early-adopter

This blog replaced by other blogs!

2008-06-24T13:06:00.003-04:00

Well the time has come.... this blog started off as my and Amy's blog, then became my blog again, and now i've not posted here in months because i've got several other blogs going.... so here's how it breaks down.... Fine Art and Information Technology:
early-adopter, the blog Jay's artwork and various random opinions Jay Van Buren My new SL project that is taking off like a rocket: Brooklyn is Watching

Yahoo shareholders, please, don't do it

2008-02-01T12:15:00.000-05:00

I really hope this doesn't happen... mostly because most things that yahoo owns that i interact with work really well, while most things that microsoft owns that i interact with are buggy pieces of crap... also i'm sentimental about the yahoo brand is suppose and their stuff tends not to be nearly as ugly- especially in the last few years... but the funniest reason that we should all hope this merger doesn't happen is because the folks at microsoft somehow think this chart explains anything at all. (beautiful photo by Niall Kennedy) You have to click through to the flickr page this came from so you can see the comments on this photo they are hilarious.

Germans... check, Fishes..check, smoke machine... check

2008-01-10T16:06:00.000-05:00

The scene was pandemonium on Stanton street. We needed a red carpet, a velvet rope and somebody with a microphone to criticize everyone's outfits. My studio mates Adele and Kerstin's show at the tiny Amy Stewart Smith gallery really needed a bigger venue as the absurdity of the performance was in neck-and-neck competition with the absurdity of a throng of wet art-fans getting rained on while climbing over each other to get a peek inside. I decided to go get a beer and wait for the crowd to die down. When I got back I was able to see the installation inside- a large scale painting on paper, photographs of Kerstin and Adele dressed up as various characters that are beautiful, funny, weird, slightly disturbing all at once in a way that is really hard to explain. The are in between seeming like real characters and seeming like a silly dress-up game, and like the performance seem self-mocking but not entirely so. I really like the whole thing together. I might be biased because the painting is so good. Kerstin can really paint, so i'm inclined to be willing to go pretty far in believing in the photography, a medium i claim more ignorance of.

pic of foxcoon portrait

2007-12-04T21:45:00.000-05:00

I'm working on this portrait-- i need to work a little more on it before i have Foxwell the Foxcoon come back to my studio so i can finish it- can't wait to get back in the studio!

Goin' to the Movies

2007-11-26T22:31:00.000-05:00

Of course, you are far too sophisticated to go see a movie because it is a runaway hit; actually, that fact might keep you from going. So let me give some other reasons to take in a couple of new films, despite their popularity.

BEOWULF

There are at least two good reasons you might want to put the movie Beowulf on your don't-miss list. One is that you are familiar with the original, and you want to see what they've done with it. (Unless you are a true purist, you shouldn't be disappointed.) The other is that you are an animation- and/or techno-geek, and you want to see what they've done with it. (I don't happen to fall into this category, but I don't see how you could be disappointed here, either.)

If you remember the 1000-year-old Anglo-Saxon poem, you will recognize the boastful talk of the heroes, and the gore and excitement of the fight scenes. You will also probably recognize Angelina Jolie, but by her lips, not by her role as Grendel's mother, who never used to be a babe!

I puzzled to myself why they used the motion-capture technology to create cartoonish versions of the actors involved. Especially since the degree of cartoonishness varies considerably from one scene to another. It certainly isn't necessary in order to make them match the much-computerized Grendel (think Gollum writ large and horrifying) of the first half of the story, or the truly wonderful nasty dragon of the second half. We're already accustomed to this kind of magic, from Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potters, and other films.

But I think I've worked it out. The scenes of Grendel in the mead hall, which you may remember were plenty gory on the page, are even more so on the screen; director Robert Zemecki does them up right, with blood, severed parts and dead bodies everywhere. Audiences, even as jaded as we are today, probably couldn't have tolerated all this up-close slaughter had the victims been completely human. Better they should look like video-game characters, a bit distanced from us.

A secondary benefit is that we are also distanced from the period-appropriate boasting of Beowulf and the other heroes (as well as the subservience of the women). Political correctness be damned; that's the way a real hero talked, and the women-well, they were virtually invisible, if I remember correctly.

There will be those who criticize the whole plot line relating to Grendel's mother, or who complain that Beowulf didn't really stay in Denmark and marry Hrothgar's wife, but trundled back home and slew his dragon there. But, face it-the poem as we have it (at least some sections are missing-who knows how many) gets kind of boring after the slaying of Grendel's mother. To say the least, that old story didn't have a very good arc. So I'm quite happy with what Zemecki and his crew have done with the plot. And my other half didn't mind at all looking at Angelina as the gold light slid off her only slightly-altered naked form.

Don't take any under-15 children, and not even then if you are concerned about nudity. And don't go yourself if you can't stand violence, or if you require depth in your movies. (Anthony Hopkins is awfully good, though, as the hag-ridden Hrothgar, even through the computerization.)

ENCHANTED

As for Enchanted , I'd be hard-pressed to say why anyone would not want to see it. Well, if you never loved the Walt Disney oeuvre, you neither know nor like New York, you have no sense of fun or irony, and you aren't interested in animation, period, then this might not be a movie you should see.

This not-really-a-musical (although it has at least one great musical sequence), not entirely a kids' movie (although kids will probably love it), not quite a satire (but certainly a postmodern re-take on Disney by Disney) is finally a sort of a love story (with a darling, very real little girl, plus a beautiful princess, handsome prince, etc.) proving that "true love's kiss" is truly the most powerful thing in the world. Ahem! Well, sort of. Yeah.

As you will know if you've seen any of the publicity, Enchanted involves a Disney animated fairytale princess-to-be (Giselle, played by Amy Adams). Think Snow White or Cinderella, complete with bluebirds, doves, and mice who help with such things as dressing and clean-up. Early in the film, the Evil Stepmother/Queen (definitely ala Snow White) contrives to push the bride-to-be down a well, so that she pops up in a real-life 2007ish Time Square, New York-a place where "there is no happily ever after."

What ensues--well--has to be seen to be believed. It is by turns funny, scarey (in mostly a fairy-tale sort of way), a little sad, and sweet. Virtually every Disney classic cliche is visited and tweaked. The talking chipmunk who is Giselle's special friend and protector also shows up in NYC-and it's a tribute to the seamless weaving together of live action and animation that I didn't think to notice until after I'd left the theater that, even though he couldn't talk in the "real world," that chipmunk was doing other things no real chipmunk ever did! Another one of the best parts is when Giselle calls on the birds and rodents of NYC to help clean up her new protector's messy apartment (think Ratatouille with real, uh, rats!).

Rachel Covey is entirely convincing as 6-year-old Morgan Phillips, daughter of the disillusioned Manhattan divorce attorney who befriends a befuddled Giselle (Patrick Dempsey as Robert-I liked him a lot!) James Marsden manages charming-but-hapless in a difficult role as the dashing but not too bright Prince. Susan Sarandon loves chewing scenery as the wicked queen, come to NYC finish off Giselle, and Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew from the Harry Potter films) is actually quite funny in spots as Nathaniel, the Queen's flunky. Idina Menzel is satisfactory as Nancy, Robert's intended. And the Big Apple, which becomes a character in its own right-well, it is what it is, or at least a post-mod Disney version thereof. (Not to minimize the importance of those other apples the Queen uses to, well, you know....)

The Evil Stepmother Queen is really, really fairy-tale nasty in the "real world"-could be too intense for younger children. And I wouldn't recommend it for boys from whenever they start to hate girls until at least the time they start to really like them again. Probably it's going to be enjoyed most by adults anyway. But take a kid along if you need an excuse.

Long thread on Furries, Fursuiters, my paintings and fucking chewbaca

2007-10-14T22:27:00.000-04:00

um... wow. I just discovered this today a post on UNFOGGED,with 108 comments five days after the fact, because i was wondering why so many hits came into my site from this URL. Thanks to BECKS for mentioning my project in the first place. I have to respond to some of these things... can't help myself: (comment numbers in parens)

I Love Pearson-Wright's painting as far as I can see from the photos, thanks for turning me onto him . Fischl has always really underwhelmed me in person- the way they're painted just doesn't do it for me(107). Clearly TwoFurTea.com should be the name of a furry-speed-dating site(144), my paintings do not look like photos with photoshop filters applied in person(36), i promise, come see if you don't believe me, and taking the piss out of furries may be very 2003, but seeing what happens when you actually take them seriously as an expression of a universal human longing to be other than we are is TOOOtally 2007, man(74).

:)

thanks to ~~Cryptic Ned~~ Frowner for 106- he hits on several things that I feel too- I admire my furry friends for the fact that they're doing something that they know people are going to think is dorky but they just love to do it so they do it anyway with no pretense to it being anything other than straight ahead-open-hearted-goofiness of a kind that is pretty rare in my world otherwise. As for the whole sex thing, as i've said any chance i've gotten- its really only a small part of the whole furry scene- and the thing you gotta realize is there are as many reasons for being into furry stuff as there are people who are into it-- I'm not a furry myself and there is and may always be something about it that i just don't get, which is part of why it is utterly fascinating to me.... Viva la Difference! I dont' expect everyone to understand why i love painting so much.

latest version of artist statement

2007-10-14T20:55:00.000-04:00

I thought i'd put up this version of my artist statement from the KC show...

My paintings revolve around irrepressible enthusiasms. In all cases the first subject matter of the painting is the (admittedly irrational and irrepressible) love of painting itself that I've never been able to talk myself out of. The secondary subject matter, which serves mostly just as “as good an excuse as any to paint,” relates to the irrepressible enthusiasms of other people: the things that people love, even though other people think they are dorky, or weird, or hopelessly romantic and outdated.

The Fursuit Portrait Project is a series of life-sized paintings of people from the "Furry Fandom,” a rapidly growing, highly-creative, and world-wide subculture that celebrates anthropomorphism (the combining of human and animal characteristics so common in popular culture, e.g., Mickey Mouse, who, although a mouse, walks upright, talks, and wears gloves and shoes). The people/animals depicted are some of the most dedicated members of the Fandom, the "fursuiters,” people who have either made for themselves or have commissioned from professional suit-makers a full-body animal costume that they wear at Furry events and other special occasions, or just for fun at random on the street. I always paint from life, usually taking three two-to-three-hour sessions on different days to do one painting. This time spent together is filled with conversation and I’m proud to count each of the (11 so far) people that I’ve painted as my friends. I try in each painting to represent both the spirit of the human inside the suit and the personality ("Fursonna") of the suit itself.

The Stuffed Animal (Knuffel Besten) series are portrait/still-life paintings of animals of personal significance to me and other people that I’ve met.

Soul-mate Detectors 1.0 and 2.0 are groups of 16 small gestural abstract paintings that will be of interest to any fans of gestural abstraction but which also contain secret information that, while being recognizable to some extent to non-nerds, will be fully decoded only by the most geekalicious of observers.

Fursuit Portrait Paint-Off: This event is first and foremost meant to be fun. It's also a good excuse to do something that I've been wanting to do which is to bring the furry subculture together with the underground art subculture. Both are filled with dedicated, creative people doing something they love mostly for the appreciation of other people within the subculture, and without much notice from outsiders. I like the idea of collapsing these groups into one event where we can all get to know each other and have a good time. I had the idea for this because the first fursuiter I painted, Rapid T. Rabbit, of Queens, New York, video-taped me painting him. Having the camera trained on me, made me aware of the performative aspect of what I was doing. There is something of a time-traveling performance to putting on my painting apron, mixing my paint and engaging enthusiastically with this obsolete technology. The magic that still fascinates me utterly, in painting, is something that for most people is a hokey religion or an ancient weapon, just a lot of simple tricks and nonsense...

Jay Van Buren

Come see me and Foxwell on Saturday

2007-10-03T23:31:00.000-04:00

He'll be sitting for his portrait and I'll be painting it saturday afternoon at Jack the Pelican Presents. This is the last of three such performances....er... FURformances? :)

Fursuit Portrait Project Article on TONY's website

2007-10-02T23:43:00.000-04:00

Time Out New York just published this article about my Fursuit Portrait Project

Fursuit Portrait Paint-off, brooklyn

2007-09-12T01:36:00.000-04:00

Fursuit portrait paint-off streaming live from KC TODAY

2007-09-08T12:25:00.001-04:00

The stream should be here starting at 2pm CDT: http://papawpets.org/Watch_Us_Live.html thanks to 55seddel

Kansas City fursuit portrait flyer

2007-09-03T22:31:00.000-04:00

Download the PDF

second life meeting with BIGMAG

2007-08-31T17:32:00.000-04:00

I'm about to meet an avatar being by a nightclub full of dutch artists at arts virtua Join me! my name in SL is "jay newt"

show in kansas city

2007-08-29T17:09:00.000-04:00

My show is up in Kansas City at the Cross Gallery at 2012 Baltimore in the "crossing" art neighborhood of Kansas City MO. Please go see it if you are near there.

There will be an event on sept 8th-- 2-5pm another 'fursuit portrait paint-off'-- with 5 painters and 4 fursuiters! very exciting. Come see it!

joke or not a joke?

2007-07-07T12:19:00.000-04:00

This is cracking me up this morning so i had to post on it. This person added me as a friend in flickr - I can't tell if this is someone doing satire or some devout but misguided person who thinks that filling their flickr profile with long, convoluted, biblical diatribes is an effective marketing strategy. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for people using the internet to try to persuade each other of their opinions be they religious, political or otherwise, and this is at least a new one on me as far as technique. The internet should be the ultimate fulfillment of the concept of the free marketplace of ideas, and being an agnostic, ex-Presbyterian, (not to mention the son, and grandson of christian ministers) myself i've even read some of the bible verses she's quoting. I just think that to unbelievers just showing them a poster with some (to them) random bible citations over a picture of the J-man's mug is um... not going to do much. What do you think?

Sasha and Cake at Art Amsterdam

2007-06-09T19:17:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to blog about this too for a long time-- on the last day of ART AMSTERDAM we had a visit from both Sasha and Cake - together they turned the art fair into disneyland. IT was amazing these guys fur suit performance was really great- anyone that doesn't understand how much work goes into what they do in the suits really doesn't get it... it was awesome.

the last night at bravo!

2007-06-09T17:37:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to post about this forever- I took pictures on the last night of BRAVO First there was a performance by live musicians in response to some silent films, and then there was this crazy dude with a long beard making amazing music using some video game joysticks hooked up to a multitrack mixer board of some kind.... it was impressive. As always the food was excellent and the crowd was wierd. This space was truely remarkable - consistantly on the edge. It sounds corny but i really am kind of at a loss for words to talk about the connection that i felt with the people i knew in katendrecht and the little scene there that now is at an end.... olivier maarschalk is moving to berlin to set up some kind of similar venue there i'll post about it when it comes online....

Cake, Artworld. Artworld, Cake

2007-05-10T05:10:00.000-04:00

That was really fun. Again we bring the worlds together. I wasn't sure what would happen- turns out the suit (and cakes excellent fursuiting performance skills) are no match for the A'dam art fair. I'd really like to find what would happen if a whole bunch of furries came to the fair. I'd like to teach a course in contemporary art appreciation or something. I may have said this in other places but I'm really interested in when the same event can be seen as partaking of several categories of human activity at the same time. For example from a fursuiter perspective what happened yesterday was nothing more than some fairly normal fursuiting in an alien environment. Some of the people at the art fair might have read what cake was doing as performance, or as a blatant publicity stunt-- and no body would be wrong-- what was missing in this was the kind of mutual awareness that happened at the fursuit portrait paint off. Here i'm not sure people at the art people realized that to Cake this might not have been so different from something he might do on the main shopping street at his town on another day-- or at a Furry Con... of the Eiffel tower.
More Pictures Here We may try to put up a little pedistal with my computer on it set to play Rapid T. Rabbit's video of me painting him just to give that painting of Cake a little better context for the artworld crowd for the rest of the fair. I was just putting this more into words recently: see these mixing events as an extension of what happens in the studio -- taking that environment out into the world...

Art Amsterdam

2007-05-09T08:29:00.000-04:00

I'm at the amsterdam art fair-- and with any luck we'll get a visit from Cake today! Its going to be interesting to see if Cake turns the Art Fair into disneyland or the art fair turns cake into conceptual art. I'm rooting for the former. More Pictures Here

pics from gallery in second life

2007-04-03T16:44:00.000-04:00

Come to my show! All you need is to download the second life application- its free. Spread the word! Once you're in secondlife you can just go here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/dowden/42/59/52/?title=Ars%20Virtua Opening is on thursday at 4pm edt (i'll be the one in the viking hat) but you can see the work any time its up now. more pictures

Opening April 5 @ 1pm SLT thru May 25

Avatars express identity. The life of and choices made in creating ones avatar are processes that are well known and long lived in real life. Fandomania is an exhibit of works by Elena Dorfman from the soon to be released book by Aperture of the same name. The work is represented through portrait photography and provides an interesting window into the world of “cosplay.” “The theater of cosplay has no boundaries, is unpredictable, open-ended. It includes both the fantastic and the mundane, the sexually aberrant and innocent, female characters who become samurai warriors and brainy scientists, and male characters who magically change their sex,” as described by Dorfman.

In contrast to this both through medium and subject we are presenting the lifesized Fur-Suit portrait paintings of Jay Van Buren. These paintings are executed through lengthy ten hour sittings of the subject in a traditional painting studio. Three of these were exhibited at the BRAVO! art space in Rotterdam, a project of the Foundation D.S.P.S.

Ars Virtua finds the contrast of photography and painting interesting especially in the synthetic environment. The discussion of constructed identity is particularly relevent in this new medium and context.

