A Personal Take on the Medicare Debate

Medicare payments to doctors are currently under threat because the two parties in Congress cannot agree on how to avoid an “automatic” cut in payments even though neither side claims to actually want the cuts to go into effect. The deadlock is usually described as a conflict between the interests of poor sick people, represented by Democrats who want to cut funding for the semi-private Medicare Advantage program, and the interests of insurance companies, represented by Republicans who want to cut benefits to Medicare recipients. If the situation were really that simple, I, a low-income, disabled Medicare beneficiary would have no trouble whatsoever deciding which side to be on: I don't want to lose my benefits! In addition, I am a long-time Democrat and am in favor of a government-managed single-payer system of health care. I have lived in France, which has a national health system, and have friends in England and Canada which each have somewhat different single-payer systems. I have seen the advantages of these systems first-hand.

I offer this account of my own experience choosing a Medicare health plan, complete with the boring and confusing details, in order to show that the decision facing Congress regarding Medicare funding is a complex question requiring analysis of the details of costs and benefits to (different groups of) recipients. It is not, as most commentators seem to think, fundamentally an ideological issue involving a choice between public and privatized models of care, or between serving taxpayers or poor people.

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an appreciation of Millie Niss, the writer and new media artist, and founder of this site, who died in November of last year.

"One thing which came across from Millie's correspondence, as well as from her own work and her occasional online commentaries, was her sense of perspective about new media art... Her insistence on clarity and user-friendliness, her desire to reach out to an audience of "ordinary" people whenever possible, was one of the things which made her voice such a distinctive and refreshing one in the new media world. "

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewmillieniss.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=372 .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

"Coffee stall by the front entrance. People drinking coffee in the shade of a tree. More or less everyone in suits. Business coffee-break. Giles, meet me at half-two, outside the church, for a power-espresso. Stockbrokers, financiers, commodity-dealers. I don't do tangibles, I do invisibles, I'm into futures, that's where the big money is. Right in front of the church steps. If Jesus were to pay an unexpected visit, I wonder if he'd knock their tables over?"

Continuing the hyperfiction based on visits to churches in the City of London. Part 2 takes in the following:

All Hallows by the Tower
St Olave
St Margaret Pattens

To view the London Churches project, go to http://edwardpicot.com/londonchurches/ .

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

PS - Get well soon, Millie!

"The house was full of packing-cases. Even the pretty lawn at the side was to pack up, stiffly and slowly, through the bare echoing November. The very robin that her father had so often made, with his own hands, more gorgeous than ever; amber and golden; here, at this bed of thyme, began to speak of carrots. The grand inarticulate mighty roar."

I recently made contact, after many years, with an old college friend called Katrin McGibbon. When I inquired what she was doing, she revealed that she was abridging Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South for the radio. As a joke, I suggested that instead of trying to reduce the size of the book without losing any of the essentials, it might be an idea to discard all the important bits and keep the other stuff. Then I had a go at using this method myself, and found it to be both more difficult and much more rewarding than I had expected. I intend to abridge the whole book in this way, and the first eight chapters are now online.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: a review of The Path, a "short horror game" by Tale of Tales (Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey), based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

"The two best-known versions of the tale are by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers - but there are numerous others. Sometimes Red Riding Hood meets not a wolf but an ogre; sometimes, when she gets to the house, she is fed various parts of a dismembered grandmother. Samyn and Harvey retain the gruesomeness, the allusions to dismemberment, and the violent sexuality which feature in many earlier versions, and the symbolism which lurks beneath the surface of Red Riding Hood in all its various manifestations comes through particularly strongly."

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewthepath.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=358 .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

The idea of the London Churches project is to visit every church in the City of London - and probably a few outside - and use the visits as the basis of an online work. This isn't a blog, and it certainly isn't a historical or architectural guide. It's a work of hyperfiction, but derived from real places, real experiences, real observations and real conversations. In many ways it isn't about the churches themselves, but the experience of visiting them.

Part 1 is based on a visit made on Monday 6th April 2009, which took in the following:

St Martin-in-the-Fields
St Paul's, Covent Garden
St Clement Danes
Temple Church
St Dunstan-in-the-West
St Bride's, Fleet Street
St Martin, Ludgate

To view the London Churches project, go to http://edwardpicot.com/londonchurches/ .

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an examination of the new genre of art computer games, dealing with The Princess Murderer by Geniwate and Deena Larsen, The Free Culture Game by Molleindustria, The Marriage by Rod Humble, Samorost 2 by Amanita Design, The Graveyard by Tale of Tales and Gravitation by Jason Rohrer.

