KNOWLES EDDY KNOWLES

the manchunian forager

2012-02-14T17:54:00.001-02:00

Jamie Oliver finds Joy Division and New Order master tapes in restaurant basement

The tapes were found alongside guns and gold during an excavation in Manchester

Photo: PA

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Ordermaster tapes when digging up the basement of a new restaurant in Manchester.

The new restaurant, which is being built in a former branch of Midland bank, was being excavated when the tapes were found, alongside guns, gold and jewellery. The total value of the haul is £1.1 million, reports Holy Moly. Oliver has since given everything found in the basement to the treasury.

New Order have just been announced as the Saturday night (September 8) headliner at this year's Bestival. Bestival will take place from September 6–9 at Robin Hill Park on the Isle Of Wight. For more information about the event, seeBestival.net.

Prior to that, the Manchester band tour the UK for the first time in over five years.

New Order will play:

O2 Apollo Manchester (April 26, 27)
Birmingham Ballroom (29)
O2 Academy Brixton (May 2, 3)
O2 Academy Glasgow (5)

To check the availability of New Order tickets and get all the latest listings, go toNME.COM/TICKETS now, or call 0871 230 1094.

2012-02-09T20:43:00.000-02:00

Bang!

(Indeterminate, yet sharplydelineated noise; perhaps of gunshot or fist thumping table or boot contactingstone)

"I refute itthus."
--(Dr. Samuel Johnson,kicking a stone; rejecting Bishop George Berkeley's idealist philosophy.)

Furniture

No matter what the debate,whatever its content or its medium (text or talk), there is likely to be somefurniture around. While we talk about things and events, principles andabstractions, cognition and reality, or read about construction and objectivity,we do so in chairs and in rooms, at desks and tables, or even out in the open,where the rocks and trees are. The appeal of these things is that they areexternal to the talk, available to show that it is just talk, that there isanother world beyond, that there are limits to the flexibility of descriptions.Hitting the furniture also works as a nonverbal act, offering the advantage ofgetting outside of language; its force is that it avoids the rhetorical dangerof appealing to nonverbal reality by putting it into words.

The Realist's Dilemma

Of course, the hitting isnot just a slapping; not only words signify. The table-thumping does its workas meaningful action, not mere behavior. All the pointings to, demonstrationsof, and descriptions of brute reality are inevitably semiotically mediated andcommunicated. Rocks, trees and furniture are not already rebuttals ofrelativism, but become so precisely at the moment, and for the moment, of theirinvocation. We term this the realist's dilemma. The very act of producing anonrepresented, unconstructed external world is inevitably representational,threatening, as soon as it is produced, to turn around upon and counter thevery position it is meant to demonstrate.
The solidity andout-there-ness of furniture (etc.) makes it a hard case for relativists todeconstruct. And just as commonsense observation is the hard case forrelativism, it is the soft case for realism. Furniture arguments are realismworking on its chosen soft ground. However, there is a cost for realism in thisstrategy: for in resorting to these cases, realists appear to be setting aside,conceding even, a huge amount of more contentious stuff torelativism--language, madness, the social order, cognition, even science. Andit is generally disputation about these sorts of things that ends intable-thumping, the point of such gestures being to bolster a realist defenceof something more contestable. In the rhetorical situation we are describing,the relativists may be winning the Epistemological Wars, but are in danger oflosing the final battle. The forces of relativism are gathered about the lastand best-defended castle of realism (Fortress Furniture), laying siege to it,and in the process suffering a blistering bombardment--Bang! Bang! Bang!

The Bottom Line: TheRhetoric of Reality Demonstrations - Malcolm Ashmore, Derek Edwards, and Jonathan Potter

PTSD

2012-02-07T21:23:00.000-02:00

"Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them".

Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 15

La Cochon Culturale

2012-01-31T20:20:00.003-02:00

The commonality of animal rearing for food is rooted in the peculiarities oflocal history. Ashington’s history as a significant urban centre dates backonly to the early twentieth century. Rapid development of the local miningindustry in this period required the colliery owners to import a labour forcefrom outlying rural areas and from their agricultural estate lands in places asdistant as Ulster. Continuity of the rural subsistence skills that these peoplebrought to the area was facilitated principally by the emergence and resilienceof the allotment movement and stimulated periodically by the shortages of war,recession and unemployment.

Having said this, rearing of animals is more than a mere matter ofsubsistence. These semi-domestic animals are subjects of an array of beliefsand practices whose logic is intimately related to local experience, and, inparticular, to the threat of mining death. Above all, the pig is simultaneouslythe most revered and feared of animals. In some accounts it is attributed withthe powers of prediction. Charlie Burnsey: ‘You can tell when there’s a stormcomin’ when a P.I.G. turns its arse to the breeze.’ In other accounts it ischaracterized as the purest of animals. Jackie Thompson: The pig eats nothingbut ‘rubbish, muck and shite, but when you cut it open it’s as clean as awhistle’. Indeed, among the varied ingredients, the Guinness, the virgin’surine, and the rabbit droppings, that are used to nourish prize vegetables,pig’s blood is regarded by many as the very best. Charlie Burnsey: ‘A bucket ofgissy blood on your leeks works wonders . . . it’s like rocket fuel.’

Contrastively, for fear of inviting death many people refrain from using theword pig, referring to it instead as ‘P.I.G.’, ‘gissy’, ‘grunter’ or descriptively‘round fat thing with stumpy legs’. On a number of occasions the taboo has beenused effectively. For example, one man relayed a story of the last days of thestrike of 1928. Many of the men at Newbiggin pit were weakening and returningto work. In response, a group of men broke in and nailed the decapitated headof a pig to the entrance of the main shaft. Before the management had time toremove it, one of the returning men saw it and beat a hasty retreat. Word ofthe event spread and the strike remained firm for a while longer

Leisure and Change in a Post-mining Mining Town - Andrew Dawson

to be Fair

2012-01-29T11:57:00.001-02:00

THE F SCALE: FORM 78
2. Although many people may scoff, it may yet be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.
3. America is getting so far from the true American way of life that force may be necessary to restore it.
6. It is only natural and right that women be restricted in certain ways in which men have more freedom.
9. Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.
10. It is more than a remarkable coincidence that Japan had an earthquake on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1944.
12. The modern church, with its many rules and hypocrisies, does not appeal to the deeply religious person; it appeals mainly to the childish, the insecure, and the uncritical.
14. After we finish off the Germans and Japs, we ought to concentrate on other enemies of the human race such as rats, snakes, and germs.
17. Familiarity breeds contempt.
19. One should avoid doing things in public which appear wrong to others, even though one knows that these things are really all right
20. One of the main values of progressive education is that it gives the child great freedom in expressing those natural impulses and desires so often frowned upon by conventional middle-class society.
23. He is, indeed, contemptible who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
24. Today everything is unstable; we should be prepared for a period of constant change, conflict, and upheaval.
28. Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance, and adventure.
30. Reports of atrocities in Europe have been greatly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
31. Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
32. It is essential for learning or effective work that our teachers or bosses outline in detail what is to be done and exactly how to go about it.
35. There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wideawake citizen should take the law into his own hands.
38. There is too much emphasis in college on intellectual and theoretical topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
39. Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.
42. No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason.
43. Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried men very far, but there are many important things that can never possibly be understood by the human mind.
46. The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it.
47. No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
50. Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
53. There are some things too intimate or personal to talk about even with one's closest friends.
55. Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work that makes life interesting and worthwhile.
56. After the war, we may expect a crime wave; the control of gangsters and ruffians will become a major social problem.
58. What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
59. Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict.
60. Which of the following are the most important for a person to have or to be? Mark X the three most important.

artistic and sensuous popular, good personality
drive, determination, will power
broad, humanitarian social outlook neatness and good manners
sensitivity and understanding
efficiency, practicality, thrift
intellectual and serious
emotional expressiveness, warmth, intimacy
kindness and charity

65. It is entirely possible that this series of wars and conflicts will be ended once and for all by a world-destroying earthquake, flood, or other catastrophe.
66. Books and movies ought not to deal so much with the sordid and seamy side of life; they ought to concentrate on themes that are entertaining or uplifting.
67. When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit.
70. To a greater extent than most people realize, our lives are governed by plots hatched in secret by politicians.
73. Nowadays when so many different kinds of people move around so much and mix together so freely, a person has to be especially careful to protect himself against infection and disease.
74. What this country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous, tireless, devoted leaders whom the people can put their faith in.
75. Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped.
77. No sane, normal, decent person could ever think of hurting a close friend or relative.
—Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

43 comments...

2012-01-21T12:39:00.000-02:00

"HEIDEGGER HOTEL

In January 2002, broken, I read Heidegger's Being and Time and thought nonstop about hotels.
Heidegger was my hotel, an unfriendly, dominating, domicile. I stayed for one cold, difficult month.
No philosopher, I entered Being and Time for aesthetic pleasure and for hotel gleanings.
My goal: to refurbish the meaning of hotel. As Heidegger says, "it is the business of philosophy to protect the power of the most elemental words..." (...)
Being-at-home, Heidegger says, is not the "primordial phenomenon." "Not-being-at-home" is more fundamental. To be not-at-home may mean to be at hotel. (Am I at home in this language?)
I may deviate from Heidegger in this discussion.
Hotel presupposes home. To speak about hotel is an oblique way to address home problems.
Do you check into a hotel? Or does the hotel condition check into you?
My friend referred to his lover's death, euphemistically, as "checking out": "Mark checked out." We "check out" when we cruise: "I checked him out."
Dwelling in the hotel state, my voice newly neutral and indifferent, I hope to override the "They" of home, of fixed domicile.

HEIDEGGER AND CUSTARD PIE

While reading Being and Time, suddenly I remembered a custard pie from the 1960s. I hadn't tasted it; I'd merely seen it, quivering, in its cafeteria vitrine. The relation between house and hotel is like the relation between restaurant and self-serve smorgasbord. The custard pie, trembling behind glass, is the hotel, offering itself.
Hotel existence uncannily suspends us above groundedness. To be in hotel is to float, or to tremble, like just-set custard.
Heidegger frequently uses the term "thrown." We are thrown into Being. And, I'd add, we are thrown into the hotel, thrown into its impersonal, public muddle.
We turn away from work as a means of "taking care," says Heidegger. To check into a hotel: this too, may be a mode of taking care, of refusal.
Hotel is a method of "not-staying." Curious, we stray; we enter the euphoric state of "never dwelling anywhere."
Hotel existence, because socially unattached, is silent, even amid noise.
We may take speed in a hotel room, and yet a hotel room more frequently finds us tranquilized and numb. Stranded, alienated, closed off from authenticity, in the hotel we commit what Heidegger calls "the plunge." We dive into "everydayness." We eddy. We "fall prey."
To be in hotel: is this an inauthentic practice? Checking into a hotel, are we freed from surveillance and ordinariness, or are we squashed and smothered by the "They"?"

—Wayne Koestenbaum, Hotel Theory

lamb on polenta

2012-01-20T19:53:00.001-02:00

Smoke Teaser (what you pompous seminar-goers missed... whoops, is this microphone on?!!)

2012-01-19T00:00:00.000-02:00

Q: Can phallic chandeliers also be mothers?

2012-01-16T08:05:00.000-02:00

"So — the first waldorf school was named after a cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. The waldorf salad got its name from the Waldorf Hotel in New York (later the Waldorf Astoria), where it was created. But were there any connections between the cigarette factory in Stuttgart and the hotel in New York? Incidentally, the company that owned old cigarette factory in Stuttgart also bore the name Astoria — The Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company — though nowadays the factory is occasionally mentioned only as the Waldorf cigarette factory. (I believe? I may be mistaken here though.) And the waldorf schools, as far as I know, never adopted the entire name Waldorf-Astoria.

And, more importantly, what happened to the Waldorf cigarette factory? My google searches didn't bring up anything but a very brief history of the factory itself on wikipedia. I may have come across more substantial information at some point in the past, but I cannot remember.