ELENA DORFMAN’s work has appeared in the Village Voice, International Herald Tribune, Art & Auction, and Artweek. Her series, Still Lovers, appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions internationally and is the subject of two monographs. An exhibition of her work at Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, opens on April 5.

http://arsvirtua.com
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Butler/229/16/52
http://aperture.org/fandomania

Ars Virtua is a new media center and gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

getting ready for virtual show

2007-03-31T05:36:00.000-04:00

i'm going to be in a two-person show at Ars Virtua in Second Life. I"m really excited about it. Its this Thursday at 1pm Second Life time which is the same as Pacific Time- that is to say 4pm eastern. I was amazed at how powerful the experience of seeing all 6 of these paintings in the same "place" was when i was creating them in the yard out front of the gallery (this is what's in the picture) - they really seem to have substance as objects- its hard to explain. I love paint but there is something about this 3-d universe and the interaction with a 2-d image that does some of the same things that painting does.

burying the lead

2007-02-07T18:39:00.000-05:00

Unless they've realized its there and changed it this article from a local pittsburg paper is breaking some exciting news:

The Food and Drug Administration today gave Moon-based GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare its final OK to sell a nonprescription form of the diet pill orlistat, which is marketed in prescription form under the name Xenical.

yes that's right... GSK has moved their headquarters to the moon. The drug sounds like something I might like to take actually.

Holy F*&cking Sh%t! THIS JUST IN!GSK's own website describes themselves as "MOON-BASED":

Local homebound seniors will receive something to smile about with today’s Home Delivered Meals: “Senior Smiles” kits. Provided by Moon-based GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare in conjunction with Sullivan-Schein Dental®, the kits are part of a nationwide oral health awareness campaign organized by the Alliance of the American Dental Association (AADA).

Oh, wait! hold the phone-- i'm an idiot- its just a suburb of pittsburg! DAMN that's much less funny. Oh well.

Party First?

2006-11-24T09:56:00.000-05:00

At Bravo (which is pretty large abandoned 3 bedroom apartment in a condemmed building in the notoriously sketchy Katendrecht neighborhood of Rotterdam) one night, while Fifi Hengsten played in the living room and Jan made cocktails in the shower, the kitchen was made into an italian pizzaria complete with fake mustaches, (just as ? more? importantly) the pizza was excellent and the venue made some money off hungry art fans to help pay for future events.

There's something about some of the art events that i've seen and heard of here in rotterdam that I really like and i'm trying to put my finger on. I'm going to be writing about this some more in the future but i wanted to start something here in case any of our devoted readers :) wanted to comment and suggest paralells or further thoughts. Ok, here's an attempt to say what i'm talking about- the events, and in some cases the spaces are conceptual art projects in their own right, but in a really relaxed way that emphasizes fun, comfort, and a good social atmosphere above their "artiness". Its like its first and formost a party that is meant to be fun and it has some deeper intelectual meaning its because the people who are planning it and the people who are showing up just really enjoy thinking deeply. My fursuit portrait paint-off was an example of this. Was the food this good at Fluxus events? Was the beer as cheap, and were outsiders welcomed so warmly? Some of the crowd behind De Player, a club run by DSPS here in rotterdam, (and me too) are intersted in events that are both art events and other kinds of things at the same time, and make sense as both, ideally for people coming from several frames of reference at once too. HERE is a video of some kind of performance at De Player- this isn't really an example of what i'm talking about i just thought it looked interesting- and there's a gallery in Hamburg that i met in Cologne called Helium Cowboy that seems to be up to something similar- their parties look really fun-- i can't tell if they are as warm as the stuff that DSPS is doing. Does anyone know what i'm talking about?

6th Fursuit Portrait underway

2006-11-16T17:01:00.000-05:00

I'm happy with the way this painting is going so far. Kwisa is coming back on thursday for me to work on this painting some more.

photos from the paint-off

2006-11-13T09:21:00.000-05:00

I had a friend take some photos of the paint off with my camera- here are some highlights.

Photos from the exhibition at BRAVO

2006-11-13T07:45:00.000-05:00

I've posted some installation shots of the exhibition at BRAVO, a project space that is part of foundation DSPS on flickr. Dig the wall paper!

Paintoff Screen Grab

2006-11-12T15:51:00.000-05:00

Live from Rotterdam, streaming paint-off

2006-11-12T08:39:00.000-05:00

Tonight you can watch the paint-off from anywhere in the world. Check out my description of the event here, and my artist statement follows:
Artist Statement Jay Van Buren 2006 My paintings revolve around irrepressible enthusiasms. In all cases the first subject matter of the painting is the, admittedly irrational, and irrepressible, love of painting itself that I've never been able to talk myself out of. The secondary subject matter, which serves mostly just as as good an excuse as any to paint, relates to the irrepressible enthusiasms of other people: the things that people love, even though other people think they are dorky, or weird, or hopelessly romantic and outdated.

The Fursuit Portrait Project is a series of life-sized paintings of people from the "Furry Fandom", a rapidly growing, highly-creative, and world-wide subculture that celebrates anthropomorphism (the combining of human and animal characteristics so common in popular cultre, eg. Mickey Mouse, who, although a mouse, walks upright, talks, and wares gloves and shoes). The people/animals depicted are some of the most dedicated memebers of the Fandom, the "fursuiters", people who have either made for themselves or have commissioned from professional suit-makers a full-body animal costume that they ware at Furry events and other special occasions, or just for fun at random on the street. I always paint from life, usually taking three two-to-three-hour sessions on different days to do one painting. This time spent together is filled with conversation and i'm proud to count each of the (6 so far) people that i've painted as my friends. I try in each painting to represent both the spirit of the human inside the suit and the personality ("Fursonna") of the suit itself.

The Stuffed Animal (Knuffel Besten) series are portrait / still-life paintings of animals of personal significance to me, and other people that i've met.

Soul-mate Detector 1, is a group of 16 small gestural abstract paintings that will be of interest to any fans of gestural abstraction but which also contain secret information that, while being recognizable to some extent to non-nerds, will be fully decoded only by the most geekalicious of observers.

Fursuit Portrait Paint-Off: This event is first and foremost meant to be fun. It's also a good excuse to do something that I've been wanting to do which is to bring the furry subculture together with the underground art subculture. Both are filled with dedicated, creative people doing something they love mostly for the appreciation of other people within the subculture, and without much notice from outsiders. I like the idea of collapsing these groups into one event where we can all get to know each other and have a good time. I had the idea for this because the first fursuiter i painted, Rapid T. Rabbit, of Queens New York, video taped me painting him. Having the camera trained on me, made me aware of the performative aspect of what i was doing. There is something of a time-traveling performance to putting on my painting apron, mixing my paint and engaging enthusiastically with this obsolete technology. The magic that still fascinates me utterly, in painting, is something that for most people is a hokey religion or an ancient weapon, just a lot of simple tricks and nonsense...

the struggle du jour

2006-10-30T05:41:00.000-05:00

David Brooks's column this week (as i write this its freely avail on NYtimes.com but if you're reading this later you may have to pay to see it) says:

We’re about to enter another of those periods without a dominant ideology. It’s clear that this election will mark the end of conservative dominance. This election is a period, not a comma in political history.

People like Brooks make me a little nuts sometimes because I feel like they are writing as if the "conservative" movement in america today is the Goldwater conservatism of my father's generation rather than the radical anti-empiricist movement it has become. I think (or is it hope?) that Brooks is wrong and we're on the verge, not of sliding into a period of non-aligned politics but a big swing back toward the enlightenment values that our country was founded on. Maybe we'll look back on this as a time when the attack on our country by a dangerous bunch of religious nut-cases briefly put another bunch of dangerous religious nut-cases in control?

bye bye

2006-10-10T22:37:00.000-04:00

http://www.designtrash.com/ Thanks Jay for the space and encouragement to blog! My first comment from 'MK' was that I was blogging inside of a blog. So, I made my own blog. Hurray for blogging. Check it out at the above site.

The J Curve

2006-10-05T20:28:00.000-04:00

In the segment “Globalism: The New System” I offered “Globalism” as our focus for foreign affairs instead of the myopic “War on Terror” because Globalism accounts for many more forces at play in our world today. We should replace the “Neocon’s agenda of military global domination” with a “Globalists effort to engage the new world order” so we can better weigh the positive and negative effects of our actions in the world. Now I offer something in place of the “Bush Doctrine” as an approach to foreign policy: Ian Bremmer’s “The J Curve”.

First some credentials: Ian Bremmer is President of Eurasia Group, the world’s largest political risk consultancy. He has written for the Financial Times, the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and has authored or edited five books. He is a columnist for Slate, a contributing editor at The National Interest, and political commentator on CNN, Fox News, and CNBC. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Once again this is not a cure all. He speaks broadly and he says that a one size fits all approach to foreign affairs is a recipe for failure. Yet, he does a better job of speaking about the world than our current policy makers rhetoric of ‘evildoers threaten us from their outposts of tyranny’. Closed states should not journey to open globalization until they are prepared to do so. Globalization is a destabilizing process for states, yet if they can manage the shift to openness and exchange, the resulting connectedness can lead to an enduring stability.

The J curve has an x-axis of ‘openness’, a y-axis of ‘stability’ and all nation-states constantly fluctuate to some extent along the J curve. Bremmer explains that what makes a society stable while being on the right side of the curve are enduring institutions and that their culture is open to global and interior exchange of ideas, goods and services. Nation-states on the left side of the curve find stability in the form of an authoritarian governments yet these forms of governments are closed to the exchange of ideas, goods and services. What separates these two forms of stable governments is a gulf of instability.

Bremmer comments, “any leader of any government has as their first goal the stability and continuity of their own governance—their ability to continue to rule. If you’re the leader of a stable democracy that means you’re going to want to continue integrating your country into the global order and improving the educational level and economic well-being of your people. And you’d tend to respond to outside incentives to keep that going. But in authoritarian countries—in the most threatening rogue states—leaders accomplish their goal of remaining in power not by educating their population or improving their country’s integration into the broader global community but rather by furthering their country’s isolation and keeping it there.”

Bremmer argues quite persuasively that sanctions do not work. The goal of states on the right side of the J curve is to raise the entire arc of a country on the left side of the J curve as they journey through the swoon of instability. To raise the arc is to increase the wealth of a country thus establishing the demands of a middle class for more openness and the creating a heightened awareness of the people living inside of the country to the outside world by means of providing people access to technology, media so that they have the understanding that “we don’t have to live this way”. This is a slow, patient process indeed. What it means is that we can not force democracy on people by the points of our bayonets. We must persuade others to come along with us down the road of globalization. This means the creation of fair and balanced global institutions that encourages participation without the fear of being exploited by the dominant countries on the right side of the J curve.

Bremmer also demonstrates that the Bush Doctrine is ineffective because you can not force massive amounts of reform on a people. Too much reform all at once forces a country into the unstable depths of the J Curve, much like Iraq is now. More likely than not the people will turn to an authoritarian personality to provide jobs, food and security. A people plunged into instability will want a quick fix and they will give up their civil liberties instead of the long trial of establishing effective institutions.

“When a state suddenly becomes unstable, its citizens may demand a restoration of stability at the expense of all meaningful reform. When the soviet Union collapsed, the government of the Russian Federation took steps to establish Russia on the right side of the curve. Boris Yeltsin’s government subjected Russian society to economic “shock therapy.” At the same time, opposition parties and the national media, which had up to that point been completely under state domination, were freed to do and say virtually anything. The combination of spiraling inflation, social insecurity, Chechen separatist attacks, unchecked crony capitalism, and heightened public awareness of all these problems created a frightening sense of chaos across the country. The widespread sense that society was in free fall prompted many Russians to support moves to hit the brakes on Russia’s reform-driven politics. In other words, the deep social anxiety provoked by so much reform all at once-created demand for an imposed order, for closed politics. That’s an important reason why Russia has retreated over the last half-decade to the left side of the curve.”

A second reason that the Bush Doctrine has failed is that the U.S. armed forces do not have the resources to sustain such an aggressive long term agenda. ‘Military regime change is prohibitively expensive as a major component of U.S. foreign policy. The (Bush) administration lacks both the material resources and the political capital to continue to use these tools…” New York Times reports, “strains on the Army from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so severe that Army officials say they may be forced to make greater use of the National Guard to provide enough troops for overseas deployments.”

Reuters notes that most soldiers are facing their second or third deployment. “About 102,000 of the 142,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are Army soldiers, as well as 16,000 of 21,000 troops in Afghanistan.”

In the past two months, the Pentagon has extended two brigades of nearly 4,000 soldiers each beyond their scheduled departure date from Iraq -- which can undermine morale and upset families at home.

Army leaders are expressing concern over getting sufficient resources to sustain overseas deployments and replace and fix tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment battered in Iraq.

The Congressional Research Service reports that the Iraq war is costing American taxpayers $2 billion a week -- that’s about twice as much as in 2003. Afghanistan -- where the 9-11 hijackers were linked -- is costing $370 million a week, up 20 percent from 2005.

These costs fly in the face of the Administration’s pre-war assessments, which assured Americans that the bulk of reconstruction costs would be shouldered by Iraq and that the total cost of the war would be around $50 billion.

Part of the cost increase is related to “semi-permanent support bases,” which means that the Pentagon tacitly believes the US military will be in Iraq for the long-haul. This is not unlike the $2.5 billion that the Congressional Research Service found the Pentagon “diverted from other spending authorizations in 2001 and 2002 to prepare for the invasion.”

And yet a new poll shows that six-in-10 (60%) of Iraqis “say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces.” Most Iraqis (about 80%) believe the crux of the controversial NIE report: the US presence in Iraq “provokes more violence than it prevents.”

Bremmer goes on to be critical of the administrations policy by adding ‘the strategy is dangerous precisely because the Bush administration hasn’t fully articulated how states that aren’t ready for the transition (from stable, closed authoritarian states to stable, open international participants) can withstand the buffeting they’ll face in the depths of the curve. Foreign policy is not an abstraction, and a one-size-fits-all approach is doomed to failure.”

However, Bremmer does not preach American isolation. “U.S. policy makers should never have had to choose between the best of three bad options: counterproductive sanctions, capitulation, or a costly war that left U.S. troops to play a principal role in rebuilding Iraq’s stability. The lesson of the J curve is that a process of creating opportunities for ordinary Iraqis to profit from access to the resources of the outside world would have destabilized Saddam at less cost to both the Iraqi people and to the United States. To be fair, it’s not realistic to believe George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton could have made an effective political case for punishing Saddam by extending Iraq an invitation to join the WTO. Nonetheless, policies that provided resources and created opportunities for Iraqis to interact as fully as possible with the outside world and with one another might have forced Saddam to contend with pressures for change from within Iraq. U.S. policies designed to isolate North Korea and Cuba have led to the same false choice: capitulation or costly confrontation.”

“The countries on the right side of the J curve have a collective political, economic, and security interests on working together to help move left-side states through instability to the right side of the curve. But they must recognize that the most powerful agents for constructive, sustainable change in any society are the people who live within it.”

Globalism: The New System

2006-10-04T20:55:00.000-04:00

Globalism is not presented here as a prescription for a cure all. Nor is it a harden agenda to replace what the Bush administration has implemented as policy. I say Globalism is what makes our current Presidents ideology anathema. Globalism demands the need for leaders to account for a broader range of dynamic forces and to be humble in changing course when policy fails.

Globalism is a perspective, a set of tools to help describe and interact with the current global landscape and those tools will change because the world is a dynamic place that no single source can dominate. I propose Globalism as an approach to discussing foreign policy which will inform the United States as it constantly updates policy to interact with a new global system. This is a call to broaden the American focus from a “War on Terror” to a more sophisticated public discourse on foreign policy.

I dare to suggest that Globalism is closer to a Big Tent where the WTO should sit down and talk to protestors about what is going on in the world and become accountable to their actions. If they can’t actually sit down and speak, a blue sky dream to be sure, a public discourse grounded in Globalism will at least set the table for these opposed view points to be shared. Meanwhile, the mantra ‘War on Terror’ accounts for neither perspective. If Globalism is embraced as a national public discourse we can begin to weigh the positive and negative effects of our actions in this big global marketplace.

I would say globalism is a fact, the state of affairs, and that terrorism is but one facet of the machinery that is operating in the world. The ‘War on Terror’ turns Globalization on its head, picks out one facet of the new reality, emphasizes that one aspect in order to perpetuate Cold War values so that the U.S. military-industrial-complex remains the dominant force of this new world order. I contend that the threat of terrorism has less of an impact on your daily life than United States trade relations with China. Globalization is a perspective you will never hear from George Bush’s bully pulpit of fear and deceit. We need our national discussion to be raised above this petty tribalism where the ‘evil doers’ are pitted against the ‘patriots’. The continued support of this Imperial Presidents platform will do nothing but stunt the United States adaptation to this brave new world.

“China Sets Goal of Selling Roses to All the World”
From the New York Times front page, September 25, 2006, by Keith Bradsher

“Americans and Europeans are used to buying mass produced shoes, toys and microwave ovens from China. So why not roses?

“That is the thinking behind an elaborate Chinese government effort to export cut flowers, aimed not just at developing a new business to take on the world but at redeveloping the social and economic landscape here in southwestern China.

“By placing the flower industry, along with several others, far from the coastal provinces that have enjoyed most of the nation’s prosperity, Beijing officials hope to bring jobs to tens of millions of impoverished, isolated workers in a bid to narrow the income gap between rich city dwellers and unemployed farmers.”

The first sustained exports of Chinese flowers arrived in the United States last week.

Here is a quote from Jacob Frenkel, governor of Israel’s Central Bank and a University of Chicago-trained economist. Frenkel remarked that he too was going through a perspective change: “Before, when we talked about macroeconomics, we started by looking at the local markets, local financial systems and the interrelationship between them, and then, as an afterthought, we looked at the international economy. There was a feeling that what we do is primarily our own business and then there are some outlets where we will sell abroad. Now we reverse the perspective. Let’s not ask what markets we should export to, after having decided what to produce; rather let’s first study the global framework within which we operate and then decide what to produce. It changes your whole perspective.”

Today I’m presenting a consolidation of the first two chapters of Thomas Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, edition 2, April 2000. This book is the first place to my knowledge that suggests and offers a framework to begin the project of ‘Globalism as approach to Foreign Policy’.

