One thing about and one thing by

Stephen Truax wrote an article about Famous Accountants for BushwickBK, "Meaning IS Inevitable".


And I wrote this review/article for Hyperallergic about a show called Reaganography.

The zombie rides a unicorn into the mirage...

"The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more "choice" and "competition") to expand government power."

from "Public Plan Mirage", The Washington Post, October 26, 2009



"A public plan is likely to damage competition. A government insurer has some big advantages over a private one; its financing costs would be lower because the government can borrow cheaply; it would not have to worry too much about future liabilities since it could never go bust; and its economies of scale would be larger than those of the competition. Those using the public plan would benefit in the short term, but the scheme might very well squeeze private insurers out of business, which would be bad news for the other half of Americans that have them—and, according to opinion polls, are generally happy about that."

from "Back from the Dead", The Economist, October 29, 2009

Hyperreality

"A few years ago, however, the health-care economists Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider recalculated the numbers after controlling for deaths from homicides and traffic accidents. Because these things tend to strike very young people, they can have an outsize impact on mortality statistics. Those deaths reflect America’s crime policy and its driving habits more than the effectiveness of its health-care system. And if you remove them from the picture, say Ohsfeldt and Schneider, America jumps to the top of the life-expectancy tables."

from "Misleading Indicator" by Megan McArdle

Mostly Motion Graphics Classics

Kyle Cooper, 2004







Saul Bass, 1963







James Whitney, Permutations, 1966







Len Lye, Free Radicals, 1958







Maurice Binder, 1973







Nando Costa







Norman McLaren, A Phantasy, 1952







Pablo Ferro, 1964

Ed Tannenbaum and Paul Pfeiffer

I dig the music in the Tannenbaum video. It's credited to Might Dog. Who's that? It makes me think of ESG. It kicks a a similar early 80s, New Wave funk vibe. The primitive computer graphic effects (the video dates from 1982) jive well with it. Compare this video with Paul Pfeiffer's "Live Evil" (2003).





Ed Tannenbaum, "Digital Dance", 1982







Paul Pfeiffer, "Live Evil", 2003

Bushwick Biennial, 2009

1.
Loren Munk's Brooklyn Rail article: http://brooklynrail.org/2009/07/artseen/brooklyn-dispatches-new







2.
Hrag Vartanian’s BushwickBK.com article: http://bushwickbk.com/2009/07/07/serious-omissions-but-biennial-brings-good-focus/

Nature versus Nurture

120 generations — from now back to Plato and Socrates

500 generations — from now back to the invention of writing, agriculture and the first cities

80,000 generations — from now back to the Plestocene (the dawn of Homo Sapiens).

I found this in Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct (pg 23-24). He uses it to explain why evolutionary psychologists (and Komar & Melamid) have discovered that every human culture, everywhere in the whole world, finds the same type of painting most pleasing: landscape.