Long winding conversation with Sasha last night, in spite of me being not quite comfortable in my skin. The turnover has prompted the long-comiing love page update. Go forth and burrow in the sortid details of my pretty little life, you beautiful gossip monkeys you. I'm also writing a revealing little story to tell tonight at axiom about my 23rd b-day and Watkins.

Right now I positively feel like I'm living the dream: sitting in my backyard with the wireless internet connection running strong, exercising my right as an adult to have a gin and tonic after lunch. It's good to be alive.

I didn't see the program, but apparently last Friday on Nightline, anonymous Team Bush sources more or less admitted that the case for making war with Iraq was a sham, that many overstatements (some would call them lies) were made for emphasis, and that the real purpose for the war was to display American force to the Middle East, combatting a perceived post-9-11 weakness.

The Bush administration decided it must flex muscle to show it would fight terrorism, not just here at home and not just in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but in the Middle East, where it was thriving.

So this really was about "showing them who's boss." Not the Iraqi's per se, but them. Nice to see we've got our best and brightest at the helm in these troubled times.

Elsewhere, ABC's "the Note" is running a section with messages from the various Democratic campaigns. Dean's delights, showing both humor and savvy: his is the only with hyperlinks.

Music is a main weapon in the struggle against apathy and sloth and disinvestment. Poetry is another, but it's still pretty fringe. If poetry ever becomes mainstream again, maybe through hip-hop -- still currently a bit overdominated by ego and sex, like the early rock'n'roll scene -- that will be a good sign. In any event, the rhythm and imagination common to both of these forms of expression make them powerful media for putting new memes on the market, and when they're put to use in the service of Truth, good things tend to result.

Right now we've got a lot of musicians making alt.politix songs. Thank goodness for that, but they're not getting a lot of airplay thanks to the Patriotic Consensus which keeps the highly risk-averse music conglomorates in check, to say nothing of openly conservative elements like Clear Channel. However, artists are continuing to pump up the volume. The latest entry into the fray is former Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha with his well-tuned DJ Shadow collaboration, March of Death. I used to spend some early-teen years grooving to the leftist mind-control sounds of Rage (fuck you I won't do what you tell me...), and so for me this is a welcome addition to the field.

On a slightly less serious, but maybe more personally satisfying note, some dance DJ has lifted quotes from Howard Dean's speech at the California Democratic Caucus and made a remix. As you may have gathered from the little banner on your left, I'm endorsing Dean at this time out of the Gang of 9 Democratic hopefuls. I plan on putting together a page explaining this and adding my polemic to the mix, but that's hasn't happened yet. Feel free to ask me questions though.

Finally, for more music (anti-war and otherwise) you won't hear on stations that are controlled by Bush donors, check out the listings at protest-recorts.com. There's also a lot of stuff coming out of international outlets. It seems that paradoxically (or not so), we radical Americans must look overseas for our inspiration, internal media crackdowns and chilling effects creating a real -- and I must admit at times exciting -- samizdat atmosphere. What's samizdat, you ask?

On the wonk end of things, I've been reading excerpts from The Unconquerable World in Harper's Magazine. Dense and academic, but really really good and real in a way that nothing I've read in a long time has been. This, the bus ride down from Boston, everything is giving me shivers of possibility.

Posting and checking email from the Science Museum here. We just saw a little play about the life and times if Nicola Tesla and a planetarium show on the edges of space and time. Big thoughts. So my mind is crackling with notions of nature, design and the way it aught to be. Taking over the world a so forth.

Boston is nice. Quaint and historical, a bit metro-lite to this New Yorker -- cops coming to break up the quietest party ever and a transit system that seems like a toy -- but oozing with old American charm nontheless. Madeline's show was amazing. My mother purchased a big canvis entitled, "Welcome to the Monkey House," which contains portraits of many of my hippy-fam friends (and me in the corner!). Lots of beautiful work.

I'm off to Boston on the Fung Wah. It's a bit of an East Coast Monkey Rally, and I'm bringing up Sasha to show off. Blogging will be minimal to nonexistant until Monday, but I love you all.

Looks like my man Tim Robbins is still getting the shaft. Here's some documentation of what happened a couple of days ago on the Today Show. Reminds me of how MSNBC axed Donehue and of the fact that GE owns NBC.

Full Disclosure: I once shared a theater space w/Mr Robbins (I was putting up Nitewerk and he was teaching a master class during the daylight hours) and apparently pissed him off by having my lighting guy rewire some things.

Fellow New Yorkers, as you may or may not be aware the Republican National Convention for the 2004 Election is going to be at Madison Square Garden. It's just been announced that they are moving the convention back to September in a transparent attempt to cash in again on the memory of 3,000 dead. You will hear more from me about this in the future, but for now here's the theme for the opposition:

Republican National Convention NYC 2004: This Time It's Personal

I have had enough of this shit. If these corrupt clowns think they're going to come and have their pep-rally in my town and not catch some serious beef from me and my people, they've got another thing coming. Bonus points to anyone willing to get a haircut and volunteer to work the convention so they can throw stinkbombs or something. As far as I am concerned, these people are not welcome to masturbate over 3000 dead in my backyard, and I intend to let them know that.

