miniblag

068

Sol LeWitt passed away, but somehow this escaped me. It seems as if so many of the masters are starting to fade, with few worthy replacements.

I better get my Ryman compositions to him soon.

067

Over a year has passed since the last entry.

Let's try this again. Simple links. Once a day. No frills.

066

a quick update on things.

]]> Greetings one and all.

This is a brief letter just to update you on things, because recently I’ve gotten a lot of complaints that I haven’t been doing so well to keep in touch, post-blog. My apologies. Things, as always are busy busy busy here.

So here’s a quick update on what’s going on:

1. I am exasperated with my job and I am currently seeking other career opportunities. First person to find me a job gets a wonderful gift.
2. I am working on an exhibition in a museum. May 12th is the opening reception for Works 2000-2006. This will feature a slew of unreleased collaborations, installation pieces and stuff new and old. It’s a part of the Thinkbox group show, but I’m so fucking excited for my spot in the show I couldn’t wait for them to promote it, so I made up my own fucking flyer for the thing. This will probably be my last gasp at being a proper high fallutin artiste.
3. I just finished up a cover story for Big Idea magazine, which will appear some time in May or June.
4. My ego remains firmly intact and wildly out of control. Rest assured that no one can self promote and grandstand quite like I can. I’m just lying low until autumn. That’s when the big guns come out. Hopefully.
5. My challenge to read a book a week this year fell down the tubes this past week. But I went three months and one week straight reading some dang good stuff. Can’t front on that.
6. I’m strongly contemplating doing a podcast. There has been much encouragement by dearly loved ones to pursue this endeavor, and it’s something that’s been stewing about since Latif, Reilly and Will put the bug in my ear.
7. I have resigned from my post at Dorkwave HQ. It was a good two years, and I’m super excited to see what happens next for myself. I wish nothing but the best and lots of love for Servo, Doyle, Jon and Mark.
8. I am currently stalking Taku Sugimoto. Just kidding. But I wrote a long gushing fan mail to him. Anyone who hasn’t heard his guitar work is missing out. He’s part Tal Farlow, part John Cage, ALL awesome.
9. A list of albums I’ve dug this year:

William Basinski- The Garden of Brokenness
Belong- October Language
Biosphere-Dropsonde
Dabrye-Two/Three
Kaito- One Hundred Million Light Years
Keith Fullerton Whitman- Lisbon
Growing-Color Wheel
Markus Guentner-Lovely Society
I Am Robot and Proud-The Electricity in Your House Wants to Sing
Gregg Kowalsky-Through the Cardinal Window
Mikkel Metal-Victimizer
Mono- You Are There
TV on the Radio-Return to Cookie Mountain
Sebastien Roux-Songs
Saturday Looks Good To Me- Sound on Sound
Ryoji Ikeda- Dataplex
I'm Not a Gun-We Think As Instruments
carl michael von hausswolff- leech
VA- Hefty: history is Bunk
VA- Idol Tryouts Two
Fabric27: Audion
AGF+Sue C- Mini Movies
Uusitalo-Tulenkantaja

10. New things are in the works. New new things that I’m excited for. More updates soon.

The Michigan Democratic Party may be a walking, disastrous joke, but I assure you my love for you is not.
I’m really sorry I’ve been out of the loop. I’ll take you all out for tea soon. Promise promise.

Love from Ferndale,

Rob

065

Chartier interview from the Smithsonian (podcast)

Quite possibly the worst music blog I've ever read.

064

A piece of Anti-Taylor legislation.

063

This is really funny.

062

One of my all time favorite blogs.

061

One of my all time favorite photographers has works on display at the U of M art museum.

060

Beauty, science and order.

059

My middle fingered salute to the Michigan Democratic Party, Part I

]]> 1.

From time to time I feel it necessary to stretch my grey matter the way I did on my retired blog, and these are one of those times. They will be few and far in between, but I hope that you enjoy reading them as much as I do typing. It’s always good to keep moderate form.

