Dallas VideoFest 2011

. . . is Sept. 21 - 25!

To my extreme regret, I have to miss it 'cuz I'll be out of town, and before that, I'll be too busy to put together the kind of chronologically-ordered schedule I've provided in previous years.

However, the Fest website is here, with lots of info and, I'm sure, more to come.

And I guarantee that if you go and see all you possibly can, you'll see things you'll remember with interest and pleasure for the rest of your life.

UPDATE: Something just happened to penetrate into my hard-at-work space today, about a program called Women Art Revolution; and if I were able to make the Fest this year, I wouldn't miss it.

From the DIY Front

I'm saving up a few items for future posts, but had to sneak back to share this:



(Thanks, Ben! More at Dark Roasted Blend.) So, who's turn is it to be the "designated excavator"?

(B.t.w., just happened to notice, this is my 1,206th c-Blog post. So if you're missing my usually-more-frequent-posting {see Temporary Hiatus for Big Project below}, feel free to check out a few previous highlights:

Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar
The Case for Wikileaks
On the Creative Time Summit 2 (NYC, 2010)
Reasons for instigating the ART WORK in dallas (2010) series.
On Rotozaza's GuruGuru.
On Kalup Linzy's Keys to Our Heart.
On Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 13 and Ryan Trecartin's A Family Finds Entertainment.
Analysis of Patti Smith's and Jem Cohen's cover music video of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Gaga Quest: a review of Lady Gaga's Monster Ball show.
Descriptions of works shown in THE PROGRAM (2008).

For posts explaining why It's the Derivatives, Stupid (before even Planet Money was talking about them), see here and here; and if you'd like more on the same or related topics, click on the label at the bottom of one of those posts, "follow the money.")

Temporary Hiatus for Big Project

I'm working on a multimedia art/reality project that will consume my every waking moment for the next several weeks. I'll reveal more when it's done.

Until then, please bear with my silence; and check back here around the end of September! I promise, I shall return! With good stuff!

(And if you live in Dallas and would like to help, pls contact me.)

(And b.t.w., no, I don't believe the world's ending any time soon. It may be the end of the world as we knew it; but I believe we're on our way to re-creating a better version – I'm working on it, and send my love to all others who are, too.)

More "After Hours with George Quartz"

The artist sometimes known as George Quartz is a former Good/Bad Art Collective member and CentralTrak resident and shows at Cris Worley Gallery, and he also operates under the personas of La Maladie Tropicale and Jock Ewing.

I find his "After Hours with George Quartz" operation very interesting (previously, briefly blogged here) – he does a live-taped, "talk show"/ performance art -type of work that's like Dick Cavett meets The Twilight Zone. The next one is this Friday.

At the one I saw, the "guests" learned who they were supposed to be at the same moment they were announced to the audience, and none bore any physical resemblance to the celebrity they were to impersonate (e.g., "Joe Namath" was a black female). The "celebrities" were of the 70's-ish vintage emulated by the show.

The ensuing, improvised interviews were sometimes boring, sometimes funny, sometimes weird, usually opening with discussion of the celebrity's career and personal life (about which the guests, mostly young-ish, often knew little or nothing) and culminating with questions such as, "Liz, what is Beauty?", or "George, what is Art?"

Meanwhile, "Quartz" has most of the trappings of a live-taping tv show going on, including a talk show band and a monitor facing the audience that flashes "APPLAUSE" at the appropriate times. And the video actually produced from this performance is beyond-true to 70's or earlier production values (excerpts from the resulting "show" can be viewed on Quartz's vimeo channel).

In short, this is great, wacky parody; but there's a lot more than that going on.

The next Quartz taping/performance will be at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, Dallas, at 10PM; more details here (together with links to visuals). Be part of the audience, and you might end up on "tv."

#F@ckYouWashington

"Thousands of tweets erupted in a matter of hours on #Jul23 protesting the US's failed debt ceiling talks and general policies. Spurred by @JeffJarvis . Seen by some as part of #WorldRevolution or #USRevolution." More at Raw Story.

Twitter capp'd the trend early on, but you can see how it's doing at trendsmap.com.

