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Steve Gilliard wrote this imagined dialogue between Bush Senior (41st president) and Junior (illegitimately elected 43rd). The substance is there, but this conversation would never occur in a patrician family like the Bushes'. 41 would communicate his concerns to Barbara or one of Bush's brothers, who would pass it along to Junior. An even more likely scenario is that Senior would weakly, passively say nothing and Barbara (possibly after a few cocktails) would instigate and deliver the lines below:
The Bush family is sitting in the White House family quarters.
41 is standing, 43, sullen and silent while Barbara looks on
41: Son, you're in real trouble now
43: Whatever
41: No, son. You're in this up to your ass and I cannot fix it. I thought Dick would look out for you, but his ass is cooked as well.
43: I'll handle it.
41: Handle what? What are you going to handle? A prosecutor?
43: I'll pardon them
41: No you won't. You wanna be impeached like Clinton? People don't like you, George. You're mean and crude and this day has been coming for years.
[etc]
Cory Arcangel did an interview with me, published today at Rhizome.org [dead link - see below]. Thanks to him for the good back-and-forth, once I got my rather long-winded biographical reminiscing out of the way, and Marisa Olson for her editing. (Update: Marisa just reposted the lead-in to the interview--newsGRIST's reblogging of Rhizome's original post.)*
It was great to talk about music with Cory, whose work I really like. The 8-Bit Construction Set LP--which he made with the BEIGE crew--still gets props, most recently in an article in Wired. Also "Rudy Tardy and the Slowes," his solo music that I posted here a while back, continues to be listened and linked to, just this month by an Italian site called neural.it. We also talked about visual art--Chris Ashley found a good excerpt that I will probably post as a teaser; see the comments for now. In fact, I'll probably end up putting up goodly chunks of the interview here as I continue to have second thoughts and/or run out of new things to say.
At the end of the interview we discussed what it means for an artist to be "all over the place," i. e., not just sitting in the studio turning out objects in that same signature style. I gave the best answer I could--it's tough. I understand the benefits of that kind of forced discipline, and go in and out of periods of Tim Hawkinson-like focus myself, but I hate that it's the only measure of commitment or worth as an artist. One hope I had in starting the blog was that the various diverse activities documented here could be seen as feeding into some kind of overall artistic sensibility. But for all the lip service paid to the idea of cross-disciplinary practice by curators, etc., it's still viewed with skepticism. In the art world's collective unconscious, the prime model is still a romantic primitive like Albert Pinkham Ryder, painting all day and sleeping on the streets at night in a rolled up carpet. And doing nothing else.
reposted with more verbiage...and ranting
Update: New Link to Cory's interview with me.
*Update 2: Marisa Olson's lead-in is now at http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/oct/31/tom-moody-chats-w-cory-arcangel/
Digital Media Tree blogger Jim Louis returned to his house in New Orleans, in one of the neighborhoods not smiled upon by the gods in the recent weather disaster, and has this report. Jim has been living in another state but still owns property in the city; he went back to assess the damage and is there now with his laptop. In a related post he said the water level on his block came to four feet, which is just slightly higher than his floor. My thoughts are with Jim as he surveys the damage in a city he has been reporting to us on for years.