The Waldorf Hotel, opened in 1893 according to Wikipedia, clearly predates the Waldorf school. The salad, likewise, was a creation of the 1890s. The Waldorf Hotel closed for relocation, merged with the Astoria Hotel and opened as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1931.

The Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company, on the other hand, was established by Emil Molt — the anthroposophist who would later be involved with Rudolf Steiner in setting up the first waldorf school — and colleagues in 1906. It had been named after John Jacob Astor (1763-1948) from a German town called Walldorf. He had emigrated to the US and become enormously wealthy. Molt's Waldorf-Astoria cigarette company went out of business in 1929 — that is, before the joint Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York had even been opened.

To make the story more complicated, the Waldorf-Astoria hotel had originally been two hotels, both of which were established by descendants of the same rich emigrant John Jacob Astor, whom the cigarette company had been named after. As already mentioned, the Waldorf Hotel was opened in 1893. The other hotel — the Astoria — was established four years later. By this time, it seems, the family had adopted the name of John Jacob Astor's home village, Walldorf, though with another spelling: Waldorf.

The Waldorf-Astoria Tobacco factory may have ceased to exist in 1929, but the tobacco brand remained in production, during many years manufactured by a company called Remtsmaa. The Waldorf schools are still around. When the Stuttgart school had been established by Molt and Steiner in 1919, Molt was manager of the cigarette company, and he and the company provided the building space the school needed."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"OK, Zooey, first correct a typo here. You've got JJ Astor living to be 185!

"It had been named after John Jacob Astor (1763-1948) from a German town called Walldorf."

So, JJ the First dies on March 29, 1848. But then William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor, is born two days later, March 31, 1848, and that day straddles Steiner's death day of March 30! Wee Willy Waldorf is the son of JJ the Third, and he is the Waldorf half of the famous Hotel.

Wee Willy's cousin, JJ the 4th, is the Astoria half. But JJ the 4th is probably most famous for going down with the Titanic in 1912. But before he died, he put his wife into the lifeboat. She was 5 months pregnant with JJ the 6th (there's a reason it's not the 5th) and he is considered a Titanic survivor even though he was a fetus at the time.

Then Wee Willy Waldorf Astor dies in October 1919 just a month after the first Waldorf School opens. How karmi-cosmic the timing!

The school opened on Sept. 7, 1919 with 256 pupils in eight grades; 191 of the pupils were from factory families, the other 65 came from interested families from Stuttgart, many of whom were already engaged in the anthroposophical movement in that city.

In the following years, a numerical balance between the factory workers' and outside children was achieved; it had been an explicit goal of the social three-folding movement to create a school that bridged social classes in this way.
For the first year, the school was a company school and all teachers were listed as workers at Waldorf-Astoria, by the second year the school had become an independent entity."

-----------------------------------------------

Re: Willy Waldorf & the Cigarette Factory

"Thanks Tom! Unfortunately I was not just informative, I was misinformative.
The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel existed much earlier than I thought when I wrote
the post yesterday! It means the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel existed, under that
name, before the cigarette company."

-a

Steiner

2012-01-12T19:17:00.003-02:00

When I was growing up there was always a pub at the end of the road. It was your local.
At about nine o’clock when everyone had got a bit merry, you began to sing. Everybody did it. It was incredibly communal. You could walk up the main road where there was a pub on every corner and it would be a cacophony of singing.

- Terence Davies

Deutsche Atelier

2012-01-12T13:27:00.000-02:00

"I have read so many books...
And yet, like so many autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading—and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.
This morning, as it happens, I am standing, puzzled, in the kitchen, with a little book set down before me. I am in the midst of one of those moments where the folly of my solitary undertaking takes hold of me and, on the verge of giving up, I fear I have finally found my master."
—Muriel Barbery The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Color Underground

2012-01-11T07:26:00.002-02:00

COL. MORRIS DAVIS: "Well, I think it was a complete act of cowardice on his part. As I’ve stated before, I think on Inauguration Day, somewhere between the Capitol and the White House, a pair of testicles fell off the President."

"One problem I found myself running into fairly often while writing this book, for instance, was the lack of a theoretical language with which to talk about desire. Unless one is able to convince oneself that there really is a compelling reason to believe that language itself has a special affinity to one’s father’s penis, and is therefore willing to adopt the ideas of Jacques Lacan, or unless one is willing to adopt the Nietzschean approach adopted by authors like Deleuze or Foucault, which makes desire, or the desire for power, the fundamental constituent of all reality—a position that if carried at all far invariably seems to lead to truly bizarre conclusions, such as left-wing academics singing the praises of the Marquis de Sade—one is pretty much stuck."

—David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

Bad Old Rabbit

2012-01-04T18:43:00.000-02:00

2011-12-27T10:38:00.000-02:00

I MADE SOME ART - NOW TELL ME EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT A CAREER IN THE VISUAL ARTS

2011-12-14T17:57:00.001-02:00

artists who play with a "rupture of sense".

Strangely indistinguishable from the familiar terrain of normality

The show explores what it means to step over this barrier and to set foot into the inexplicable and illogical world of humour

These strategies, and those of all the artists in 'Ha Ha Road', serve to illustrate the liberating freedom of thought at work in humour.

A REAL COMEDY SPECIALIST WE HAVE HERE FOLKS:

"I really doubt a member of KEK or an aficionado of Broodthaers actually wants an explanation, but a photo's worth a thousand words, one's i agree with more than the curators write up."

CHARLES STANKIEVECH
Die Mauer (The Wall), 2009
Nine vinyl records with covers
Courtesy of the artist
Charles Stankievech (b. 1978) is a Canadian artist who often uses
installation and sound art to tell stories inspired by landscape, architecture
and history. Embedded in this practice, Stankievech's minimal installation
Die Mauer intertwines languages of conceptual art, cold war iconography,
institutional critique and rock ‘n’ roll pop culture. In 2009, exactly 30 years
after the album release (1979) and 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall
(1989), the artist bought all The Wall vinyl records by Pink Floyd for sale at
the popular Mauer Park Market in Berlin. That day, there were 9 used LPs
of various editions and prices available from various independent sellers. In
the context of Ha Ha Road, the long assemblage of freestanding covers with
their album art of white bricks daubed with graffiti resonates with the idea
of the “barrier” at play in the exhibition’s title. But positioned on the gallery
floor, due to their specific design, the covers make a humorous reference also
to one of the UK’s greatest art scandals ever: the vandalisation of Carl
Andre’s Equivalent VIII at the Tate in the 1970s. Protesting the idea of “a
pile of bricks” actually being art, someone smeared this work with paint. We
would invite you to be a little more gentle.

"Angles"

2011-12-13T19:09:00.001-02:00

Richard Prince
Untitled (RP007) (Cigarettes), 1978-79
Diptych of Ektacolor photographsP
Each print 20 x 24 inches (51 x 61 cm)
Each frame: 30 x 23 ¼ inchea

occupy cocaine art

2011-12-08T16:05:00.001-02:00

Brian Wilson Big On Bio-politics

2011-11-08T21:42:00.002-02:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi6aCJV9JTo&feature=player_embedded#!

"Austerity might also strengthen the most well-known building block of Italian society: the family. Many foreigners are rather sneering when they observe extended families living in the same block of flats, if not the same flat. It creates childish, immature grownups, they say. It's not usually true at all, and what those criticisms fail to realise is not only the fact that living together is very often an economic, rather than an emotional, choice (wages are extraordinarily low: the average monthly pay packet is €1,286 [£1,100] net); they also ignore the fact that the strength of the family is the reason that Italy's social fabric is so much better knitted than Britain's. And there are useful economic consequences: almost every successful business is built upon the family. Benetton, Fiat, Ferrari, Panini – all were created by many siblings, or many generations, of one family. If austerity means relatives have to huddle once again under the same roof, it might be claustrophobic, but at least it might mean that Italy, once again, resists the disintegration of the family unit."
—Tobias Jones, "Berlusconi's exit – what does it mean for Italy?" The Guardian, Nov. 10, 2011

homers update

2011-11-01T22:56:00.003-02:00

"An outwardexpression of the desire to withdraw money from the stream of circulation andto save it from the social metabolism is the burying of it, so that socialwealth is turned into an imperishable subterranean hoard with an entirelyfurtive private relationship to the commodity-owner. Doctor Bernier, who spentsome time at Aurangzeb’s court at Delhi, relates that merchants, especiallythe non-Moslem heathens, in whose hands nearly the entire commerce and allmoney are concentrated—secretly bury their money deep in the ground, “beingheld in thrall to the belief that the money they hide during their lifetimewill serve them in the next world after their death.”

—Karl Marx, A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy

PlAtItudE QuEEn

2011-10-31T20:22:00.001-02:00

Whilst having a routine clear-out Paul, a member of staff, mentions to his colleague Mark that, when he’s finished with his documents, he takes them home for his children to use for drawing pictures instead of placing them in the confidential waste bin. Mark mentions this to his line manager but takes no further action.

The 'New' 'Weird' Al Yankovic

2011-10-31T07:00:00.000-02:00

"My life then was marked with great discord, seven long years of malaise. Although there was no desire to go back to that anointed but trapped self, there was the tension of having to shed this self. To have gone back meant a life lost to anxiety, to a constant dread of not ever finding one’s way home, a life so ill-fitting, I had no choice but to stay untethered in the new territory where the only fear was the unknown. Consequently, a technique of attention to be used in and on my daily life (Fisher 9) was needed to do the work via negativa: work not amongst people or for others but with and for oneself alone; painful arduous work, isolated, invisible, intimate, valuable only to oneself; work with the self as prima materia, the subject demanding to be the object of reflection, relentlessly attended to. Eventually there came a time when having lived long enough at the periphery, I started to know the periphery. Having painfully attended to my being there, a different self started to emerge, a self formed within and "of the periphery.""

—Judy Freya Sibayan, Scapular Gallery Nomad: Beyond the Limits of the Center and Into One’s Own

Take It Back

2011-10-27T11:30:00.000-02:00

"Dear Geert,

I had the unfortunate vantage point of meeting Kittler in the early
1990's, when perhaps his persuasiveness was fading. As for his person,
I was stunned by his open misogyny and a talk he gave in which women
were zeros and men were ones (the second being a far more attractive
proposition). I followed him outside, where he dragging on a cigarette
to ask him if he meant this to be taken seriously. He brushed me off.
As I took a closer view of him in the sunlight, I realized that he was
covered with cigarette ashes. I, in contrast, had white cat hairs all
over my black suit.

Your remark about his early death is the thing that moves me about
your reminiscences. It suggests how affectionately you remember him.
In another way, though, his smoking was such a part of him he seemed
to be courting death; furthermore, given that he appeared to be
suffering a mental decline, death could have been kind.

I wondered whether I should share this memory but I decided it was OK.
I seldom describe what it meant to be a woman when confronted with the
actual Foucault, for instance, but it is part of the story. It colors
the work for me; I can' t think it away, but it doesn't negate what it
is.

