"Frustrated Democrats hoping to elevate their election fortunes have a resounding message for party leaders: Stop talking so much about Russia,” The Hill reported over the weekend. In sharp contrast to their party’s top spokespeople, “rank-and-file Democrats say the Russia-Trump narrative is simply a non-issue with district voters, who are much more worried about bread-and-butter economic concerns like jobs, wages and the cost of education and healthcare."
around the web
recursive alto
Ken Shirriff has been restoring a vintage Xerox Alto computer (the PC Steve Jobs "borrowed" his ideas from). Using the BCPL programming language, a precursor to C, he made this image of an Alto on an Alto on an Alto [etc]
Before Wikipedia such an image would have been called infinitely recursive and everyone would have known what you meant ("infinite" within the limits of screen resolution, of course). Now the Wikipedians are encouraging us to use the term Droste Effect, after an obscure cocoa package design. Thanks, I'll pass, but Redditnerds are all over it with an online festival of recursive computer screen images they're calling Droste Week. Here's a typical example (most of these aren't very infinite):
overcoming "our" disillusionment
Geert Lovink's latest anti-social media rant starts out well with amusing quips:
“Artificial intelligence is not the answer to organized stupidity”—Johan Sjerpstra.
“Please don’t email me unless you’re going to pay me”—Molly Soda.
“Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter”—Laurie Penny.
“Wonder how many people going on about the necessity of free speech and rational debate have blocked and muted trolls?”—Nick Srnicek.
“Post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism—a by-product of operations”— Evgeny Morozov.
“I have seen the troll army and it is us”—Erin Gün Sirer.
But then Lovink switches to first person plural causing me to vomit on the keyboard:
Our disenchantment with the internet is a fact. Yet again, enlightenment does not bring us liberation but depression. The once fabulous aura that surrounded our beloved apps, blogs, and social media has deflated. Swiping, sharing, and liking have begun to feel like soulless routines, empty gestures. We’ve started to unfriend and unfollow, yet we can’t afford to delete our accounts, as this implies social suicide. If “truth is whatever produces most eyeballs,” as Evgeny Morozov states, a general click strike seems like the only option left. But since this is not happening, we feel trapped and console ourselves with memes.
As the old '60s joke goes, "What do you mean we, kemosabe?" Some people didn't sign up for Facebook in 2007 -- because it smelled like a racket. Some people don't carry surveillance devices in their pockets just because everyone else does. Some people have made a good-faith look for alternatives to swiping and sharing, shy of a "general click strike."
Lovink's article appears in e-flux, which recently tried and failed to acquire the .art domain, speaking of the need for general click strikes. A Facebook for art, controlled by well-intentioned do-gooders, was narrowly avoided.
The rest of Lovink's article discusses positive uses of memes, or something. I haven't read it all. It was hard to get past that first paragraph. Will update if there is anything worth passing along.
various zappa-related links
A YouTuber's review of Timothy Carey's film The World's Greatest Sinner. Frank Zappa wrote the score in the early '60s when he was a broke unknown and described it as the "worst movie ever made" during his legendary Steve Allen appearance. Career oddball Carey was essentially a performance artist working in the film medium, and enlivened two Kubrick projects, The Killing and Paths of Glory. TCM shows Sinner occasionally but I haven't seen it in its entirety (yet).
Interview with David Walley, who wrote the 1971 Zappa biography No Commercial Potential. Zappa hated the book because it dared to describe his faults, and he badmouthed Walley in interviews. Walley updated it in 1980 at the request of the publisher and updated it again after Zappa's death in 1993. The updates don't continue the "Zappaesque-collage-with-interviews" style of the original text and they have a sadder-but-wiser tone but they merit reading. Walley admired Zappa's music despite reservations about the "darkness" of his vision: "a universe of no hope and putdowns." The interview captures the love-hate spirit.
Walley notes in the interview that Zappa wasn't always the best judge of his own work -- including which older projects needed improvement. Never was this clearer than the disastrous 1984 CD remix of We're Only In It For The Money, where Zappa dubbed in new bass and drum playing to punch up the original sound. This web page goes into exhaustive detail on the changes and Zappa's shifting justifications for them.
I knew the Zappa kids were feuding after mom Gail died. It's interesting to compare this family interview from when she was still alive with this posthumous one. Apparently she didn't prep the kids that they'd be getting unequal shares in the Zappa Family Trust (30% each for Ahmet and Diva, 20% each for Moon and Dweezil). As Kazanian says (admittedly tangentially) in Dario Argento's film Inferno: "[T]he only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people." First Zappa by creating a monster creative legacy and then Gail by doling out who profits from it.
a purpose for collecting
Robert Nickas, from his essay on the Affidavit website titled "A 12-Step Program for 'Collectors'":
To collect is to draw things towards ourselves over time, to study and learn from them, to see what they elicit, one from another, not to engage in a continuous and expedient dispersal.
Well said. The essay is a collection of Benjamin Franklin wisdom or Tom Paine common sense aimed at flippers of artwork. None of it should need to be said except this is the era of a $2.9 million Peter Doig (a terrible painter) and a $110.5 million Basquiat that, according to Nickas, "may not be among Basquiat’s very best."