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Currently up on NY Arts magazine's website is an interview with yours truly titled "Not Just Flying Toasters." I'm told the piece will be running in the September/October print edition, as well. I'm happy with how it came out. Thanks to Aaron Yassin, who did the interview, James Westcott for the excellent editing, and everyone else at the magazine.
rem:x by jimpunk (I added the green)
One of the things the Rovunists do to discredit certain liberals is say "They opposed Afghanistan!"
"Afghanistan was good" is supposed to be the conventional wisdom but not everyone thinks invading that sovereign albeit crappily-run nation and destabilizing it further was any better of a response to 9/11 than "doing" Iraq. When the attacker is a shadowy group as opposed to a nation the only (still) relevant question was whether the severity of 9/11 justified the use of (internationally) extrajudicial means such as commando raids, or whether there were other ways to bag terrorists and pressure countries "harboring" them. Invading meant precisely this: Osama got away, and we now have troops permanently stationed in yet another damn country. Why is this good exactly?
Mine isn't really a "liberal" position, but rather a libertarian or paleoconservative one based on the idea that the US doesn't need military bases all over the world. For the cost of dropping daisy cutters on Afghanistan we could have increased vigilance at home--say, by actually reading airport passenger manifests--and been a lot safer. And perhaps it wasn't such a hot idea to let the incompetents who allowed 9/11 to happen be the ones to "go hunt down the terrorists." Instead of rallying around Bush and comparing him to Prince Hal, the wastrel who became a military leader, as the NY Daily News did, we should have impeached him immediately for 9/11, then thrown out the remaining bums in '04, and let the next administration "go get the terrorists." Again, obviously, law enforcement would have to be extra-vigilant to prevent another domestic attack in the interim, but my sense in '01 was that Osama & Co. had given it their all and nothing else that horrendous was in offing. BushCo hasn't foiled any terrorist plots against the US on the scale of 9/11 because there haven't been any.
I miss the '80s...
"Drum Reverie" [mp3 removed].
My Winamp playlist editor currently has 60 of my own tunes in it, most made in the last six months. There's some duplication, with multiple versions of a few tracks, but still, that's
Update: the amount of music was revised after I downloaded iTunes while updating Quicktime. Unlike Winamp, iTunes tallies the total time of the music in the playlist editor.
My somewhat overoptimistic July 4 post from two years ago:
Wrong.
I enjoyed seeing the fireworks over the East River last night and...whoops, wrong picture, this is us blowing up Baghdad. But seriously, talk about a disconnect between American ritual festivities and the chaos in Iraq right now. We're fast approaching the point where the number of our soldiers killed after George Bush's victory declaration tops the number that preceded it. After a few exciting days of monkey-screeching and hard-on flashing, Bush, Rumsfeld & Co. have moved on to other things (campaigning, plotting global domination, plundering public funds) and left others to clean up the mess. American troops are getting shot up, the Treasury's overdrawn, people are losing jobs, and the 9/11 conspirators are still at large.
Fortunately we can all go the polls next year and get rid of these clowns, right? Right?
More work in progress. One thing not clear from the photo is the black and white sheets no longer overlap: they've been cut into jigsaw pieces that mimic the initial one-shot, casual distribution of pages on the floor. You can see where the fragment to the right would fit into the "puzzle": every page is now similarly irregularly shaped. All of this keeps the piece from getting too thick and "multi-ply" when it's eventually taped together into a mosaic. Right now the white pages are held together with low-tack housepainter's tape, barely visible in the photo. The buckyball will be moved to the center for more tracing and trimming of the black and white paper.