Best wishes,

Maggie"

Lustreware

2011-10-25T16:53:00.001-02:00

"It is 2009 and Jobs is recovering from a liver transplant and pneumonia. At one point the pulmonologist tries to put a mask over his face when he is deeply sedated. Jobs rips it off and mumbles that he hates the design and refuses to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he orders them to bring five different options for the mask so that he can pick a design he likes."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/25/steve-jobs-biography-walter-isaacson-review

Stress the Civilization

2011-10-19T08:39:00.001-02:00

"Characteristic of such dietetic regimes (régime diétetique) is the view of mushrooms as 'anti-food'. This view is testified to by legends about the fact that at one time, a time prior to the beginning of 'culture' and the emergence of the first culture hero, the ancestors of the given collective ate mushrooms (cf., for example, certain myths of the Mundurucu and Tucuna tribes cited and analyzed by Lévi- Strauss, or Russian nicknames of the type griboedy 'mushroorn-eaters'). Often the refusal to use mushrooms in cooking is connected with one of the first and most important acts of the culture hero of the given tradition and is equated to the transition from the state of 'nature' to that of 'culture'. Mushrooms as food are usually identified with the mold or fungus that, in many versions of such myths, appears on the hero's corpse. Such myths go back to a period prior to agriculture or cuisine, the introduction of which resulted in the formation of the oppositions raw-cooked, rotten-fermented (cf. the opposition honey-beer). From the point of view of the 'culture' as a whole, mushrooms begin to be viewed as something related to death and hunger (as is the case among many South American Indians), as the food of the dead (the Ojibwa Indians), as excrement, often that of celestial objects (e.g. of thunder among the Siciatl or Seechelt Indians, of the rainbow among the Toba Indians and so on). Yet many cultural traditions with such a negative attitude toward mushrooms, once they have made the transition from 'nature' to 'culture', turn to mushrooms with more particular needs. (Cf. the burning of mushrooms for the archetypal conception, a function of sorts, that may be embodied in a whole series of concrete signs, mushrooms being only one of them). If one is attempting to define this function and the conceptions, legends, myths, etc. corresponding to it, then, naturally, one must turn to the whole class of objects which are synonymous (isofunctional) in the given relation. In general, we can state that the objects are chosen in such a way that the opposition of active, penetrating and passive, penetrated (receptive) principles is particularly underscored. Such a structure permits one to define the function and pragmatics of this entire relation as the overcoming of disconnectedness, the achievement of a state of unity, of primeval fullness and self-sufficiency." Leaving aside for the moment an examination of these two principles, it is sufficient to limit ourselves here to three remarks.
The first of them has the aim of establishing a certain temporal reference point in the development of these forms (convex: concave, round: pointed, and the like). This has to do with the fact that the ancient megalithic culture reflected by monuments extending in space from the Mediterranean to India, Tibet, China and Indochina, used objects which embody these oppositions. The evolution of these objects led to the appearance of such structures as the stupa, the pagoda, and so on, on the one hand, and the pillar, the pole, the scepter, the Vajra, and so on, on the other hand. (It should be emphasized that both types of objects have a direct relation to funerals and weddings.) Moreover, in several traditions the semantics of these objects was preserved with extreme clarity; cf. the distinctly expressed phallic meaning of the pole Ma-ni or its diachronic variant, the arrow, the spear, and so on, in Tibet. (Incidentally, one or another of such forms may have entered as well into a set of other identifications.)
The second remark relates to the umbrella or parasol as the isofunctional object which is most clearly linked with mushrooms. Inasmuch as the identification of these two objects assumes, in many cases, a sufficiently direct character (cf. the names of mushrooms,' riddles," symbolism," and so on), the complementary data relating to the image of the parasol and its unconscious reflections in mythology and symbolism may be used, albeit with care, in a semiotic analysis of the image of mushrooms as well.
The third and last remark is aimed at directing attention toward the purely hypothetical, but in principle quite important, assumption that visual images for the convex and concave, which are constructed by identical forms conversely positioned to form an opposition, may corre- spond to linguistic expressions built precisely according to the same principle and used correspondingly as names of mushrooms. Moreover, in some cases, it is quite probable that such 'converse' linguistic expressions were used precisely for the differentiation of 'masculine' and feminine' types of mushrooms. We have in mind the successors in various languages of two nostratic roots which are in a relation of metathesis one to the other, namely *b/p-N-g/k-:*g/k-N-b/p- (where N is a nasal irchephoneme) or, on the Indo-European level, *bhoNg-:*goNbh-. Cf., on the one hand, Uralic *paqg-1*poqg- (cf. Mordvin [Mordva] payga, o, Cheremis [Mari] poyge, pagge, Hanty Ostyak [Khanty] poyx, payx, yga, Vogul [Mansi] paqx, pi,7ka), Paleosiberian *poy (cf. Ket haYgo, Yukagir [Odul], Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchadal [Itelman], and others, all extinct)," Indo-European - Ancient Greek u7r6yyoq, u7r6yyq, o-(p6yyoq, Latinfungus, and so on, and, on the other hand, Slavic gpba (Old Indic gabhd-), Hungarian gomba (cf. bolondgomba 'mad mushroom', similarly German Narrenschwamm, Serbo-Croatian ljula g1jiva, and so on), Lithuanian guthb(r)as, Old Icelandic kumbr, and others. In the capacity of io paUg pa semantically marked members, cf. Ket haygo in connection with the igend mentioned above and Slavic gpba in its two meanings. If this hypothesis is correct, it opens the way toward the explanation of a series of other words which, until now, have also remained etymologically unclear. Finally, it is not to be excluded that words of this root may occur in other languages as well."

—V. N. Toporov "On the semiotics of mythological conceptions about mushrooms"

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

2011-10-04T07:59:00.000-02:00

Knowles Eddy Knowles: the magazine.

*********************************

"...The abstraction that is Wall Street already has a double aspect. On the one hand, Wall Street means a certain kind of power, an oligopoly of financial institutions which extract a rent from the rest of us and in exchange for which we don't seem to get very much. “What's good for General Motors is good for America” was the slogan of the old military industrial complex. These days the slogan of the rentier class is: “What's good for Goldman Sachs is none of your fucking business.”
This rentier class is an oligopoly that makes French aristocrats of the 18^th century look like serious, well organized administrators. If the rhetoric of their political mouthpieces is to be believed, this rentier class are such hot house flowers that they won't get out of bed in the morning for less than a thousand dollars a day, and their constitutions are so sensitive that if anyone says anything bad about them they will take their money and sulk in the corner. They have, to cap it all, so mismanaged their own affairs that vast tracts of public money were required to keep them in business.The abstraction that is Wall Street also stands for something else, for an inhuman kind of power, which one can imagine running beneath one's feet throughout the financial district. Let's call this power the vectoral. It's the combination of fiber optic cables and massive amounts of computer power. Some vast proportion of the money in circulation around the planet is being automatically traded even as you read this. Engineers are now seriously thinking about trading at the speed of light. Wall Street in this abstract sense means our new robot overlords, only they didn't come from outer space.
How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall Street took over a more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site, and set up camp. It is an occupation which, almost uniquely, does not have demands. It has at its core a suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as rentier class and Wall Street as computerized vectors trading intangible assets?..."

McKenzie Wark: 'How to Occupy an Abstraction'

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728-mckenzie-wark-on-occupy-wall-street-how-to-occupy-an-abstraction

Donkey-carrot tasting its tail, glancing elsewhere, with stick and string flailing wildly and freely

2011-09-27T13:33:00.000-02:00

2011-09-17T01:38:00.000-02:00

Queen Elizabeth High School, Halifax, Nova Scotia, being demolished, July 2011. Word has it that allotment gardens will replace the rubble for the short term.

"This effort of thought seems to meet with its greatest resistance in attempting to define the thingness of the thing, for what else could be the reason for the failure of the above attempts? The inconspicuous thing withdraws itself from thought in the most stubborn of ways. Or is it rather that this self-refusal of the mere thing, this self-contained refusal to be pushed around belongs precisely to the nature of the thing? Must not, then, this disconcerting and uncommunicative element in the essence of the thing become intimately familiar to a thinking which tries to think the thing? If so, we should not force our way into the thing's thingness."
—Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Artwork

Gotong Royong

2011-09-15T11:19:00.000-02:00

"When anthropologists nowadays speak of “value”—particularly, when they refer to “value” in the singular when one writing twenty years ago would have spoken of “values” in the plural—they are at the very least implying that the fact that all these things should be called by the same word is no coincidence. That ultimately, these are all refractions of the same thing. But if one reflects on it at all, this is a very challenging notion. It would mean, for instance, that when we talk about the “meaning” of a word, and when we talk about the “meaning of life,” we are not talking about utterly different things. And that both have something in common with the sale-price of a refrigerator."
—David Graeber, An Anthropological Theory of Value

Right Now in Silicon Valley

2011-09-08T05:36:00.000-02:00

"The amount of time needed to install the sculpture exceeded my expectations and added extra labor costs. If I had been able to employ my own men, the cost of labor would have been roughly one tenth to one thirtieth of what it cost to employ the Canadian workers. I truly did not expect these added costs. Thus, I quickly realized that when you're doing large scale projects abroad, you must be careful about whom and how many workers you choose to employ. If your own men can't come over from China, large adjustments in technology and operating costs will be required. Of course, this is all part of the learning process."

—Ren Jun, Praise to Water: The Sculpture of Ren Jun—A Series of News (Vancouver Biennale - Winter Olympic Games; catalogue), 2011

monads on parade

2011-09-06T10:31:00.000-02:00

"A skull with what seemed an anatomically modern brain case and an ape-like jaw was discovered in Piltdown, England in 1912 and dubbed Eoanthropus ("Dawn Man"). Until 1953, when it was realized to be a hoax of patched-together human and ape bones, British scholars welcomed Piltdown Man. The reputation of UK paleo-anthropology was enhanced and national pride reinforced as "this early man with such a large and precocious brain was English and had chosen the rolling hills of Sussex for his home""

—Barry Sautman, Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological Nationalism in China

Larve

2011-09-05T03:54:00.000-02:00

"From a starting point in Christmas folklore, with its central figure of Father Christmas, in just a few unforgettable pages Levi-Strauss reconstructed the meaning of initiation rites; behind the adult-child opposition, he discerned a more basic opposition between living and dead. In fact, as we have seen, children correspond less to the dead than to ghosts. Within the perspective of signifying function, adults and dead belong to the same order, that of stable signifiers and the continuity between diachrony and synchrony. (From this point of view, there is little difference between cold societies, which represent this continuity as a circle in which the living become dead and these in turn become living, and hot societies like ours, which develop this continuity in a rectilinear process. In either case what matters is the continuity of the system.) But children and ghosts, as unstable signifiers, represent the discontinuity and difference between the two worlds. The dead person is not the ancestor: this is the meaning of the ghost. The ancestor is not the living man: this is the meaning of the child. For if the dead immediately became ancestors and ancestors immediately became living men, then the whole present would in an instant be transformed into past, and the whole past into present, and this would diminish that differential margin between synchrony and diachrony on which is based the potential for signifying relations, and with it the potential for human society and history. Thus, since ritual allows the persistence in the churinga of an irreducible diachronic residue, and play allows a synchronic residue in the toy, so the passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead allows the persistence of two points of discontinuity which are necessary to maintain the operation of a signifying function. So the passage between synchrony and diachrony, between world of the living and world of the dead, occurs in a kind of 'quantum leap', in which the unstable signifiers are the cipher:

Within this perspective, ghosts and children, belonging neither to the signifiers of diachrony nor to those of synchrony, appear as the signifiers of the same signifying opposition between the two worlds which constitutes the potential for a social system. They are, therefore, the signifiers of the signifying function, without which there would he neither human time nor history. Playland and the land of ghosts set out a utopian topology of historyland, which has no site except in a signifying difference between diachrony and synchrony, between aion and chronos, between living and dead, between nature and culture.
So the social system can be pictured as a complex mechanism in which (unstable) signifiers of signification are counterposed to stable signifiers, but where in reality an exchange takes place between them to guarantee the functioning of the system. Thus adults submit to becoming ghosts so that the ghosts can become dead, and the dead become children so that the children can become men and women. The object of funeral rites and initiation rites, therefore, is the transmission of the signifying function, which must resist and endure beyond birth and death. Thus no society, whether the hottest and most progressive or the coldest and most conservative, can altogether do without unstable signifiers and, in so far as they represent an element of disturbance and threat, must take care that the signifying exchange is not interrupted, so that phantoms can become dead and babies living men."
—Girorgio Agamben, "In Playland" in Infancy and History, 1978.

