March 2009

Sanctuary in advance

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More weird journalism from the New York Times. This is the lead paragraph of a recent story by Helene Cooper:

HERE is a proposition that is bound to cut deep into the national psyche: Should the United States seek to negotiate with some of the same people who gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden prior to the Sept. 11 attacks?

It's always good to invoke the national psyche, since we all know what that means, and cutting deeply into it is always worrisome. The story recycles an administration talking point, from Gen. Petraeus's mouth to Pres. Obama's to a Times exclusive interview, which is that to win the war in Afghanistan the US needs to make deals with local Taliban factions. The article doesn't say "win," though, it says "try to put a tourniquet on the hemorrhaging war effort there."

But back to the national psyche. The Times lede says that the Taliban, who were running large parts of Afghanistan in 2001, gave bin Laden "sanctuary" "prior" to the 9/11 attacks. This follows the Bush script, which was that Mullah Omar, et al were hiding and protecting bin Laden from the US and therefore needed to be "taken out." But bin Laden didn't have sanctuary prior to 9/11 because (i) 9/11 hadn't happened yet and (ii) he had been living in the country for years, after fighting for the Afghans against the Soviets.

The US' rationale for invading and destabilizing that country never made much sense. At the time the propaganda was a strange mix of "if they hide terrorists they must be annihilated" coupled with "and besides, we will really be helping the women of Afghanistan." It seemed pretty obvious that Bush and Cheney were trying to deflect attention away from their own failure to protect US citizens from the 9/11 attacks and took advantage of the nation's riled up mood.

Now the Obama administration appears to be compounding the problem by committing more troops with no clear mission goals. At least, that's what this part of the national psyche thinks.

Faux self-condescension from A.O. Scott

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...of the New York Times:

Indeed, the ideal viewer — or reviewer, as the case may be — of the “Watchmen” movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.

[...]

I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen” lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” — would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good movie.

Scott sneers at Alan Moore, writer of the Watchmen comics, not realizing that he, Scott, is the tool of Moore's ingenious plan to destroy the movie, operating from the comic writer's high tech redoubt in Northampton.

Net Art in Real Life

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On Sunday, March 8, 2008, I'll be participating in an exhibit titled In Real Life, at Capricious Space in Brooklyn.

The show is a month-long series of short (as in 4 hours) gallery residencies for people working on the Net, including Art Fag City, ASDF, Club Internet, Ffffound, The Highlights, Humble Arts Foundation, I Heart Photograph, Loshadka, Netmares/Netdreams, Platform For Pedagogy, Private Circulation, UbuWeb, VVORK, and Why + Wherefore.

I will be putting up work (performing virtually?) on the Club Internet site--the gig is described as follows:

4–8pm
Club Internet

All members of Club Internet will be invited to sit behind their computers, either at home or in the gallery, as Harm van den Dorpel announces the curatorial criteria for them to create a new work on the spot and participate in an opening party—all within 4 hours. The resulting show will remain online for one month at clubinternet.org.

Thanks to Harm for the invite. My placeholder page is loaded and I await my instructions.

"In Real Life" commences with a panel discussion on Saturday, March 7, titled "Browser As Exhibition Space," from 8-10pm.

The exhibit is organized by Laurel Ptak, who blogs at I Heart Photograph.

Update, recopied from my twitter page:

post-panel consensus: finding ways to hide your site or slow down its reading is not "democracy"

More on Ruez

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The Ruez mini-CD written about here a couple of weeks back appears on a rather intimidating list of recordings available for sale from Erstwhile Records. Worth a peruse--it's like a curated show of "downtown" music.

Ruez's label also has a MySpace page where another reviewer, Vital Weekly, reached similar conclusions about the CD: "Eric Laska is the man behind Ruez, and his sound input deals with 'corrupted MP3 files, scrambling synthesizers, urban field recordings, chirping feedback recordings,' which may sound a lot more noise than it actually is. Ruez plays an interesting game of noise versus silence, with things sometimes dropping down in volume to the level of almost silence. Only to burst out in chirping electronics, which makes these fifteen minutes very enjoyable. Noise which is thought and cared about. A form of noise I like. If you like Gert-Jan Prins doing some more subdued music, then Ruez might be a fine place."