"The fundamental question, which haunts all attempts to create art from computer games, is whether it is really possible to reconcile the two. It could be argued that art requires a different kind of concentration from a game, and uses a different part of the mind - and that the more intensely you play a game, the less inclined you will be to pay attention to any artistic qualities it may possess"

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewgamesasart.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=345 .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

I have now finished revising The Puzzle Box, as follows:

1. A new interface/front cover
2. One new Help Card animation and a couple of minor amendments to other animations
3. More sparing use of the box-icon within the chapters: it now only appears at those points where the box is mentioned in the narrative, and where readers will find something new if they click to open it
4. The page-background for Chapter Three has been redesigned
5. The text has been thoroughly proof-read and various minor amendments have been made
6. On the back of this (show me the money!), a print version is now available via www.lulu.com and will soon be available from Amazon

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/
(If you don't see the new interface, with lots of pictures on it, when you get to the Puzzle Box index-page, click CTRL + Refresh to update.)

Some recommended videos:

Recently, largely under the tutelage of the film-maker Michael Szpakowski (http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi), I've been looking at a lot of experimental videos, and I've been really surprised and excited by some of the work. Below is a selection of some personal favourites, and it seems to me that one of the most noteworthy things about them is how different they are from each other in terms of their style:

OK Charlie by Brian Gibson - http://lucidunison.com/baio/okcharlie_web.mov: A portrait of the video artist Doron Golan by his fellow-artist Brian Gibson. Golan chinks his coffee-cup and says "OK Charlie"; the sequence is looped; and suddenly we're listening to a tune. Manages to be fingerclickin' funky and toe-curlingly clever at the same time.

Journey by Robert Croma - http://robertcroma.com/2008/09/24/the-journey/: Commuters on a tube train: profiles, the backs of heads, shoulders, sliding doors. About halfway through this video there's an extremely subtle transition from observational realism to something symbolic and metaphysical, leading up to a magical moment at the end.

Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie - http://www.myspace.com/orenlavie: A video, co-directed by singer-songwriter Oren Lavie, to go with his song of the same name. The song is pretty good, but the video is really lovely, a supremely inventive piece of stop-motion animation featuring a girl on a bed and a lot of pillows and laundry.

The 9th Allegro by Doron Golan - http://www.the9th.com/04/the9th_allegro/allegro9.mov: All of Doran Golan's videos are worth seeing, but this is one of the most outstanding, and contains many of his most important themes: a sense of place, a sense of character, a sense of culture and history, a really complex, stereotype-free attitude towards politically explosive material, and above all tremendous qualities of composition, structure and control.

Inaugurationanimation by Pall Thayer - http://www.vimeo.com/2917641: Television coverage of the US Presidential Inauguration, slowed down and processed until it acquires a rich painterly texture. Redolent not just of American history and American politics, but the history of American art too. The slowness of the action seems to bring out the patrician, studied aspect of the ceremony: the intensely aspirational quality, the feeling that individuals can make a difference, that the human spirit is inherently noble, and that the world can be made a better place if we just make a sufficient effort - along with the intense theatricality, the self-regard, the sense that these gestures are being made with the whole world for an audience, and that if you can just get the gestures right it almost doesn't matter what you actually do.

U cant hold me down by Donna Kuhn - http://digitalaardvarks.blogspot.com/2009/02/u-cant-hold-me-down.html: The dancer and artist Donna Kuhn has gradually been evolving her own completely individual style of experimental video, and this is one of the best examples. Glimpses of dance, glimpses of sea-shore, and glimpses of Donna's spiky, Klee-style drawings combine into something mysterious, tense, sad and poetic.

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

“All of yesterday I feared for my husband's life,” said the Queen. “I carried him to my palace beneath the earth, and gave him food and drink. Ice-cold water from the well beneath the world-tree, and manna from the deserts of the moon. Tonight he stood up and asked what time of year it was. Then he went roaming out into the world, as he used to in the old days. I went up to the moon, to keep watch, and it seemed to me that the world already looked different. Then I remembered the puzzle that you had shown me, Dora, and I guessed the answer."

The secret of the box is revealed, the children see Father Christmas, and Dora learns what she has to do to get her Dad back.

"The Puzzle Box has all the magical numinous quality of Lewis, Tolkien,
and L'Engle." - Millie Niss, writer and new media artist, http://www.sporkworld.org .

Chapter eleven is online now: please note that chapter twelve will be uploaded on Christmas Eve. I shan't be posting any notices about it, so please remember to check back.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/
(If you don't see links to all the chapters when you get to the Puzzle Box index-page, click CTRL + Refresh to update the page.)

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an appreciation of David Daniels, the great shape-poet, who died in May 2008.

"Daniels is one of those figures who straddles the divide between digital and pre-digital art and literature... His art is about liberation, uninhibited outpouring, spontaneity and fun."

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewdaniels.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=323 .

A page of tributes to David Daniels (entitled "Tributes to David Daniels by divers hands") is also being compiled at http://hyperex.co.uk/reviewdanielstributes.php . If you would like to add a tribute of your own (in whatever form you prefer), please send it to edward at edwardpicot.com - a small prize will be sent to the best one received before 1st March 2009.

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com