Puerilia Ludicra

2011-09-01T14:49:00.001-02:00

"I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, whois incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himselfindustriously to the required task. But, as far as my activitiesbeyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, Itake them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so thatI should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything todo with hobbies - preoccupations with which I had becomemindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill the time - had Inot become hardened by experience to such examples of this nowwidespread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them. On the other hand, I have been fortunate enough that my job... cannot be defined in terms of that strict opposition of free time, which is demanded of the current razor-sharp division of the two..."
—Theodor Adorno, "Free Time," in The Culture Industry

2011-08-29T06:01:00.005-02:00

"In a sample of the residents interviewed, it was found that for above-ground dwellers of white-collar occupation, 4 out of 10 would be prepared to live in modern earth-covered housing compared to 8 out of 10 of the total sample. For these people, a large brick house was a cue to socioeconomic status. The fact that they chose to live above-ground despite the obvious drawbacks such as air-conditioners which were often inoperative due to irregular and uncertain power supply and clogging dust in fierce temperatures, suggest that some people must have had good reasons for so doing (as the lifestyle was adopted in spite of its obvious drawbacks.) Unfortunately these reasons were not investigated as they were not relevant to the subject of the research, but the following statements epitomize their attitudes: "I'm hot and miserable, but it's a good way to live—above-ground." "They're cooler underground and a lot more comfortable, but I still think above-ground is better." Most Australians and British people stated that they would live underground in modern earth-covered housing, whereas a high proportion of Greeks and Italians said they would not. Apart from the variables of racial origin the extreme climate was the main reason given for adopting the underground lifestyle, one English underground subject (U.Ss) commenting: sane sorts of people who want to get out the heat live underground." Approximately half of the residents of Coober Pedy lived above-ground and half underground; hence all either had experience with or at least knowledge of, the advantages and disadvantages of the underground lifestyle. Survey results indicated that 75 per cent of the population sample (including 50 per cent of the above-ground subjects, A.Ss) stated that, given the opportunity, they would live in modern earth-covered homes.
The sampling procedure followed was that of attempting to obtain an equal number of above and below-ground subjects. However, a disproportionate amount of time was spent in the field trying to equalise the numbers of above-ground subjects and underground subjects. Despite heroic efforts made on the part of interviewers when unbearable conditions prevailed (daily temperatures maxima ranging from 40 to 46 degrees C with dust storms blowing for half the period that the survey was in progress), and sometimes under threatening circumstances of savage guard dogs and gun-carrying home-owners, it was not possible to achieve equal sample numbers. Of all A.Ss approached, it was only possible to interview 26-per cent of them. When U.Ss were approached, without exception all agreed to be interviewed. The attitude of most U.Ss was open and enthusiastic. Even before the purpose of the survey as stated interviewers reported that a distinct attitudinal difference existed between A.Ss and U.Ss. A major proportion of A.Ss were suspicious, stating they thought the interviewer was a taxation official. Amongst those A.Ss who refused to be interviewed, there were some who were unexpectedly aggressive or abusive, those who slammed doors without speaking, those who shouted through closed doors: "Go away," and others who did not answer the doorknock even though sounds could clearly be heard from within. Most U.Ss gave their names freely and were eager to answer the questions and talking about living underground. (...)
That there were obvious differences towards the interviewers in the attitudes of most A.Ss compared to U.Ss was surprising. What could have caused these differences in attitude? Both sexes and a wide range of occupations, nationalities and age groups were represented in both groups. It seems reasonable to infer that environmental determinism of some type was operating. Although there were many variables involved, all environmental factors: heat, glare, drying winds, dust, geographic isolation, long periods of summer temperatures, and so on, would have been experienced by all respondents. However, the one factor that clearly separated the population of this multiracial township (52 nationalities were recorded) was the adopted mode of living. Occupants of conventional above-ground dwellings would have been more exposed to many of these environmental factors, while those in dugouts would have been comparatively sheltered.
To facilitate discussion on these observations, it is necessary to explain a concept originally proposed by Mehrabian and Russell, ad adopted here. Pleasure, arousal and dominance are considered as mediating variables (between environmental stimuli and resultant behavioural responses), and used to describe degrees of anxiety in relative terms of low pleasure, high arousal and low dominance. As used here, "pleasure," "arousal" and "dominance" have the following meanings:

"Pleasure: Pleasure/displeasure is a feeling state that can be...assessed with self-report...behavioural indicators...scored on a dimension of pleasantness...independent of their own arousal quality and dominance-submissiveness. Thus these cues provide an important behavioural end...pleasure is distinguished from preference, liking, positive reinforcement of approach-avoidance.
Arousal: A feeling state varying along a single dimension ranging from sleep to frantic excitement...most directly assessed by verbal report.
Dominance: Dominance-submissiveness is a feeling state that can be assessed from verbal reports...An individual's feeling of dominance in a situation is based on the extent to which he feels unrestricted or free to act in a variety of ways."

In the literature, certain environmental physical factors that have been associated with higher levels of arousal may have been influencing A.Ss. As A.Ss would have been subjected to an increased degree of exposure (compared to U.Ss), the possibility that this may have contributed to their attitude is discussed under the following headings:
1. Above-ground Subjects (A.Ss): Possible increased sensory stimulation from the environment due to conditions of: (a) low humidity; (b) high temperatures; (c) wind exposure; (d) glare and high levels of illumination; (e) positive air ionisation.
2. Underground Subjects (U.Ss): Possible decreased sensory stimulation from the environment due to conditions of: (a) absence of, or reduction in the number of windows; (b) noise attenuation; (c) heat and light, low intensity effects."

—Dr. Sydney A. Baggs "Environmental Factors Possibly Influencing Attitude in Australians Living in Above- and Below-Ground Dwellings in Arid Region Mining Town" in Report on the International Symposium on Earth Architecture, March 1986

The triumph of a public art

2011-08-27T09:55:00.004-02:00

"At issue now is the positioning and posture of King in the 28-foot-tall statue that will greet visitors when the memorial is completed in 2009. Last year, the foundation caused a stir among some in the African-American community, particularly the Black art community, when it chose Lei Yixin--a Chinese "master sculptor" who has carved monuments of many of China's most prominent figures, including Mao Zedong, father of communist China--to design the monument of King.

Lei's goal, which was approved early in the planning process by the commission, was to depict King as a towering figure emerging from the "Mountain of Despair" to the "Stone of Hope." But in a letter written to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation on April 28, the seven-member, all-White fine arts commission expressed concern that without further refinements, including changes to make King look more "sympathetic," the sculpture would be "inappropriate as an expression of [King's] legacy."

"The original concept showed an image of Dr. King that was asymmetrically composed, dynamic in stance, meditative in character, and modeled as if emerging from the Stone of Hope," the letter stated. "[But] the development as shown now features a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character-and appearing as if it had been affixed to the surface of the Stone of Hope."

The letter from the commission went on to criticize the technique represented by the statue, saying, "The colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries."

The commission "recommended strongly that the sculpture be reworked, both in form and modeling, to return to a more sympathetic idea of the figure growing out of the stone with increasing detail and emphasis of the upper part of the figure."

In an interview with JET, Thomas E. Luebke, secretary of the fine arts commission, said that, while the language in the letter is strongly worded, the changes being requested are relatively minor. "It's subtle things," Luebke said. "There seems to be a shift from where it was to where it is now. Our interest is aesthetic. The commission has always supported the concept, the idea and design of the memorial. What we are asking is nothing drastic."

Foundation President Harry S. Johnson said that the objections of the commission, whose approval is necessary for the project to move forward, are part of a long back-and-forth process that every memorial has had to go through. Johnson said that the foundation plans to make minor "tweaks," including setting King's body back into the stone more, in hopes of satisfying the commission's desire to make King appear less dictatorial.

"This is normal," Johnson said. "If you look at the big memorials on the Mall, they all go through a very lengthy, and important, discussion because everyone wants it to be correct."

But even with these changes, some Black artists, including sculptor Ed Dwight, who had vied to be the project's sculptor, believe that depiction of King is anything but correct. Dwight has said that King would "be spinning in his grave" at the idea of a representative of the Chinese government--which once called King "a political lapdog"--being the lead sculptor of the memorial.

"This guy knows nothing about King," said Dwight of Lei, who is collaborating with Black artists James Chaffers and Jon Lockard, both University of Michigan professors, on the sculpture. "I've seen his rendering. It's not a good likeness of King. King never stood like that. He's standing with his legs spread like he's guarding something. His brow is larger than it should be. King never wore a bulky suit on that. The suit looks like the kind of suit that the Chinese people wear.""

—Kevin Chappell
JET Magazine

Hello, Vegetable! 你吃了吗？

2011-08-18T08:13:00.002-02:00

“Have you eaten yet?” is a collection of artist practices that work with farming and food production and consumption. It is meant as a database to find, compare and learn from these art practices, and their intentions, their methods, their networks. This is an ongoing list being compiled for the project Country Fair, within the context of China and the information available here, but it seeks to connect information of these practices internationally. It is presented online as well as at each Country Fair.

《你吃了吗？》是一篇有关农业以及食品生产和消费的艺术家实践汇编。本汇编相当于一个数据库,其目的是帮助人们收集,对比,和学习这些艺术家的实践,意图,方法,社会网络。它是一个正在进行中的列表,这一列表是在中国的语境和可获得的信息条件下为《市集/Country Fair》项目所做的。但它也寻求这类实践的国际信息。本汇编在网络和市集上都可以找到。因为这类艺术实践在现代艺术中谈及的较少,所以本数据库是很有必要的。颇具讽刺的是可及性还是许多这类艺术家的项目所关注的。泛泛地说,虽然这些艺术实行常常跟本地环境、经济和社会体系有关,但是它们大部分也关系到共有知识网络,在许多情况下也巧妙地,综合地使用了科技手段。当然,艺术家个人网站上的信息是更深入的;《你吃了吗？》只是走近他们工作的一个切入点。

请访问！ Please visit!
http://www.homeshopbeijing.org/nichilema/

"this is authentic"

2011-08-16T09:36:00.007-02:00

e

"There was a time when the image of the voter was limited to a person in an institutional or economic role—trade unionist, organization man, bureaucrat, manager of the domestic economy, reproducer of labour power or whatever. Early socialism was based on the sibling-like solidarity of fraternalism and male bonding which moved on to the caring mother model of the postwar welfare state. Conservatives tended more to a paternalist mode—being a more or less kindly father, doing what was necessary for the family business to continue without unnecessary interruption. Voters/children were to be seen and not heard and should be grateful for whatever was done for them and should certainly fight for their rulers when told to do so. Admittedly this shifted to a determination to make the children stand on their own feet and not be "moaning minnies" in Mrs Thatcher's phrase, always asking for a helping hand instead of just getting on with it. Politicians fall easily into fatherly or motherly roles, chiding voters for not recognizing the difficult time they have in providing for 'the family', that is, all of them, and keeping the United Kingdom neat and clean and safe.

Rarely do politicians relate to voters in a truly unpatronizing and friendly way, expressing their feelings and hopes as one friend might to another. Nor do politicians let us see them as people enjoying pure friendly relations: we see them formally as mothers and fathers or patrons and clients, yet their close personal friendships remain hidden from view. If the family is the chief model for political relations, with much parliamentary debate being, as it were, a struggle between the authority of the father and the authority of the mother, this produces a highly directive, secretive and exclusive style of politics. The voters as children or siblings can do little more than react to what is done on their behalf. They cannot engage as friends. The more the political process is centralized, the greater will be this tendency. The principle of subsidiarity, to locate responsibility for decisions and actions at the lowest possible level, is certainly more friendly.

The larger formations of social life—kinship, the law, the economy—must be different where there is, in addition to solidarity and dutiful role performance, a willingness and capacity for friendship's surprising one-to-one relations. This difference alone may be enough to transform social and political life."

