general

Alan N. Shapiro has put up two thoughtful posts on this year's (so far) surprising US election:

Donald Trump Casino Owner: seduced to losing by the lure of winning
Shapiro considers pulling the lever for Trump as wholly consistent with addictive gambling in a Trump casino.

Homage to Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism and George Orwell’s 1984
Shapiro explains why "democratic socialism" isn't the same thing as socialism. I sent him a comment:

Bernie Sanders’ version of socialism essentially reconstitutes the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt: improved social security, more oversight of banks, support for labor. His opponents couch this as radical, which shows how far the pendulum has swung since Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and began the gradual dismantling of the New Deal. Sanders’ current opponent, the political team of Bill and Hillary Clinton, delivered the final blow for Reagan, ending welfare and allowing banks to trade stocks again; they seek to protect this legacy in the present election.

There is a point where serving the public becomes indistinguishable from controlling it, and restoring the New Deal in an era of technocratic surveillance carries dangers. To receive medical benefits, for example, citizens’ personal data will be digitized and could be used against them by unscrupulous public servants.

Yet the private sector is no more benevolent. Capitalism in the US has drifted from production into rent-seeking (“seeking to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth” — Wikipedia) in almost every area (cars, phones, food, travel, medicine, etc). In the current race Sanders is the only candidate advocating meaningful checks on this parasitism. The leap of faith one takes in supporting him is that ultimately one has to trust government, suitably transparentized, over private accumulators, to moderate for the “greater good.”

The Clintons represent the status quo: on the civil side, “limited government” enabling rent-seeking; on the military side, unlimited government draining the public treasury with disproportionately ineffective results. For the environment and for working people, this state of affairs is increasingly untenable, Hence the sudden upswing in public momentum for Sanders and his program.

Have had one argument with a Hillary supporter, who followed the playbook of (i) insisting she's more "electable" (even though most Americans are sick to death of her) and (ii) making little sneering cracks.

Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi explains how Tr*mp is a creature of our crappy national media. They can't stop giving him coverage and look what happened.

The interview I did a few months ago on the topic of Nasty Nets and internet surf clubs is being published by Link Editions, in connection with the book Cloning Aura. Art in the Age of Copycats by Chiara Moioli. The interview appears in a browsable form at Issuu.com. A PDF version is forthcoming via Lulu. From the Link Editions post:

The Surfer’s Conspiracy. Investigating with Tom Moody digs deep into Surfing Clubs and the way they turned the practice of appropriation into a natural attitude, with the help of one of the most active surfers and of the best critical voices in this scene.

This publication is a spin-off of the book project Cloning Aura. Art in the Age of Copycats, by Chiara Moioli: an essay that explores the close relation between practices of appropriation an, going through Postmodernism, 70s-80s subcultural movements, net.art and the Surfing Club generation. This is the second of five interviews (Florian Cramer, Tom Moody, Vittore Baroni, Vuk Ćosić and Cory Arcangel) in English and Italian, that will follow in the upcoming weeks. The book, in Italian, will be available on our shelves from mid March 2016.

The interviews are being published in weekly installments on the Link website.

Cash and freedom - from Crooked Timber. Discusses the politics of the "cashless society." Who benefits? (Banks, governments).

The GOP Is Finally Debating Bush-Era Failures - from the paleocon American Conservative mag.

Unsystematically Oppositional is buying Sauvignon Blanc at the yuppie wine store. At the counter, as he sets down his merchandise for purchase, he notices a brand of rum, prominently displayed next to the register, called "Three Sheets."
He comments on it to the fresh-faced Employee ringing him up. The following convo ensues:

Unsystematically Oppositional: Three Sheets -- that's not very romantic.
Employee (feigning politeness): What do you mean?
U.O.: That's a brand you buy when you're just looking for something to get the job done.
Employee: How so?
U.O.: Uh -- the expression "three sheets to the wind"? It means stinko... blotto.. hammered...
Employee: Ah, hadn't heard that. I will recommend it to anyone who says they plan to spend Valentine's Day alone.
(Both laugh.)

