summoning ghost frames

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stAllio! - on the DLL out now!

my new data sound release on the DLL is now available for streaming or pay-as-thou-wilt download on bandcamp! this album has been in the works for more than a year and i'm pretty stoked to finally release it. here's the write-up:

stAllio!'s triumphant return to the world of sonified data! once again, stAllio! plunges deep into his hard drive and listens to the data -- image files, executables, and link libraries alike are converted to sound for his review. the choicest bits of data are then meticulously assembled into music: glitchy melodies, skittery rhythms, and thunderous beats emerge from the digital noise. you could call it IDM (interpreted data music), dirty 8-bit, or glitch-hop. stAllio! used to call it databent music, but these days prefers the simpler term data sound.

this is stAllio!'s first full-length release in the data sound style (his label debut, dissonance is bliss!, and 2004's true data 12", were both EPs) and his first release as a pay-as-thou-wilt bandcamp download. so stream it online, download it for free if you're feeling cheap, or even chip in a few bucks for your music the way people used to -- but whatever you do, don't sleep on this!¶

stAllio! at GLI.TC/H 2112

it's that time again! tomorrow i'll be driving up to chicago for GLI.TC/H 2112! GLI.TC/H is pretty much the premiere glitch art event in the world and i'm excited to be taking part again this year. i'll be here and there throughout the weekend, checking out various panels, performances, and workshops. and in particular i'll be participating in the following:

• i'll be part of a panel discussion on the subject of "glitch porn" friday afternoon, as part of the glitch cultures thread.
• i'll be doing a short improvisational performance friday night for the "no media" performances, teamed up at random with another artist.
• i'll be leading a workshop on my ghost frames process saturday morning for the dirty new media w3rkstation.

check out the full schedule of events here. maybe i'll see you there! or maybe you'll see me but i won't see you... some events will be streamed online for those who are unable to make it out to chicago.¶

introducing glitch pillows

from the "things you never knew you wanted until now" files: glitch throw pillows!

if you'd told me even a week ago that the most popular item In my society6 shop—more popular than t-shirts or laptop skins, even—would be throw pillows, i probably would've thought your prognosticator circuit was faulty. pillows aren't something i generally gave much thought to, let alone get excited about. and judging from the comments at this prostheticknowledge post, i'm far from alone there.

so i didn't know what to expect when i got the email that society6 now offered pillows, and was as surprised as anyone by how sharp these things look:

(yes, these are computer-generated preview images, but society6 does good work & i have faith these will look just as good in person.)

on reflection, it makes perfect sense: these pillows are as big as an art print, but much more functional & practical, plus you don't have to worry about stuff like framing. and because they're offered by society6, a create-on-demand site that can make them at scale, they're more affordable than limited-edition products like notendo's glitch scarves or philip stearns's glitch blankets.

and the timing couldn't be better: glitch is hotter than ever (it's even a core component of the latest hit disney movie, which i highly recommend)... and just in time for the holiday shopping season. the world is practically begging for a little piece of glitch pulled up from the matrix into their homes.

finally, it feels good to be getting some recognition for my big pixels series, which i feel is some of the best glitch work i've done, but which tends not to get as much attention on tumblr as my glitch gifs do. (of course, if you could put an animated gif on a pillow at that price, i'm sure that would sell even better.)¶

taking advantage of google+'s "transparent black" glitch

google rolled out version 2 of their google+ service a few months back, and it seems to have a glitch involving the resizing of animated gifs. the glitch causes black pixels to be misinterpreted as transparent, which results in ghosting artifacts. i've taken to calling this glitch transparent black. naturally, many artists's first reaction to this glitch is that they want to avoid it, but my immediate reaction was that i wanted to learn how to deliberately invoke it. this post will tell you how to do both.

here's how the glitch works. google+'s "preview" window is a seemingly arbitrary 497 pixels wide. if you upload a gif that's wider than this, google+ will resize it to 497, showing the resized version in the preview window, and allowing you to click it to view the original, full-sized gif. but if your original has any true black pixels, these will turn transparent in the resized gif.