The Michigan Democratic Party is acting like a bunch of chucklefuck dickslaps who are running around like handicapped people staffing a hospital emergency room. At this point, I’m rather confident in saying that we might not have Jenny From The Block as our governor and Captain Amway J. Homophobe as our state governor. It’s March and we’re already seeing the first wave of advertisements for the man; prime time commercial slots, print advertisements, bumper stickers and web banner ads on both Freep and News web sites are out in full and present force. As a result, we’re seeing DeVos (that’s the Republican fundamentalist pro life guy most of the state will be voting for, including alot of Detroit because Democrats have been woefully taking Detroit forgranted) gaining ground in all sorts of polls across the state. So much ground that if the elections were held today, we’d have a close shave race on our hands.

But let’s get back to my rather abrasive yet poignantly accurate statement for a second. Is it unfair to generalize and say ALL Michigan Democrats suffer from panic-inactive disease? Of course not. It’s NEVER fun nor accurate to paint all people with the same brush. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s just look at the forest from the trees and look at the Michigan Democratic Party.

For this rant/protest, I’m going to focus largely on the communications aspect of the party, whatever of it is there. On the whole, they’ve done a reasonable job framing the arguments and issues in the mass media, especially in the Freep, the traditional liberal standby. However, their platform is about as clear as the Rouge River. Who knows what the party stands for anymore? They are suffering from the same paralysis of confidence and focus that the DNC is suffering on the national level. But here’s the major difference: Michigan Democrats don’t have the luxury of time or comfort any more. We are the state with the worst economic growth and unemployment rate in the nation. Every piece of legislation designed to rectify this has been blocked in state legislation by bureaucracy at its best, especially thanks to the speaker of the house. I’m not going to say the man’s evil, but at times he reminds me of a certain government official in history that had a fondness for khakis and thought it was pretty cool when everyone raised their hand in unison.

It’s a horrible thing to say, especially for a bedwetting Democrat for myself, but times are not good. At all. I worry for the state of the party. Which is why I decided to get involved.

I went to the Democratic party website to offer my services. I have extensive experience in database work, can use HTML, PHP, CSS and XML with relative ease. I have years of editorial work under my belt and have written a few stump speeches for a certain Detroit mayoral candidate that somehow blew his chance at turning the city around. I am young, swarthy, quick thinking on my feet and I’d like to think I work best under pressure. I toiled over a letter of volunteer for a few hours and when finally satisfied, went to the site to find an email address for a point person.

Ever been to the MI Democrats site? I have, and I almost coughed up my skull. It’s as if their webmaster is stuck in 1999 using PageMill 2.0. It’s rather embarassing, especially in contrast to the GOP site based in .ASP (which is even funnier, but hey...at least the design doesn’t look like it was done for a middle school science project). After stumbling around the contact page trying to figure out exactly WHO I needed to send my email and CV to, I did so and went back to surfing. There were more dead pages on that site than any other political based site I have ever been to. Ever.

This was sent in December. I’m still waiting for a response.

Undeterred by the lack of response from the parent party, I decided to see if I could get a seat at the kids table. I googl’d “Michigan Young Democrats”. The first link that came up led me to a page for travel, leisure, business, computers....everything but what I was looking for. Moving right along to the next site, I came across this: http://www.mi-youngdems.yda.org/

I didn’t think it could get any more embarrassing or exasperating. I was wrong. If you clicked the link above, I’m sure you would find a bit of sadistic joy and mild disbelief at what I found. President Isaac Robinson should be ashamed of himself for having such a crap excuse for a website. I present to you, in contrast, the Michigan Young Fa...Republican site: www.mfyr.com

Unreal.

I took a deep breath and yet again, for the second time since late 2004, attempted to join the Michigan Young Democrats. I haven’t heard from Robinson, or any membership chair since.

I have volunteered for Freman’s campaign. I have offered my services to the Granholm campaign helping with the site, email blasts and everything else. I have tried to get involved with the state DNC and DNC Jr. organizations. This is just one of many angles of what is exactly wrong with the party, and I’m sure I’ll tackle more of them in the near future. But right now I am going to wait patiently until I hear from someone. I’m not holding my breath though.