EXEUNT

On February 27 I'll be discussing my work and pontificating about Dump.fm (to the annoyance of many dumpers) at a live event in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, organized by Joe Milutis. The other participants are Nico Vassilakis and Cat Tyc, who'll be talking about their own respective projects (and not about dump.fm per se). Below is the text from Sunview's announcement of the event:

ptyxolopies*:
a nighght of image-textonics
Tom Moody ~ Nico Vassilakis ~ Cat Tyc

Join us at the Sunvievv Luncheonette for a panel of thr33+ artists to discuss, present, question and preform the variegated commonities and rnultiptyxtodimensional worls of visual poetics, from Mallarmé to dump.fm. Enhanced by the possibilities of the innernots, yet against the grain of the meme, our night of vispo projected into the future and back again, captioned captioning and escaping captions closure, will answer what. Unseen practices, the avisual of the visual twice-seen (bisvisual, revisual, reversual), hypervisual, dividual, invisible and invisual. With a live stream of dump.fm throughout the evening (or until someone gets an eye poked out.)
February 27 @ 8pm EST at Sunview Luncheonette, 221 Nassau Ave., Greenpoint, Brooklyn

vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis-à-vis

Nico Vassilakis wrestles letters to free them of their word scrum. Many of his results can be found online and on his website, Staring Poetics - http://staringpoetics.weebly.com/. Alphabet Noir, a book of texts about seeing writing & visual poetry, is forthcoming from c_L Books. Also, a book of poems, In The Breast Pocket Of A Fine Overcast Day, will come out later this year from Deadly Chaps Press. Nico is vispo editor for COLDFRONT magazine.

Cat Tyc is a Brooklyn based writer/artist whose work exists on the precipice of poetic mediology. Her video work has screened locally and internationally at spaces that include the Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, CUNY Graduate Center, Brooklyn Museum, Kassel Fest and the PDX International Festival where she also acted as a curator of poetry on a bill combining poetry with experimental film presentations. In 2006, she was awarded a Flaherty Seminar Fellowship. Her video work has been anthologized in the "Journal of Short Film" series distributed by Ohio State University. She is co-curator and co-director with Victoria Keddie of the Poet Transmit, a live/recorded broadcast series that explores the projective possibility of poetics in transmission. Her most recent writings have been published in Weekday, The Sink Review and 6x6. Currently, she is in her second year as a MFA Candidate in Writing/
Activism at Pratt Institute.

Tom Moody is an artist and musician based in New York City. His low-tech art made with simple imaging programs, photocopiers, and consumer printers has been exhibited at artMovingProjects, Derek Eller, and Honey Ramka galleries in New York as well as other galleries and museums in the US and Europe. His videos have been screened in the New York Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Dallas Film Festival, and other venues, and he and his work appear in the film 8 BIT, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His blog at https://tommoody.us, commenced in February 2001, was recommended in the 2005 Art in America article "Art in the Blogosphere." His music made with the home computer and various electronic gear has been heard at Apex Art in NYC, WNYU-FM, and basic.fm (internet radio).

Produced by Joe Milutis

*Milutis has written, "In Mallarmé's 'Sonnet in Xy,' he uses the mysterious word 'ptyx.' Some have said this word is precisely meant to have no image. If some poetry resists (at least in this case, but in many others) the demands of the 'poetic image,' is that because the idea of poetry + image is a fatal combination? That is, in what ways does text + image merely create a redundancy, or distract with plenitude or close down mystery? Is there something in visual poetry that returns to the avisual or anti-informatic 'ptyx'? What does an image demand? What does a text demand? Is the difference still tenable? Does image-text create a web of communication? Of translations? Or does it exist in-and-of-itself, resisting info, resisting meme?