for example, here's one of my gifs before posting to google+:

and here's what it looks like after:

you may have already guessed at a technique for how to avoid this glitch. one is to simply size your gifs to 497 pixels or fewer in width. another is to not use black—or if you want to use black, use a color that looks black but isn't quite #000000.

but if you're like me and you want to play around with this glitch, here are some tips:

• your gif needs to be wider than 497 pixels. 500 is often big enough, but bigger than that will work.
• your gif must have "true" black. i don't know if there's a tolerance (if, say, #000001 would be close enough, or even #0F0F0F), but merely "looking black" isn't enough. the easiest way to ensure that your gif has true black in photoshop is to add a "curves" adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack, and then use the "set black point" eyedropper. pick a pixel that's "close enough" to black and click it with the black-point dropper. all pixels of that shade or darker will turn to true black. you may also want to set a white point using the white-point eyedropper, but this isn't necessary.
  
  
• that's it! simply upload your gif to google+ and it should come out glitched. you may then save the glitched version using right-click (or whatever the mac equivalent) and post it elsewhere. note that resized version of your gif may actually be larger (in terms of storage space) than the original, so if you want to repost it somewhere with a size cap (like tumblr), you may need to re-encode to shrink the file.

i've been using the tag #transparentblack on google+ and #transparent black on tumblr, so if you experiment with this glitch, tag your posts accordingly so that others can find them. and happy glitching!

special thanks to lorna mills, manuel fernandez, prosthetic knowledge, and anthony antonellis ¶

i'll tumblr for ya

i've been spending a lot of time on tumblr lately (more time than on this blog, obviously), posting and reblogging gifs on glitchgifs. but as much as i love glitch gifs, they're a small fraction of my work. and since that blog has such a narrow focus, i've gone for days at a stretch where i didn't have any of my own content to post and was only reblogging other people's work. that's cool for as far as it goes, but frustrating because i have such a large body of work that i can't post there. the weirdest was when i would see that someone else had posted something of mine, and i couldn't even reblog it because it didn't fit the format!

you can probably see where this is going: i've started a new tumblr devoted to my work. that blog will be a blend of new and old content, revisiting past work (but with new commentary) as well as featuring new work (and i've been sitting on a bunch of new glitch art). i've always been reluctant to feature my image work too heavily here at stAllio!'s way, at most linking to a flickr photoset and telling you to check it out there. at stAllio! on tumblr my visual work will be front and center, though of course there will be music too—past and present, solo and with others, as well as my net radio show Active Listening / The Act of Listening, which for some reason i haven't been promoting very much here either.

in short, fans of my music and/or visual work should follow me at http://stallio.tumblr.com/ (there's an RSS feed if you're not a tumblrer).

as for the blog you're reading now (stAllio!'s way), it will remain in its current form: a more text-focused forum for occasional longer-form writing, with scattered links to noteworthy projects, upcoming show announcements, and the like. ¶

cut party tour, tonight in indy!

obviously i don't come around these parts so often anymore or i would've already posted about tonight's show at melt house! (or, for that matter, about this past sunday's show in muncie.) i believe this will be my first hometown appearance in three years, and this will also be only the second time i've performed material from my upcoming full-length data sound release—tentatively titled on the DLL and due for release sometime this year (perhaps summer). so if you're a fan of my true data 12", you're going to want to hear the new stuff.

also on tonight's bill: chicago's halluciphile, touring act muerto zoke vs 3ton cinema, and melt face. the latest word is that cincinnati's boy fruit may not be able to make it, but this is still a must-see lineup for fans of noisy, experimental electronics.

for more information about the cut party tour, including info on upcoming dates in other cities, check out http://badtaste4life.com/cutparty2012tour/. ¶

animals within animals - produce, abuse, resample out now!

animals within animals are back with a new full-length album: produce, abuse, resample! it's 60+ minutes of noisy collage and sample abuse, and as always is available for free download from badtaste4life.com.

check it out, and share it with your friends and/or enemies. ¶

application sensitivity revisited: the results

note: this post will be updated if/when i receive more results

here are the results from the experiment in my previous post. this is a collaborative experiment that requires audience participation to work, so if you haven't taken part yet, please read about the experiment and follow the directions—it should only take a few minutes.

