Tom Moody

tom moody

If Net Neutrality is gutted, Google, eBay, and YouTube either pay protection money to companies like AT&T or risk that their sites process slowly on your computer... And the little guy with the next big idea would be muscled out of the marketplace, relegated to the "slow lane" of the information superhighway.

Green's post has some links for the little guy to use to help stop the pro-AT&T legislation that is winding through Congress like a big bowel movement. Unlike the fake populist website ex-Clintonista McCurry set up ("Hands Off the Internet"--as in no regulation, even though regulation is what keeps the Internet a level playing field), the various pro-neutrality forces are the real good guys here. Or at least better guys.

Thanks to whoever sent me this cellphone pic of the OptiDisc installation. This was in my inbox when I got home from the opening last night.

What happened to the "peace dividend"?

From a Salon interview with James Carroll, author of the book House of War (no link to amazon--I'm not part of their blogger payola network, sorry, and sorry for the link to subscription-only Salon; it's all about money these days):

The most important example of the momentum I'm describing in this book, this unchecked momentum, is what happened at the end of the Cold War. Because by the end of the Cold War a massive military machine had been set up and the thing that justified it, our enemy the Soviet Union, disappeared. Yet that machine was not dismantled.

There's the big clue of the momentum I'm talking about. How is it that in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 -- not so long ago -- there was a lot of talk about something called the peace dividend, but it never came? The American military did not significantly change its posture with regard to nuclear weapons, even under Bill Clinton. Why did that happen? It's the great unanswered question. And because it happened that way the responses of George W. Bush to 9/11 have all been extremely and unnecessarily militarist. We responded to 9/11 as though we were in the thick of the Cold War. The great symbol of that is an anecdote from the 9/11 Commission, which is that when we finally scrambled jet fighters to respond that morning, they went out over the Atlantic Ocean looking for incoming attacks from the Soviet Union. The other great symbol is George W. Bush fleeing to the command bunker at Offutt Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command bunker that had been created by Curtis LeMay. That's the perfect symbol of our problem. It's not so much him I'm faulting here. [Oh, go ahead. -tm] What I'm suggesting is there was this unchecked Niagara current, a current that flows from the Pentagon to the disastrous cliff just ahead of us.

For future viewing (haven't seen it, just posting the link): Why We Fight on Google video (not the Frank Capra version).

Yes, another plug for my show, opening tonight. No, this skull won't be in it, room sized, it's just to "get your attention." (I got it from an "assorted GIFs page" and scaled it up.) Please join me at artMovingProjects, 116 N. 12th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 7-9, for some vino and pulsating low-res animations in a variety of sizes, some with sound, some without. I hope to have some pics up by tomorrow. Thanks for the shouts from AFC, MTAA, TONY, and ArtCal.

A helpful "no murder" pledge from Steve Gilliard:

Some bloggers, mostly right wingers, after being embarassed by the conduct of some of their peers, have created a pledge of Online Integrity. Which, if one is aware of the rules of the internet and common decency, is as useful as a third nipple.

One should not have to be told to be decent.

But if we're going to have pledges, I think we need to pledge not to kill other people. Murder is so destructive and if we all agree not to do it, then we can have a better world. Here is the News Blog's 15 point no murder pledge

1. You cannot hire a man to kill your wife in a custody dispute. Murder is not a legal option in marital discord
2. Driving by homes and firing automatic weapons is unacceptable behavior.
3. Ed Gein is not a role model
4. Neither is Jeffery Dahmer
5. You cannot use Saw or Hostel as training films for kidnapping and torturing strangers
6. Axes are for wood, not virginal coeds
7. Just because someone steps on your brand new Nikes, you cannot cut their arteries with a boxcutter
8. Hitchhikers are not deer, you cannot hunt, gut and make jerky of them
9. Killing someone for insurance fraud is unlikely to work, ask Fred MacMurray
10. Farms are not disposal areas for meth dealing bikers on the wrong end of a drug deal. And, no, you can't store the hookers you kidnap and strangle there either
11. Just because you hate your neighbor, you cannot wire C-4 to his engine block, then wait for the explosion. And I know some of you can do just that.Don't.
12. I know your mother in law is annoying . Feeding her seconal and then letting her drive is STILL MURDER. Sure, your hands are clean, more or less, but your actions led to her death
13. Even if he has a gun, if you shoot someone in a home invasion, you've committed murder
14. Even though your wife left you, barging into her parents home, killing everyone inside and driving away is an overreaction.
15. Just because you own a high powered rifle, doesn't mean you can climb to a roof and start picking people off

Now that people understand the rules, they should follow them

"LoopB4YouLeap" [mp3 removed]

The B-4 is a software synthesizer version of the Hammond B-3 organ. Here an insistently stereo-panning riff gets the Glass/Reich/Ratledge treatment; I envision doing more rock-y sorts of things with those notes in the future. And normally when I see the phrase "loop-based musical styles" I reach for my revolver, but it's OK if I do it. Ha ha.

Draft checklist for my exhibition at artMovingProjects, opening Friday, May 5.

1. OptiDisc, DVD-R, projection dimensions variable

2. Double Centrifuge, DVD-R

3. Eyeshades, DVD-R (see above)

4. Guitar Solo, DVD-R, music by the artist

5. Sensor Readings, DVD-R, music by the artist

The e-card for The GIF Show, opening tonight at Rx Gallery in San Francisco, is here. A del.icio.us directory of the works in the show, including my vid "End Notes" (featuring my GIFs and ones I made with jimpunk), is here. Curator Marisa Olson says "Of course, many of these [works in the directory] will look quite different, installed in the gallery... What's not there, as of now, are Tom Moody's drawings, Lovid's fabric pieces, Guthrie Lonergan's gif avatar video, or Paper Rad's "Welcome to My Homeypage" gif video..." (link added to quote)

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