Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

A couple of stolen items.

First, this link, stolen from r@d@r at Ex-Lion Tamer.

Second: William Gibson posts the following on his website – which he stole, first.

” Initiating preflight check…”

• Cabal of oldsters who won’t listen to outside advice? Check.
• No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.
• National boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.
• Unshakable faith in our superior technology? Check.
• France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
• Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
• China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
• SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.
• Fear we’ll look bad if we back down now? Check.
• Texan in the WH? Check.
• Land war in Asia? Check.
• Rightists unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.
• Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.
• Soldiers about to be dosed with our own chemicals? Check.
• Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.
• Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.
• B-52 bombers? Check.
• Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.
• Infighting among the branches of the military? Check.
• Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.
• Local experts ignored? Check.
• Local politicians ignored? Check.
• Local conflicts since before the USA has been a country? Check.
• Against advice, Prez won’t raise taxes to pay for war? Check.
• Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.
• Use of nukes hinted at if things don’t go our way? Check.
• Unpopular war? Check.

“Vietnam II, you are cleared to taxi.”

Following a link from Rin’s LiveJournal.

C. Glen Williams is a Haggis-Eating Ninja Monkey with a Battle Rating of 9.5.
Unleash your own Food-Eating Battle Monkey.

As the streetlights slowly filter in through my window on the closing of my twenty-third birthday, it’s time to talk music. Or a reasonable facsimile.

By the way – if all you’re interested in is the fact that it is (or was, rather) my birthday today, then feel free to skip the following – a plug for my new albums available on Cafepress. Actually, don’t feel free to skip it. Feel compelled to read the whole thing.

I am pleased to announce the opening of The New Kallixti Music Store.

Post-Millennial Heebie-Jeebies was recorded well before the Millennium (or even the Willennium, for that matter), and was my first full-length album. The year before that, I had released my first EP – The Money Keeps Rolling In.

Post-Millennial Heebie-Jeebies has been available for the past couple of years exclusively through Ampcast – an online music distributor. The Money Keeps Rolling In was released briefly through mp3.com, but has been out of print for three years.

Ampcast – like many OMD’s – used mp3’s to master its CD’s. While the resulting sound quality is acceptable, it’s not really the best that it could be. For this release, the music has been taken from the original master CD’s and turned over in high quality.

Not only that, but Post-Millennial Heebie-Jeebies now comes in two editions. The Basic Edition is the original acoustic album presented in a stripped-down package. Priced at a steal at only $5.99, the CD comes in a paper sleeve with a clear front window and is re-mastered from the original recordings. Meanwhile, the Special Edition gives you the original album with full packaging and artwork and includes a total of eight bonus tracks – three alternate mixes and the complete first EP, The Money Keeps Rolling In.

Of course, that isn’t the only music I’ve recorded over the years.

Meet my dancefloor alter-ego – Deep Blue Funk. DBF made his debut on mp3.com, but remained there only briefly before he, too, moved to Ampcast. His initial CD, Funktron 5000, was four tracks long and included the track “Got It Sussed” – which reached the mp3.com’s Top 10 for Electronic music and drew rave reviews from DJ’s the world over. With the move to Ampcast, the content of Funktron was folded into a completely new, full-length album, Deep Blue Funk’s Rockabionica.

This edition of Rockabionica features cleaner character artwork than the Ampcast original, as well as more artwork (on Ampcast, the artwork for the inside of the booklet was lost, and therefore never printed).

Not only that, but there are Deep Blue Funk shirts, as well. Will my whoredoms never cease?

Please, check out the Kallixti Music Store, powered by CafePress. I’m certain that we can find some kind of music to suit your tastes.

Thus endeth the lesson.

I almost missed this story when it appeared on CNN’s Money page. It looks like Halliburton is out of the running for a major contract to rebuild Iraq. Of course, plans for a private sector reconstruction of Iraq (meaning millions in government money for large American corporations) are still well underway – two firms are still in the running for that contract, and Halliburton already got theirs.

If you missed it already, Halliburton got a contract earlier this past week to help put out the oil fires in Iraq – a contract that is of unspecified value to the company, which is the former home of current Veep Dick Cheney.

Halliburton, of course, insists that Cheney had nothing to do with their being in the running – and so does Cheney’s office. But the fact remains on the record that Cheney has been instrumental in getting Halliburton some big, fat, juicy contracts from the government his first time around, and wound up nicely-paid for it. With his track record, it’s hard not to imagine that Cheney hasn’t so much retired from Halliburton as taken an extended leave of absence. I imagine he has a lot of sick leave stored up or somethin’.

Heaven forbid that I should spread rumors, but the dominant one is that Halliburton was dropped to avoid a potential PR stink caused by their involvement in a goverment run by their former CEO. Well, let’s examine this.

First: The connection has been made by more than yours truly. Even the right-leaning, pro-war cable networks have felt obligated to point out that Veep Cheney’s former company was ready to move into Iraq after Bush pulls out.

Second: Halliburton is not completely out of the running for contracts. While they will not be the winners of the main contract, they will still have multi-million dollar shots at contracts as subcontractors, contracts for different segments of the reconstruction, and contracts for several of their subsidiaries. If the Southern Baptists have taught us anything over the years, their boycott of Disney has taught us that it’s impossible to know just how far corporate America’s tentacles spread.

And now, a brief item of business.

