Sunday

Recursive Art

Dang, it's raining again. It seems like every weekend lately. Just a matter of time before the old Gray brothers gravel quarry slides down onto Sansome street and someone decides to paste it up again. Question: does a picture of a picture become art in its own right. If looked at bluntly, the original was stolen. (assuming that the subject isn't a paid model) A look at the purposed copyright law gives no answer short of hire a lawyer, and art theorists can fill 30 or 40 pages that boils down to "don't mess with our gig". Since I had to use an editing program to rotate and trim the above picture, does an Arbus picture become my work? After all, it has a clever title (with requisite ironic distance) and the word art in it. Just asking. Now the usual Sunday stuff.
Politics du jour:

• Varadarajan is just one among many conservatives thrown into apoplexy by basically nothing.
• Why no more 9/11s
• Where conservative intellectuals once had to prove themselves by the strength of their arguments, they could now increasingly get along by repeating not much more than slogans and audience-pleasing half-truths.

Money and Business related

• The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it.
• Exciting design interventions in your life of abject poverty

And some this, that and the other. A handy computer trick, a review of Valis, some culture and a sheet for guitar players.

• Some firewall programs may include a self-test feature in the controls or settings. If you want to test the firewall from the outside, one good tool is the Gibson Research Corp.’s free Shields UP! firewall testing service.
• This is the great secret of madness, one obscured by the doctrine of "creative madness": its banality.
• Indian religious muckraking.
• Quartal Voicings