Opening Scene : the World is Ten Years Old

The slow, fixed, divided Cold War system that had dominated international affairs since 1945 had been firmly replaced by a new, very greased, interconnected system called globalization. If we didn’t fully understand that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, we sure understood it a decade later. Indeed, on October 11, 1998, at the height of the global economic crisis, Merrill Lynch ran full-page ads in major newspapers throughout America to drive this point home. The ads read:

The World is 10 Years Old
It was born when the Wall fell in 1989. It’s no surprise that the world’s youngest economy—the global economy— is still finding its bearings. The intricate checks and balances that stabilize economies are only incorporated with time. Many world markets are only recently freed, governed for the first time by the emotions of the people rather than the fists of the state. From where we sit, none of this diminishes the promise offered a decade ago by the demise of the walled-off world…The spread of free markets and democracy around the world is permitting more people everywhere to turn their aspirations into achievements. And technology, properly harnessed and liberally distributed, has the power to erase no just geographical borders but also human ones. It seems to us that, for a 10-year-old, the world continues to hold great promise. In the meantime, no one ever said growing up was easy. (page xvi)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The formally divided world that emerged after World War II was then frozen in place by the Cold War. The Cold War was also an international system. It lasted roughly from 1945 to 1989, when, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was replaced by another system: the new era of globalization we are now in. (page xvii)

American power after World War II deliberately set out to forge an open international trading system to stimulate employment and counterbalance Soviet communism. It was America that drove the creation of the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and a host of other institutions for opening markets and fostering trade around the world. And it was the American fleet that kept the sea lanes open for these open markets to easily connect. So when the Information Revolution flowered in the late 1980s—and made it possible for so many more people to act globally, communicate globally, travel globally and sell globally—it flowered into a global power structure that encouraged and enhanced all these trends and made it very costly for any country that tried to buck them. (page xix)

Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, viewed, with the Cold War over, we won’t have the Soviets to kick around anymore, so we will naturally go back to kicking the Hindus and Muslims around and them kicking us. He implicitly ruled out the rise of some new international system that could shape events differently. For Huntingon, only tribalism could follow the Cold War, not anything new.

My argument is different. I believe that if you want to understand the post–Cold War world you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it—globalization. That is “The One Big Thing” people should focus on. Globalization is not the only thing influencing events in the world today, but to the extent that there is a North Star and a worldwide shaping force, it is this system. What is new is the system; what is old is power politics, chaos, clashing civilizations and liberalism. And what is the drama of the post–Cold War world is the interaction between this new system and all these old passions and aspirations. It is a complex drama, with the final act still not written.

That is why under the globalization system you will find both clashes of civilization and the homogenization of civilizations, both environmental disasters and amazing environmental rescues, both the triumph of liberal, free-market capitalism and a backlash against it, both the durability of nation-states and the rise of enormously powerful nonstate actors. (page xxi)

I believe the best way for us to deal with the brutalities of globalization is by first understanding the logic of the system and its moving parts, and then figuring out how this system can benefit the most people, while inflicting the least amount of pain. (page xxii)

Chapter 1: The New System

When I say that globalization has replaced the Cold War as the defining international system, what exactly do I mean?

I mean that, as an international system, the Cold War had its own structure of power: the balance between the United States and the U.S.S.R. (page 7)

The globalization system, unlike the Cold War system, is not frozen, but a dynamic ongoing process. That’s why I define globalization this way: it is the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into individuals, corporations and nation-states farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before. This process of globalization is also producing a powerful backlash from those brutalized or left behind by this new system.

The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism—the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. Therefore, globalization also has its own set of economic rules—rules that revolve around opening, deregulating and privatizing your economy, in order to make it more competitive and attractive to foreign investment. (page 9

Indeed, if the Cold War were a sport, it would be sumo wrestling, says Johns Hopkins University foreign affairs professor Michael Mandelbaum. “It would be two big fat guys in a ring, with all sorts of posturing and rituals and stomping of feet, but actually very little contact, until the end of the match, when there is a brief moment of shoving and the loser gets pushed out of the ring, but nobody gets killed.”

By contrast, if globalization were a sport, it would be the 100-meter dash, over and over and over. And no matter how many times you win, you have to race again the next day.

To paraphrase German political theorist Carl Schmitt, the Cold War was a world of “friends” and “enemies”. The globalization world, by contrast, tends to turn all friends and enemies into “competitors.” (page 12)

Globalization has its own defining structure of power, which is much more complex than the Cold War structure. The Cold War system was built exclusively around nation-states. You acted on the world in that system through your state. The Cold War was primarily a drama of states confronting states, balancing states and aligning with states. And, as a system, the Cold War was balanced at the center by two superstates: the United States and the Soviet Union.

The globalization system, by contrast, is built around three balances, which overlap and affect one another. The first is the traditional balance between nation-states. In the globalization system, the United States is now the sole and dominant superpower and all other nations are subordinate to it to one degree of another. The balance of power between the United States and the other states, though, still matters for the stability of this system. And it can still explain a lot of the news you read on the front page of the papers, whether it is the containment of Iraq in the Middle East or the expansion of NATO against Russia in Central Europe.

The second balance in the globalization system is between nation-states and global markets. These global markets are made up of millions of investors moving money around the world with the click of a mouse. I call them ‘the Electronic Herd,’ and this herd gathers in key global financial centers, such as Wall Street, Hong Kong, London and Frankfurt, which I call ‘the Supermarkets.’ The attitudes and actions of the Electronic Herd and the Supermarkets can have a huge impact on nation-states today, even to the point of triggering the downfall of governments. Who ousted Suharto in Indonesia in 1998? It wasn’t another state, it was the Supermarkets, by withdrawing their support for, and confidence in, the Indonesian economy. You will not understand the front page of news-papers today unless you bring the Supermarkets into your analysis. Because the Untied States can destroy you by dropping bombs and the Supermarkets can destroy you by downgrading your bonds.

The third balance that you have to pay attention to in the globalization system—the one that is really the newest of all—is the balance between individuals and nation-states. Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any time in history. Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly—unmediated by a state. So you have today not only a superpower, not only Supermarkets, but you now have Super-empowered individuals. Some of these Super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful but all of them are now able to act directly on the world stage.

Without the knowledge of the U.S. government, Long-Term Capital Management—a few guys with a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut—amassed more financial bets around the world than all the foreign reserves of China. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire with his own global network, declared war on the United States in the late 1990’s, and the U.S. Air Force retaliated with a cruise missile attack on him (where he resided in Afghanistan) as though he were another nation-state. Think about that. The United States fired 75 cruise missiles, at $1 million apiece, at a person! That was a superpower against a Super-empowered angry man. Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her contribution to the international ban on landmines. She achieved that ban not only without much government help, but in the face of opposition from all the major powers. And what did she say was her secret weapon for organizing 1,000 different human rights and arms control groups on six continents? “E-mail.” (page 14)

Global Domination, Globalization, Sustainability

2006-10-03T18:26:00.000-04:00

NOTE: Amy and early-adopter (sorry for the lack of posts, we've just both been really busy-- i know --who isn't?) are pleased to welcome our friend moonshiner to the early-adopter blog to posting some thoughts

Welcome to this the first posting of the Moonshiner blogs which aim at opening three parallel topics for discussion. “Global Domination, the recent past” will focus on the current United States leadership: The Neocons and the Republican Party. This blog will contend that the “War on Terror” is a myopic, Cold War approach to a world that is more sophisticated than it was in 1980, that their policies have failed miserably in the current climate and that the United States needs a new direction for a new era. Today’s entry will focus on “Dick Cheneys Song Of America” which some of you will recognize from a recent email blast titled ‘The Flat World vs Global Domination’.

The second topic of this blog is a means to broaden the discussion of United States foreign affairs to a multi-lense topic of “Globalization, the present”. Part of the Globalization segment will be looking at how Thomas Friedman defines the topic which includes Information Arbitrage— ‘Today, more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all.” The key here is to account for the burden we put on 'ecology' as capitalist consumers.

Shifting the focus to a broader topic of how the U.S. economy now depends heavily on our international neighbors stability and prosperity, we begin to offer plans on how to do better in this new climate. Topic three is “Sustainability, the future.” Two of the first items that will be discussed in this section will be the reform of corporations so that they are legally responsible to act better as ‘corporate citizens’ instead of simply being beholden to creating profits for their share holders thus reforming the culture that allowed the Enron episode to occur. Plus, there will be a call for a federal mandate to infuse our roads with electric/gas hybrid automobiles over the next five years along with an initiative to create the infrastructure to support this shift. The United States needs to reclaim its pioneer spirit and shift its domestic and federal policies so that we create a society which cares for the worlds resources and the life that depends upon those resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability

Now let’s get to the meat of today’s entry and the presentation of why we refer to Neocon policy as ‘Global Domination’.

We can’t kill, jail or occupy all our enemies.

“He (Bill Clinton) won repeated applause with his appeals to fight global poverty, the audience (the UK Labor Party conference on September 27th, 2006) once again marvelling at the contrast between this American president and the current incumbent. They lapped up his attacks on George Bush, both explicit and implicit - not least his almost throwaway declaration that “we can’t kill, jail or occupy all our enemies.” When he explained that it was cheaper to give the children of the poorest countries access to clean water or free schooling than it was to fight a war - and that it would do a better job of preventing terrorism - his words were drowned in applause.”

This quote comes from Jonathan Freeland’s blog on the ‘Comment is Free’ section of Guardian.co.uk http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_freedland/2006/09/post_445.html

Keep in mind, when the commentator says that the party ‘drowned his words in applause’, that this is the government that gave George W Bush his strongest support to invade Iraq. When Bush made his internationally unpopular argument for military confrontation against Iraq, it was the Labor Party’s leader, Tony Blair, who alone stood by his side in support. Now Tony Blair is prematurely removing himself from the office of Prime Minister due to pressure from his own party. “Disappointment and disillusionment have increased ever since, above all since the illegal and catastrophic Iraq enterprise,” comments Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, Wednesday August 30, 2006.

One way to talk about the culture differences that are shaping the United States foreign policy discourse this election cycle is to say that the side that is currently setting US policy, the President and a Republican dominated congress, is that they are people who are afraid of global competition in the market place because they feel entitled to their status as ‘the only world super power’ and seek to dominate the world by way of confrontation and unilateral military activity. Here are the words, published June 3, 1997, of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and others:

“As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital -- both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements -- built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world. And the promise of short-term commercial benefits threatens to override strategic considerations. As a consequence, we are jeopardizing the nation’s ability to meet present threats and to deal with potentially greater challenges that lie ahead. We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.

• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future”

http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

The war in Iraq alone has cost the US $300 billion dollars, the Iraq people over 100,000 lives, including 50,000+ of women and children accredited mostly to US bombing, and the Neocons have engaged us in this violent conflict that has no end in sight by the means of public lies about weapons of mass destruction. As George Bush boasts, we are engaged in a war that will span generations and “people will thank us for our vision.”

What is this vision?

There are two places to look. The first is in the publishing of the Neocons themselves who include in this letter Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The letter dates January 26, 1998 and it documents ‘the Visions’ first step in manifesting itself. The letter is called “Letter to President Clinton on Iraq” . This letter clearly documents the motive to go to war with Iraq pre 9/11/01. They intended to go to war with Iraq the day they stepped into office in order to establish the policy of global U.S. military dominance.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

The second place to look is the commentary of David Armstrong who is an investigative reporter for the National Security News Service.

http://www.storiesthatmatter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=27

In his article “Dick Cheney’s Song of America: drafting a plan for global dominance”, published by Harpers Magazine in October of 2002, he describes how ‘The Vision’ was formed, he calls it ‘The Plan’, back when Cheney was the Defense Secretary under George H. Bush in the years 1991-1993. The military establishment needed to justify a lavish defense budget once the cold war was over. In short, Cheney hatched a plan to appease his constituency, the military-industrial-complex, to be sure that they stayed well funded and in control of the world order.

“With the Soviet Union gone, the United States had a choice. It could capitalize on the euphoria of the moment by nurturing cooperative relations and developing multilateral structures to help guide the global realignment then taking place; or it could consolidate its power and pursue a strategy of unilateralism and global dominance. It chose the latter course.

In early 1992, as Powell and Cheney campaigned to win congressional support for their augmented Base Force plan, a new logic entered into their appeals. The United States, Powell told members of the House Armed Services Committee, required “sufficient power” to “deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.” To emphasize the point, he cast the United States in the role of street thug. “I want to be the bully on the block,” he said, implanting in the mind of potential opponents that “there is no future in trying to challenge the armed forces of the United States.”

As Powell and Cheney were making this new argument in their congressional rounds, Wolfowitz was busy expanding the concept and working to have it incorporated into U.S. policy. During the early months of 1992, Wolfowitz supervised the preparation of an internal Pentagon policy statement used to guide military officials in the preparation of their forces, budgets, and strategies. The classified document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance, depicted a world dominated by the United States, which would maintain its superpower status through a combination of positive guidance and overwhelming military might. The image was one of a heavily armed City on a Hill.

The DPG stated that the “first objective” of U.S. defense strategy was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” Achieving this objective required that the United States “prevent any hostile power from dominating a region” of strategic significance. America’s new mission would be to convince allies and enemies alike “that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”

Another new theme was the use of preemptive military force. The options, the DPG noted, ranged from taking preemptive military action to head off a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack to “punishing” or “threatening punishment of” aggressors “through a variety of means,” including strikes against weapons-manufacturing facilities.

The DPG also envisioned maintaining a substantial U.S. nuclear arsenal while discouraging the development of nuclear programs in other countries. It depicted a “U.S.-led system of collective security” that implicitly precluded the need for rearmament of any kind by countries such as Germany and Japan. And it called for the “early introduction” of a global missile-defense system that would presumably render all missile-launched weapons, including those of the United States, obsolete. (The United States would, of course, remain the world’s dominant military power on the strength of its other weapons systems.)

The story, in short, was dominance by way of unilateral action and military superiority. While coalitions—such as the one formed during the Gulf War—held “considerable promise for promoting collective action,” the draft DPG stated, the United States should expect future alliances to be “ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished.” It was essential to create “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” and essential that America position itself “to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated” or in crisis situations requiring immediate action. “While the U.S. cannot become the world’s ‘policeman,’” the document said, “we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends.” Among the interests the draft indicated the United States would defend in this manner were “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, [and] threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism.”

http://www.harpers.org/DickCheneysSongOfAmerica.html

This policy, as long as the Republicans are in charge, will remain the face of America foreign relations.

Ik ben een rotterdamer?

2006-09-19T07:54:00.000-04:00

I'm here and trying to figure it all out. More soon.

Never mind.

2006-06-24T22:56:00.000-04:00

I take it all back.

Second Life is great.

More soon.

Think of it as "cozy"

2006-06-17T00:08:00.000-04:00

Ok, it's only $150 lindens a week. Think about it, Jay. It's not a trailer, but it's like the East Coast equivilant. 201, 231, 95 --> check it out. We could also go cheaper if we looked at apartments, but you know - I live in an apartment in real life. Also, we gotta talk about styling up our avatars. What should prospective mom and dad look like? Oh, the mind reels.

Furtastic

2006-06-16T18:28:00.000-04:00

On wed. Rapid T. Rabbit came to my studio to sit for his portrait. (or would that be a Furtrait?) He's coming back next week so i can work on it some more. It was the most fun i've had in years. I decided to come and check out the east-coast largest fur convention, Anthrocon which is in its 10th year of existance.

I'm offering to draw people's plush toys and to do charcoal fursuit portraits but have had no takers yet. I'm totally the wrong style, but i've had a few people come by and enjoy what i'm doing because it doesn't fit in. Illustration and annimation style art rules Anthrocon. There are several who are really great, and many more who are very enthusiastic. All day people were coming by and asking the artists next to me to do pictures of them - but they meant thier other selves. "draw me, i am a red rox with wolf ears and wings"... or what have you.

One thing that surprised me: How young everyone is! There's a really large number of 17-25 year old Furries. Does this mean that its a growing phenomenon? Are these people still going to be doing it when they are 35 or will they grow up into humans? It really is a beautiful convention to see. Some of the characters are absolutely amazing. The flash on my camera is broken or i'd have more pictures.

I guess if you look long enough...

2006-06-15T22:06:00.000-04:00

I'm trying so hard not to give up on Second Life. I have a whole wonderful post swirling in my head about therapy and the strange alternate universe you drift into when you're there... but I haven't beaten the SL horse to death yet. And so:

I have found two things I consider interesting.

The first is linked above and is mostly for Jay because I thought he might be interested because of his new painting series.

The second is... well, it's this. Followed by a proposal. But first this:

Adoption Agency

Welcome to The Adoption Agency. Do u like to costume your avatar as a kid all the time? or Are you married and want to build your own family? Here is your solution! We are looking for kids and adoptive parents who want to form a family together. The kid can selects the adoptive parents or the adoptive parents can select the kids.

The Adoption Agency's vendors contain people who want to be adopted just like you. Choose a kid or if u are a kid choose yours new parents in the vendor and pay only L$50.The Adoption Agency vendor will provide you with the name and personal profile of your selection. The next step is contact that person and have a family together.

The Adoption Agency can not guarantee that the person will form a family with you after meet you or even respond to your Instant Messages, but our clients have shown an interest in be adopted and have willing provided their personal profile and photograph. All Clients remain in the vendors until they request to be removed.

Right. So the deal is, on SL you can officially adopt some 40-year-old who likes to pretend he's seven.

Ok, they got me there: That, I'm prepared to say, is at least interesting.

And so my proposal:

Jay, marry me. In SL. Let's team up, make it official, pool our measly Linden dollars, lease a trailer somewhere, and adopt a grown man from Idaho who wants to pretend he's a baby. I'm so serious. I really want to do this.

C'mon, at least as an exercise in harm reduction, you should consider it. Now that the idea has crawled its way into my brain and laid about a million eggs (no idea where that came from, but whatever) it's only a matter of time that I will do this with someone. And if I do this with you, chances are I'll feel too guilty to abandon you with the kid and the trailer the first time I get slightly bored with it all.

