Despite appearances to the contrary, I have not in fact fallen into a coma, but have been taking a breather in LA for the past several days. And this right on the heels of my Philadelphia trip.

I hop the plane today, though. Back to Austin. And I'm looking forward to being in the same city for a week straight.

Back from Philly, which was magnificent and a much-needed breath of fresh air. A brief report will come after I recover from 3 days of bar-hopping and meeting random strangers on the streets. But the news is good. I like that big, big world.

And sorry about all the drunken posts in the comments sections of all your blogs. (Though I'm sure I meant every word of it.)

Ok kids, I'm in Philly and the minute the plane touched down that plan about working the whole time went right out the window. I mean, for cryin' out loud! I'm two blocks from the Fabric Workshop!

Roberta, Libby, I'm here!

So I'm up the other night working on this book project, and thanks to Quark (or the Mac or the digital gods or whatever) most of the files get chewed up and burnt to a crisp along with all the backup copies in the folder, instantaneously transforming my work-slash-pleasure trip to Philadelphia next week into a work-slash-work trip.

Thanks, everyone for the suggestions though, seriously. I may be able to sneak out for one thing or two. Fabric Workshop is the leading contender right now.

current music: The Aluminum Group, Pelo

Swamped. Next week to Philly. Help! What/who should I see?

Click to enlarge

I re-post the image below not in the spirit of "we're all truly the same deep inside," but as a study in how different modes of presenting information encourage different kinds of thinking. The familiar red v. blue map accurately represents the political reality of the electoral college, but it does a lousy job of reflecting the social reality of a continuum of political viewpoints, with a huge, huge middle and practically nonexistent extremes. (via Mike Hauser's CasdraBlog) See, can't we all just get along?

Meanwhile, Martin Bromirski weighs in over at Anaba on the art blog subtheme of New York City's ideological dominance/tyranny over the art world PR machine. I also made the same leap to insular worlds and their real political effect as mirrored in (if not demonstrated by) the most recent election.

That's enough on politics for now. I long to return to talking about art. I may even pick up where I left off and actually discuss something going on in the local (Austin) scene. There's that and there's also my own personal neuroses that I could continue to discuss--and boy were they served a doozy recently. More on that R and L saga later.

While packing up 4 boxes of books that I intend to sell to Half Price Books, I came across an unopened letter postmarked April 1995. I instinctively opened it, before noticing that it was addressed to a Jonathan Goldman from Dorrit Cohn of Cambridge, MA. Anyway, Jonathan, this message is for you:

Dear Jonathan,
Those tulips! They've been blooming for almost two weeks now and they are still going strong.
It was a lot of fun working with you on labyrinths. I hope by now your life is less complicated, and less rushed. Let me know which Med. school you decide on.
Many thanks, and greetings, DC

Jonathan, I too hope your life is less complicated and less rushed.

Tom Moody and I mixed it up over at his blog, exchanging verbal jabs all day. This is what I was doing instead of working on the book project, even though I specifically took a day off work for just that purpose. First go here, then here, then here.

I stand by everything I've said over the past 48 hours, though I realize that I dramatically underestimate the degree to which people take this stuff personally. To me it's all like the stock market--sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. You simply adjust your strategies of resistance depending on the outcome. But I appreciate that not everyone has that relationship to the whole affair.

I am pissed off about losing this election. And my rage falls not on the right, but on the left.

To the Democratic Party: you are a bunch of sniveling, weak-willed, egg-headed corporate shills. I hate you. But you're all I've got. I am a radical leftist independent with religion-based moral underpinnings. My economic beliefs tend toward socialism--I believe in progressive tax policies, a robust welfare state and subsidized education. My views are not mainstream and are politically untenable, and my nearest refuge of significance turns out to be the party of John Kerry and Lloyd Doggett.

Fine.

We on the left lost this one because of our own shortsightedness and lack of imagination. Stop blaming Bush supporters, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney, and all those bogey men under the bed. Now is the time to do some serious soul searching and figure out what, if anything, we stand for.

We have four years people, four years to get our shit together. 4 years to come up with some actual ideas. Not a laundry list of policies. Ideas. Not a series of complaints against the current administration. IDEAS.

In short, a moral vision.

Until the left understands the power of moral visions, we will continue our steady march toward historical irrelevance. Until we stop dismissing values-based voting as a sign of weakness, ignorance or laziness, we will continue to miss out on the major engine of human behavior, be it conservative or liberal.

My education as an activist was the same as most people's on the educated left. We were taught to see people as the sum of a particular set of socio-economic categories. Someone's race, age, gender, sexuality and class were supposed to be all the information you needed to know how that person existed as a social being. That was supposed to determine what motivated their every action.

This is why liberals on November 3rd are so baffled by the idea that someone might believe in something so passionately, so fully that they might even vote against their own economic and social benefit in order to support it. Liberals can't fathom this, because we have no ideas on our own side that are equally compelling. Those on the right are neither stupid nor misinformed; they are intensely motivated my compelling moral visions.

The reporters at NPR never failed to register their bewilderment over the fact that values was at the top of the list of voter concerns this season. Dear NPR: values are always at the top of the list, even if people don't state it as such. The problem is we've let "values" become a synonym for "conservative values," and that's a shame. And so we liberals squirm around unsure of what to do around the words values and morality, preferring instead to focus on policies. We don't talk about what's right, we talk about what's effective.

Well, Jacques Derrida is dead and it's safe now to say the word morality without putting quotes around it. It's safe now to believe uncynically in a moral vision. It's ok to go ahead and say you believe in something without smirking.

The left has a long tradition of moral visions. Think of civil rights in the 50s and 60s. We talked then about what was morally right. Somehow we gave all that up and decided just to focus on numbers.

Unfortunately, most liberals will prefer to go on thinking that "those people must just be idiots" because that's so much easier than interrogating the complex truths. That, too, is a shame, and the reason why the red states will drift further and further away from the blue.

My schedule for the book design project I'm working on has me completing several chapters a night. That won't happen. Fortunately, said schedule also has me finishing about 2 weeks ahead of time (11/8), so slipping won't be a problem.

Meanwhile, I am haunted every day by the gorgeous, creepy, low-fi photography of G. Schindler. He has a great eye for weird urban iconography. Austin really does look like this. Sometimes. (left, Schindler 10/29)

current music: Macy Gray, The Id