our first batch of results come from iriXx, who is running mac OS X Lion (10.7.2). here is the glitched image in safari:

mac-safari.jpg

as you can see, this is virtually indistinguishable from bollybend3mac (which was captured using OS X 10.4 and looks the same on my ipad). the only real difference here is that the colors are brighter; this may not even be a difference in the rendering engine—it could be explained by using different encoding options or codecs when creating the JPEGs.

here it is in firefox on OS X 10.7.2:

mac-firefox.jpg

this looks pretty much like it did in firefox on my wife's machine, except for the green bar at the bottom.

most interesting is this screenshot, generated using the mac program preview, which shows that the image thumbnail renders very differently from the image when viewed in that same app full-size:

mac-preview.jpg



(click to view larger)

iriXx also tried it in android "(running CyanogenMod 7.1, in default Browser and in Dolphin)", but couldn't get it to open. this likely means that damaged JPEGs won't open in android at all, but we need more results before we can conclude whether this is the case.

please join in the experiment! i'll give you a shout-out and post any interesting screenshots here (and eventually on the results page). ¶

application sensitivity revisited: an experiment

i finally got around to reading hugh s manon's and daniel temkin's excellent "notes on glitch" (it took me a while to get to it, despite the fact that it cites my work and i consulted briefly with daniel about sonification while he was working on it). overall, it's a great essay full of glitch art insight, but i wanted to quibble with one bit, and use that as a springboard to revisit one of my early experiments. from the essay:

12. During the process of its creation, glitch art appears stochastic. It is difficult to foresee which alteration of data will metastasize, which will instantaneously kill the file, and which will have no discernible effect. However, from the point of view of the file, whose "genetic predispositions" are rigid and fixed, there is nothing random about glitching. "Open 57904.jpg >> replace all Q with 9hJ" produces exactly the same results every time. Alternately, we could say that glitch practice is pseudo-aleatory, since results which appear random are in fact entirely reproducible.

though it's true that glitches aren't "random" in the sense that they do follow rules, no matter how incomprehensible to us those rules may be, it's an oversimplification to say that any given glitch "produces exactly the same results every time". to say this is to ignore the role that the rendering engine plays in visualizing the glitch.

different rendering engines sometimes render the same glitched data in different ways. this is what i call application sensitivity (for want of a better term). examples:

• a file that is too corrupted to open in one application may open in another—adobe photoshop generally won't open damaged JPEGs, but others (including many web browsers) will
• some corrupted files will render in different ways depending on the application that's reading them—compare a glitched PSD file opened in its native photoshop to the same file opened in gimp (or even in a different version of photoshop)
• glitched files may even render differently when opened in the same application but on different hardware (though this could still be a software issue related to subtly different codecs etc being installed on the different machines)

so let's revisit my bollybend experiment from 2005. in that experiment, i posted an actual glitched JPEG which i knew rendered differently on different software, and i asked my readers to submit screenshots of what it looked like on their systems. i then reposted all of the different versions here.

software and hardware have changed a lot since i first did that experiment, to the point that this same file renders differently on modern systems than it did on 2005's systems.

here is the actual bent JPEG:

the file above will not even open in internet explorer. here's what it looks like in chrome on my computer (running windows 7):

bollybend3-chrome.jpg

here's what it looks like on my wife's machine (firefox 9.0.1 on win7):

bollybend3-ffox.jpg

here's how it looks in microsoft paint on my machine:

bollybend3-paint.jpg

here's how it looks when i insert it into a word 2003 document:

bollybend3b.jpg

here's how it looks on our ipad (running i think iOS 4.3):

bollybend3mac.jpg

and here's how it looks in firefox on my several-year-old laptop:

bollybend3c.jpg

compared to the results from last time, i got three brand-new variations, just by opening the file on newer systems. there are surely more variations out there—in addition to whole new browsers and operating systems on the market now (such as chrome and win7 above), there are also a lot more smartphones and tablets out there. i'm curious how the file might render on an android phone or on web os, for example. but to find out, i'll need your help!