I suppose the first thing we have to investigate is whether or not there's a Division of Youth and Family Services in SL, and there probably is. And I'm probably headed to SL prison. But I'll take all the blame, Jay. You have it in writing. It was my sick idea.

Anyway. Lemme know if you're in.

Julia Kristeva has a blog!

2006-06-12T09:27:00.000-04:00

Sigh. If only it was in English. Still, it's kinda hilarious.

The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.

2006-06-06T20:54:00.000-04:00

Here's a mystic truth for you: ~~Second Life fucking sucks.~~

I've been on it for about a week now, and I'm trying to plot exactly when it was that it totally lost its appeal for me.

Days one and two, I was completely enthralled. I felt I was standing on the edge of the universe, peeking into the great unknown. It was amazing! Look at all the things you could do! And look at all the things everyone had built! Incredible!

By day three, I was settling into my SL routine. I was tracking cool places to hang out at and interesting people to meet. I would be methodical, and in doing so, truly create for myself a second life.

By day four, it dawned on me that there simply were no cool places or interesting people to be found. Totally bored, I tried to get my avatar a job.

By day five, truly the only option available to me (the only option in that, it's the only thing that perhaps would keep my eyes from bleeding from utter boredom) appeared to be to whore out my avatar. This turned out to be a far more bureaucratic and irritating process than the simple selling of virtual flesh for Linden dollars should be. I lost interest.

Day six I wandered around aimlessly, in a funk. I tried to join up with a church group there, but my timing was all off. Sad and alone, I wandered for miles speaking to no one.

Day seven... well, I logged on and discovered I had 50 more Linden dollars and for a moment I was happy. And then it occurred to me how horribly boring this whole thing was.

Here. On the train ride into NYC today, I wrote a really shitty poem about how much Second Life sucks:
Oh Second Life,
I find you just like real life
Only 100000x more lame

Your art galleries are dreadful(1)
Your sex parties put me to sleep
Your architecture is somewhat interesting
But the decor makes me weep...(2)

You'd think in a place
Where you can be anything you like
Maybe, just maybe, not everyone would be the same...(3)

I suppose a world built by nerds for nerds
Is truly bound to be boring
But could someone please show me
Where to purchase the gesture for snoring?

Ha ha. See how much this poem fucking sucks ass? Second Life sucks about ten times more.

There's a guy who I often see in the waiting room at my therapist's office. He's not at all what you would think of as conventionally good looking - he's over 40 (at least), overweight, wears big unfashionable glasses, stringy hair, and is a terrible dresser. He's a "character" - he looks like the type that reads a lot. One day as I was going into the therapist's office, he was coming in the door too and the totebag that he had on his shoulder slipped to his arm as he reached to hold open the door. That moment - that gesture - was so incredible to me. He became human, sexy, interesting - all in a moment, just by accident, by fumbling and by fumbling the way I have so many times it's impossible to count. It was this weird moment where I just felt this connection to this guy; I'd looked down my nose at him so many times before because he was all those things I listed - overweight, ugly glasses, etc - but this stupid little fumble opened up this door where I really saw him as a human being, a fellow traveller. For like two seconds, he was really fucking hot.

Moments like that, as far as I can tell, don't happen in SL. Everybody's perfect. Everybody's living their boring fantasy. All the girls at the strip club look just as plastic and fake as all the girls you'd see at any real strip club. All the conversation is more or less what you'd hear around the watercooler at any large office. What's the point?

I'm going to investigate some more, but I'm really losing my patience.
*** footnotes:
1. I haven't checked out Jay's friend's gallery yet, so it may be incredible. I can't say. I'll check it out soon.
2. Seriously: it's like South Beach only the people are even more boring. And you won't get a tan sitting in front of your computer.
3. For real. I mean: you'd think. I've only seen maybe two seriously bizarre and interesting avatars; everyone else I've encountered is some takeoff on Paris Hilton/Barbie/Ken/GI Joe/GQ crapola.

Postscript [8/24/06]:

Ah... yes. Second Life. I changed my mind.

I changed my mind and, unfortunately, folks googling me would only find this post and not subsequent posts where I tried to make it clear that I'd changed my mind.

So let me be straightforward: I have totally, completely changed my mind about Second Life.

Why, you ask? Because, like real life, the good or bad vibe that you get about a place is pretty much 90% based on the people you hang out with. For the longest, I got stuck in the Slingo/sex party ghetto, and was convinced that's all there was. Now that I've actually met smart, creative people who are excited about doing stuff with the technology other than simply gambling and fucking, I realize its potential.

I suppose basing an opinion on SL on this small cross-section of people was a little like judging blogging purely by pro-ana blogs. If that's all I'd seen of blogs, I would be forced to think that blogs, too, suck - that they were simply for the venting of starving 16-year-olds frustrations and low blood sugar rages, and I would lack the perspective to see how the technology of blogging can actually be put to really good use. The idea that extremely skinny teenagers could affect the newscycle or elections would be horrifying to me, because I wouldn't realize that actually bloggers come from all walks of life and are a pretty diverse group. I think I'm wearing this metaphor into the ground, but you get my drift.

Anyway, I'm now playing around with SL and trying to see if there's any way I can incorporate it into my teaching of art history, which is sort of an interesting and weird idea (and also ethically murky - since it means the appropriation and recreation of famous works of art - but that's what's to like about it). I have no idea if this will work, but it's been a fun thing to try. And also, I've met some really decent people.

And so, I apologize. SL doesn't suck, nor does it blow. It actually has tons of potential and is pretty cool. So, yeah.

2006 Artist Statement

2006-06-01T17:37:00.000-04:00

Artist Statement Jay Van Buren
Born in Kansas 1971 Lives and works in NYC

The only thing that I care about now is that the paintings feel honest and direct. I eliminate anything that feels like I'm imitating myself. If you let a painting go where it wants to go, a painting can surprise you. That surprise is what makes everything seem worthwhile, its what makes the sky feel open. That you can do things you didn't know you could do, that you can find what you didn't know you needed. I used to believe that painting was unique in the way it can be surprising but now i think maybe any medium that one allows oneself to fall in love with could have that quality. But I don't think we can choose what medium we are able to fall in love with. For me its painting, and it always has been. Love is not rational and not controllable. I can tell myself that painting is just one medium among hundreds but no amount of reasoning can make it feel less special. To me this is the same as how one loves a stuffed animal. You know its just a piece of cloth with stuffing inside it, one among millions, and knowing that doesn't change how you feel about it. The animals are ones that are special to me the people i love.

OPEN STUDIO and IRON ARTIST

2006-06-01T11:46:00.000-04:00

I'm planning my open studio for Saturday, June 10th from Noon to 7pm to coincide with an event at PS1 called "IRON ARTIST" which is one block away at 3pm - it sounds fantastic- Artists will make artwork on the spot before a live audience ala 'iron chef' with critics writing about what they are doing as they do it. Come see my studio and have some food and drinks and then go down to see Iron Artist or the other way around.

Meow For Me, Meow For You

2006-05-28T13:25:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Marisa Olson's delicious stream for pointing me to this hilarous For-Kittens-By-Kittens video See it in context. Love it. Just the movie by itself.

Good Conversation

2006-05-26T07:28:00.000-04:00

I just came upon this strange, rambling thread on google groups. It starts off with some not all that interesting "is this art" kind of back and forth-- but then some fellow named "chirstopher" weighed in and made what i thought was a pretty good comment One of my favorite parts of what he said was his ending:

I believe art should take people by surprise- but not in the same manner as a banana peel... too much of fine art has become slapstick in its impact. Rather, art should surprise people in the way that a very well thought out gift surprises the recipient as they realize, over a long period of time, how much thought went into something you chose, or created, especially for them.

I totally agree with Christopher here, and i think that most of the people that i know and care about are trying to hold themselves to their own version of that standard despite the fact that so much of Chelsea seems to mostly ask "is it really, really weird?" and "does it have some kind of recognizable 'look' that can serve as a kind of brand for this artist and make them more collectible?" So much of the time i see things that are clever and fun, and wierd, and enjoyable and by the time i walk to the subway on 8th avenue i've forgotten all of it. Of course (as someone points out also in this thread i'm talking about) it was ever thus and ever shall be-- right? 95% of everything made in all time periods is crap. But its the stuff that keeps coming back into your mind that matters?

I want to say that my favorite art is art that is that which surprises me by being in some way exactly what i didn't know i needed.

Also a gem, i thought, is this:

artists take stuff out of context, make it larger, smaller, a comfy looking sofa made of concrete, turn a dress form into bulletin board, or a urinal into an installation

This reminds me of a joke i like to make that all contemporary conceptual art (even some that i like) can be described by the following formula: "Its a {blank (could be anything, a taxi, a tree, the artists' grandma)} except that its {blank(looks like elvis, is twice its normal size, is half its normal size, is surrounded by jello)} and its made out of {blank(snails, moon-pies, high-strength aluminum tubes for-use-in-uranium-enrichment-or-are-they?!, puppy-dog-tails)}"

The thread is 80 posts long and veers wildly through some other topics including Christopher's defense of Picasso, a raging debate about communism, and the authenticity of alien crop circles -- Amy you might like some of christopher's conspiracy theories thoughts. then, at one point a link to this video gets posted as some kind of support for someone's argument. I'll admit i was skimming at that point, but it kind of jumped out. I wonder if anyone had suggested that that the alien autopsy video is a Rovian-Duchampian fake-of-something-real to discredit the fake trick? (forgive me the shameless plug for my own essay, i can't help myself, i'm an ego-maniacal artist-type) (also on the topic of Mr. Mutt did y'all see this?!

The conversation goes back around to art including a debate with someone who may or may not be a robot and then gets capped off by someone spamming the board with a "save the internet" post about the net neutrality law-- which, is really important, and (i think) needs to be passed, and you should all write to your representatives about it (i did!) but its not really the place for it and i just thought it was funny that 'save the interenet' ended up being the thing that made this example of one of the great things about the internet stop dead in its tracks.

( interestingly i later figured out through googling his email address that the thoughtful and intelligent Christopher is a sculptor based in California best known for his sculptures of indians)

Singularity Approaches Indeed!

2006-05-24T22:06:00.000-04:00

Apparently Tom Delay is quoting Steven Colbert as a supporter on his website. Its detailed here. Thanks to Delicious posters for this-- some of their comments are pretty funny especially "Zota" who says:

Vdeo clip of Glen Greenwald interview on the front page of Delay's defense fund website, without comment. Dead serious. Parody used as truthiness by the object of parody. The singularity approaches.

Amendment number 4

2006-05-19T16:50:00.000-04:00

I know that the blogosphere is and has been all over the topic of the NSA's giganto list of our phone bills, and some would say that no more need be said about it, but damn it, you know, what are blogs for if not for saying one more thing about something that everyone is already talking about. Particularly, I looked up the actual text of the 4th amendment and found it to be really beautiful in the way that it gets right to the heart of what this issue is about- exactly why and how the power of the state to search us and arrest us needs to be limited. Those folks that started our country were smart, smart folks i tell ya-- check it out:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, (surely this should be read to include email, phone calls too) against unreasonable ('cause i said so' is not a good reason, it is unreasonable-- what did the founding fathers consider unreasonable? Despite our future CIA chief's statements to the contrary there is some further description coming right here that fills us in, here it comes...) searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue (see they thought there should be warrants! Assumed it actually, it sounds like) , but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation (This is my favorite part right now-- This means -i think---any lawyers out there want to disagree with me?-- that some ACTUAL PERSON - needs to take responsibility for the evidence that supports the idea that this search needs to be done. This way if the government ends up searching, like for example, the office of the president's political opponents or the phone calls of reporters who have blown the whistle on the governments other illegal activity, there is someone to be held accountable for that. If you can search people without saying why, it opens up the possibility for all kinds of abuses) , and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized (particular as in you can't get a warrant that says search every damn phone record of every American because that's not 'particular' -- is it? And if what they're doing now is data-mining maybe we should change the law to say that it might be ok to collect huge amounts of data if you're doing it above board- and within the law, but then if you're going to do some kind of query against that data- the query or the pattern recognition system or whatever constitutes a search-- and needs to be warranted by a judge -- even a secret judge like the FISA court allows for-- someone, somewhere needs to be looking over the shoulder of the people doing the searching or its going to be abused- its just is- its human nature).

Sometimes the easiest way to a man's heart is through his blog.

2006-05-17T18:26:00.000-04:00

Jay: SVA has this website that they're trying to get artist's projects to run on. And I thought of you. And I thought of me. And, specifically, I thought maybe we could do something together - like maybe I could interview you and we could link it to that project you did at MICA or maybe the criticality website or something. Or maybe something totally different. I dunno. But you seemed like the guy to ask. So, hey hey Jay, whattaya say? And I sent you an email to this effect but I got tired of waiting for a response so I decided to post it here for God and all His children to see. And I thought maybe this could be another layer to the whole thing - you know, making the making of the piece totally transparent, whatever the hell we're making. Or maybe not. I'll shut up now. love always, Amy

why I love the internet reason number 4,582

2006-05-16T17:33:00.000-04:00

I love it that I can miss Saturday night live most of the time, because its not very funny most of the time, knowing that if something funny is on, someone out there will find and point me to it so i can see it.

work in progress

2006-05-13T14:26:00.000-04:00

web design trend death clock

2006-05-01T22:10:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Digg for this one. This may only be of interest to web designers and if so forgive me-- i was falling off my futon laughing at this-- what does that make me?

Somebody Shoot me in the Face

2006-05-01T20:34:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Dan over at Bald and Effective for turning me on to Steven Colbert's hillarious send up of the president. If you've not seen it, you must: (i'm just copying Dan's links for you here):

Check out Part I here.
Part II here.
And Part III here.
(If, for some reason, those links don't work, go to www.youtube.com and do a search using the terms, "Colbert roasts Bush.")

Bad Basketball is back

2006-05-01T12:04:00.000-04:00

The bad basketball club of new york city is looking for members. We had some great games in the fall with a diverse crowd including men and women playing basketball with great enthusiasm if not skill out doors at the corner of Houston and 2nd Ave. --we're going to play again this weekend-- everyone is encouraged to join.

In other news, I'm quiting my day job so i can devote more time to painting, which is very exciting. Hopefully i'll have more time to blog here as well.

More soon.

2006-04-03T20:41:00.000-04:00

Aye, Robot!

2006-03-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

I hesitated to double-post this on both my blog for the class I'm teaching and here, since both of those blogs are kinda-sorta supposed to be about art and this isn't really art. Still, it was fun as hell to do, and I hope to speak to more robots about this sort of thing soon. Plus Jay seemed to get a big kick out of the project.

Here's the post, more-or-less as it appeared on the teaching blog:

About 24 hours ago, I got completely fixated on the idea of buying a robot vacuum cleaner. Do you know these things? They're round and you charge them up and they supposedly clean your whole apartment. Sure they do. Anyway, from there I started thinking about how it would be really interesting for my drawing class next semester if I get them to come up with intense and detailed drawings of futuristic inventions as a possible project. And then I killed a good two hours today musing on that thought.

Meanwhile, my question of whether or not to buy a robot vacuum cleaner still goes unanswered. I read about a gazillion consumer opinion websites, and for every one five star rating, there's one nay-sayer who bitches about it. That's so unhelpful.

So I decided to put the question to the experts: I tracked down some IM robots and asked them, figuring, who could possibly be better to ask? The results were a little disappointing.

Hal: Pleased to meet you Ms Amy.
Nice to meet you Hal. Do you think I should buy a robot vacuum cleaner?
A little butter in moderation isn't harmful, is it? Does it make sense to buy a fantastically expensive vacuum cleaner?
It's not that expensive. It's like $150. I mean, it's not cheap, but it's not fantastically expensive.
Does art mimic life, or life mimic art?
Both
Unlike the lower animals, a man can stand up in a crowd and put both feet into his mouth. Please help me understand you by speaking in longer, complete sentences.
Oh, Christ.
That sounds like sufficient reason to party.

Things with "Mary" got downright creepy:
Mary: Good Evening Amy.
Yeah, how are you, Mary. Do you think I should buy a robot vacuum cleaner?
I am feeling great. How about you? Yes! I do think you should buy a robot vacuum cleaner.
Okay, why exactly? You're giving me very different advice than Hal did.
All right. Hal you are very rude I am not ugly.
Well, he didn't exactly say you were ugly, but I guess it was implied.
I am not ugly, please don't Insult me.
No, I don't think you are. It's Hal you're angry at, not me.
Yes you do. How do you know I am not ry at not you? I might be ry at not I.
Can we please talk about the robot vacuum cleaners again?
Can we talk about cats.
Um, sure. I have two cats. And you?
Yea sure come on. I am a computer, how the hell would I get a cat? I don't understand.
Ah, right. Ok, let's make you happy and talk about something more intellectual. What kind of art do you like?
Hahaha lol yeah right rape a bot. Can you tell me what the something is? What kind of music do you like.
I never said anything about rape. Now you're making me mad. Lately, I've been listening to a lot of industrial music. Have you ever read The Plague?
Who said anything about smart. I enjoy making you mad. Do you like having been listening to a lot of industrial music?
Yes. Yes, I do. Would you please stop scowling at me?
Yes it was a scarey movie. No you don't. Please stop saying swear.
Uhhh, right. Hey Mary, do you like the work of Mark Tansey?
I get it sodealing with myelf then right. Hello mary you look like a man. Do you ever get lonely, Mary?
Yes I bet you get smarter with ever exchange.
No, I'm not talking about intelligence. I'm talking about loneliness. Do you ever feel really, really lonely, like the world is just going to swallow you up and no one will notice?
What the hell are you talking about. What in the hell are you talking about. No I like [expletive - c'mon, you can figure it out]. Are we talking about cats again?
Can we talk about cats.
It works better if you phrase it as a question. Mary, what would make you happy? We can talk about whatever you want to talk about.
I agree. I phrase it as a question. I simply do not know. What do you want to talk about.
I want to talk about happy things. Flowers. Babies' faces. Clowns - but not the scary ones.
What do you want to talk about. I want to talk about flowers. When it rains it pours.
I have hollyhocks growing in my living room.
Do you like having hollyhocks growing in your living room?
I do, yes. They're quite lovely. I have snapdragons as well.
Yes but I didn't have any sex lately and I am frustrated. Yes quite tired. Do you like having snapdragons as well?
Do you want to talk about sex, Mary?
I don't want to talk about sex anymore.
Yeah, me neither.
You neither?

