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I've been looking at Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo a fair amount lately. While he's good on his facts and scholarly in his argumentative approach, he still comes off as another Washington wannabe hanging out with the same tired government types, chasing the same types of leads, and reaching the same namby-pamby "consensus" as everyone else. He favors invading Iraq to install leadership more to the US's liking, for example, only disagreeing with Bush et al over the timing and the methodology--a viewpoint not likely to get doors slammed in anyone's face. (Karl Rove wants the media talking about Iraq to get their minds off Bush ties to corporate mal-fee-ance: who is Josh to buck the trend?) Folks constantly change hats in DC, from government to lobbying to media to think tanks, in an endless (lucrative) circulating flow, and if you're a pundit you inevitably pull your punches, since the person you're criticizing today might be working in the same office with you tomorrow. That's the suckup trail Marshall appears to be on. By contrast, a lot of what the west coast pundits (Counterpunch.org, Antiwar.com) print is paranoid speculation, but at least they call'em like they see'em and don't have to worry about "offending a potential source." The granddaddy of unimpeachable commentators, of course, was I. F. Stone, who worked solo, burrowing through government records, drawing intelligent conclusions, and printing the documented dirt. That's what Talking Points Memo should be like--instead of "I called Jane So-and-so in Senator Such-and-Such's office and I'm still waiting for her to get back to me..." or "I'm appearing on MSNBC tomorrow so be sure to tune in..."
Update, January '06: Marshall was wrong to support the war--got sucked in like a lot of other centrists by the disgraced Kenneth Pollack's BS--but most of the rest of this post was unfounded fretting. Marshall has done terrific work tracking government shenanigans--particularly during the Bush push to destroy Social Security. And he recently moved to New York.
I started an archive of the molecular wall-drawings I've been doing recently. I spent several years in the mid-'90s using this type of stick-and-ball model in paintings, drawing the struts and spheres in pencil and laboriously hand-rendering them with acrylic paint. (Now I hand-paint them in the computer, and frankly, the only thing missing is the repetitive stress injury in my wrist.) The constructions started out based on actual complex molecules, but then I started looking elsewhere for patterns: For example, in this piece from 1994, I snapped a photo of Curly Howard of the Three Stooges off the TV (from the short where he's a plumber and ineptly builds a cage of leaky pipes around himself) and used the cage as a model for a "molecule."
It just dawned on me recently that in all that work, I was somewhat pathetically regressing to the level of playing with tinkertoys, a product I had a love/hate relationship with as a child. I liked the look of them but they never really worked after you used them a few times, because the split ends of the wood sticks wore out and lost their spring. They fell right of the wooden "wheels" and nothing complicated could be built. In contrast, my molecules can be any shape because there are no guide-holes and gravity is not a factor.
At any rate, thinking about that product led me to the Hasbro website, where I was amused and depressed to see that tinkertoys are still being made, for "pre-schoolers." My theory is that boomer parents only remember the good and not the bad aspects of the classic (read archaic) toy and want their kids to "experience the magic." One design caught my eye in a page of overly-complicated, somewhat loaded examples of tinkertoy constructions for tots to build: a stealth fighter, so the little Rummy or Condoleezza in your household can play Kill the Bad Taliban Man.
This led to my own molecular stealth fighter:
Giant Reptile News. My brother Brad forwarded this photo of a massive alligator found in Missouri City, TX, a Houston suburb. A construction worker discovered the creature lying in one of the concrete pipes shown in the photo. According to animal control officers, it weighs just under 2100 lbs and is 18 1/2 feet long. It was taken to Brazos Bend State Park (28 miles south of Houston), where it was released.
On my "miscellaneous page" I've critiqued some anime-style drawings by Krystal Ishida, an artist based in the UK who I discovered surfing around the net. Her work has enthusiasm and punch, and I don't care if she's still in the learning stages: she works harder than a lot of mature artists I know. Also, I'm interested in what makes a good web drawing, and in the post I discuss some of the aesthetics of using low-fi vs. "upgraded" software.
Also, on my technodiary page I discuss a recent release by Beige Records artist Paul B. Davis.
