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Our tax dollars at work: in case you didn't hear, Ahmad Chalabi has been named oil minister in Iraq's shaky, US-propped-up government. They say it's "interim"--yeah, right. This sleazy con man, the Administration's pet Iraqi exile during the Saddam years, provided much of the fake weapons of mass destruction "intel" that dragged us into war in his country. He is a fugitive from justice in Jordan after embezzling millions from a bank there, and has been accused of passing classified information to the Iranians. Iraqi ministers get to hand out patronage positions, so he'll soon be surrounding himself with cronies and hobknobbing with US oil companies, as he prepares to rob his countrymen blind of their biggest material asset. It's sickening the US has aided this creature in his climb to power, with tax money and the lives of so many soldiers.
Jack Masters responds on his blog to the following mildly sniping paragraph posted here a few days ago:
The castlezzt.net guy has a blog now. He's posting under the name "Jack Masters." Interesting pictures, funny/surreal descriptions of dreams, wry philosophical musings, including thoughts on Excel charts that make me suspect a connection to the IT industry (who else would care about Excel?). He's been updating castlezzt, too, and I guess it was inevitable given the cost of bandwidth that "the mile long web page" has been broken into multiple pages.Masters' reply, accompanied by this great Pokey the Penguin drawing (thanks, anonymous):
Sorry, man. I was doing some heavy interpolating (and projecting).
My bandwidth is fine, it's just that it was getting to be quite an ordeal to load the page.
Actually I have no connection to the IT industry at all, I just use excel to record ideas. It has certain advantages over a simple text file, because you can easily rearrange things, or even have the computer alphabetize or randomize them. My notes tend to take the form of lists anyway.
In the screenshot that accompanied the excel post, I was using it to map out the edge permutations of a blank jigsaw puzzle I was working on. I've also used it as a poor man's cellular automata, and various other things.
Top: Lucas Samaras. A couple dozen brand spankin' new Apple flat screen monitors are arrayed on tables inside PaceWildenstein, as in a classroom or library. From a central server one can call up hundreds of photo stills or Quicktime videos by the artist, documenting his strange solitary existence inside a luxury high rise garret in Manhattan. A handful of elementary Photoshop filters are employed to psychedelify mundane actions such as blowdrying his hair and beard, watching TV by himself on New Year's Eve, recording sunsets and Macy's Thanksgiving floats. Kind of poignant, all this, and occasionally stunning despite the familiarity of the effects. Below: Walter Redinger of London, Ontario, who shares Mitchell Algus' gallery with Banks Violette this month. The sculptures below are the artist's trademark fiberglas resin, suggesting Yves Tanguy by way of the Star Trek props department, or Max Ernst with a plague of boils--and I mean all that in a good way. Very strange, excellent sculptures. A bit more on Redinger here.
Eyebeam has organized a contest on the theme of contagious media, the idea being to come up with a meme (project, hoax, web page, joke) that gets you the most hits within a certain period of time. This occupies an awkward zone between social sculpture (art), public relations (not art), new media art, and web-development-as-usual. Participants in the workshops include Nick Denton of Gawker media, who didn't wait to see how the unruly and amorphous new form of expression called "blogging" would evolve but rather led the charge in turning it into something streamlined and branded a la the late 90s dot com model. Blogs under the Gawker umbrella are much like the one you're reading except they have nicer logos and blinking ads interspersed with the copy. They do get hits though. This page has had a couple of mentions on a site called Screenhead (thanks, mon) and both times stats spiked big time.
Speaking of stats, mine are great, thanks. Numbers aren't crowed about here like they frequently are at Josh Marshall's blog but let's just say they're very encouraging and I appreciate everyone who reads. One of the discussions I had early on with fellow bloggers at Digital Media Tree (a collective that is the brainchild of tech whiz Jim Bassett) is that blogging isn't like dot coms because it isn't about number of eyeballs but quality of eyeballs. "Paradigms (memes, whatever) grow around communities of strong interest" is another way of saying it. Well, maybe they do, maybe they don't--you never know what's going to be important in the long or short run. But a perverse thing about the Internet is too much success can destroy the effort before it begins: bandwidth costs money, and more traffic makes blogging more expensive. To accommodate the traffic you have to upgrade and put up ads or a tip jar to keep going.
It can be exhilirating to have a contagious project take off, but recent history teaches us the party's quickly over and you're left picking up your guests' cigarette butts. The only solutions to the problem of the hit meme are to embrace capitalism, quit while you're ahead, or be like the characters in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," who wear prosthetic devices that blunt their natural talents (thick eyeglasses for painters, heavy ankle weights for ballerinas) so they're perpetually good but not too good.
And when it's all said, what did "Turkish Man Kiss You" and "America We Stand As One" really contribute to the discourse? Is their "success" as ironic artifacts something that could, or should, be deliberately contrived?
Updated slightly to accommodate a good point from someone who seemed mildy surprised that these things get updated/rewritten after they're posted (let me know if you want credit for the thought in the last sentence). The rule of thumb is if the post changes substantively I do an "update," otherwise it's just sub-Orwellian tweaks.