how you can help with this experiment

scroll up to look at the glitched JPEG at the top of this post. compare it to the other versions. if it doesn't match any of them, take a screenshot* and email it to me along with information about what browser and OS you're running. you don't need to crop it for me, but you're welcome to if you like (the image should be 333x485).

submitted images will be posted here on the blog as well as on the results page, and you will of course be credited for your contribution.

extra credit: for bonus points, save the glitched file to your machine and try opening it in other image editors (it probably won't open in photoshop), insert it into word processing files or other types of documents, etc and send me screenshots of any interesting results you get.¶


*(here's how to take screenshots in windows and how to do it in OS X.)

new ventures: active listening radio & glitch gifs

obviously i haven't been posting to this blog too often lately, and i don't expect that to change anytime soon because i'm taking on even more new projects this year (on top of 2-3 albums in the works, ongoing glitch art experiments, etc).

first, i've started a tumblr blog devoted entirely to glitch gifs. there you'll find awesome glitch art animated gifs created by myself and dozens of other artists. the URL, shockingly, is glitchgifs.tumblr.com.

i'm also starting a brand-new net radio show called Active Listening / The Act of Listening. the show takes its name from an essay by john oswald:

As a listener my own preference is the option to experiment. My listening system has a mixer instead of a receiver, an infinitely variable speed turntable, filters, reverse capability, and a pair of ears.

An active listener might speed up a piece of music in order to perceive more clearly its macrostructure, or slow it down to hear articulation and detail more precisely. Portions of pieces are juxtaposed for comparison or played simultaneously, tracing "the motifs of the Indian raga Darbar over Senegalese drumming recording in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950's (a sonic texture like a "Mona Lisa" which in close-up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal.")

each week i'll play music and sound art somehow related to this theme (glitch, remix culture, prepared records, etc) as well as do some active listening experiments here in the studio, shining new light on old records by playing them in nonstandard ways.

tune in each sunday night at 9:38 pm eastern on http://numbers.fm/! if you're good, i may even archive old episodes somewhere. ¶

stAllio! glitches in front magazine

i'm pleased to announce that some of my glitches were published in the latest issue (#163) of the british magazine front. specifically, i glitched some photos for their feature on dubstep artist joker.

front is a lifestyle magazine that covers music, video games, culture, and—like all british publications—includes photos of nude women (specifically "alt" women with natural busts). you can buy paper copies from their web shop to be shipped anywhere in the world, or if you prefer virtual magazines that can only be viewed using proprietary software, they have that, too. they even have a censored "SFW" digital version for smartphones and tablets, so if you have an ipad and/or want to avoid any risk of seeing an exposed nipple, you're in luck!

i haven't received my copies yet, but here's a taste of the first two pages, courtesy of antonio roberts, who nipped on down to the newstand to snap some photos for me:



i am also available to do glitches at parties or glitch your wedding photos. ¶

upset about the mote in his brother's eye

gary welsh is frothing at the mouth because a democratic politician said mike pence "is like a rabid dog" in his pursuit of an immigration law for indiana.

gary himself is well-known for using laughably over-the-top language such as his claim last month that "The entire Obama presidency is based on a series of forgeries", so it's odd that he is so upset about the words rabid dog, which are pretty tame as far as political insults go. but perhaps he's not so upset by the words themselves, but by the unforgivable rhetorical offense of name-calling.

People can disagree on the answer to any problem with which we are confronted without resorting to name-calling, but if you are a liberal, it's much easier to resort to the demonization of your political counterparts than debate the merits of your argument.

he concludes his post with this:

If you can't win on the merits of the debate, let the name-calling begin. It takes much less effort to name call than debate the substance of your arguments.

indeed, name-calling takes way less effort than rational debate, which is probably why gary routinely uses it in his own writing. just in the past three weeks, gary:

• wrote that county clerk beth white is "totally unethical" and "can't be trusted to run impartial elections"
• in the same post, called lobbyist greg hahn "a highly partisan [...] sleazeball attorney"
• said of city-council candidate kostas poulakidas, "What a total sleazebag!"
• wrote that "the [Indianapolis] Star is the best friend the corrupt politicians in this state have" and columnist "Matt Tully is just a tool for the corrupt political insiders in this town"
• complained that "the Star's editors and reporters are too stupid to realize" that poulakidas was guilty of a felony for sending out a mailer that gary didn't like

to be sure, sifting through gary's blog for ad hominem insults and fallacious reasoning is like picking fleas off a rabid dog—it's easy, but the longer you do it, the more likely you'll end up getting sick.