—Ray Pahl, "Friendship: the Social Glue?" in The Politics of Risk Society

2011-08-08T04:49:00.002-02:00

Spoox Magazine #8 finally here:
http://spooxmagazine.org/

2011-08-07T03:29:00.004-02:00

"The idea of sleep as dream = caught up in a mythology of productivity, of work: "dream-work": sleep is useful for something; not only does it restore, "regain," "recuperate," it also transforms, labors: it is productive, rescued from the disgrace of the "good for nothing." (Psychoanalysis instituted the idea of the producing dream, material for analysis. Ideology of work: one doesn't dream "for nothing") ≠ utopian sleep (dreamless), falling asleep: unproductive : is even defined by the fact that it is a kind of unconditional expenditure (= the very essence of "perversion": all in all, it would be a perverse sleep):
1. Affinity with drugs, since, in both cases (Also Rescio on Walter Benjamin and H), it is a matter of "immersing one's important thoughts into a long sleep," into a "non-place," into the "fatherless" (but obviously not the "motherless": (worn out!) theme of the fetal sleep).
2. Affinity with the theme of immortality, through the figure of suspended time. Recall a frequent theme of the iconography of Greek vases or reliefs: night distributes its poppies, which are like the plant of immortality.
Diogenes Laertius tells a very beautiful story about Epimenides (one of seven wise men): "He was a native of Knossos in Crete, though from wearing his hair long he did not look like a Cretan. One day he was sent into the country by his father to look for a stray cheep, and at noon he turned aside out of the way, and went to sleep in a cave, where he slept for fifty-seven hours. After this he gt up and went in search of his sheep, thinking he had been asleep only a short time. [...] So he became famous throughout Greece, and was believed to be a special favorite of heaven. [...] He lived one hundred and fifty-seven years." To take note of (at least in my view):
a. Selective suspension of time: his body ages, but his memory does not: he looks for his sheep; interestingly enough, I believe, since memory is not an act of pure recollection of the past, as if it were external to time the better to grasp it: memory is itself submitted to time, to its injustices → cf. process of writing that I have called anamnesis, it is the sheep of the Cretan, "as if it was yesterday," but in an aged body ≠ Myth of Sleeping Beauty: cruder since it's the whole setting of life that is frozen and then restarts: immortality by means of ice: freezing of the past as a whole (cf. cryothanatology: present-day sect that freezes corpses, because they believe that in several years science will have found new means of bodily survival). Greek myth more beautiful: sleep somehow more alive, "warm," because it separates (cf. above): lets the body (hair and face) age but suspends the time of memory.
b. A certain thought of immortality, since the Greeks think that a sleep of this kind is a gift of the gods: longevity of a stretching out of life; not the mathematical, "stupid" immortality (never to die, without taking the trouble to fantasize about what such an infinite life would be, what of our real life it would prolong, at what age it would lock us) but idea of the subject as set of traces (waves) recast according to different wavelengths.
c. Finally, notice that even for the Greeks the idea of an unproductive time triggers a resistance. True: Diogenes Laertius, Greek of the third century after Christ. Laertius: Cilicia, Anatolia. "Some are found to maintain that he did not go to sleep but withdrew himself for a while, engaged in gathering simples": he didn't sleep, he did something that, by the way, can relate to immortality, drugs."
—Roland Barthes, The Neutral

Song of the Monad

2011-07-31T12:57:00.004-02:00

Come in here, Dear boy, have a cigar.
You're gonna go far,
You're gonna fly high,
You're never gonna die,
You're gonna make it, if you try;
They're gonna love you.
Well I've always had a deep respect,
And I mean that most tensely.
The band is just fantastic,
that is really what I think.
Oh by the way, which one's Pink?

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.

We're just knocked out.
We heard about the sell-out.
You gotta get an album out.
You owe it to the people.
We're so happy we can hardly count.
Everybody else is just green,
Have you seen the chart?
It's a hell of a start,
It could be made into a monster
If we all pull together as a team.

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.

tastefully framed subliminal painting in a private karaoke room

what Tennyson once called the “Parliament of Man, the federation of the world.”

2011-07-27T14:56:00.002-02:00

2011-07-26T13:50:00.002-02:00

"Did any of the world religions, in some of their sects, recommend the perfection of ambivalence as a spiritual course whereby the novice ensures that he'll never be completely disappointed even as he also disqualifies himself from any true satisfaction? I wondered this."
—Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision

not another generalization

2011-07-25T16:15:00.002-02:00

“From being inside the center of the storm, I’ve learned not just about the structure of government, not just about how power flows in many countries around the world that we’ve dealt with, but rather how history is shaped and distorted by the media,” Julian Assange

amalgamation

2011-07-24T05:18:00.008-02:00

~~Blockbouster Video~~ on Quinpool Road

"For the 1889 Paris Exposition, Jules Bourdais, a prominent French architect, proposed to erect a tower 360 metres (1200 feet) high in the centre of Paris, near the Pont-Neuf, with arc-lights strong enough to illuminate the whole city. By this means the street lighting of Paris, which at the time consisted of thousands of gas-lamps, was to be transformed into city lighting. This proposal by the builder of the Trocadéro was the subject of a detailed discussion, along with another vision involving a tower, that of the bridge builder Gustave Eiffel. Eventually, however, the committee preparing the exposition decided to accept Eiffel's project. No one doubted that it was technically possible to illuminate the whole of Paris from one source of light. In the end, Eiffel's tower was built, not because it was considered less far-fetched than Bourdais'—on the contrary, contemporaries feared being blinded by such a centralized light source."
—Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night

did you RSVP? did you cause a scene?

2011-07-20T20:15:00.002-02:00

Hotel by Guillaume Apollinaire
My bedroom is shaped like a cage
The sun puts its arm through the window
As for me I want to smoke to make a mirage
I light my cigarette with daylight
I don't want to work I want to smoke

2011-07-08T10:53:00.002-02:00

"For example, if viewed as an "artist", David Bowie makes no sense at all. He seems to be little more than a perpetually spooked moth in slip-ons, sputtering, in a series of self-shaming leaps towards imagined relevance, from one swiftly guttering fad to another – grunge metal, drum and bass and having a skellington face. But imagine Bowie instead as a cunning lichen, an adaptive tuber or a semi-sentient mould, endlessly reshaping himself in search of the moisture of acclaim, and it is easy to understand him."

- Stewart Lee

Effigy of the State

2011-07-04T20:19:00.002-02:00

“If contemporary art, marginal and minute as its influence is, doesn’t get it together and offer new models for a future some of us still hope to have, chances are at this point nobody will, and that’s more than a shame.” Holland Cotter, “Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together,” The New York Times, January 19, 2003

Enter the Roman Room (activate Bourgeois memory potential)

2011-06-27T12:59:00.006-02:00

"Legend has it that the poet Simonides recited a soliloquy for a banquet held in one of the great halls in ancient Greece. Shortly after he left the building, the roof caved in, killing everyone inside. The bodies were so mangled they could not be recognized and authorities went to Simonides to see if he could remember at least who some of the people were. Surprisingly, he was able to recall everyone in the hall simply by remembering where the person sat around the tables in the room. He remembered them by their location.
The Roman orator Cicero, around the turn of the first century, expanded this concept by mentally placing ideas around the tables instead of people. He could recite volumes of information by seeing visions and symbols in the chairs. Like icons that we have on our computer desktop screens, his mental icons represented the critical points he needed to recall in his arguments or debates. Cicero became world renowned for his ability to make clear, lucid points in his debates without using notes. This technique became known as the Roman Room method. By projecting onto his mental screen a room equipped with tables and chairs, Cicero could simply walk around the area in his mind and elaborate his key points. He organized information in his mind so that he could mentally go around any table picking up the memories he had stored in various chairs and simply describing those memories to his audience. (...)
When I look carefully at our living room from the doorway, over to my left is the speaker stand in the corner. The TV console is located along the adjacent wall, and the rocking chair is in the next corner of the room. The fireplace is located on the wall opposite the doorway, and my favorite chair in the third corner of the room. The third wall is actually a larger doorway that leads to the dining room, and a lamp table occupies the fourth corner. Along the fourth and final wall is the sleeper sofa. The floor, carpeted, has a large walnut coffee table in front of the sofa, and a fan hangs from the ceiling. (...)
If I close my eyes, I can see this room completely in my mind. If I apply the third Reversible Rule of Engagement and give action to the picture in my mind, I can move the lens of my mind's eye—just like Ken Burns does in his excellent documentaries, beginning with the speaker and moving the camera lens all the way around the room, seeing each object in its very specific location. (...)
The mind doesn't distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined. In my mind there is no difference between looking at a room while standing in the doorway or looking at a room while seeing on the page. To make the room vivid, I mentally dust the room (my wife will tell you that I do a lot more imaginary dusting than I do real dusting). If it's appropriate, I mentally pick up each object, like a vase on a stand, and note its shape, texture, and feel while dusting it with a mental cloth. If it is something like a fireplace or a painting on the wall, I still take my cloth and feel the subtle grooves in the mantel or in the picture frame. Again, I am noting and picking out detail and applying deliberate intensity to each location in the room. Sometimes I even use aromatherapy or light a scented candle to help establish in my mind the overall environment of each room. Smell is a powerful memory stimulant, and it adds to the vividness of the environment. When you apply this technique, you understand how unlimited your mind and memory can be, because there are an infinite number of pictures of rooms in a seemingly infinite number of magazines on the bookshelves each month."
—Scott Hagwood Memory Power (2006)

"Nobody's safe," said the trader. "If I felt safe, I wouldn't be talking to you next to a fridge in a dark space at the back of the stall."

2011-06-19T20:47:00.006-02:00

"But, there were still bits of action. One guy was caught on the same stairway that I had been trapped on. He was caught there with his head under some girl's skirt. Then one of the girls who worked in the cafeteria complained that she hadn't been paid, as promised, for a bit of oral copulation she had supplied to a general foreman and 3 mailhandlers. They fired the girl and the 3 mailhandlers and busted the general foreman down to supervisor.
Then, I set the post office on fire.
I had been sent to fourth class papers and was smoking a cigar, working a stack of mail off a hand truck when some guy came by and said, "HEY, YOUR MAIL IS ON FIRE!"
I looked around,. There it was. A small flame was starting to stand up like a dancing snake. Evidently part of a burning ash had fallen in there earlier.
"Oh shit!"
The flame grew rapidly. I took a catalogue and, holding it flat, I beat the shit out of it. Sparks flew. It was hot. As soon as I put out one section, another caught up.
I heard a voice:
"Hey! I smell fire!"
"YOU DON"T SMELL FIRE," I yelled, "YOU SMELL SMOKE!"
"I think I'm going to get out of here!"
"God damn you, then," I screamed, "GET OUT!"
The flames were burning my hands. I had to save the United States mail, 4th class junkmail!
Finally, I got it under control. I took my foot and pushed the whole pile of papers onto the floor and stepped on the last bit of red ash.
The supervisor walked up to say something to me. I stood there with the burned catalogue in my hand and waited. He looked at me and walked off.
Then I resumed casing the 4th class junkmail. Anything burned, I put to one side.
My cigar had gone out, I didn't light it again.
My hands hurt and I walked over to the water fountain, put them under the water. It didn't help.
I found the supervisor and asked him for a travel slip to the nurse's office.
It was the same one who used to come to my door and ask me, "Now what's the matter, Mr. Chinaski?"
When I walked in she said the same thing again.
"You remember me, eh?" I asked.
"Oh yes, I know you've had some real sick nights."
"Yeh," I said.
"All right, Mr. Chinaski, now what's your problem?"
"I burned my hands."
"Come over here. How did you burn your hands?"
"Does it matter? They're burned."
She was dabbing my hands with something. One of her breasts brushed me.
"How did it happen, Henry?"
"Cigar. I was standing next to a truck of 4th class. Ash must have gotten in there. Flames came up."
The breast was up against me again.
"Hold your hands still, please!"
Then she laid her whole flank against me as she spread some ointment on my hands. I was sitting on a stool.
"What's the matter, Henry? You seem nervous."
"Well... you know how it is, Martha."
"My name is not Martha. It's Helen."
"Let's get married, Helen."
"What?"
"I mean, on the work floor."
She wrapped on some gauze.
"You mustn't burn the mails."
"It was junk."
"All mail is important."
All right, Helen."
She walked over to her desk and I followed her. She filled out the travel form. She looked very cute in her little white hat. I'd have to find a way to get back there.
She saw me looking at her body.
"All right, Mr. Chinaski, I think you better leave now."
"Oh yes... Well, thanks for everything."
"It's just part of the job."
"Sure."
A week later there were NO SMOKING IN THIS AREA signs all around. The clerks were not allowed to smoke unless they used ashtrays. Somebody had been contracted to manufacture all these ashtrays. They were nice. And said PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. The clerks stole most of them.
NO SMOKING.
I had all by myself, Henry Chinaski, revolutionized the postal system."
—Charles Bukowski, Post Office

Democracy Algorithms

2011-06-19T11:33:00.004-02:00

"For its competitions, ---- has developed a form of crowd sourced ---- that asks as many as 200 people to take part in the voting process. Our ---- system is designed to be as democratic as possible and the ---- identifies the two winning ---- without any input from ----. ---- read and evaluate ---- online. Each ---- reads a random cross section of all the ----, and our system ensures that each ---- is viewed and voted on the same number of times. All ---- are reviewed without the ---- names attached, and each ---- receives as many as 25 votes."