Or, as Frank likes to put it, "those funky bastards are gonna pay."

Started in on the new Bill Gibson (Pattern Recognition) last night, then stumbled across this blog of dubious authenticity chronicalling the travels of a young woman on the run from her powerful family today. The anonymous nature reminds me of restlesslord an anonymous blogger who purports -- not that I doubt his authenticity, but you never know -- to be an older british man with a 20-year-old American girlfriend (and was also the first person to blogroll me). Parallels with "the Footage" in Pattern Recognition are developing rapidly in my mind, getting me cooking on the future of life, the internet and culture (as always). That man is tapped in to something fierce.

I like the new book. It's got the cadence and quixotic/specific sensual description that are Gibson signatures: "the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm." Unlike his previous work it's present-day and not, as of yet, really about saving the world. I'm in awe of his facility with language. Dog Solitude. Long Chain Monomers. The Sky Was The Color of Television Tuned To A Dead Channel. Beyond style, what I've always loved about Gibson beyond style is his ability to project human emotion and ideosyncracy into rather inhumane surroundings, with interesting narrative and metaphysical results. I hear he used to be into acid -- though now like many vetrans, he sends a cautious message. Strange how so many of my interests, idols and literary heroes seem to intersect. Here's Gibson and Burroughs. Here's Gibson and Keasy (and Cassady). Somtimes this makes me feel banal -- just playing the bohemian version of six-degrees -- other times hopeful, like there's an actual throughline to all these things I appreciate and am interested in.

Thanks to good old Slashdot, I saw this, a loving parody of Gil-Scott Heron's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, updated for the early 21st and all us netslaves. I dig the humor and the truth; here's a sample:

 Survivor, The Osbournes, and Joe Millionaire  
 Will no longer be so damned relevant, and 
 People will not care if Carrie hooks up again with 
 Mr. Big on Sex and the City because Information
 Wants To Be Free even while Knowledge Is Power. 
 Revolution is not an AOL Keyword. 

I've loved the original jam since I first heard it, and can't wait for someone to lay down a remix with the new lyrics. The whole text is hyperlinked out the wazoo, so give the links a click if you want to learn what any reference is all about.

Oh goodness, and this comment is too poignant to miss. Reminds me of when a semi-acquaintance of mine from NYU -- now in Army Intel -- sent an angry response to a peace-petition email forward which referenced The Rock (the flick, not the wrestler) as part of its central thesis.

For anyone with a passing interest in the Biz game, y'aughtta know that my current feeling is that the user-controlled and people-friendly projection of secure and authenicated identity into the internet will herald the next generation of e-commerce and be the principle cause of our next economic boom. I didn't say it first, but it's the first time I've said it here. Maybe I'll elaborate on this in the not too distant future, but in the meantime, I'll explain why blogs are a good foundation for this. Again, this isn't a totally original idea. Doc Searls has a little ditty about it on his blog today, but I can tell you this sort of thing has been on my mind for quite a while.

Basically, it occurs to me that If you're willing to put your name on your blog and keep it real -- my original inspiration being Jusin's Links -- it could be the ultimate "I ain't scammin' you" proof. Using my blog as trust collateral first popped up when I wanted to buy something on eBay a while ago, and I realized that all these people had thousands of transactions and I had the goose egg zero and those suspicious-looking sunglasses. EBay lets you put up a little something about your self, so I stuck this up there. I like to think it helped me put prospective sellers at ease.

That was nice, but the real ah-ha! moment was when I started including my url in exploratory emails for freelance gigs off of craigslist or one of the innumerable job boards. This provides tremendous initial value for me as opposed to just some dude with an aol account: people can click my link and immediately see what I'm about and that I'm a real person, far more so than we'd be able to establish in an initial phone call. They also have a sense of what I'm about and so forth, lets them know if they want to deal with me or not.

Also, I used the term collateral specifically for a reason, that being having a personal blog gives me something to loose. Unlike a hotmail address or a monster.com login, this website gives me a non-disposable stake in the online world. Should someone decide to take the next step with me, this gives them peace of mind. If I put my blog on the table, you can bet I'm going to follow through. Sure I could chuck it all and start from scratch, but at this point I would be leaving behind over a year's worth of almost daily effort. It's not giving up my whole life, as if I decided to dissappear for real, move to Mexico or something, but it's far from insignificant. Someone who's thinking about entering into a virtual agreement with me knows how to recognize me online, where to find me in the future, and how to tell other people about me, three of the core tennants of identity, the underlying basis for any trust.

Of course, once real ID management (with legal backing) is here my outlandishjosh competitive advantage will be lessened if not eliminated, so you might ask why I'm still stoked about digital identity. Well, I want this sort of thing to become the norm because I think if it happens right it will open us up as a society and help integrate the world in more efficent and meaninfgul ways, and that's worth more to me than a competative advantage for freelance gigs. Besides, I probably loose some potential clients right off the bat because they're all freaked out to see me talking about using drugs and my sex life. Then again I don't really want to work with those people anyway. If things get tough and I need a temp job, I can just email them a word document with one of my other email addresses on it, but for now, I'm keeping it real to the fullest.