so when gary complains about name-calling as if it's not his bread and butter, is he being deliberately hypocritical, or just demonstrating his typical lack of self-awareness? ¶

this weekend in chicago: GLI.TC/H 20111

i'm pleased to announce that i will once again be performing in chicago as part of GLI.TC/H! GLI.TC/H is an international glitch art conference and festival, with events and exhibitions in chicago, amsterdam, birmingham, and online. i'll be performing friday night, november 4, at the enemy.

this year i have a special treat: an entire set of all-new, never-before-heard datasound music—my first new material in this vein since true data—with live video accompaniment by video artist glitchard nixon!

also on the bill that night: performances by i ♥ presets, morgan higby-flowers, and cracked ray tube, as well as video screenings and something called glitch karaoke. and that's just one night: GLI.TC/H will be in chicago all weekend, so check the full schedule for more info.

did i mention that all GLI.TC/H events are free? so if you're in the chicago area, you really have no excuse not to show up.

here's a video bumper i put together to promote the conference, with a sneak preview of a few seconds of one of my new tunes... if you want to hear more, you'll either have to show up friday night or wait for the release (tentatively titled does not compute, with possible release next spring):

difficult populations

from the indy star:

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard's words about minority unemployment -- words he says have since been twisted -- found new life this week in a Democratic Party-funded radio ad and during the latest mayoral debate.

Ballard used his opening statement at Friday's debate to call on Democratic challenger Melina Kennedy to yank the ad. The 60-second spot seizes on his use of the phrase "difficult population," uttered during the previous debate Oct. 15 while the mayor was describing the city's efforts to address high unemployment among racial minorities.

The ad -- placed by the Marion County Democratic Party, not Kennedy's campaign -- took his words out of context, Ballard said.

the star complains that they weren't provided a transcript of the debate, and apparently they don't have the reporting manpower to spend 10 minutes on google looking for the video, which is online at WTHR. sadly, WTHR's javascript embed code doesn't seem to work, so you'll have to click the link to go to their site and view it. the question about unemployment starts at about 3:00. kennedy responds first, then mayor ballard; he refers to blacks and other difficult populations at about 4:50. he uses the phrase twice.

watch the video decide for yourself whether the comments were inappropriate. i don't think the context helps him much here; at the least, the mayor is guilty of very poor word choice. ¶

charlie white files specious complaint; bloggers pretend it has merit

secretary of state charlie white, who is awaiting trial for voter fraud among other things, filed a complaint yesterday alleging that former senator evan bayh is also guilty of voter fraud. the complaint (PDF link) is poorly written, poorly reasoned, poorly proofread (if proofread at all), and doesn't even attempt to be impartial—it's more of a rant than a legal brief, full of petty personal attacks on bayh, his family, democrats in general, and the local media. predictably, the local media was not impressed, while conservative bloggers ate it up.

by filing this complaint, white has either effectively admitted guilt, or he has deliberately filed a specious complaint. if he legitimately believes that the charges against him are bunk, then by asking the prosecutor to file the same charges against bayh, he is asking the state to intentionally waste its time on a case where it knows no crime occurred. the only way white's complaint makes sense if you assume that he's guilty. either way, i doubt the judge at his pending criminal trial will be impressed.

bayh's response to the complaint was to call the charges "baseless" and state that white's "situation is factually and legally different than mine." conservative bloggers whined that bayh didn't elaborate on how their cases differ, but this should be obvious to anyone who's willing to think about it. as a town council member, white was expected to truly live within his district and commute to work. this is the whole point of a town council, and white is accused of lying to cover up the fact that he had moved (or was planning to move) out of his district and was thus no longer eligible to serve.