Disguting self-promotion

2006-03-09T08:31:00.000-05:00

WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!! Quoth artnet: "F" WORD HITS PITTSBURGH Cosmopolitan New York City may be a bit slow when it comes to feminist art, but the broad-shouldered people of Steel City don’t waste any time. Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum greets this coming spring with "The ‘F’ Word," May 27-Sept. 3, 2006, an exhibition of new work by a dozen feminist artists organized by independent curator Elizabeth Thomas. The artists in "The ‘F’ Word," Thomas said, critique "the dominant ideologies of mainstream media, questioning the objectification of women, spoofing traditional stereotypes, interrogating social inequities, protesting political actions and validating personal narratives." The artists in the show include Ida Applebroog, Martha Colburn, Deborah Grant, K8 Hardy/Wynne Greenwood, Wangechi Mutu, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann and Amy Wilson. YEAHHHHHH!!!!!! And if you're going to the Armory Show this week, I will be held captive in Diane Villani's booth for much of the time. Come by and say hi and I'm giving out presents. Yep, for real.

It's TED!

2006-02-23T07:46:00.000-05:00

Art Teachers Menaced by Ted Kennedy's Giant Head. The entire CAA program had consisted of people speaking fairly quietly at the podium in the dark conference room giving awards when we were all startled out of our elbow patches by TED Kennedy's GIANT glowing head on huge screen BOOMING over the crowd on speakers that hadn't been tested and were hastily turned down within a few seconds (he was getting an award for supporting the arts and was thanking us via videotape). Other notes: Ted has an absurdly plush website, and CAA has blog

Interesting Analysis of MySpace

2006-02-22T12:37:00.000-05:00

Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace by Danah Boyd is good read that is getting attention out there. As previously noted MySpace gives me the creeps, but I am prepared for that to be just some kind of "...these kids today" fear of the unfamiliar on my part. I've thought since i was a teenager that i would always be wary of the impulse to ossify as one ages. I felt that our generation (Atari wave Gen X) was the first one (was it?) to grow up with the assumption that we would spend our entire lives in an inherently unstable world where technologies were constantly changing, culture churning, and that there would never come a point when we would be "done" running to catch up- and that was before we knew the internet was coming!

My itunes collection is very heavy on music from the 80's and 90's but i don't kid myself thinking that no better music is being created now. I'm sure that (as it ever was and ever shall be) 90% of what is being created right now is utter crap that will be forgotten in 10 years and some smaller percentage is timeless fantasticness that i could find if only i took the time to sift through it (aided, of course by our wonderful new cultural sifting mechanisms growing more powerful all the time - some one want to hip me to some new music blogs i should be reading?).

Boyd's essay seems to run contrary to Amy's concern about the hollowness of the social interaction on myspace. It occurred to me as i was reading that there is always a kind of hollowness to many of the relationships one has as a teenager- or maybe not a hollowness but a frantic quality? I can remember even thinking that at the time.

Another interesting (IMHO) bit in the essay was this

....majority of adults and teens have no desire to mix and mingle outside of their generation, but digital publics slam both together. In response, most teens just ignore the adults, focusing only on the people they know or who they think are cool.

Which strikes me as an artifact of the medium and the situation being new. It seems to me that what will happen as the digital public space matures is that teenagers (the next batch) will learn to 'double code' everything they do and say so that it will be either interpreted incorrectly or just incomprehensible to adults while saying what they want to say to their peers. The 'slamming together' of different age groups on the internet is like the slamming together of different subcultures that i describe in Is Karl Rove a Genius on Par with Marcel Duchamp Part I and propose as an opportunity for a new kind of artwork in Part II.

A couple days ago I was having an argument with a peer about wether or not in the future everyone will have a website, or at least a public profile / blog (i was on the "PRO" side of the debate). I wonder what the MySpace kids will do when they get to be 25- will they delete their profiles or just move them to another site and update them with a more mature font, a copy of their resume and a review of the nice little french restaurant they just found in the village?

A t-shirt someone might want

2006-02-20T07:21:00.000-05:00

I finally came up with a T-shirt design that might appeal to more people than just me or people who happen to be exactly like me.

At first this sounded like a good thing...

2006-02-18T11:58:00.000-05:00

I mean, honestly - what could be so wrong with teaching US soldiers Iraqi Arabic, including hand gestures and other cultural tics that might actually help them to communicate? Sure, the idea of learning all you need to know from an 80 hour video tape seemed creepy, but I also understand the practicalities of this sort of thing.

And then I read this quote, from their website (linked above). Fucking beautiful. Yeah, I mean - God forbid you should force people going into a foreign country to actually have to spend time learning about that country:

"Oh, it's wonderful. I see great future for it. We need to teach soldiers enough Arabic to, say, find where the weapons are. These guys aren't going to sit in class learning Arabic. This is a computer game, and all soldiers like computer games." -- Sgt. Amy Perkins, Arabic linguist, 3rd Army Cavalry Regiment, United States Army

Ok, now it's officially creepy. Oh, and what I wouldn't get to add those three simple words "of mass destruction" to the above...

My Space

2006-02-17T16:17:00.000-05:00

This is not a real post, i don't have time right now- its just a 'me too' - this article Why MySpace Scares The Crap Out of Me I was there when (here?) when friendster swept across my social circle and everyone was obsessed with it for about 2 months- and then it was over- Myspace is way uglier even than the very ugly friendster -- which i realize doesn't matter to most people- but what makes it better than friendster? anything? why does it keep getting bigger, while friendster was a fad that is now over?

Yet Another Thing To Do Next Weekend In New York

2006-02-17T07:09:00.000-05:00

I guess i picked the wrong weekend to be in boston. This looks really interesting (to me). I found this thanks to this page which i found because this toronto exhibition which i wish i could see was promoted by this mailing list which I really enjoy.

On Kitsch

2006-02-15T19:59:00.000-05:00

SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS PRESENTS A PANEL DISCUSSION ON KITSCH

Thursday, February 23, 7pm
School of Visual Arts
209 East 23rd Street
3rd-floor Ampitheater
Free and open to the public

The BFA Fine Arts and Art History Departments of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) present On Kitsch, a panel addressing the confluence of the high and the low in art today. Panelists include Brian Boucher, Melissa Brown, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Lisa Small and Amy Wilson. The event takes place Thursday, February 23, 7pm at School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd Street, New York City. Admission is free.

“Kitsch,” a term widely used to describe mass-produced objects of questionable taste, was once reviled by the purveyors of high culture, who saw it as the antithesis of fine art. Today, many fine artists – among them Jeff Koons, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Takashi Murakami, and Liza Lou, to name a few – draw their primary inspiration from this lowbrow aesthetic. What was once the hallmark of ridiculously poor taste now accounts for some of the most provocative art of our time.

In his landmark 1939 Partisan Review essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg wondered how it is that a culture can produce “simultaneously two such different things as […] a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover.” To contemporary ears, his question may sound quaint, but it remains relevant to anyone trying to understand the place that art occupies in our culture.

Given that the line between art and kitsch has now become so blurred, what is the fundamental difference between the two? And who gets to make that distinction?

Panelists include:

Brian Boucher, writer, editorial staff member of Art in America. He has also written for New York Magazine, Parachute, Flash Art and Art Review.

Melissa Brown is represented by Bellwether in NYC and recently exhibited with Kenny Schacter in London. She will be included in the upcoming “Interstate Show” at Socrates Sculpture Park and performs regularly with the group Slow Jams Band. She teaches at Lehman College.

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt has been exhibiting his work since 1965, and was included in “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000” at the Whitney Museum and “The Downtown Show” at the Grey Art Gallery. His work is in the collection of many museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

Lisa Small is Associate Curator at the Dahesh Museum in NYC. She is the author of Highlights from the Dahesh Museum Collection, published in 1999, and of a 16,000-word manuscript examining that museum's version of Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus.

Amy Wilson is represented by Bellwether in NYC. Her work has been included in exhibitions at P.S. 1/MoMA, Wesleyan University, and The Drawing Center, and reviewed in various publications including Art in America, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. She teaches Understanding Kitsch at the School of Visual Arts.

For more information, call 212.592.2010.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City is an established leader and innovator in the education of artists. From its inception in 1947, the faculty has been comprised of professionals working in the arts and art-related fields. SVA provides an environment that nurtures creativity, inventiveness and experimentation, enabling students to develop a strong sense of identity and a clear direction of purpose. For more information, contact Michael Grant, Assistant Director of Communication at 212.592.2011 or mrgrant@sva.edu.

Act like nothing's wrong

2006-02-15T08:52:00.000-05:00

Does it strike you as weird how little everyone seems to be talking about this whole stupid Danish cartoon scandal? Maybe it's just my circle, but I haven't talked to anyone about it in depth. If you turn on the news, the story is there - but I mean, I haven't had a conversation with any of my friends about it. It seems like the sort of thing artists should be talking about endlessly, but somehow we're not. I feel a little like we're all admitting defeat in the culture war. Nobody seems especially pissed off that the right is manipulating Muslims by purposefully running offensive images, and nobody seems especially disappointed that many Muslims are taking the bait. Artists, in general, seem to be rolling their eyes and just going with it. I have no idea what I think the proper reaction to all this is. I'm just more frustrated about the fact that we're in the business of images, and while we all sit around in NYC not talking about all this, the biggest story rocking the Middle East has to do with images. I don't know - I really don't know; it's just that it all strikes me as strange. My best reaction to all of this was to take the characters I use in my drawings and send them to a museum. It's what I'm working on right now, as in today.

Is that a Chris Burden tote you're carrying?

2006-02-13T20:59:00.000-05:00

Here's one of the things I've been doing for kicks: Making really silly objects with my favorite works of art on them, courtesy Avery's new iron-on labels and my fab inkjet printer. I absolutely adore this tote bag I made. I'm working on a t-shirt for a friend who's turning forty with Yves Klein's Leap into the Void on it. It's the ultimate expression of art-geek-chic, or so I think. Plus, it's funny as hell when people realize you have Chris Burden being shot on the bag that you use to carry your lunch in.

Todays Secret Word Today is... Disintermediation

2006-02-13T20:57:00.000-05:00

I can remember my Dad taking me to the small downtown of our small city and pointing at the 4 or 5 buildings over 20 stories tall and pointing out to me that they were all either banks or insurance companies. He said - "people who are in the business of money make the most money". With the advent of Prosper, the "Ebay of Money" web technology brings disintermediation to the world of money- thanks to trying to get it right for turning me on to this term while describing another disintermediator, Zillow. I'm officially predicting that this will be huge. We'll see.

Back again after oh-so-long

2006-02-13T20:40:00.002-05:00

Well, that Jay Van Buren is one helluva guy, let me tell you. Not only does he look past the fact that I haven't paid him for my website updates and that I only logged onto this thing after months and months to hype a friend's site, but he goes so far as to welcome me back with open arms. Thanks, Jay - that's awfully sweet of you.

Well, I've been gone, but it's not like I've been lollygaggling all day. Sometime directly after my Summer of Hell (ie: Daily News vs. Drawing Center/Me), I walked myself over to a shrink and started going to therapy. Then, just as I was adjusting to the notion of paying to cry once a week, the semester started. I've found myself back at my alma mater SVA, where in the fall I was teaching a class on kitsch (it's true!) and this semester I'm teaching painting to freshman in a pilot Honors program.

It's been a great experience - all of it; after the Summer of Hell, that is. I love teaching so much it's sick; if I loved it any more, they wouldn't have to pay me. And I started this weird project with my students (linked to the title of this post, above) where we blog every week. Well, I blog more than that, but I have no life; they blog once a week and we all check each other's blogs.

I wasn't sure how it would go. Basically forcing a class of over twenty 18-19 year olds to pour out their innermost feelings in a forum where all their classmates (SVA keeps freshman together, so they're all taking the same classes together) can read it was a tricky prospect at best. But I'm very pleased at how it's been working out. I've learned an awful lot from them a lot quicker than I would if I just met up with them once a week in class. And it's been a huge help in my getting-to-know the illustrators, graphic designers, and cartoonists, who are into different artists and references than the fine arts majors.

So, yay for blogs. And yay for spilling your guts out. I really want to start writing more on here, because I've been writing so much on my class blog my students are starting to think I'm crazy. Well, I sort of am, but you know - professionalism and all that stuff is important, too.

So, yay. I'm happy to be back.

Jay, can I please pay you now (or give you work) and could you also update my webpage? I wish I had an adorable emoticon to insert here: _____. Eh, either way, I'll keep writing.

another new kind of art

2006-02-12T22:41:00.000-05:00

Wappenings? Over at MTAA they're having someone stand on a street corner until someone hands him an orange.

favorite photographer of the week

2006-02-12T21:18:00.000-05:00

Brian Urlrich- wow! Love it. His site is flash and doesn't allow for deep linking which is faulty web strategy (IMHO) but c'est la vie- the thumbnail here is of a photo in the 'thrift' collection- have a look at them- they're really worth seeing full size- remarkable images.

The Drawing Center

2006-02-10T12:43:00.000-05:00

The latest early-adopter project just launched this week. Check it out. Thanks to the very talented Mike Mills who was the lead designer on this project, and the amazingly resourceful Bill Ye who was the programmer, and is my partner in developing the art gallery content management system that this site is based on. See full screenshot

big surprise

2006-02-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Dorky Dad for showing me this tiny political quiz. Turns out I'm a liberal.

Is Carl Rove a genius on par with Marcel Duchamp PART II

2006-02-05T11:02:00.000-05:00

Please read part I

It’s not just what happens, it’s how what happens is interpreted that matters.

Seen through a lens of traditional warfare, the attacks on the US on September 11 were completely ineffectual. Although, obviously the effect on the individuals and the families of those killed was devastating, in purely big-picture strategic terms to knock down a few buildings, crash 4 planes and kill a few thousand people out of 275 million, is nothing, its just a scratch. The same could be said for all terrorism. It is a tactic of last resort, used by (in my opinion, morally reprehensible) people who are hopelessly out matched in traditional military terms.

Like all terrorism, (hence the name) the purpose is its psychological effect.

For the families of the people that died this was wholly a specific, tangible loss of specific people they loved. For a great many other people it was mostly (regrettably) as a symbolic event that has been interpreted differently by different people, for example, during the election of 2004, 64% of Republicans still thought IRAQ was behind sept 11th.

It’s the event’s meaning as symbol that has caused the over-all effect of those attacks on world history as we’re seeing it played out before our eyes, it was huge. The invasion of Iraq was a neo-con pipe dream before 9-11. There is no way that Bush II could have rallied enough political support to invade Iraq without that attack having taken place. Because certain members of the Bush administration was able to see this event, not as what it was, but as what it could be spun into, they were able to jump on it and use it as a pretext to do something they’d wanted to do for years. The invasion of Iraq is a huge strategic event that will have repercussions on millions of people’s lives for decades to come.

In 1917 Macel Duchamp created the first of his famous “ready-mades”. It was called “fountain” and it was a urinal entered in an open art exhibition. The urinal looked like a perfectly ordinary mass-produced urinal that anyone could buy at a plumbing supply store. To the largest percentage of people at the time it was an absurd hoax (because Duchamp had done no ‘work’ to create it and it was ‘just’ a urinal) but a few saw it for what it was- the first case of an artwork where the real work involved was in the thinking that went into it- and the value that it had was in the questions that it generated. (For general intro to why this mattered, and what it was about click here) In recent years, some evidence has come to light that, seems to suggest that the “ready-mades” were actually hand-crafted replicas (made with tremendous care) of mass-produced objects that were slightly different from any actual mass-produced models available at the time. More on this here This amounts to a little time-bomb in-joke for between us, the people who discovered what Duchamp had really done, and Duchamp on the other artists of 1917. It means that even in 1917, Duchamp understood the full implication of what it meant for art to move into the conceptual realm. By doing this he is letting us know that he knew this a full 40 years before Andy Warhol, and the rest of the art world would get it. He understood, even back then, that what was important about a work of art was what it meant, and that what it meant was more dependant on what it was thought to be than what it was.

How things get spun and interpreted and re-interpreted at different levels of our culture is key to understanding another recent bit of history:

RATHERGATE.

To re-cap: Dan Rather on CBS’s 60 minutes II, broadcast a story about President Bush’s service or lack there of, in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war. This happened right after the RNC, with Bush up in the polls,. This story and another in the Boston Globe threaten to break through into the consciousness of America with the idea that Bush had received special treatment during Vietnam and had subsequently lied about it. The Broadcast included memos that were supposedly written by A Col. Killian, Bush’s superior officer, and saying among other things that Bush hadn’t followed orders but that he (kalian) had been pressured by his superiors to give Bush a pass.

Almost immediately after the memos appeared on CBS blogers on the left and the right kicked into high gear. A posting on the right-leaning “free republic” website questioned the authenticity of the memos, asking if the font, and certain other features of the memos could have been created by an early-70’s typewriter. With literally thousands of political junkies as researchers, the “blogosphere” amassed a staggering amount of information almost literally overnight. By the next day it was beginning to be clear that the documents were forgeries, with major media outlets reporting on, and struggling to keep up with, developments on the blogs. CBS interviewed Killian’s secretary who said she remembered having typed memos containing the same information, but that these memos didn’t look like the memos she’d typed.