Community of Experience

2011-06-17T08:22:00.006-02:00

"There must be historic reasons for the rise of the compartmental conception of fine art. Our present museums and galleries to which works of fine art are removed and stored illustrate some of the causes that have operated to segregate art instead of finding it an attendant of temple, forum, and other forms of associated life. An instructive history of modern art could be written in terms of the formation of the distinctively modern institutions of museum and exhibition gallery. I may point to a few outstanding facts. Most European museums are, among other things, memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism. Every capital must have its own museum of painting sculpture, etc., devoted in part to exhibiting the greatness of its artistic past, and, in other part, to exhibiting the loot gathered by its monarchs in conquest of other nations; for instance, the accumulations of the spoils of Napoleon that are in the Louvre. They testify to the connection between the modern segregation of art and nationalism and militarism. Doubtless this connection has served at times a useful purpose, as in the case of Japan, who, when she was in the process of westernization, saved much of her art treasures by nationalizing the temples that contained them.
The growth of capitalism has been a powerful influence in the development of the museum as the proper home for works of art, and in the promotion of the idea that they are apart from common life. The nouveaux riches, who are an important by-product of the capitalist system, have felt especially bound to surround themselves with works of fine art which, being rare, are also costly. Generally speaking, the typical collector is the typical capitalist. For evidence of good standing in the realm of higher culture, he amasses paintings, statuary, and artistic bijoux, as his stocks and bonds certify to his standing in the economic world.
Not merely individuals, but communities and nations, put their cultural good taste in evidence by building opera houses, galleries and museums. These show that a community is not wholly absorbed in material wealth, because it is willing to spend its gains in patronage of art. It erects these buildings and collects their contents as it now builds a cathedral. These things reflect and establish superior cultural status, while their segregation from the common life reflects the fact that they are not part of a native and spontaneous culture. They are a kind of counterpart of a holier-than-thou attitude, exhibited not toward persons as such but toward the interests and occupations that absorb most of the community's time and energy."

–John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934.

2011-06-09T17:22:00.001-02:00

Otto Dix, Newborn Baby on Hands, 1927

Water Crystal of the Month

2011-05-30T10:49:00.001-02:00

THE WATER CRYSTAL FROM THE WATER
EXPOSED TO THE WORDS "LOVE AND GRATITUDE"

I had a vision of love

2011-05-28T15:11:00.003-02:00

Holt - Jarmara - Vinegar Tom - Sacke and Sugar - Newes - Ilemauzer - Pyewacket - Pecke in the Crowne - Griezzel Greedigutt

2011-05-28T07:05:00.003-02:00

Sigmund Freud's office chair, by Karl Hofmann and Felix Augenfeld, Austria, 1926.

2011-05-14T06:38:00.001-02:00

Milton Keynes: More Than Just Concrete Cows

Posted by admin0502 on August 18th, 2010

Easy AdSense by Unreal

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Being digit of the field retail areas in Southeast England, poet economist has an comprehensive difference of shops, markets and superstores. The Centre in poet economist is digit of Europe's daylong shopping centres, which houses a sort of broad street stores and smaller, doc shops. Midsummer Place shopping centre, on the another hand, is a £150 meg organisation which provides the city with an added 430,000 sq ft of city centre shopping. solon tralatitious shopping region can be institute at the senior towns of Stony Stratford, metropolis Pagnell, Bletchley, Wolverton, Woburn Sands, and Olney.
The most visited tourist attractions in poet economist allow Bletchley Park,

where cipher breakers during World War II were sequestered; Xscape, a sports and recreation Byzantine that features interior deceive slopes, rise walls, bowling lanes, a multi-screen medium and a difference of mutual games; Willen Lake, 180 acre lake and park, substance all types of watersports, broad ropes course, undertaking golf, endeavor area, mini railway, taphouse and cafes; Gulliver's Land, a thought park; National Hockey Stadium, where the MK Dons endeavor bag games; poet economist Theatre, where travelling shows and daylong streaming productions are staged; the Bletchley Park museum of wartime cryptography; and the poet economist Museum, which features the Stacey Hill Collection of agricultural chronicle that existed before the groundwork of the new city.

Some of the favourite festivals and events in the city allow Gardening Show, Free Events, mythologist Park Fireworks, Sherlock's Excellent Adventure, Salsa Events, Slava's Snowshow, etc.

http://youtu.be/uo2Qr8hjSTI

2011-05-11T16:47:00.001-02:00

On Monday the Guardian reported that Pakistan and the US struck a secret deal permitting US military action to capture or kill Bin Laden almost a decade ago, during the rule of President Pervez Musharraf.

Responding through a spokesman and his Facebook page, Musharraf denied that any deal, written or verbal, had been struck.

"The accusation of my having allowed intrusion into Pakistan by US forces chasing Osama bin Laden is absolutely baseless," he said.

"Never has this subject even been discussed between myself and President Bush leave aside allowing such freedom of action that would violate our sovereignty (sic)."

The Mother of Invention

2011-05-10T14:28:00.004-02:00

First sighting of a smoking shelter on a Beijing street after the institution of a citywide smoking ban. Photo by Elaine W. Ho.

Clio Coddle

2011-05-07T10:24:00.012-02:00

The Corporate Diner: Lunch at Facebook

By April Dembosky

Published: April 29 2011 22:21 Last updated: April 29 2011 22:21

Café X, Facebook Engineering Building, 1601 California Avenue, Palo Alto, California
Food: International and mostly organic Monday-Thursday, American comfort food Fridays
Value for money: Unmatched – three meals a day and limitless snacks are provided free for staff
Corporate mission: “Helps you connect and share with the people in your life”

The café in the engineering building of Facebook is a cross between a university dining hall and a Las Vegas buffet. Coders and programmers, for whom lunch is often the first meal of the day, fill up plastic trays with the assistance of a string of chefs - one hand-carving roasts of pork and turkey, another extolling the virtues of black eyed peas, collared greens and pulled pork. An
unmanned salad bar and a make-your-own panini station round out the options. At breakfast, there is a waffle bar.

Employees in jeans and T-shirts (including the occasional Google t-shirt) eat their meals at simple white tables with plastic orange chairs, designed to complement Facebook’s overall décor – raw and industrial – which reminds employees that their work is only, always, “1 per cent finished.”

Executive chef, Josef Desimone, is currently overseeing the design of the new cafeteria at Facebook’s future headquarters in Menlo Park, but he has already turned down the first draft. “It was gorgeous,” he said, “which is a problem.” He has to anticipate the graffiti and handprints that will come to grace the walls over time, as employees make their own contributions to the industrial aesthetic.

In addition to café design, Desimone is in charge of planning breakfast, lunch and dinner, five days a week, for the company’s 2,000-odd local employees. He entertains himself as much as his diners by experimenting with different themes, from Chinese to Haitian to an all-chocolate menu that featured chilli-ricotta-cocoa ravioli and asparagus with chocolate vinaigrette.

All meals are free of charge, and at the office’s many snack bars there is a bountiful supply of bananas, Snickers bars and Vitamin Waters. Even the reception desks are furnished with hefty bowls of Starbursts, Tootsie Pops and Peppermint Patties. It’s not surprising new employees are warned of the “Facebook 15,” the typical number of pounds gained in the first year of employment. Free toothpaste and toothbrushes are also provided in the bathrooms.

April Dembosky is the FT’s San Francisco correspondent

Postcards from Beirut

2011-04-28T14:25:00.005-02:00

Some folks say wow

2011-04-27T07:00:00.005-02:00

Another successful KEK venture gets off the ground

2011-04-25T05:29:00.005-02:00

"While the eternal-mailart network has no formal rules, it is growing at such a rate that certain "considerations" must be given to the conduct of those individuals hosting mailart exhibitions if the system is to grow in a positive way.
Beyond the dictates of basic human nature, focusing on politeness, mailart shows are a two-way street of communication. We, as practicing mailartists, feel that the following "considerations" should form the foundation of any show that calls itself a "mailart show."
(1) No fee (2) No jury (3) No returns (4) All works received will be exhibited (5) A complete catalog will be sent free of charge to all participants. (Hopefully the catalog will be more than just a list of names.)
If for whatever reason a mailart show curator cannot fulfill these "considerations," then he/she should return, without cost to to contributing artists, all mailings received. As this new art phenomenon emerges and develops, it is our wish to offer clarity.
"Mailart is not objects going through the mail, but artists establishing direct contact with other artists, sharing ideas and experiences, all over the world."
It's time to strengthen this vital alternative avenue of self-expression because we no longer feel that the present-day art structure is concerned with the artist as a sensitive individual, trying to develop within an ever increasing and complex cultural milieu. Art today is concerned with valuable objects and status. Mailart is concerned with communication. Art is magic, magic is fun, art is fun.
Whereas in the past, we mail artists would send works to mailart shows merely because they were listed as such, we no longer find it acceptable to submit material to shows that do not deal—up front—with these "considerations."
Mailart is still the art of "no rules." Only the "considerations" of basic human politeness prevail. It must be remembered that a mailart show show curator receives one of the world's finest collections of art "free: and we feel that the show "owes" hing to those individual threads who compose the final piece. Also, curators get to keep the artist's work and [artists] should get something in return for their energy/time. Without them there would be no show."
–Lon Spiegelman and Mario Lara, 1980

Apples

2011-04-20T13:33:00.013-02:00

"Psychological level
Living in this powerful authoritarian culture, common Chinese have to develop their defensive behaviors and feelings to cope with it adaptively or not. For example, every Chinese adult may have the experience of dealing with his or her leader's over-dominating orders or comments (e.g., asking employees to do some work for the leader's private needs; ordering subordinates to make his or her mobile phone be available 24 hours a day; giving some work on weekends without respect for the subordinate's private time), using a splitting way of definitely agreeable attitude on the surface and disagreeable thoughts in his or her mind. Instead of directly refusing or fighting with the leader, the latent social authoritarian rules unconsciously influence Chinese to repress their true feelings in order to achieve surface harmony in social conversation, and, at the same time, unconsciously promote the inhibition for the inner psychic need of autonomy, which may lead to more latent aggressive feeling. Hence, the authoritarian system, which is the dominating component in Chinese culture, has the function to persuade Chinese people to repress their individual wishes and sacrifice oneself to the collective or family, if the authorities find some conflicts between the individuals and the group. In my opinion, this kind of repression is not mainly about the feelings of guilt, but about fear, which means the anxiety of being abandoned or destroyed by the authorities in fantasy.
"At the same time, parts of Daoist and Buddhist beliefs may be helpful for the Chinese to repress aggressiveness and feel more peaceful, I think, at least on the surface. Different with Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism offer the philosophic and operational ways for Chinese to escape from the inner conflict and splitting feelings when they meet the powerful authoritarian social context. Instead of choosing fighting, with the help of Daoism and Buddhism, Chinese culture gave common Chinese a good way to escape and helped Chinese keep their repressed private wishes or fantasies, provide an acceptable chance to deal with their defensive feelings or repress their aggressive emotions. For example, the idea of reincarnation is a typical Buddhist belief which helps Chinese bear the suffering in his or her current life and gain the hope to get happiness in his or her next life. The basic Daoist idea of oneness, to integraate with nature, promotes lots of Chinese people to escape from their psychological conflict in their life span."