in contrast, as a US senator, bayh's job duties were in washington DC, not in indiana. thus not only did bayh have a legitimate reason to acquire a second home in washington, but his job required him to have two homes, and indeed required him to spend more time at this second home than at his "primary" residence in indiana. on the surface, it may seem odd that we require congress to simultaneously "live" in their "home" states while working full time in DC, but that catch-22 is built into the system—bayh was playing by the same rules all members of congress must play by.

after bayh's term ended at the end of last year, the question then becomes where is his official residence now? the job of congressional representative is unique in that they are technically federally employees but their job is to represent their home state's interests. in a sense their residency in DC is similar to members of the military, who are considered residents of their home states even when stationed elsewhere—except that the military is generally provided room and board, whereas members of congress are expected to maintain two residences. so what happens when they resign or get voted out, and are stuck with two homes?

in his complaint, white notes that dan coats relinquished indiana residency after leaving office in '98, but this ignores the fact that coats had no intention of ever moving back here until he was drafted to run again in 2010, at which point he promptly flew in to establish a home here. (white's complaint makes no mention of whether coats actually "lives" at his new indiana address.) the bayhs claim that their official residence is still in indiana, just as it was while bayh was in office, and that they are only staying in DC temporarily until their kids graduate high school, after which they intend to move back to indiana full-time. this is a plausible enough story (your opinion of the bayhs' trustworthiness notwithstanding), and their case is boosted by the fact that they still carry indiana driver's licenses and have a homestead exemption on their admittedly-crappy northside condo. also, even if they wanted to move back right away, it's not as easy to sell a mansion as it used to be.

white would have you believe that the moment bayh's term expired, he was required to pull the kids out of school and move back to indiana full-time or else lose his indiana residency. this seems extreme considering that the reason bayh moved his kids to DC in the first place was to keep them close while he represented indiana in congress. even if a prosector were nuts enough to press voter fraud charges, no judge or jury would convict.

in short, "factually and legally different" is an understatement—bayh's and white's situations have virtually nothing in common, and you'd have to be willfully obtuse in order to think otherwise. (and that's not even mentioning that white is accused of voting fraudulently in a general election whereas bayh's vote was in a primary, and that bayh voted absentee whereas white voted in person—thus the only recent documented case of in-person voter fraud was committed by a GOP politician.)

one more thing that's odd about white's complaint: his repeated claims that the indiana democratic party "by all accounts, is still led in all but name by Evan
Bayh." to be sure, bayh still holds power here, but he burned a lot of bridges in 2010 when he made a big show about resigning from the senate and then took lobbying work the minute he was out of office. bayh may have once been our golden boy, but he's not very popular with the rank and file these days. furthermore, how would he even find the time to run the state party in addition to all of his lobbying work?

finally, why did carl brizzi, white's attorney, allowed white to embarrass himself like this? throwing these sorts of tantrums is just how white rolls, but brizzi had to know that such a stunt wasn't going to impress anyone who wasn't already convinced, least of all the local media. so why? can brizzi not control his client, or perhaps is brizzi also bitter about how the media treated him during his own scandals? and what value is brizzi adding if he can't even prevent white from humiliating himself? ¶

stAllio! - eggify music video

created in 1999, this music video for "eggify" was probably my first true glitch video, consisting of video feedback, scrambled porn, and garbled closed captioning. due to the scrambled porn, it's not safe for most work environments, as the occasional breast is visible.

youtube was a lot more restrictive about file sizes and the like when this was first posted years ago, so i went back to the original VHS source in order to post this new, higher-resolution video with a lot fewer compression artifacts.

this track is from the long-out-of-print perpetual emotion machine release. someday i'll get my 4-track fixed so that i can remaster pem for mp3 reissue, but that's fairly low on my to-do list. ¶

tully lazily checks in on panhandling

i'll admit: i got a little excited when i saw the headline for matt tully's latest column. mayor ballard and council republicans made a big stink about panhandling a couple years back, and even passed an anti-panhandling bill of dubious constitutionality, so looking back at whether things have changed since then is a great idea for a column and exactly the kind of thing local newspapers should be doing.

Panhandlers' hands still out in Downtown Indianapolis

A week after he was elected mayor, Greg Ballard walked around Downtown with me for more than an hour on a chilly afternoon, talking about his plans and hopes for the city he would soon lead.