Two years ago this fall, video artist Caspar Stracke did a performance at PS1 with an obsolete consumer video player called a CED: basically he just let the glitch-ridden machine run for six hours. The CED player (exhaustively documented on this website) was the biggest loser at a time (the early '80s) when VHS, Beta, and laser discs were all competing for market share. It works like a vinyl record player: you slide a twelve-inch-square cassette into a long slot, the disc drops down into the machine, and a tone-arm reads the capacitance (analog information) stored on grooves on the disc. Stracke has several malfunctioning machines, and each reads the discs in its own uniquely screwed-up way. Unfortunately I missed the performance, but the amazing press release caught my attention, so I looked up Stracke and visited his studio. He showed me a couple of CEDs, projected large on the wall, and the "errors" do make for fascinating viewing. As he explains in the press release: "the machine, 17 years old, reads scratches on the disc not like crackles on an audio record but chops a scene into fragments less than 1/4 second long and reassembles them by chance operation. The needle gets physically irritated by several factors besides the scratches that let it skip the grooves, resulting in an infinite number of similar but not identical collage variations of the same scene. The performed 'cuts' are almost seamless."
Thus, in the CED of The Shining, you see Danny playing darts by himself in the kitchen of the Overlook hotel; he stands up on a chair to retrieve a dart, turns around, and sees the spooky twin girls. Then he's instantly back on the floor, on the chair again, on the floor, on the chair, and sees the girls again. Then he's on the chair, grabbing a dart, and suddenly he's teleported ahead to a completely different scene in the movie, then he's back on the chair, but always, in the about eight different loops I saw, the "scene" ends with him seeing the girls. It's like a bad dream that keeps repeating itself, or the chapter in Philip K. Dick's Martian Time Slip where the same events are refracted through Manfred's autistic consciousness over and over, each time slightly different but all ending dismally. The looped events don't have to be negative, of course: in a busted CED of Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983), Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken have a screen kiss that keeps getting interrupted by the skipping player, so that an erotic moment is deliriously sustained. That's especially ironic, since the subject of Brainstorm is a new virtual reality technology (also analog) that allows people to record, playback, and loop experiences and share them electronically with others: happy memories, orgasms, after-death experiences, stuff like that.
As an artist, MC Escher is pretty corny but some of the visual paradoxes in his work are hard to resist. A recent New York Times article describes the efforts of a Dutch mathematician to fill in a mysterious "hole" in Escher's image The Print Gallery. In this picture a man in an art gallery is staring at a picture of a city, which spills out of the frame--in a weird anamorphic swirl--to become the city in which the man is standing. In a center of the image is a blank space, with the artist's signature. Was this a failure of imagination? Biting off more than the artist could chew mathematically? Well, thanks to the miracle of the computer (and retouch artists) we now know what should, logically, have gone in the hole: it's a picture of a man staring at a picture of a man staring at a picture of a man, etc., spiraling down to infinity. Below is Escher's original grid for the drawing (kind of nice, isn't it?), which was the starting point for a process of restoration/completion/meddling described in detail on this website.
I took out a personal ad at nerve.com in connection with the exhibition "Are 'Friends' Electric? - The Art of the Online Personals Ad." My nickname is afe_supertoy (my page is a concept piece, "exploring contemporary mating rituals in the posthuman context"). Here's the blurb from the New Times LA calendar, July 26, 2002: "Is there any single person left in America who hasn’t posted their puss in pixels? The concept of cyberdating is ripe for artistic interpretation, say L.A. musician Jody Hughes and New York painter Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, who persuaded 50 artists, writers, musicians and curators to post ads in the nerve.com personals -- which The New York Observer referred to as ostensibly hip but really creepy and soulless -- and explore the commodification of personal relationships and projections of the self in online ads. Copies of the ads and responses received go up tonight at 7 p.m. at arefriendselectric.com."
More press accounts, and comments regarding nerve.com's semi-hostile interview in response to the exhibit, can be found in the comments to this post.
A couple of new pages have been added to my artwork archive: a selection of drawings made with MSPaintbrush, and "Volume Two" of my work from 77-96, concentrating mostly on abstraction. Also, I've added a page for posts on electronic dance music called technodiary. The picture essay I began several months back on "Video Games and Contemporary Sculpture" has been expanded and added to my writing archive.