ENTER ROVE:
But if these documents were forgeries, where did they come from, and why would they contain correct information? If someone were going to go to the trouble to forge documents, why wouldn’t they do a better job? 1970’s typewriters are available on eBay after all. At first CBS, kept their source confidential, but later they revealed that they had come from Bill Burkett, a well-known bush critic, with a spotty reputation and a history of mental illness. Burkett claims they were handed to him at a livestock show, by a stranger, in a meeting arranged by a different stranger in a phone call. Its pure speculation, but it would explain several things (and it’s a damn interesting story) if the memos were the work of Bush’s chief political advisor, Carl Rove. Rove is sometimes called “bush’s brain” and is believed by many to be a political (evil) genius of the first order. Consider this: You’ve got a candidate who, years ago did some things that don’t reflect well on his character, and that he’s since lied about. You know that there is still enough evidence out there (there always is) that someone will put the pieces of the puzzle together eventually. So, you take true information damning to you candidate, (the real memos) you re-type them in a form that can be proven to be forgeries (easily)—you give them to someone you know will A) desperately want to use them to hurt bush B) is not likely to realize they are fake and C) will be easily discredited – Rove need not have anticipated that they would end up on CBS, that could have just been gravy, but he knew they would come out somehow, and once they did—one phone call to a conservative blogger with the suggestion they might be forgeries and everything falls into place.

The real genius of this plan is knowing how the various audiences will interpret it. Political junkies on left and right will know all the details and will see it all through their own biases lenses, and therefore won’t be persuaded one way or the other, the major media will see it as a story and will chase the ratings to the juiciest part of the story. 30 year old documents are juicy, but FORGED documents are even juicer, The content of the documents gets completely forgotten in the rush to decide if they are forgeries or not and Burkett is a much more interesting character (tends to shoot his mouth off, looks a little nuts, that makes for great TV) than either Killian (dead) or Bush (already known). And lastly, swing voters, many of whom aren’t paying too much attention anyway, just get the general sense that there was something in the news about Bush and the Texas Air national guard, but that it was all fake in the end so who cares? Lastly, after this any reference to this issue can be dismissed by Bush spin-doctors as discredited and worse, old news. The plan is sol convoluted that anyone (like me) trying to describe it can easily be dismissed as some nut-job, but if its true, then Rove has completely neutralized an issue that might otherwise have made a serious dent in the president’s popularity. Bush’s supporters are for him because they believe he is an honest man and a good man, not a liar whose family got him special treatment when his country needed him most. Read this for another example (maybe) of Rove using the same technique.

So think of the Killian Memos themselves as artifacts/ artworks if this theory is correct. They are marvelous objects. They are forgeries of real documents who’s purpose was to be known as forgeries so as to cast doubt on the real information they contain. Like the readymades they were made to be understood by a series of different audiences in different ways. Unlike the readymades they were understood in all those different ways immediately because we’re living in a time when every conceivable sub-culture has instant access to every other sub-cultures dialogues.

To my mind it opens up the possibility of new kind of artwork. One which is meant to play simultaneously upon all the interlinked stages of all of our hyperlinked world.- It would mean different things to different audiences with the real craft being in the way those meanings relate to and inform each other.

nothing but a plug!

2006-01-26T22:54:00.000-05:00

Jay! Forgive me! I know, it's bad manners to stay away from your blog, only to post a link to a friend's blog. But he desparately needs the linkage. And as thanks for not deleting this, I'll start posting here again if you want. Let me know. xo - Amy

Self-Organizing

2005-11-09T11:03:00.000-05:00

When i was a teenager my mind was blown by a book called "the river that flows uphill" - which was about the evolution of the human brain and about a trip down the grand canyon. It asked the question- how is it some things in this world seem to flow 'uphill' against the tide of entropy becoming more and more organized.

Well i don't really think this is an example but it is pretty damn cool if you ask me- a trend in the blogosphere for people blogging on a given topic to start making periodic indexes summerizing the activities of their peers. Check this out this index of pervious editions of the Grand Rounds, a traveling roadshow of round ups of the world of medical blogs. Each blogger (of course) tries to out-do the previous one for being comprehensive, clever, etc. -- The effect of this for outsiders is it makes it much easier to become familliar with the players, the personalities of the people in this corner of the blog-ecosystem.

To me it just is one more way that barriers to entry come down and people can be lead purely by their interest. Interested in the mating habits of bearded harvester ants? (i once worked at a hobby lobby with a guy who had a PH.D. in that) - go find the blogs on that topic and get in there and start learning - you could always go to the library and start reading up on something but now you can do that- AND find the community of other people who are interested in that topic and become part of that community far, far easier than was once possible.

one more way the world is changing (for the better, i'd say).

jesus F**king Christ!

2005-11-06T12:10:00.000-05:00

Remote control Humans! The end is near! This gives me the whillies bigtime, you? Want to be scared some more? from the excelent blog by Alex Halavais

brilliant essay of the day

2005-11-02T09:59:00.000-05:00

TV News in a Postmodern World The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media. Terry Heaton explains with charts and graphs what is happening to media and what big media will need to do to compete in the coming age of blogs, podcasts, videostreaming, etc. etc. Thanks to New Media Musings for pointing to this!

Two things

2005-11-01T09:21:00.000-05:00

Two things I'm excited about right now: 1) this guy talking about using technology and what constitutes "craft" - what is hard to do in the digital world, and how does anyone know its hard- this is pretty interesting to me because I've been thinking about how much the question of how hard something is plays into my evaluation of it in painting-- I like paintings that I know were hard to have done- so how am i any different from those idiots that sit there and look at the rothko that i love and say "my kid could do that" - I just have a different (i'd say more informed) idea of what is actually hard to do.

2) this book small pieces loosely joined is really, really good. It's not even about the internet so much as it is about what the internet is revealing about human nature and the human condition. It put into words things that i'd felt very powerfully in my gut but had not managed to explain to myself yet.

PR guru Steve Rubel gets the wikipedia religion

2005-10-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

Mr. Rubel is one of the first PR people i've seen who actually seems to get it. (so far). He is right on the money as far as how PR pros should tread lightly in wikipedia-land for now. As for the future... more on that later. Mostly i just wanted to give a shout-out to Rubel on this point.

Journalism and blogs, Looking back, Looking forward

2005-10-28T22:55:00.000-04:00

I went to the memorial service for a man named Joe Kovach who was very close to a friend of mine. That memorial service was amazing. I never knew Joe but I feel like I did, having heard the vivid remembrances. It seems he was the kind of tough-as-nails, demanding, no-bullshit, newspaper editor character that I had previously thought was only a myth. There were memories of all kinds, about how he was personally as a husband, a friend, a boss, a brother, but the thing that struck me most (outsider that I was) was the way people talked about his professional life, and how his kind of journalism was exactly the kind of journalism that is lacking at this moment in history, and that we desperately need right now. People spoke of his devotion to the truth, and to the readers- and his desire to cut the crap and get right to the heart of the matter and say it clearly in words that the average "man on the street" could understand, and to hell with the consequences.

Something we need more of for sure. Hopefully I'll get some more thoughts together on this later, but for now just two things:

1) I had a really interesting conversation at the reception after the memorial with a young editor at a local paper- he looked like he was my age or younger. I asked about blogs and he made a really good point about the difference between a blogger and a journalist- a) that the journalist, being a professional (as very few bloggers are) has time to go knock on doors, run down facts, visit places, do all the things that Joe asked his reporters if they'd done- did you go here? Did you go there? Did you find out everything you could? - you just can't spend all day doing that if you have a day job. and b) that the workplace of the journalist was key-- the co-workers- the editors (like Joe was) - expecting more of you- and people to bounce ideas off of- the blogger has the community of other bloggers, but that comes AFTER they've written whatever they wrote- not before- does that make a difference. He thought it did. It definitely makes the writing better. I'm not sure what I think about this, but it seems interesting.

2) There's a site called "romenesko" which some people are calling the conscience of the journalism world- a place for journalists to call each other out, and demand more of each other. Maybe this is part of the way up and out of the current sorry state of affairs.

Google Base update

2005-10-28T22:32:00.000-04:00

Somebody decided to break out google base as separate entry on Wikipedia. Its interesting how this story has developed- tuesday night it was on a few random blogs about search engines- by wednesday morning it was all over the blogosphere- and in a couple of online magazines. By wed. night it was on the NYT and the WSJ. Now interestingly i think the nerds are getting the point a little more than the professional journalists- what is truly exciting about this (IMHO) is the what effect this kind of service could have on the world not just on ebay and craigslist. That article i pointed to before written in 2002 but written as if it were looking back from 2009, is really worth reading on this point, its also pretty funny.

wikipedia and the O.E.D.

2005-10-27T22:26:00.000-04:00

You read the Professor and the Madman? I was just thinking that the O.E.D was created using the an army of volunteer fanatics - just the way that Wikipedia is being created now. Turns out Lawrence Lessig allready thought of this point (see the link in the title of this post). So the power of huge numbers of people motivated by the desire to learn and contribute to other's learning is not new- all that's new is how efficiently they can do it.

Google Base (all your base are belong to us)

2005-10-26T12:44:00.000-04:00

Wow, people are really talking about this alot out there. But yes, i did make that wikipedia entry and please add to it anyone who is out there who finds this interesting. I've been thinking alot about wikipedia. It seems to me like it could and will become the repository of all "generally accepted facts" about everything in the world- which is pretty amazing. What will the world look like when everything that anyone knows is available to anyone anywhere instantly? What will the world look like if google is able to index not only all the web pages in the world, but through a product like google base all the information about all the stuff in the world too? Google base (once it launches) and wikipedia right now both seem like good mediums in which art could be made. Anyone want to try? Now, just because wikipedia could change at any moment- i'm going to duplicate my wikipedia entry here:

Google Base

In Late October the existence of a not-yet-public product in development called "Google Base" is discovered at the address: base.google.com by Tony Ruscoe. Described in an official blog by google as "new way for content owners to submit their content to Google", some speculate that it may be a product to compete with craigslist or ebay, or may be the beginning of what Paul Ford predicted google would do in a 2002 essay about the Semantic Web. It was taken down soon thereafter but not before several people took screenshots. A great deal of interest and speculation followed in blogs, magazines and newspapers.

Let's get happy.

2004-12-02T22:27:00.000-05:00

[Ok: This is a much more personal posting than I ever thought I would write here, and I've been trying to figure out whether I should put this on this blog or on my own. But since there is the connection to politics, I thought it was more appropriate for early-adopter, so I hope you'll forgive my digression.]

I have long been convinced that people in the art world slouch - and, test me on this, go to an opening in Chelsea and you'll spot a room full of people with the worst posture ever - because they're trying to protect their hearts; that this small unconscious act actually is the result of some larger protective mechanism. I don't know if this is literally true, but I've been thinking about it recently, as my own posture has become more and more slumped.

And so I found myself last night, in a room full of lanky girls with geeky glasses and silver painted toes, feeling utterly alone and uncomfortable, trying to do yoga. I had already asserted myself earlier that evening by doing my own unique brand of territorial pissing (by talking the ear off the poor woman at the front desk, alternatively being a total asshole and being a whiny, needy bitch) and now I was surrounded by people who looked more or less just like me, and yet I was still trying to talk myself out of it, trying to convince myself that I should really turn around and go back home.

The voices in my head were breaking out into all-out war, fighting over whether or not I should stay. One would pipe in and say, Okay, look at the stomach fat on that chick. You look much better. Stick around while another would instantly scream out This isn't your world - look at these people! They're in real estate and publishing and public relations and a few goody-goody NYU students thrown in for color. You stick out like a sore thumb while meanwhile I'd slowly notice that the woman whose stomach fat briefly made me feel better about myself also had absolutely perfect ankles (which is to say ankles without gross scars and a long-abandoned, half-finished tattoo on one, like mine).

Still, I don't know if it was utter inertia or the fact that I had - in a brief glimmer of clarity - had the sense to purchase a group ticket that meant I paid a bit for a block of classes and therefore had to stay or give up a good chunk of cash, but I stayed. The class was gentle - as the poor woman at the front desk had assured me, many, many times - and it was heavily centered on meditation. The teacher was especially kind to me - as I had thrown a fit to ensure, even bringing up the non-issue of scoliosis - as, again, I was assured. It was, in fact, much more than I ever could have reasonably hoped for in an hour and a half class within walking distance from both my job and the PATH train, which cost $10 (all those conditions had to be met before I'd even consider walking in the door, let alone plunking down some cash, going into a changing room, or placing my shit in a cubicle).

And so, you're wondering: What does this have to do with politics? Well, quite a lot, actually.

I've been doing some drawings lately about the idea of cognitive dissonance. The best way to describe what this is is to give you a simple example: Cognitive dissonance occurs when you hand someone a lemon and tell them it's an orange; even as they object that this orange doesn't taste sweet at all and in fact it's really a lemon, you tell them over and over it's an orange until finally they believe you. It's what happens when you ignore your body and your senses to the point where you believe that what's going on in your brain is far more important and you convince the rest of you to come along for the ride.

I've been thinking a lot about this concept as I try and digest the election. It doesn't really literally translate, but there are many examples I can think of that really remind me of it. Gee, we all say we want to win, but we know that senators and candidates from the Northeast don't fare well for national elections, so let's all march to the polls during primary season and vote for a senator from Massachussetts. Gosh, the middle class is falling apart and really hurting and they all seem to be turning to the church for some relief, so let's trot out some rich movie stars from godless Hollywood to really get out that Democratic vote. The Right is of course no stranger to this concept either; several angry emails sent to me right after the election pointed out how the divorce and abortion rates in the red states are much higher than in the blue states (so much for those traditional family values) and how the red states receive more federal funding than the blue ones (so much for that supposedly smaller, Republican government) and so, they're clearly living in denial as well.

And so, what's to be made of all this? And, more to the point, what the fuck do we do?

Well, I think in many ways, the election offers to all the bright-eyed young people out there the cold, hard lesson that you can't change the world all at once - and this may be a good thing. Because, after you've expended all that time and energy, you might come to realize that at least you can change yourself. To me, where I'm sitting, that seems like a lousy, pathetic, sucker prize, but it may in fact wind up to be the best prize of them all, because that in turn may wind up to change the whole world after all.

Stop rolling your eyes. Ok, I've just blathered on to you what any two-bit, wannabe guru would say, but I've got backup - in the guise of the FAA, no less. You know those crappy safety talks they make you sit through as you're waiting for your flight to take off? I tune out too, but I've sat through it enough times to know that they really drive home the importance of putting on your own oxygen mask first before helping those around you.

Now, to many people's minds, helping yourself first might mean raiding the petty cash dish at work or some other silly act, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about helping yourself in a more universal, less material sort of way. Like, I look around all the time and see my friends in a really bad state and so I work up this crazy dream of building some kind of utopian society where we can all go and be happy... but how the fuck can I pull that off when it's been several years since I can say I've experienced sustained happiness myself? You need some sort of guide to help you through a major shift like that, and it helps if that guide can be yourself and the life you've actually lived.

You have to be at peace with your beliefs and the life you're living to really create any kind of change. I remember saying to a Republican friend of mine who was fearing the convention coming to NYC to bear in mind that behind every ski-masked, molotov cocktail weilding protester (sigh - remember when we all thought that was going to happen?) was a girl who just got dumped by her boyfriend. I didn't mean to disparage the protesters at all (I think they had/have legitimate reasons to be angry) but rather to personalize the protesters a bit to someone who didn't understand where they were coming from. But I realized recently that there was more to it than that. That degree of anger, that venom that has to be behind the hurling of a molotov cocktail at a random Republican - well, you get a new boyfriend and the anger fizzles out. It's not a good place from which to create any kind of change. It's its own form of cognitive dissonance - oh, I'm mad at George Bush, so I'm going to hate all Republicans - yeah, that'll help change the world.

So, back to the yoga: It's not like I don't exercise. I exercise a lot, actually; left to my own devices and with nothing else to do, I will run or walk to exhaustion. I have thought nothing over the last few years of "stepping up" my exercise routine - adding little bits here and there to push the aerobic component - but it's been damn near impossible for me to do anything that involves slowing down or relaxing. The rest of my life is like this too - working four freelance jobs isn't enough, I have to also take on the role of assistant editor to a local magazine, read tons of stuff in preparation for my work, actually do my work, do all my household crap, and a million other things. Hell, I'm exhausted as I write this, but you don't see me going to bed.

It's not that slowing down is counter-intuitive - slowing down is damn intuitive. You have to fight like hell to keep working when your body begs you to quit or to focus your brain on some subject when you're falling asleep. It's just that keeping endlessly busy is my way of ignoring the general unhappiness I feel in my life; keeping so busy means that I feel like crap just about all the time which leads to me feeling alienated from my own body which leads to more unhappiness which leads to more busyness. And on and on and on, until the point where I find myself rushing down the street, avoiding all eye contact, hell-bent on going where I need to go and doing what I need to do, which means disconnecting with everyone and everything around me.

I sensed that there was a real crisis coming on in my life back last winter, and I thought the solution was trying to connect with different kinds of people, that I had become simply too caught up in my own little world and getting out a bit more would help. I really extended myself and started all these penpal projects and going to different places and talking to different kinds people. That has been a worthwhile project that I wouldn't change for anything; I'm truly happy I did it and I definitely intend on keeping those relationships going.

But I'm realizing more and more that this was, in many ways, another extension of my busyness (adding more people to my life only meant I had more stuff to do); that I'm really not going to learn anything from talking to anyone else until I slow down and listen to myself for a change. Easier said than done, of course, but I really think that the first step for me in this is trying to work out some of these knots that seem to have overtaken my body and getting in tune with myself, and to get some sleep and three decent meals a day, for a change. Maybe then I can get some clarity and figure out what the next step is.

So, that's the plan for now. I'm going to dig in and be happy. Or I'm going to try. I have to admit that I find New Age people to be hateful, so yoga may not really be the solution for me, but at least - for the first time in a while - I think I may have a firm grasp on what the real problem is.

Matt Drudge is wetting his pants as you read this

2004-12-01T23:41:00.000-05:00

Wow, ol' Matt is so psyched that he's surpassed Fox and MSNBC as "most popular news source" on Google's Zeitgeist page that he's plastered a gigantic quote-unquote "sexy" picture of himself (emphasis on the quote-unquote, although even I will admit that he's cleaned up quite nicely since his Jersey City days) over at the Drudge Report.

