Issue Project Room, 232 Third Street , Brooklyn N Y;
www.issueprojectroom.org
October 8th - October 11th

Celebrating Phill Niblock's 75th Birthday and his contribution to
Experimental Music
Organized with the help of Katherine Liberovskaya and Alan Margolis
There will be films / video from the "Movement of People Working" series

Wednesday October 8th - Works from the 60s and 70s

PBS created an online poll on September 5, asking whether Sarah Palin was qualified to hold the office of Vice President. The poll results will eventually be reported on PBS and broadcast in the mainstream media. They could potentially influence undecided voters in swing states.

In the interest of user privacy, PBS did not at first implement cookie registration, allowing multiple votes to be placed from one computer. The entire pbs.org site soon began to experience system overload due to massive accessing of the poll. When it became clear that right wing activists were abusing the situation, voting multiple times and flooding the site with YES votes in an effort to reverse an initial NO majority, PBS implemented a cookie registration system on September 23. Now it is one computer, one vote.

This from the PBS website:

So, is the Palin poll now "scientific"? Absolutely not. It is still subject to large scale efforts on the left and the right to mobilize people to vote. The poll has become something of a Rorschach test, a tiny political marker in a tightly contested race. Over the past two weeks, the results of the poll see-sawed back and forth from a majority saying "No" to a majority saying, "Yes". At the moment the single-voter system was implemented, it was close to a tie: 50% say Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as Vice President, and 48% say no. Those results, in my view, are actually a measure of the mobilization and manipulation efforts by partisans on both sides. Now it will be all about mobilization, and less about manipulation. Blogs on the left and right are circulating viral emails with the exact address of the poll.

I, for one, am happy to be mobilizing on the left. So, if you feel Palin is not qualified, if you resent the free ride she is being given courtesy of the mad dog right, then please do two things -- it only takes 20 seconds.

* Click on the site and vote yourself. Vote NO.
http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html

* Send the link to every Obama-Biden voter you know. Publish it in the blogosphere. Urge others to vote and then to pass it on.

The country you save could be your own!!

I received a multi-forwarded email yesterday, an account of a vacation in Fiji attributed to a professor of literature in California, and amounting to a character assassination of Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for President.

That the text rings true is no doubt based on McCain already seeming a bit "high strung", and to the heightened partisanship of this election year. But I have since been informed that it might well be an internet hoax.

I contacted the purported writer of the letter by email, asking for confirmation before posting it here. Her answer, appended below, confirms the various confusions, but also states "the account is not necessarily false", and that I should "pass this information on to anyone interested in this story." I have acceded to her wishes.

My Vacation with John McCain

Plazaville is a series of short videos based on Jean Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville. It is set in New York in the 21st Century as a series of performances in the corporate plazas of the financial district. It is offered as podcast videos that may be viewed on iPods, iPhones and HD screens via appleTV. Click here to launch iTunes --
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2926811...
It’s also available on G.H. Hovagimyan’s youTube page --
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=602FE1FF80DB8F95

A response to the Jerry Saltz review in New York Magazine.

Martha Rosler has typically been too pat and jejune in her politics, and in her assumption that it makes for good art, and Jerry Saltz correctly nails the rehash aspects of the current Mitchell-Innes & Nash show. The word "on the street" (in this case West 26th) is that Rosler is breaking no new ground, merely updating and enhancing both the scale and production values of her familiar collaging of images. Once they were taken from the Vietnam battlefield and conflated with magazine clippings from the home front: fashion models, washing machines, living room sofas and credenzas, Playboy nudes. Now they include some "relevant" Iraqi/Afghani footage - burkas and amputees - and benefit from Photoshop. Rosler might have succeeded in "bringing the war home" in 1968, but as Thomas Wolfe said, "You Can't Go Home Again". The epithet "pretty war porn" might be a bit harsh, but it is not that far from the mark.

Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Benefit

Sunday, October 5, 2008 - 5:00pm - 7:30pm -
Live Auction 6:30pm - Simon de Pury - auctioneer -

Tickets start at $125

Y V O N L A M B E R T
550 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

Tellus13

Noise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization.

from Yahoo! Finance:

It's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention: a majority of Americans oppose the bailout plan passed last night by the Senate and heading toward the House.

... Many Americans seem to understand the "real" economy -- i.e., Main Street -- will suffer if the plan fails, but they still oppose it and view it as a bailout for Wall Street "fat cats."

"I've lost my money because of these idiots, now they want me to subsidize their losses too???," Yahoo! Finance user "hoser48" wrote yesterday. "They can go to hell with the common man, we will all live together as equals then. A bailout is not the answer."

Clearly that sentiment isn't universal, and Monday's 778 Dow dive did change many people's view. But it's also true the mood in the country is ugly, and it didn't happen overnight.

Todd Harrison, CEO of Minyanville.com, has been warning about the threat of "societal acrimony" for some time.

The last few years highlighted the chasm between the 'have’s' and 'have not’s,'" he writes. "While the former middle class has struggled for some time, the comeuppance of the upper echelon has arrived. The voluntary thrift that will now manifest as a result of this culture shock will permeate an already fragile socioeconomic structure."

Note the "screensaver" image for the above video: the Peter Finch character in Network (1976), screaming "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!"