A few samples:

#f@ckyouwashington for sending our soldiers on 6, 7, 8 tours in combat zones yet thinking it's too much to ask the richest to pay taxes

#f@ckYouWashington for forgetting WHO you represent, Families,Elderly,Moms,Kids, WORKERs...NOT the Coporate Pigs who you cater to

#f@ckYouWashington for thinking activists are the same as terrorists

#f@ckyouwashington for paying billions more to hire private contractor cronies in the name of "efficiency"

#f@ckyouwashington for killing US entry into the Kyoto Accord & failing to police polluters

#f@ckyouwashington for trying to turn the Internet into the biggest top-down surveillance system ever

#f@ckyouwashington for allowing corporations to tie up copyright & patent rights to the point of stifling actual creatives

#f@ckyouwashington for spending tax dollars to illegally propagandize US citizens

#f@ckyouwashington for spending trillions to spread "democracy" abroad while gutting our Constitutional rights at home

#f@ckyouwashington for allowing Repubs to own 95% of the media AND the voting machines

#f@ckyouwashington for ignoring the biggest public outcries against media consolidation in history & approving mergers like Murdoch's

#f@ckyouwashington for repealing laws that would have prevented the 2008 financial meltdown & then claiming "no one could have foreseen it"

#f@ckyouwashington for moving mountains to disable Wikileaks while refusing to prosecute the people who lied us into Iraq

#f@ckyouwashington for threatening seniors with their SS checks they spent a lifetime paying in while working and building this country

#f@ckyouwashington for making the healthcare reform law not worth the paper it is printed on

How it started here.

As Jeff Howe tweeted: “If this trends all weekend, you think it won’t make news? It will. And a statement."

UPDATE: Unfortunately, not quite yet (surprise surprise).

What the Fed HA$ Delivered On:

. . . its intent – clear, for those who would see, in Oct., 2008 – that TARP funds would be used to bail out not only Goldman, but foreign investors et al.

Results of the recent Fed audit showing that trillions went to foreign investors discussed here. Oct., 2008 c-Blog post warning that the TARP bill was designed to permit this here.

One of the coolest things I've seen lately

A few headlines via DU today

("DU" meaning democraticunderground.com.)

Report: Obama top recipient of [Murdoch's] News Corp. donations

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with President Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation. (More at The Hill.)

Cenk Uygur was removed due to "political pressure"; Phil Griffin: MSNBC is "part of the establishment"

After a nearly six-month tryout for the Internet talk show host Cenk Uygur, the cable news MSNBC is preparing to instead hand its 6 p.m. time slot to the Rev. Al Sharpton. . . . Mr. Uygur, who by most accounts was well liked within MSNBC, said in an interview that he turned down the new contract because he felt Mr. Griffin had been the recipient of political pressure. In April, he said, Mr. Griffin “called me into his office and said that he’d been talking to people in Washington, and that they did not like my tone.” He said he guessed Mr. Griffin was referring to White House officials, though he had no evidence for the assertion. He also said that Mr. Griffin said the channel was part of the “establishment,” and that “you need to act like it.” (More at The NYT.)

The "Gang of Six" deficit-cutting plan

Sen. Bernie Sanders warned, "The plan would result in devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other programs that are of vital importance to working families in this country. Meanwhile, tax rates would be lowered for the wealthiest people and the largest, most profitable corporations." (More at Common Dreams.)

How to save $2 trillion

There are 23 million Americans who can't find full-time work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There are 50 million Americans who can't see a doctor when they are sick, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

There are more than 15 million American families who owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth, according to Zillow. That's almost a third of all the families who own homes.

* * * * *
I'll be honest – the federal deficit for the year 2021 is not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, these days. But let's assume – arguendo, as they used to say back in Ancient Rome – that for some reason, there were some compelling, emergency need to work out how to cut $2 trillion from projected federal budget deficits over the next ten years.

I have an idea about how to do that. It's a very simple idea. In fact, I can sum it up in one word, with five letters: PEACE. (More from Alan Grayson at DU.)

New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included is a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Prior to the filing, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not." (More at freepress.org.)

(Originally b&w image above by Ansel Adams, Internees Reading Newspapers, Manzanar Relocation Center, from the Library of Congress.)