—Zhong Jie "Working with Chinese patients: Are there any conflicts between Chinese culture and psychoanalysis?"

procession of dead horses

2011-03-29T06:24:00.002-02:00

1

2

3

empty touch

2011-03-17T23:12:00.004-02:00

Jointness is defined as a dynamic process representing an emotional system for attachment and for communication between separate individuals who jointly approach each other in a third, joint, virtual space. Jointness represents an encounter between mother and infant, psychotherapist and patient, or any partners experiencing simultaneously mutual intimacy, while concomitantly safeguarding separateness.

the sound of uploading sound while wearing leather while wearing leather

Conceptual Virginity

2011-03-11T03:06:00.002-02:00

Amnesia Palindrome

2011-03-06T11:24:00.002-02:00

"Secondly, proper names are transmitted by hearsay, in the same way information in general is propagated. We hear art spoken about as we hear So and So spoken about. One speaks of art as one spreads rumors, without necessarily verifying them, without knowing from whence they originate, without remembering from whom one got them, and without bothering about where they will go. A large part of culture, understood as acquired knowledge, as familiarity, as habitus, even as savoir-vivre, is woven of such rumors. Proper names posit themselves in this culture in order to maintain systems of references; this is their only function, as Kripke has shown. One knows of whom or what one speaks, even when one wouldn't know exactly what is understood or what is being said. Among proper names in general, cultural rumor circulates names of artists and names of works, to which it attaches the name of art. But rumor is not enough to make a tradition. Not that it lacks a sufficient amount of translations and betrayals, since, to the contrary, noise is the most probable state of all transmission. Rather, de jure if not de facto, the chains of transmission woven by cultural rumor imply no judgment other than the initial baptism."
Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp, p. 68

Excerpts from the museum of salt and tobacco

2011-02-20T01:09:00.000-02:00

An appeal to sedentariness

2011-02-14T22:09:00.005-02:00

Choose, but choose well.
A magnificent illuminated crystal castle with the open, brisk northern sky?
Or a small, warm, enclosed box, where the hostesses have i-Pads?
Whatever; it's your experience.

2011-02-03T07:11:00.002-02:00

Salut!
The Topography holds up briskly under a second reading in the calm of the Pyrénées. I have not succeeded, however, in digesting the term "anecdotée" (Topographie Anecdotée du Hasard). After an extensive examination of the Grand Larousse Encyclopédique in seven volumes I point out for your benefit:
1 — that the orthography anecdoté, ée, which presupposes the verb anecdoter (non-existent) is not listed, and that it is thus necessary to consider it as a neologism of your invention, a rather inharmonious one.
2 — that the word anecdote in its original sense (from the Greek anekdotos) signifies "things unpublished": I forward this observation for your cogitation.
3 — that there exists, on the other hand, the word anecdotomanie, from which one can very properly build anecdotomaniaque, and which means mania for research, for telling anecdotes. It offers, moreover, the advantage of being recognized by the Academy (in the spirit of the "nouveau réaliste").
Pierre Restany
Can Day, Amélie-les-Bains, 30-12-61
in Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1995)

The opportunity starts now. On January 30th, we invite you to pitch your idea in an informal manner over a drink at Neu Bar.

2011-01-19T17:40:00.004-02:00

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

- Philip Larkin

Bunker windows

2010-12-13T00:41:00.006-02:00

"Bunkers have already been described as privatized public spaces which serve various particularized functions, such as political continuity (government offices or national monuments), or areas for consumption frenzy (malls). In line with the feudal tradition of the fortress mentality, the bunker guarantees safety and familiarity in exchange for the relinquishment of individual sovereignty. It can act as a seductive agent offering the credible illusion of consumptive choice and ideological peace for the complicit, or it can act as an aggressive force demanding acquiescence for the resistant. The bunker brings nearly all to its interior with the exception of those left to guard the streets. After all, nomadic power does not offer the choice not to work or not to consume. The bunker is such an all-embracing feature of everyday life that even the most resistant cannot always approach it critically. Alienation, in part, stems from this uncontrollable entrapment in the bunker.
Bunkers vary in appearance as much as they do in function. The nomadic bunker—the product of “the global village”—has both an electronic and an architectural form. The electronic form is witnessed as media; as such it attempts to colonize the private residence. Informative distraction flows in an unceasing stream of fictions produced by Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and CNN. The economy of desire can be safely viewed through the familiar window of screenal space. Secure in the electronic bunker, a life of alienated autoexperience (a loss of the social) can continue in quiet acquiescence and deep privation. The viewer is brought to the world, the world to the viewer, all mediated through the ideology of the screen. This is virtual life in a virtual world. Like the electronic bunker, the architectural bunker is another site where hyperspeed and hyperinertia intersect. Such bunkers are not restricted to national boundaries; in fact, they span the globe. Although they cannot actually move through physical space, they simulate the appearance of being everywhere at once. The architecture itself may vary considerably, even in terms of particular types; however, the logo or totem of a particular type is universal, as are its consumables. In a general sense, it is its redundant participation in these characteristics that make it so seductive.
This type of bunker was typical of capitalist power’s first attempt to go nomadic. During the Counterreformation, when the Catholic Church realized during the Council of Trent (1545-63) that universal presence was a key to power in the age of colonization, this type of bunker came of age. (It took the full development of the capitalist system to produce the technology necessary to return to power through absence). The appearance of the church in frontier areas both East and West, the universalization of ritual, the maintenance of relative grandeur in its architecture, and the ideological marker of the crucifix, all conspired to present a reliable place of familiarity and security. Wherever a person was, the homeland of the church was waiting.
In more contemporary times, the gothic arches have transformed themselves into golden arches. McDonalds’ is global. Wherever an economic frontier is opening, so is a McDonalds’. Travel where you might, that same hamburger and coke are waiting. Like Bernini’s piazza at St. Peters, the golden arches reach out to embrace their clients—so long as they consume, and leave when they are finished. While in the bunker, national boundaries are a thing of the past, in fact you are at home. Why travel at all? After all, wherever you go, you are already there.
There are also sedentary bunkers. This type is clearly nationalized, and hence is the bunker of choice for governments. It is the oldest type, appearing at the dawn of complex society, and reaching a peak in modern society with conglomerates of bunkers spread throughout the urban sprawl. These bunkers are in some cases the last trace of centralized national power (the White House), or in others, they are locations to manufacture a complicit cultural elite (the university), or sites of manufactured continuity (historical monuments). These are sites most vulnerable to electronic disturbance, as their images and mythologies are the easiest to appropriate.
In any bunker (along with its associated geography, territory, and ecology) the resistant cultural producer can best achieve disturbance. There is enough consumer technology available to at least temporarily reinscribe the bunker with image and language that reveal its sacrificial intent, as well as the obscenity of its bourgeois utilitarian aesthetic. Nomadic power has created panic in the streets, with its mythologies of political subversion, economic deterioration, and biological infection, which in turn produce a fortress ideology, and hence a demand for bunkers. It is now necessary to bring panic into the bunker, thus disturbing the illusion of security and leaving no place to hide. The incitement of panic in all sites is the postmodern gamble."
–Critical Art Ensemble The Electronic Disturbance, 1993

Unsolved Mysteries

2010-12-06T22:43:00.003-02:00

An application left open

2010-11-28T14:44:00.005-02:00

2010-11-17T19:42:00.000-02:00

Not Quite "Ivory Tower" Material

2010-11-13T19:49:00.003-02:00

upon entering the exhibit, he overheard the young docent exclaim "notice the sweaty punctum".

Almond Openings

2010-10-31T14:08:00.002-02:00

The New Odyssey

2010-10-21T11:38:00.004-02:00

Life Magazine, July 19 1968

Ron Benner

2010-10-18T12:56:00.004-02:00

"We have three phases of the Internet. The first phase is that of the hackers, where access was the issue, making software available. The second one, when you begin to have interest by private actors that did not quite know how to use it. It still was mostly a public space, in some ways protected. And now a third stage, the invasion of cyberspace by corporate actors: It's really combat out there. So, for me the internet becomes a space for contestation. I am here not only thinking about multinational corporations. I am thinking of all kinds of actors, including the misusers of the Net, which is something serious also.
"The bandwidth capacity is always a very difficult issue. It is not clear to me if the capacity will be endless, like in the notion of the old frontier, where you had "endless land." But it is not really endless. It takes a number of events to discover that. Certain laboratory productions of capacity are enormous, in terms of bandwidth. But I am not sure what happens once it moves from the lab to people and companies. There are two issues, the first being the economics of introducing the new technical capacities that are possible. And economics matters, We already now have poor men and women's email, where you wait forever. If you pay, you will have a high-speed connection. The other issue is a "degreening" of the practices on the Net, which I find very disturbing: The issue of bandwidth-consuming multimedia, forinstance, where things could also have been done via email.

"In order to have a broad, general debate about the issue of bandwidth, it might be important to see how we can visualize this topic. Which metaphors do we use, what kind of images? How would you describe the bandwidth topic for a wider audience?

"I grew up in Latin America. Anybody who has spent some time there or in Africa knows how difficult it is to place an international, long-distance call. You have to wait, sometimes for hours. You don't just get on the telephone and get access. Why? Because it is a question of capacity. You will experience the notion of inadequate carrying capacity. Today, those of us who use email through institutions have also had that experience. In Europe, it is different in the afternoon than in the morning.Why? Because in the afternoon the United States has woken up and has invaded the Internet. You get to wait a much longer time. If you have a lot of money, believe me, you will have a fast lane. In Bombay or São Paulo, you will find different circumstances. For instance there are porr and rich universities. Some universities in the United States, in order to save money, shift part of their bandwidth to commercial users after 5:00 p.m. And you will wait there forever to get a connection."

—Saskia Sassen in conversation with Geert Lovink, 1997.

Steve

2010-10-07T20:02:00.007-02:00

Hello Michael

Interesting project. Yes, I would be a good resource for you if I could provide you with some publication or article on the meaning of Buddhist robes, but I cannot. I have a slide presentation called "The Buddhist Robe: From Sakyamuni to Star Trek" but unfortunately I have no text to go with it. I just speak over top of the images.

The original Buddhist robe in India was made by sewing together pieces of defiled cloth--wrappings from corpses were considered ideal. The Japanese monk Dogen said the ideal cloth for a robe was one which had passed through the stomach of a cow. These pieces of cloth were stitched together (that is why the Buddhist robe has a checkerboard pattern, called "rice paddy" pattern in Asia) and then dyed a colour called kasyaya. The recipe for this dye was rust, earth and tree roots. The intention was to create a dirty unattractive color. The colour of the robe could not be one of the prime colors and not a color which, when put on the body, made the body attractive. The intention of the Buddhist robe was to cut the usual desire to making oneself attractive. Everyone wore the same style and color of robe to extinguish attachment to individuality (same justification for shaving the head). Everyone was limited to three basic robes (skirt robe, short robe and long robe) and these were not to be considered your own possession; they were given to you by the monastery. If a donor gave some fine cloth to the monastery for monks' robes, the monastery cut the cloth into small pieces to lessen its value. All dress was designed to cut the addiction to thinking of clothing as "my" possession and enhancing "my" appearance and expressing "my" status or individuality.