At one point, we passed a common Downtown sight: a disheveled man who sat on the sidewalk with a cup and a sign asking for money.

"You won't see that in six months," Ballard said that day in November 2007, confidently promising to take steps to rid Downtown -- at least in large part -- of the panhandlers who seek money from visitors every day, to the frustration of many business leaders.

You might call the end of this story the education of Greg Ballard.

that's a good lede... but you might call it the end of a good column, because from this point on, it quickly degenerates as tully falls into his usual trap of talking to some "experts" and city officials, and uncritically parroting what they say.

the thrust of the column is how panhandling is a "problem" for the city because it creeps people out or something, and we're going to have the super bowl in a few months so god forbid the tourists should encounter any unwashed poor people while they're here. but this is about the worst way you can look at panhandling because it prioritizes the needs of the city's marketing over the needs of the city's inhabitants. when you start viewing panhandling as a problem for the city, you're no longer treating panhandlers as people. it's just a baby step from mayor ballard's statement that "we don't want them around" to abdul's suggestion that someone "get a giant broom and sweep them all away!"

tully makes a point to repeat the city's spin—seemingly mandatory for all indystar writing on this issue—that "most of those asking for money are not homeless". i've quibbled with this before, but ultimately it's not even the right question. the question shouldn't be whether they're homeless, but whether they need help—and most of them do.

tully mentions the city's ineffective homeless donation boxes, which have become a running joke because nobody uses them, but doesn't mention the city's much more troubling panhandling ordinance. as written, the law bans anyone from holding a sign or otherwise soliciting within 50 feet of a stoplight or stop sign. not only has the ban failed to reduce panhandling in the city, but it's selectively enforced, as we knew it would be—every day i pass at least 1-2 live sign holders who are in clear violation. often these live sign holders are wearing outlandish costumes, shaking their signs vigorously, or even dancing around, which is far more distracting and dangerous than most panhandling.

mayor ballard probably means well, but his perspective is skewed. panhandling isn't the problem—it's a symptom of the problem. the real problem is poverty, and panhandling isn't going away while our poverty rates are so high.

i suppose i shouldn't have expected too much from tully on this issue—his last panhandling column was just as bad. ¶

new bad taste releases out now

bad taste is back (again) with two new releases for free download, including a new AWIA EP and an album by an AWIA contributor:

bt#33: baconhanger – legion
it's been three years since the release of his debut, but baconhanger hasn't been slacking off—he's been sharpening his production skills! the beats and textures are as punishing as ever, but now they cut like a knife instead of bludgeoning you into submission. call him legion, for his breaks are massive!

bt#34: animals within animals – macho EP
a musical tribute to a longtime unofficial bad taste mascot, as only AWIA can deliver! we remember macho man randy savage, from his wrestling career to his rap album to his classic catchphrase… and who could forget his slim jim commercials? concludes with a moving eulogy delivered by macho man himself!¶

working the refs

the state of indiana (read: AG greg zoeller) wants to move the battle to defund planned parenthood out of the courts to where it belongs: some administrator's desk in washington:

Indiana asked a federal appeals court Monday to lift a judge's order blocking parts of a new abortion law that cuts some public Planned Parenthood funding, saying the issue should be decided by Medicaid officials and not the courts.

The 44-page brief asks the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reverse U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt's June 24 preliminary injunction, which barred the state from cutting Medicaid funds to the organization because it provides abortions.

[...]

In its brief filed Monday, Indiana says federal Medicaid officials, not the courts, should determine the law's legality.

that makes sense: let medicaid officials do their jobs! if you're wondering where medicaid officials will eventually come down on this issue, you only need to wait negative two months:

The state is appealing Medicaid Administrator Donald Berwick's June 1 decision rejecting changes to Indiana's Medicaid plan brought on by the new law. Berwick contended Medicaid recipients have the right to obtain treatment from any qualified provider, including those that provide abortions.

so the issue should be decided by medicaid officials, not the courts. except when medicaid officials make a decision you disagree with, in which case the issue should be decided by some other medicaid officials. ¶