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Now that the Gipper's in the grave and we're all sick of the subject: he was a mediocre-to-bad1 President who did not end the cold war or break the back of inflation but did cause a lot of suffering in the world, particularly in Central America. Some pretty good negative obits are Ted Rall's, Greg Palast's (scroll down to June 6), and Alexander Cockburn's. American politics became surreal in 1980 once people decided to hire a movie actor as President. Wasn't that when the Athenian democracy went into decline, when they started electing actors? The folks writing his scripts weren't surrealists, though: they had a very straightforward agenda of turning the clock back to some perceived Eisenhower '50s while plunging their hands deeply into the till. David Lynch nailed the era in Blue Velvet--behind the facade of old Gus waving from his red fire truck lurked the sexually depraved, oxygen-huffing criminal. Reagan's men had to wait 12 years before they found another wax dummy Average Americans could fall for--they almost succeeded in recreating what they had in the '80s, except Frank Booth keeps popping up on people's television screens. Reagan was a much better animatronic doll than George Junior.
1. Mediocre in that we're all still alive.
I made a few tweaks to my main site page. Since I've been doing more animation than installation lately I put the animation log higher up the list. Also I made a page for my music .mp3s. The artist's statement remains intact because it's what I still believe--I just added a little update about my growing interest in "time- and internet-based work."
I originally created that family of pages to apply for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World Trade Center studio program. They said you could submit a URL instead of slides, so even though I was basically painting and drawing (with the computer & printer) I was happy to dispense with the whole slide ritual. I've since found out the LMCC only wants URLs for new media or net-based projects--painters still have to submit slides. How techno-provincial is that? I guess the LMCC new media judge opened my URL that year and went, "hey where are all the moving parts and sounds making a profound comment on databases as art, the economic biases of the web, etc? These are just abstractions and drawings of pretty girls!"--if it even got that far.