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Happy Thanksgiving. Please be sure to read Sidney Blumenthal's Salon essay on Dick Cheney's climb to power. It tracks this warped creature from his palace coup (with Rumsfeld) kicking the moderates out of the Ford administration, to acting as point man for the Iran Contra traitors during his years in Congress, to engineering Gulf War I (supposedly the "good war" but as bogus as the current one IMHO), to picking himself for Bush Jr.'s VP, to his big moment--the opportunity to put all his world-dominating plans into action: 9/11. One of the most noteworthy things to me is that, yes, Cheney is a man of ruthless ambition, a bureaucratic inside player, and all that, but he's also largely incompetent. He completely had the Soviet threat wrong, right up until the USSR collapsed, and he consistently overstated Iraq's threat to the Middle East in both wars he got us into. Vice President for Torture--already planning his retirement to Eastern Maryland, where he will live off his stolen taxpayer money until his ticker finally gives out. Here's hoping he gets some Pinochet action, late in life, when he's all ready to relax. And here's hoping history properly places him on the dark side of America, along with Joseph McCarthy and the Boston Strangler.
Going back through my email, realized I forgot to plug the second appearance of the Nick Hallett-curated video program 23 REASONS TO SPARE NEW YORK. D'oh, it was last Friday and Saturday, Nov. 18 and 19, at MONKEYTOWN, Williamsburg's premiere video eatery. "23 Reasons" is a reel of music videos Hallett put together of experimental rock tunes, all by local bands, featuring Animal Collective, Antony & the Johnsons, Black Dice, Grizzly Bear, Jason Forrest, Liars, and others, and includes my web video "Guitar Solo" (tastefully memorialized in DVD form above--nice wall texture, huh?).
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
But [Montana] governor [Brian Schweitzer] is no fan of the Democratic Leadership Council -- the centrist outfit, once headed by an ambitious Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton, that is populated by Washington, D.C., lobbyists and funded by their corporate overlords.I suppose we could feel the same way about any "cultural elite." Hollywood in LA, Madison Avenue in NY. But of those elites, only the one in DC has the power to appropriate our money and kill untold numbers of people. I share Schweitzer's frustration, watching powerless from afar this grotesque DC culture where rich lobbyists mingle with rich, big hair news media and rich helmet haired Congressmen at parties. You want to knock all their heads together and say: "You're a bunch of effete screwups!" It hurts instead to have to watch them all "get on the same page," and "get behind" the Iraq debacle, the Bush tax cuts, the anti-bankruptcy bill and other horrors.
"Washington, D.C., is a giant cesspool filled with special interests," Schweitzer said. "Unless we change the culture of Washington, D.C., we're not going to change the country."
Today I helped Jim Bassett haul the new Datamantic server down to a co-location facility in the bowels of Lower Manhattan. Datamantic is his company, which will be hosting Digital Media Tree in addition to more traditional business clients. I thought it might be interesting to document the physical hardware and where it will live, since the Tree and this blog are just cyber-abstractions to most people looking at it. Above is Jim booting up the unit. The images below are the server, first with the lid removed showing off all the hot-swappable drives, fans, and power supplies, and then installed in its modest cage in the Data Center. The Center itself is a trip, a labyrinth of boxes within boxes, rivers of overhead cables, and no people, except a couple of tech guys who stay in the office to get away from the omnipresent insane hum of hundreds of server fans and an enormous cooling unit that chugs away 24/7.
The press release for an upcoming show I'm in called
, aka the O Show, can be found in this .PDF file. The exhibition opens November 30, with a reception on Dec. 11, at SICA, on the Jersey shore, and is organized by New York curatorial combine MatCh-Art. I'm showing the DVD of this animated GIF. Other artists include Lisa Beck, Louis Cameron, Moriah Carlson, Orly Cogan, Mark Dagley, Joel Edwards, Rob Grunder, Francis Holstrom, Sharon Horvath, Jim Houser, Jasper Johns, Chris Kasper, Laura Ledbetter, Jim Lee, Monique Luchetti, Noah Lyon, Andrew Masullo, Rob Matthews, Derick Melander, Matthew Northridge, John Phillips, James Rosenthal, Savako, Randall Sellers, Mark Shetabi, Jordan Tinker, John Torreano, Alice Wu, B. Wurtz, and Nami Yamamoto. More as the date approaches.
"Two Bass Salad" [mp3 removed]
Number 5 in the Sidstation/drum machine suite. Bouncy and minimal. Will likely be remixed with more panning effects and possibly some kind of break or bridge, but this is the guts of it.
Now every Bush Administration underboss is stepping forward to declare he or she was "not Bob Woodward's source" for the earlier-than-Scooter outing of CIA agent Plame's non-official cover. A la "I was not Deep Throat." This is like Evil Watergate, with Woodward transformed over the years from a valiant underdog reporter into another lying White House stooge. Meanwhile, Congress reenacts the McCarthy years, attempting to destroy the reputations of those who challenge Bush's war fantasy, the latest being Congressman Murtha. This is all corrupt, inside-DC stuff. It's perfectly clear to the multitudes outside the Washington nuthouse that:
1. Whatever you think of the CIA's use of torture to gain information, exact confessions, etc in undisclosed foreign locations, recently revealed to include prisons in the former Soviet gulag (I think it's wrong and hurts us in the eyes of the world), as long as you're willing to agree that sometimes their secret agents do protect us from mass murderers (and it's very hard to concede this after the spectacular failures of 9/11), then there's probably a consensus that blowing an agent's cover for politics (in this case, selling a bogus war) harms everybody.
2. Bush lied us into war with the help of Congress and the press. To suggest the war is failing is to state the obvious. What is the mission now? To "beat the insurgents"? Did America invade Iraq to conquer it and hold it as a colonial territory? Most people don't think we did.