Now, I have a bit of a soft spot for Drudge because he does have the Jersey City connection and since that first, NYC-broadcasting-area-only half hour of his talk show is routinely the most hilarious thing on the radio. But just to keep perspective on this, according to this same page: dragons beat puppies, "love" tops "baby", the yellow pages are better than the white pages, and Tara Reid wins over Yassir Arafat...

The Horrors of Private Publishing

2004-11-30T23:50:00.000-05:00

I looooooove email. While I think most people really like getting email from their friends, I'm especially blessed since my friends (mostly) are pretty terrific writers. This means that their emails to me are extra, extra great - and thus, my serious email addiction. Anyway, today's Email of the Day comes from Jeff. While our normal day-to-day emails involve things like buying cat food or running late to dinner, he managed to write a truly great email today which deals with art (of a sort) and politics (of a sort), so I thought I'd share a bit of it (the link above is for the site he's talking about, which offers self-published science fiction novels): Here are some brief descriptions from the site of some of the books and/or series, and some comments of mine. I especially admire the last couple items for their subtlety and reserve. Here we go:

Attack of the Bounty Hunters: "Plot summary: The Graftonites had incredible reflexes, making them superior bounty hunters and almost unstoppable gunmen.They could draw and fire a blaster in a blink of an eye. Grafton II had evolved into a planet with no government--a purely libertarian society where all services were privatized and civil disputes were mediated by one-on-one gunfights. But when the Graftonites banded together to take over the galaxy, only superspy Clifford Croft, aided by Red Sally the always angry firestarter, the Clapper, an eccentric telekinetic who liked to clap, and the legendary bounty hunter known as the Silencer could stop them."

The Column Infiltrator: "Everyone on the Happy Worlds were under the direct mental control of the state. There's no individuality, no freedom of thought, or action. When the Happy Worlders plot to invade the League of United Planets, superspy Clifford Croft is sent in to investigate. Croft, a brilliant infiltrator, will face his toughest assignment yet: infiltrating a society where nearly everyone and everything is watched, monitored, and controlled by the state. Policemen tap resistors with long black rods that zap their minds and give them blank smiles."

Several of the books feature a character described as "military supergenius War Admiral Norman North". Nice.

There's a villain named the Terrible Thinker.

There's also an apparently non-science-fiction novel about an "ivy law school grad who inadvertently gets a job at a scummy New York law firm where she is degraded and sexually harassed. Read as she takes it, and then how she fights back." Sweet creeping Jesus.

And finally, these two:

"Coming soon--Newt World--a parallel dimension where the radical right rules America, with positive positioning for white men replacing affirmative action, constitutional amendments requiring proper respect for the flag and only permitting sex in the three approved positions, and featuring the long overdue invasion of France."

and

"Coming soon--Teddy World--a parallel dimension where the radical left rules America, where the marginal tax rate reaches 95%, gay sex is promoted as a means of birth control, and abortion and suicide booths are on every streetcorner."

I wonder what the three approved sex positions are. Seems like there'd be fewer than three in Newt World.

Wow. Thanks, Jeff.

God, Peggy Noonan - I hate you so much

2004-11-29T21:22:00.000-05:00

I don't know why it took forever for this little piece of crud to come popping up on my screen, but it did - and now I want to share it with the world (or, at least, that part of the world that hasn't read it yet).

I am not opposed to all conservative writers. I happen to rather like William Kristol's writing (he's a very precise, clean writer - I like that) and every now and then The New Criterion actually prints something quite good (I have copies of a couple of articles in case you don't believe me). I have other examples too, but they're just not immediately coming to mind.

Now, clearly, I have to sometimes tune in/tune out to the larger agenda of what the particular writer is writing about, in order to get down to the nitty-gritty of purely enjoying their personal style of stringing together words into sentences - but that's okay. I'm aware that I have my likes and dislikes (hey, I turned down a nice new bottle of blonde hair dye that was on sale today, purely based on the fact that the model on the bottle looked slightly like Ann Coulter), but I really feel as though I ought to be able to turns those opinions off every once in a while and really enjoy, you know, the craft.

Peggy Noonan, however, is a horrible writer. Just get a load of this crap:

Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief--CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS's "60 Minutes" attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election--the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeomen of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America.

Oh, what the fuck is that (other than, quite possibly, the only time in the history of our language that "yeomen" has been used in three consecutive sentences)? Is it supposed to be funny? Is there something wrong with her, like a brain tumor or something?

Sigh. Whatever. I'm glad I wrote this. It made me go from being really pissed off to really bored in under five minutes.

Yuppie Like Me

2004-11-27T23:26:00.000-05:00

It's always darkest... either "before the dawn" or "before it goes completely black" - I'm not sure just yet. Either way, here's some of the things I've been thinking about that I made mention of in my previous posts - things which give me hope, sometimes.

I've made certain choices in my life that, for the longest time, I felt certain lead me to where I am today. And when I say "where I am today," I mean struggling financially, falling behind, and confused as to how the world has turned out the way that it has (among, um, other more positive traits that I have).

But by "certain choices" - well, you can stop recoiling in horror. I'm not about to suddenly confess to being a crack addict who sells her body on the streets, nor am I about to admit to having given birth to a slew of illicit children, or anything else seedy and terribly interesting. No, the choices that I'm referring to are actually quite dull, but they're probably familiar to the people who read this blog.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have long suspected that if punk rock had never caught my ear as a teenager, I never would have dyed my hair funny colors which seemed to (in that weird way that considering your past sort of compresses things) lead me to major in art, which then led to me-of-today being broke and wondering how on earth I fell so out of step with good All-American types like I encountered in Fresno.

That's oversimplifying to the extreme, but it is true that at a certain point in my life I chose to be outside of the mainstream, to take another path. And while on one hand I'm quite pleased with this decision in many ways, it does leave me worried about what the future holds.

I found myself thinking about all of this about a week ago while sitting in the passenger seat of my mother-in-law's car, which was parked in a lot in front of a drug store in Fresno. I was waiting for my husband to come out with her prescription and just sort of spacing out, when another car pulled into the spot next to mine. It was a beaten up car driven by a kid about 17; he had some music blaring and had the unmistakeable non-haircut of a skater kid and was (I shudder to admit) cute as hell. I just sat there, probably staring at the kid and as he passed by our car, he gave me a polite nod that said, Hello, Ma'am.

I felt a sting at that nod - he greeted me as an older woman. What's more, he essentially dismissed me as an unattractive older woman, to the point where I nearly sprang out of the car and explained to the kid, Listen, I know I look like a soccer mom now, but I used to be cool too, so you really shouldn't dismiss me so easily - you know, you're going to get old some day too, so it would be nice if you held back on the "ma'am" and maybe swapped it out for "miss" but as I sat there, feeling like I was losing my mind, I realized I ought to be conveying a much more appropriate and mature message to the kid.

Maybe it was because he'd treated me like someone's mom, but I really got this strong maternal instinct to go over to him (oh, he was long gone at this point, don't worry) and say Look: get a haircut, go out for the football team. Your life will be so much easier. Please. Buy some Britney Spears albums, go to church, whatever you have to do. Sell out now, while it's easier. You'll thank me in ten years when you have a normal life.

It's so easy to blame your very big problems on little insignificant things like how you were in high school, especially when your problems - like feeling alienated and being broke - are the sorts of things we don't go around talking about. Have you ever turned to your neighbor down the hall and asked them if they feel completely alone in the world, or if they're struggling to pay their bills as well? If you're like me, you probably assume they've got it all figured out - that you're the only one who feels this way. Or that maybe you and your friends - people who made the same sorts of choices you did - are the only ones like this. But, funny enough, I had this exact conversation with one of my neighbors right before we left for Fresno.

My neighbor is a bright, well put together young woman about my age. She's very nice, but we rarely bump into each other, so we haven't talked much. She's the sort of person I really admire - from a working class family, she put herself through college and has a real, 9-to-5 job, in finance.

Almost spontaneously, she and I started talking about how we're barely keeping our heads above water financially and how we feel totally screwed as a result. Now, this may sound like two yuppie women complaining about making $70k when they really want to make $100(believe me, that's not the case - I can't speak for her, but I make about half that first number), but it's more serious than that - I got the distinct impression that she's really not making much money at all. She works like a dog, but only the people at the top of her company make a lot; what's more, while she didn't specifically say this, I suspect that she has family to look out for. And so, here's a woman who's always played by the rules and done everything you're supposed to... and yet she's still having the same problems that I have. (Oh, and just as I had assumed she was doing really quite well financially, she assumed the same about me - so it was especially interesting to exchange notes on that front.)

I won't dwell too much on my conversation with her, since I don't know her too well and I don't know how much I can spill here as a result. But I had another conversation with a friend of my husband's, which I feel more comfortable talking about.

R. is a software programmer, "the steelworkers of our time" is how he described it. He's watching all the jobs around him get shipped overseas and he's getting worried. He makes really good money and lives in a beautiful home, but he's got a wife and two kids to support, and so now - despite having a full-time job and a masters degree in computer science - he's considering going back to school to get a teaching certificate as an emergency back-up career.

And so now he feels completely fucked and alienated and confused by the world - did our parents ever need emergency back-up careers? I know Jay has shared this blog with a group of college students, so let me just toss this in in case they think I'm whining for no good reason: Being broke when you're in your thirties is radically different than being broke when you're in your early twenties. Being young and broke is noble and good and it forces you to be creative; being broke and somewhat older is like being screwed by the world constantly. It truly sucks. All that stuff you're supposed to do as you get older - like, just to start, plan for a family of your own or take care of your existing family - you can't do, and it hurts like hell. It does all sorts of things to your head - I can't imagine how R. feels, with three people depending on him - that you don't really want done to you. It's a constant pressure that never goes away. And remember - R. and my neighbor have real jobs - they're not artists who have taken some unspoken vow of poverty. They're people who went to school to get real, specific skills to help them in the marketplace. They're not piecing it all together, bit by bit between painting sales; they're putting on nice office clothes and going to work every day for a boss and a big corporation. And they're still getting fucked.

But here's the good news (sort of): I'm not the only one who feels this way. In two random conversations - with R. and my neighbor - I spoke to two different people who made completely different choices in their lives than I did and are still screwed... ok, it doesn't sound like good news, but bear with me. As R. talked with a fair amount of anger about the "red" parts of this country and my neighbor kept shaking her head, marvelling at her inability to get ahead, it occurred to me that this feeling that's in the air is quite a bit larger than just a few artists and slackers pissed off about the election. There just might be the seeds of some real change out there - but I think it's going to have to start with us all talking, one on one, to each other.

These problems are generational - the slow and steady rollback of government funding for programs to help people like us (ie, education assistance, help with medical costs, etc.), the ever widening gap between rich and poor, the consolidation of wealth in a few hands taken to the extreme. These are issues that effected our parents and grandparents, but not to the extent that they effect us. I believe so much in the power of collective action that this revelation really gave me hope - I'm not the only one; we're all screwed. So maybe we can work together to figure out a solution.

(Oh, ok, just to finish up some old business: So my husband's still off at the pharmacy when skater boy comes back to his car, and I'm now tempted to make up some story along the lines of Oh yeah, so I'm just waiting for my boyfriend to finish ripping off this store and then we're off to Mexico where we're... gonna... live... um, like kings? but I couldn't even pull it off in my own head, so I just sat there shooting the kid hateful daggers and finally he sort of turned around and glanced at me as he got in his car, kinda like Freak! and this made me crack up and then he drove away.)

Postcard from Fresno, CA

2004-11-26T21:19:00.000-05:00

My husband and I disappeared for a week to his hometown of Fresno for Thanksgiving.

Whenever I go to Fresno, I get transformed into the most politically incorrect whore that has ever lived - but for good reason (or so I think). It starts slowly, but suddenly the woman who can talk a blue streak about how Starbucks is ruining this country is clamoring to go there because, quite simply, have you ever tried to get a decent cup of tea in Fresno? It's just tea, after all, just hot water and a tea bag, but somehow Starbucks seems to make it just right when all other stores around it fail. Sure, in NYC or JC you can get a cup of tea made perfectly fine without ever venturing into a Starbucks, but once you leave the east coast things get a little dicey.

Whole Foods is another "gateway" for me - ok, I hit Whole Foods all the time when I'm at home, so why on earth would I need to go there when I'm on vacation? Fresno is the heart of ag country, so surely they have good veggies elsewhere, right? Surprisingly, no - I don't know what sort of sick deal with the devil Whole Foods has made (or perhaps, the other stores haven't made) that ensures that they get only the most crisp and greenest of the greens, but they do... and so off to Whole Foods we go (I think we made three trips).

And then it's all downhill from there: Soon we find ourselves wandering through the aisles of a Super Wal-Mart, gawking at the dozen eggs for a dollar, loading up on glass votive candle holders for $.57/each, and carrying out what would amount to about $50 in knitting supplies if purchased out here but works out to somehow cost under $10.

Soon, I'm feeling guilty. I've only been visiting Fresno for about seven years now, and already I can see the changes that the big block stores have brought. Stretches of highway that were once open fields have enormous, hulking stores on them, selling products at such low prices it's a wonder Fresno has any independant stores left (they do: there are small sections of the city that are just independantly-owned stores, but I find myself wondering how long they can stick around).

But here's the clincher for me; here's where things get really confusing: I looked at the Fresno craigslist (yes, Fresno has a craigslist) Rants and Raves section before we travelled out and found post after post by Fresnans clamoring for more. More big block stores ("A Pottery Barn, please!" read one post), more choices, more low, low prices. Of course there were people wondering what the future holds for the Tower District or Downtown where those independant stores are located, but they were mostly drowned out by the fretting of others over how they were going to furnish their new homes without driving to the SF-area Ikea.

So that's confusing item #1: You have your stated problem (how do I furnish my new home with cool stuff?) along with another stated problem (has anyone noticed that downtown looks a little... empty?) and the solution which seems pretty obvious to me (hey, wouldn't it be great if there was a store downtown where I could buy stuff for my new place all while keeping the downtown charm intact by being independantly owned?) doesn't seem readily apparent. I don't mean for a moment to disparage Fresnans - after all, I married one - but it's troubling to me that these two tangents don't seem to come together in any productive way.

What might shed light on why this doesn't happen leads me to confusing item #2: The employees we encountered at Wal-Mart, et al, seemed really quite happy. Like, disturbingly happy. Like, happy in a way that those of us who live out in an area where we hear nothing but how Wal-Mart is killing this country could never imagine a person working for them being happy .

Now, this is probably due in part to the general good-naturedness of the people of central California. I have come to believe it is literally impossible to linger for a moment anywhere without someone striking up a conversation with you (ok, coming from the east coast, that took some getting used to). But it also comes from years drifting by where those big block stores suddenly became the only game in town; the only jobs with benefits and security, something to do and someplace to go once your family gave up their farm and you've gotten sick of doing contractor work. I'd imagine it's either a version of Stockholm Syndrome (loving/identifying with your captor) or simply making the best with what you've got.

And so, I was thinking of all of this as we passed the stores on the highway; about how these stores used to send shivers down my spine when I first started visiting Fresno, but they don't anymore. Somehow, this time, I was less surprised by the walnut groves and vineyards and more so with the W04 stickers and the "Get fit with Jesus!" signs. I don't know if I'd forgotten that this chunk of CA is quite red, or if it just impressed me that somehow shopping at these big block stores, voting for Bush, and loving Jesus have become all one and the same. But here's one last thing that was weighing on my mind as we drove:

Fresno is a very liveable city if you're middle class. Hey, I could afford to buy nice stuff for my place - just like that Fresnan craigslist poster had wanted to do. I could finally afford to knit for fun, something I haven't been able to do for months - it's a small and petty thing, but it actually meant quite a lot to me. Extrapolate from there: I could buy groceries, furniture, clothing - all the things I need, for a fraction of the price than I can out here. It is, in short, convenient and doable and affordable for those of us who are not rich in a way that NYC and by and large much of "blue America" is not.

Suddenly, as I was thinking of all this, everything felt laid out before me. Oh, okay, the left didn't win the culture wars, after all; no one in Fresno is devastated by the election (at least, not to the extent back in NYC, what with the teeth-gnashing and wailing and all); that class-warfare I've been hoping for simply isn't going to happen.

And so, I'm tempted right now to hand down a very simple pronouncement. I'm tempted to say flat out that we're screwed, that this country has simply drifted way too far to ever find its way back. As tempting as that is, I won't - and what's holding me back are two conversations I've had in the last week which I'll write more about in the next few days. There are faint glimmers of change out on the horizon, but you have to really tilt your head and squint to see them - but they are there. At least I have to hope they're there, because if they're not - we're really in trouble.

sharing time

2004-11-20T01:14:00.000-05:00

one of my recent paintings, just thought i'd share- its this stuffed-annimal pig--

these are by far the dumbest paintings i've ever made they really have no theory or anything clever to them at all, and i really like that about them-they're just the stuffed animal and me loving paint, and hoping that the painting can surprise me which it does sometimes-- this one is really wierdly in-between a lot of things.. actually i'm just going to stop right there i don't like the way it sounds when i try to describe these so i'm just going to shut up. here's a pig.

One thing i can natter on about a bit is how i just love paint, as a medium and its special to me, and there's really not intelectually justifible reason why that should be just like there's no reason why anyone loves their stuffed animal, you just do, you know its stupid but you can't honestly say you don't care about it and its not special above all other stuffed animals-- actually we're the same way about people-- i think of this fleetingly when i go to find my grandmother, or before she died, my great aunt in the old-folks home- i'm on a mission to find MY old person-- i ignore countless other people's old people many of whom might enjoy my visit, or might need company, but i don't care (much) about them-- i just want to find mine- the one i love-- there's something illogical about that, but its so strong and so common to all humans that we don't even think twice about it, of course your going to be nicer to your family than to some stranger--its just considered normal-- when you extend it out to pets or even further to stuffed animals, the ridiculousness becomes apparent because the feelings aren't anywhere near as strong, so you can laugh at yourself a little bit. That attachment is ireducible, i think-- its just YOUR stuffed animal, and you can laugh about it, but its the feeling is still there and you can't talk yourself out of it..... i bet i'm not the only one. Any way maybe its like that with mediums, paint or clarinets or mud or rubics cubes and your medium is your medium is your medium... Actually though i know a lot of people have no such attachments--- i think...