If you go archive trawling on the ArtMachine, you might find that some of the older entries have had comments turned off. In fact, all of the older entries have had comments turned off.

This is intended to make following response to the blog easier. It takes a lot of work for me to track down the latest comments when they’re made on entries that are over a month old – so the new policy on commenting for the ArtMachine is that comments will be open until an entry has left the front page. Pages that are permalinked from the front (like the entry featuring a music video tribute to UnReasonable Women Baring Witness) will have comments permanently opened.

Thanks to the watchful eyes of several readers, it came to be known that my blog software does support e-mailing new comments to me – I just didn’t have that option turned on.

So, the new policy was very short-lived. Soon, those entries will be opened once again for comment. Thanks, everybody!

Everybody’s worried about our celebrities. But the look-alikes are the ones causing the real problems! The Tuscaloosa News reports.

And this comes out of my recent trawling to find comments that I missed.

I appreciate feedback – both positive and negative – on the entries I post. However, it’s a lot of work to trawl through my archives to find a new comment like the following comment from my entry on Dennis Miller’s Tonight Show appearance (“The Nazi Stuff”). Notice that the entry was posted on February 26, and the comment posted on March 5 – well after the entry had dropped out of sight from the front page.

Gotta love an art fag, always wanting to say some retarded statement, whilst clueless on world issues…go read resoloution 1441, Iraq has had 17 opportunties to disarm and has violated every single one. Stick to freeform paint splattering fruitcake.
Posted by: Picaso on March 5, 2003 04:10 PM

Glad to see that free and open, intelligent discourse is alive and well. I particularly like the use of “fag” and “retarded” as epithets, combined with the use of the archaic “whilst”. Not to mention the usual statement that I should shut up because I’m “clueless” on world issues. I would refer “Picaso” to resolution 242 which clearly calls for Israel to withdraw its soldiers from the occupied territories. And compared to Iraq’s “17 opportunities,” Israel has had amazing opportunities to comply with its own U.N. resolutions. However, our diplomatic position has been to pursue change through peacable means and through the United Nations. And it still is.

And I don’t do freeform paint splattering. Let alone on or with fruitcake.

And for a moment, allow me to address the issue of “not knowing” enough to comment on current events. It’s the latest in a barrage of “shut up” tactics employed on the peace movement. It’s appeared in public forums, on cable channels, in comments, and in many fine weblogs.

Honestly, if we start requiring people to know everything about anything before they speak, we’ll have an entire nation of mutes. When it comes to the sciences, nobody knows enough to say they know everything – and when it comes to the human side of everything, there’s no possible way to know everything. Gore Vidal puts it best in Burr when he states that there is no “truth” of a story, there’s only “my version” and “the other version”.

Before you make the accusation that people protesting for peace (or, for that matter, pulling for war) “don’t know what they’re talking about,” please consider that they may know just as much – or even more – than you do. If you watch CNN’s 24-hour coverage of the war, the chances are pretty good that you are not well-informed. If you only watch Free Speech Television’s progressive coverage of the peace movement, the chances are pretty good that you are not well-informed. If you’re obsessed with Fox News Channel’s “fair and balanced” coverage, it’s very likely that you are not well-informed. If you only listen to Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Michael Moore, or any number of inflammatory political pundits, it’s very, very likely that you are not well-informed. In fact, if you have every possible news source linked directly into your brain so that you are constantly downloading information on current events and constantly updated with the latest reports, it’s still very likely that you are not well-informed.

It’s no fault of the media (well, okay. It’s mostly the fault of the media), it’s part of being human. We hear the news, filter out what works, and cram the rest into the garbage disposal. And the news itself is not always accurate, either. And what do we do when the reports on the same subject provide completely different points? We extract information and synthesize opinions as part of the miracle of the human mind.

To say that somebody should shut up because they don’t have all of the information is patently ridiculous and logically flawed, particularly if the one calling on somebody to shut up has no idea of what the speaker in question actually knows. And you can’t find out what the speaker knows if your idea of engaging them in conversation is to call them names and tell them to shut up, then refuse to listen to anything else that they have to say.

In this corner: The peace protestors – large numbers of people mostly led by grassroots movements with the support of a few vocal celebrities. And in this corner: The pro-war protestors – a handful of people backed by the Republican party, George W. Bush, and our old friends Clear Channel.

You remember Clear Channel, don’t you? Good ol’ monopolistic, vertical-integrating Clear Channel? The people who own the radio stations, the show syndicates, the concert programmers, and part of the ticket sales programs?

Yeah, it appears that our friends at Clear Channel have been exerting a little bit of influence in favor of their old friend, Dubya. They’re old friends who share a history of contracts and business dealings that have proven to be profitable on both sides. And now, Clear Channel’s helming organizations that are of the “shut up the dirty liberal” variety.

I may be adding “conspiracy nut” to the already-long list of epithets tacked onto me by the ultra-conservative branch of society, but I have to say – the “Get Behind the President” movement sprang up just a little bit too quickly for my comfort. Overnight, it seems, every television station and radio station picked up on it except for the most progressive of them. I’ve seen public service announcements on every broadcast network, and the bulk of people speaking on the cable news networks have frequently voiced these statements. It smacks of a fully-orchestrated plan to get this idea introduced into the mainstream, when the presence of dissidents has previously been considered a sign that democracy was working.

Sigh Times are tough.

They came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a Catholic.

They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a communist;

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.”

Martin Niemoller
1892-1984