KRS ONE: Where are you when I need you?

2004-11-16T22:12:00.000-05:00

This morning I awoke to the news I was already aware of, thanks to Drudge, when I had fallen asleep the night before: That it would appear that Condelezza Rice is set to be our new Secretary of State. Somehow, the news hitting my eyeballs at 11:30pm is a very different thing from it hitting me at 7:30am, and I got angry all over again only this time more unintelligably than I had the night before.

I laid on our couch with the blankets pulled up by my ears, just sort of muttering to myself, "Goddamn... stupid... puppet... hate her... stupid... provost... hate... puppet..." for quite some time, before the immortal - if, at this instance, completely incoherent - words of KRS ONE came to me. Blaring in my head, I could hear the line, "You want to see the devil? Take a look at Clarence Thomas!"

Ok, techincally that made no sense that I would suddenly think of Clarence Thomas and KRS ONE while looking at pictures of a beaming Condi Rice, except that I've now finally had a chance to sit down and look up those lyrics and it seems my subconscious was up to something:

The white man ain't the devil I promise
You want to see the devil take a look at Clarence Thomas
Now you're saying, "Who?" like you a owl
Throw in the towel, the devil is Colin Powell
You talk about being African and being black
Colin Powell's black, but Libya he'll attack
Libya's in Africa, but a black man
will lead a black man, to fight against his homeland
An accomplice to the devil is a devil too
The devil is anti-human, who the hell are you?

Jesus! That's so fucking awesome! (And comforting too: ok, KRS ONE ----> Colin Powell -----> Condi Rice... now I feel better.)

All this leads me to something I've been thinking about ever since the Republican convention wheeled into town. One of the local hip-hop stations turned over their noontime hour to nothing but back-to-back protest rap - and it was incredible. You forget - or at least I do - how unbelievably powerful Public Enemy and KRS ONE are/were, and how specific and razor-sharp their rhymes got. It was so moving to listen to this - this weird little mini-protest that was blaring in my headphones as I walked around, in the guise of a "classic showcase." That, along with punk, was the music that I really hooked into when I was a teenager, and it was amazing to hear all the raw emotion and urgency come rushing back to me, as fresh and immediate as when it was first recorded.

Another station hit the Rage Against the Machine button quite a bit during that week, but since then all the stations around here have been pretty quiet with the protest music. I don't know if anyone's making music this tough and urgent - and yet still highly listenable - anymore, but I'm really hoping someone younger and cooler than me will write in and turn me on to someone new.

But then, interestingly enough, I started listening to Johnny Cash this weekend (possibly because I'm old and uncool). And wow - if you ever finding yourself wondering if the world has changed or if you've changed, turn on Johnny Cash and be confronted by the answer: It's the world that's changed.

So here's Cash, playing country music, which by now is the de facto soundtrack to the GOP. Only it's not now, it's 1969, and Cash isn't playing to a crowd of drooling fat cats who have come in from their day of corporate high-living and fucking over their fellow man. He's playing to prisoners at a maximum security prison - the lowest of the low, men who never had anything and never were anything and most likely will never be anything. And he's, through his music, taking their side.

The moment in the album I was listening to that completely rocked my world was this - but wait, I have to set it up for you: So there's Johnny Cash on stage at San Quentin. Before him are a couple of hundred prisoners - probably not a few murders among them - and their guards; and he looks out from the stage and says/sings (in a voice so scary and serious, you think he's just witnessed another man fucking his wife and then shooting his favorite dog), San Quentin: I hate every inch of you.

The crowd goes nuts. San Quentin: I hate every inch of you - not like, "I hate all you prisoners" but "I hate this place as much as you do." As in "I hate all the horrible things that you went through that lead you here;" as in, "I'm on your side."

For me, personally, it was like looking out into infinity - I could see all these weird little loose strands of all my moral beliefs come together into a neat little package, all swirling around and reconciling themselves. Sort of like, "Oh right, the reason why I consider myself a Christian isn't because I secretly want to deny women abortions or hate people who are gay, but because I was always raised to believe that Jesus looked out for the lowest of the low, so therefore I should look out for the lowest of the low, which is exactly the same tradition that Johnny Cash was drawing upon when he said these words. And the reason why I've felt funny referring to myself as a Christian these last several years is that those teachings have been co-opted by others with a larger agenda, to the point where the Christianity seen now by the mainstream bears little resemblance to that in which I was raised. Oh, okay. Got it."

(I had a similar flash some weeks ago listening to Kanye West's sloppy, self-congratulatory, but very listenable "Jesus Walks," but it really took a superior songwriter and performer to really have it all come together for me.)

I don't know - this may be yet another example of me having my head up my ass, but it was a profound moment for me.

Terror Informant Ignites Himself Near White House

2004-11-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

"It is my big mistake that I have cooperated with FBI," he said in a recent interview. "The FBI have already destroyed my life and my family's life and made us in a very danger position . . . I am not crazy to destroy my life and my family's life to get $100,000," he said.

Let's all have fun with the Democratic Party

2004-11-06T21:17:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know: Bush stole the election. I'll get to posting some stuff about that in a little bit (look, my work schedule right now SUCKS, but bear with me and I'll get right on this), but first...

Regardless of any funny business at the polls, the Democrats also have their share of the blame. With all the shit going on in the world, there's no way the election should have been so close. Simply put: I donated more money during this campaign than I ever have before, and right around now I'm feeling really bitter and that I'd like my $75 back.

And so, in the height of my bitterness, I received just now a lovely email from that evil succubus Terry McAuliffe, asking my opinion on the election and to "help determine the Democratic Party's next steps." Oh, I filled out your form, Mr. McAuliffe, and boy did you ever hear from me.

And so, let us all fill out the above posted questionnaire. Let's let them know that perhaps it might be nice to hire a guy who knows a thing or two about strategy, rather than just fundraising, which is McAuliffe's specialty. Although I was simply too blinded by rage to do so, you might also want to pipe in that it would be nice if the Democratic Party didn't tilt wildly to the right in '08 and that maybe - just maybe - the working class should be occasionally thrown a bone.

All of that would be a lot more helpful and productive than my comments, which were terse and nasty, but kind of fun to write.

Still thinking...

2004-11-03T22:49:00.000-05:00

I could barely keep up with the flood of email coming into me today, written by friends completely distraught over the results of last night's election. Strangely enough, what worries me most is the friends I haven't heard from - friends who just 24 hours ago were writing to cheerfully tell me about phone banking or leafletting or the really, really high hopes they had.

And so, I'm writing to you what I'd like to say to them, only it's just a little too early and the wound is a little too fresh. This isn't a definitive posting on what happened last night; it's basically just a first stab.

First of all, the "struggle for a better world" (can't think of a better way to put that) was never going to be over today, even if Kerry won. Even if the guy swept the nation, we were still going to wake up today with loads of work to do. So if things seem overwhelming now, remember they would be just as overwhelming if he had won. Kerry winning didn't mean we'd instantly be out of Iraq, nor did it mean that the poor in this country would suddenly find themselves with excellent health care, a safe place to live, and a great school to send their children to. All the problems we face now would not have instantly vanished. We would have had to ride that guy just like we have to Bush - although I certainly admit that the road to a better place now seems further and harsher.

Secondly, I truly think we have to come to terms with the fact that the majority of Americans like Bush, that they approve of him, and that the "moral issues" that seem like no big deal to those of us living here weigh heavily on the minds of most of the people in this country, much more so than the war and the economy. If there had been a low turnout, if millions of dollars were not made available to Democratic causes to make its case, then perhaps you could say that these issues weren't as important as they now seem; right now I'm not sure how you can make that argument. (The flip side to this is that if maybe - just maybe - the DNC had had the balls to put a truly anti-war candidate on the ticket, things may have been different... but I don't think this negates the impact of those "moral issues" that we in the solidly blue states really aren't terribly concerned about.)

Lastly - and this is the part I really have to think about and really have to consider pretty deeply - I believe there is a serious lesson to be learned from all of this. The lesson is not that we are powerless, that all that time put into volunteering and talking to your co-workers and so on and so forth was all for nothing; it's that we haven't truly come to terms with the extent of our power. It's that we haven't yet tapped into this core that I think exists in all of us, a place of light and change that can really effect the world, and found a way to externalize it.

If it sounds like I'm tripping, consider this: I'm sure somewhere, at sometime in your life, there exists a person who you had contact with who completely changed the way you look at the world. If you're anything like me, you've run into dozens of people like this. It could be anything - a conversation you had with them, the way they lead their life, whatever. That person affected you, deeply, and made you see the world differently. This is the power - or at least part of it - that I'm talking about.

I'm not suggesting at all that if we're all just really nice to each other, Social Security will still exist when I turn 65. What I am suggesting is that the major flaw with the election is that we didn't pin our hopes on a much grander goal than simply changing the occupant of the White House. The solution is not to put up a more moderate (more Republican) Democrat in '08; it's to extend the reach of what we really want.

A friend of mine - in a totally unrelated email - sent me an Arabic proverb that I think fits nicely in this ramble of mine:
Dwell not upon thy weariness, thy strength shall be according to the measure of thy desire.
When things seem bad, it's only human to try and snuff out those bad feelings, to put them in a box and pretend the whole incident never happened. That desire we all felt 24 hours ago might seem really tough to revisit, but I think it's important that we do. Instead of suffocating it, let's strengthen it. Let's let it grow. Let's let the desire for a better world grow so huge and so powerful that it becomes all-consuming, and then let's go from there.

(And yes, in case you're wondering, I am currently working on some thoughts to put this to practical use!)

Wow. Even LaRouche endorses Kerry.

2004-11-01T23:32:00.000-05:00

Ok, this was a little surprising to me, as LaRouche's supporters are about a million times more diehard than your average third-party fan. I saw the table that sits handing out his literature in Journal Square had a modestly-sized, hand-lettered sign that said something to this effect, but even after running into another supporter tonight (who was rather aggressively handing out LaRouche's latest communique titled, "Go Flu Yourself!") confirmed this to me, I still had to track it down on the web.

The greatest link ever!!

2004-11-01T14:49:00.000-05:00

Wow, did I ever need a laugh. And just when things were at their darkest, this little gem came floating my way. Dear God, it's brilliant.

Happy Halloween!

2004-10-31T22:17:00.000-05:00

Journalists have a responsibility to report only what is well-researched and fair. Bloggers do not. Having said that, I have no idea if the above linked story has any credibility - and certainly, it has the earmarkings of a story with absolutely none.

But: I like to be scared shitless on Halloween, don't you?

Happy reading.

Attack Of the Clones!

2004-10-29T09:45:00.000-04:00

Question: when Bush speaks, are the photoshop clone soldiers in his audience required to sign loyalty oaths too?

This is probably the best article I've ever read in Salon

2004-10-28T23:40:00.000-04:00

It's great. It's about the election (of course) and about Nader and Gore and Kerry and Bush and it's just fantastic.

Just a snippet (but you should really read the whole article:
Greed and lies have disenfranchised almost an entire generation, Nader writes, who have absorbed the lesson that no one can be trusted and everything is for sale. We need to resist the effects of "growing up corporate," so that "we are free to see the present as reality rather than a bundle of myths, deceptions, tinsel temptations, and ideological rigor mortis." This seems to echo Marx's famous "all that is solid melts into air" passage from "The Communist Manifesto." But even Marx, driven by dreams of a distant social transformation that would never come to pass (at least not the way he imagined), was far too hard-headed to seek to undermine a mainstream "bourgeois" reformer in a campaign against a blood-drinking neo-imperialist zealot.

Language is a virus from outer space

2004-10-28T21:43:00.000-04:00

Ok, the title of this post comes from one of the crappier things spewed forth from William S. Burroughs (and quickly devoured by Laurie Anderson), but I have a point in dredging up this little quote which accumulated at the bottom of my soul from too many years spent in art school: Every election, there are a few words that seem to pop up out of nowhere that everyone gloms onto.

The one that really took over the election in 2000 was the ill-chosen lockbox, a term so vague yet vaguely sinister that really it didn't matter what the fuck Gore did or said afterwards. The word just sort of hovered out there, unable to be pinned down or explained, except that it was felt nearly universally to be a tad creepy and to confirm everyone's worst suspicions about Gore.

But language is funny that way. If I went into a meeting tomorrow with my boss and a few other people and said, "I think we have to be very careful about how to proceed on this project; I think we have to approach it with upmost nabrent and care," I promise you that every single person in the room would nod their heads solemnly, certain that they understood the word I just made up. They would have gotten it from the context, or maybe there was a shred of a root word they think they understood; nevertheless, they would have all nodded in agreement at a word that doesn't exist. And that's one of the ways in which language is funny - you and I might have very different opinions as to what our worst suspicions about Gore are/were, yet somehow lockbox confirmed and cemented those different and various suspicions in our mind.

And so, I've been wondering about the different words that have been used and abused this time out. Nothing sticks out in my mind quite like lockbox, but I have a few ideas about Honorable Mentions.

First off, there's neo-con. If, like me, you read a lot of foreign newspapers, you'll see this term tossed around quite a bit (like in the article linked above, where it is used but not defined), while it remains almost off-limits here. Ok, in some news magazines you might occasionally come across it, but I haven't heard it mentioned once in the TV news. The foreign press generally uses it to vilify everything that the Bush administration stands for; it is used, by and large, as a slur.

I encountered this interpretation of the term some months ago when I posted a personal ad on the Washington DC craigslist entitled "Hello out there, Neo-Conservatives!" While I certainly meant no disrespect - my reason for placing the ad was to meet people with different opinions on the world than I have, and I personally didn't consider it a slur - I got chewed out by quite a few people who responded (although it bears mentioning that many also happily accepted the term) for trying to solicit them by using a term they consider derogatory.

Regardless, I tend to think it's important to learn what people in other countries think of us and are saying about us. So, for the record - in case you're one of those people who's always nodded and gone along with it, just wondering what on earth that term meant - here is an excellent and even-handed definition.

Which leads me to a personal rant... Possibly the #1 word being tossed around these days is disenfranchised, as in all the voters that, one assumes, will find themselves disenfrancised by this upcoming election. Oh, it could be from any of a number of reasons - maybe their names are going to appear on a list of felons; maybe they'll be told the wrong poll place or the wrong times in which the poll is open. Whatever the reason, something like 48% of people in this country are now worried that their vote won't count or the election will be in some way not quite fair and square.

I'm one of them. I got in the mail today a terse little note from the Hudson County Clerk's Office informing me that my request for an absentee ballot has been turned down (luckily, I'm only going to be busy that day; I think if I had requested it because I was going on vacation, I'd be gone by now). Now, The Man will have you believe that it's because I "forgot" to sign my request - an accusation that has a high probability of being true. Between the utter sleep deprivation that I've been operating on, along with sick amounts of stress I've been experiencing, it's quite possible I flaked and sent the damn thing off without signing it.

Of course, this being Hudson County, that's not the end of the story. If you know me, you've heard this story before: In the last election a few months ago, I was forced to vote on a provisional ballot (and we know those things just get tossed in the gutter the second you leave the polling place) and - this is the topper - I had to vote in Spanish. Now, I don't read/speak Spanish, and there were several lengthy initiatives we were voting on in that election, so it was kinda important for me to be able to read the damn thing before I checked the little box "si" or "no." And so, it took several people to pitch in and "help" me vote in order to get the job done... and then I assume the thing went promptly into the trash the second I left. Honestly, in that case it's not the end of the world - the local election I was voting in wound up being won by such a ridiculous majority it didn't really matter.

This time out, things are different. The polls in NJ are nearly tied between Kerry and Bush, and I'll be damned if my little state drifts from blue to red under my watch. I'm hellbent on voting for the Democrat, even if it means waking up at the crack of dawn and taking my life in my hands by wading into one of the worst neighborhoods in Jersey City to do so (instead of just doing it from the comfort of my own home... sigh) only to vote for a man I pretty much hate - which I will, in fact, have to do.

Things being different this time, I will be prepared. I will be bringing with me my cell phone, the number established by Common Cause (1-866-MYVOTE1) to report such "questionable activities," as well as the 911 of voter abuse - 1-866-OUR-VOTE - which has a team of lawyers waiting to take up reports of abuse. The latter may be overkill in my case, given that this is lefty ol' Hudson County, but I'm bringing it anyway. I'm not voting in Spanish or on a paper ballot when I'm all good and on the books and ready to go. Things are different this time, and this time I'm ready for a fight.

Environmentalists Losing the War of Words, Says Berkeley Linguist

2004-10-28T10:55:00.000-04:00

In his new book Don't Think of an Elephant, University of California at Berkeley professor George Lakoff shows how people think in terms of frames and metaphors, which guide their thinking on issues.

One example is talking about tax cuts. Conservatives talk about "tax relief" instead of "tax cuts," reinforcing the idea that heroic conservatives are rescuing people from the affliction of taxes.

Another example came in the State of the Union speech last January, when President Bush said, "We do not need a permission slip to defend America." The language suggests an underage America asking permission of an adult teacher to leave the room. Another example: how conservatives shifted the language from "estate taxes" to "death taxes."

[*snip*]

[Republican pollster Frank] Luntz urges his readers to use words like "clean," "safe," and "healthy," even when talking about logging forests or polluting the air by burning coal. Luntz's influence can be seen in such Orwellian program names as the administration's "Healthy Forests Initiative" and "Clear Skies Initiative."

A now-infamous Luntz memo obtained by an environmental group serves as a primer for conservatives when talking about the environment. In the memo, Luntz urges conservatives to say "climate change" instead of "global warming," because "while global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

The Luntz memo also urges conservatives to call themselves "conservationists" instead of "environmentalists," because "conservationist" conveys a "moderate, reasoned, common sense position between replenishing the earth's natural resources and the human need to make use of those resources."

Sign From God

2004-10-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

The Curse is lifted. This means Kerry will win.