There is lots more on the history of the Buddhist robe. The end of the story however is that the robe gradually evolved into an adornment and came to be used in exactly the opposite way from the original Buddhist robe. The robe got made from expensive silk brocade and complicated ornamental design and pictures were woven into the fabric. Many colours were introduced to emphasize difference in rank. Monks had to had different kinds of robes, some for ordinary daily wear and some for formal ceremonial wear. Some robes now are fantastically expensive.

The peasant dress which Mao Tsu-tung instituted after the Chinese revolution in 1949 had many of the same purposes as the Buddhist robe. First, the old Chinese scholars' gown and the monks' robe were banned. These garments did not have legs, a split crotch, because Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks did no manual labour. So after Mao, everyone in China wore pants, signifying that everyone did manual labour. Then also, women wore pants as well, signifying gender equality. Even now, the older generation of women in China, the one that grew up in the 50s and 60s still wears pants. It is only very recently that younger women have started to wear skirts and dresses. In Mao's time, everyone wore the same colour and material of suit to emphasize their equality. And so on. The chief difference between the Buddhist robe and the Mao suit is that the Buddhist robe was donned as a personal decision for spiritual self-discipline; the Mao suit was imposed on people for political purposes, although lots of people personally agreed with its aims.

I did not mean to write this note. Got carried away with the topic.

Victor Sogen Hori

G. Victor Hori
Faculty of Religious Studies
McGill University
3520 University St.
Montreal, Quebec H3A 2A7
(514) 398-1347; fax (514) 398-6665
XXXXXXX@mcgill.ca

----- Original Message -----
FROM: XXXX
To: XXXXXXXXX@mcgill.ca

Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 11:58 AM

Subject: A history of Monastic robes

Greetings, my name is Michael Eddy and I am a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I have recently been asked by an artists' project out of Toronto, "The Grey Sweatsuit Revolution", to write a short account of the various meanings and interpretations behind the pratice of devotional dress. Specifially, my intention is to explore the approaches to the denial of one's self-image that various faiths and disciplines prescribe/suggest.

"The Grey Sweatsuit Revolution" is soliciting the general public to wear nothing but grey sweatsuits for the entire spring and summer in an ironic attempt to curb fashion authoritarianism. Initially I had sent the Revolution an e-mail questioning the redundancy of such a movement when various religious disciplines already take up the call; the organizer responded with an invitation to write an essay.

Terri Woo of Dalhousie University suggested I contact you, mentioning that you had been a monk and that you had written a piece on the topic of robes. You would seem a perfect resource.

Could you point me in a suitable direction? Thank you, Michael Eddy

Oh Finsbury Park!

2010-09-26T15:55:00.005-02:00

CARL PALM, VERY YOUNG ARTIST

2010-09-17T22:51:00.003-02:00

Progresso Soup

2010-09-08T04:36:00.009-02:00

Timothy Leary, Early in the life of every mammal

An Empty Paper Bag in a Suit

2010-09-06T17:37:00.009-02:00

Mr Harvey

This is to inform you that if you do make any more two course
Hole, you will have all your Frames broken and your goods too, though you may think you have made your doom just I shall know how to break your frames, we will not suffer you to win the Trade will die first, if we cant do it just to night we will break them yet, and if we cant break them we will break something better and we will do it too in spite of the devil.

Remember Ned Ludd

2010-09-05T06:47:00.003-02:00

Moulins

2010-09-02T07:18:00.010-02:00

Ecological ashtray designed with Felipe Escudero, going into mass production in 2013!

"I just met a Spanish artist who proposed a new project - it's a bit macho but could be interesting - he wants to punch every Spanish architect he meets in the face! To try and wake them up! It's a rather primitive form of critique but I think it encapsulates a frustration people have with what's going on in our built environment. Why should all these public spaces be privatized? Was anyone asked if they wanted another ridiculous mall in their neighborhood? But to answer your question - I think that it's done both. I'm now more aware of the compromises and processes involved when considering larger urban projects but that, in a way, makes not doing anything even more valuable." –Nils Norman

Hybriw

2010-08-30T07:37:00.009-02:00

"We will continue to employ the methodological concept of the model by setting out precisely what its attributes and properties are:
a) It refines certain characteristics of the concept in general, and of conceptual elaboration or conceptualization. By summing up an experimental and practical given, the classic consept turned too much towards the past, and also towards the simple. The model is a more flexible tool, capable of exploring the complex and the random. With it, thought becomes 'propositional' in a new way: programmatic. However, if the 'model' refines the concept, it cannot dispense with it. It presupposes a conceptual elaboration.
b) Like the concept, the model is a scientific abstraction and a level of abstraction. It is always revisable, and cannot be taken either as a reality or entity imminent to the real beneath the appearances of phenomena (the ontological temptation, which structuralism finds hard to avoid), or as a norm or value (the normative temptation). The methodology of models forbids their fetishization.
c) The model is constructed in order to confront 'reality' (experience and practice). It is useful, not least because it helps us to appreciate the gap between itself and the facts, between the abstract and the concrete, between what has been certified and what is still possible. The model is useful: it is a working implement for knowledge. Only the concept has the dignity of knowing.
d) As far as a set of facts is concerned, there can be no question of a single model. If we are to grasp the actual and the possible,we must construct several models. The confrontation between these will be as interesting theoretically as the confrontation between one of them and the concrete element it represents. In this way diversity and discussion during the process take on added value. No one model can be sufficient or pretend to be sufficient by bringing research to a halt. So we are faced with two alternatives: ontology or criticism, dogmatism or empiricism (or pure relativism).
e) The concept of the model also helps to refine the concept of hypothesis. Every model encompasses a hypothesis (in the broadest sense, theoretical or strategic). Every hypothesis concludes by constructing a model, which is the halfway stage between inventing the hypothesis and proving it. So the model assumes the qualities of the hypothesis: provability, creativity. As Politzer said, it should enable us to move from philosophical luxury to the economy of philosophy, by separating the hypothesis out from speculation.
f) Because it must prove its creativity, the model must have an operating or operational character. However, this trait must not be fetishized. The operating techniques linked to a particular model must be examined with care and suspicion. Fetishization of this characteristic, which blows it up out of all proportion, is the feature of a certain well-defined ideology, namely technocratism. The operational model becomes the practical and theoretical property of a bureaucracy and a technocracy. This brings us back to the most disturbing aspect of structuralism. The fetishization of the concept of the 'model' is part of the strategy of the social group of technocrats."
–Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life; Volume 2, p. 177.

2010-08-27T15:03:00.002-02:00

	Cosima von Bonin IDLER, LEZZER, TOSSPIECE, 2010 STEEL, GLASS FIBRE REINFORCED PLASTIC, ALUMINUM, STYROFOAM, LACQUER DELINEATION: COSIMA VON BONIN & DIRK VON LOWTZOW SITTER: LIVIA VON BONIN MANUFACTURING: SAYGEL & SCHREIBER BERLIN MAY AND JUNE 1, 2010 STEEL, LACQUER, PLATE-GLASS,SPRUCE 130 CM x 90 CM x 400 CM SMOKE, 2008 / 2010 (COSIMA VON BONIN & MICHEL WÜRTHLE) PERSPEX, STEEL, LACQUER, NEON LAMP, LIGHT-EMITTING DIODE Photo: Markus Trette © Kunsthaus Bregenz, Cosima von Bonin

a comely Dikē throttled an ugly Adikia

2010-08-24T07:42:00.005-02:00

"9. Archives are governed by the Laws of Intellectual Propriety as opposed to Property

As the monetary value of the global information economy gains more importance, the abstract value of images get articulated within the language of property and rights. The language of intellectual property normativizes our relationship to knowledge and culture by naturalizing and universalizing narrow ideas of authorship, ownership and property. This language has extended from the world of software databases to traditional archives where copyright serves as Kafka’s gatekeeper and the use of the archive becomes a question of rights management.

Beyond the status of the archive as property lies the properties of the archive which can destabilize and complicate received notions of rights.

They establish their own code of conduct, frame their own rules of access, and develop an ethics of the archive which are beyond the scope of legal imagination. If the archive is a scene of invention then what norms do they develop for themselves which do not take for granted a pre determined language of rights. How do practices of archiving destabilize ideas of property while at the same time remaining stubbornly insistent on questions of ‘propriety’.

Intellectual propriety does not establish any universal rule of how archives collect and make available their artifacts. It recognizes that the archivist play a dual role: They act as the trustees of the memories of other people, and as the transmitters of public knowledge. This schizophrenic impulse prevents any easy settling into a single norm.

Propriety does not name a set of legislated principles of proper etiquette, instead it builds on the care and responsibility that archivists display in their preservation of cultural and historical objects. The digital archive translates this ethic of care into an understanding of the ecology of knowledge, and the modes through which such an ecology is sustained through a logic of distribution, rather than mere accumulation.

It remembers the history of archivists being described as pirates, and scans its own records, files and database to produce an account of itself. In declaring its autonomy, archives seek to produce norms beyond normativity, and ethical claims beyond the law."

—from Pad.Ma, 10 Theses on the Archive

2010-08-15T11:39:00.003-02:00

"Dialectical materialism is not, and never has been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, “Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in time and space and not lose them in utterly idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated.” And above all else, “Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent."
- Richard Lewontin

Bad Vibel

2010-07-30T14:15:00.001-02:00

"Alan goes to Korea, where we have some big orders coming through," Ron explained recently over lunch--a hamburger, medium-well, with fries--in the V.I.P. booth by the door in the Polo Lounge, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "I call Alan on the phone. I wake him up. It was two in the morning there. And these are my exact words: `Stop. Do not pursue the bread-and-batter machine. I will pick it up later. This other project needs to come first.' " The other project, his inspiration, was a device capable of smoking meats indoors without creating odors that can suffuse the air and permeate furniture. Ron had a version of the indoor smoker on his porch--"a Rube Goldberg kind of thing" that he'd worked on a year earlier--and, on a whim, he cooked a chicken in it. "That chicken was so good that I said to myself"--and with his left hand Ron began to pound on the table--"This is the best chicken sandwich I have ever had in my life." He turned to me: "How many times have you had a smoked-turkey sandwich? Maybe you have a smoked- turkey or a smoked-chicken sandwich once every six months. Once! How many times have you had smoked salmon? Aah. More. I'm going to say you come across smoked salmon as an hors d'oeuvre or an entrée once every three months. Baby-back ribs? Depends on which restaurant you order ribs at. Smoked sausage, same thing. You touch on smoked food"--he leaned in and poked my arm for emphasis--"but I know one thing, Malcolm. You don't have a smoker."

- Malcolm Gladwell, "The Pitchman." The New Yorker, October 30, 2000

Hegel's Hotel

2010-07-10T04:42:00.007-02:00

Bernard Madoff Client List
"The accusation is that artists are at best the ultimate freelance knowledge workers and at worst barely capable of distinguishing themselves from the consuming desire to work at all times, neurotic people who deploy a series of practices that coincide quite neatly with the requirements of neoliberal, predatory, continually mutating capitalism of the every moment. Artists are people who behave, communicate and innovate in the same manner as those who spend their days trying to capitalize every moment and exchange of daily life. They offer no alternative."
—Liam Gillick

Manila Vice

2010-06-30T03:07:00.004-02:00

"But yeah, ten years ago, Paul Martin, who was then Canada’s finance minister, later Canada’s prime minister, was at a meeting with Larry Summers. This is 1999, so Summers at that time was Bill Clinton’s nominee for Treasury secretary. And the two men were discussing this idea to expand the G7 into a larger grouping to respond to the fact that developing country economies like China and India were growing very quickly, and they wanted to include them into this club, and they were under pressure to do so. So, what Martin and Summers did—and this history we only learned last week. This really wasn’t a history that had been told. So this story came out in The Globe and Mail. And it turns out that the two men didn’t have a piece of paper. They wanted to—I don’t know how this would possibly be the case, but their story is that they wanted to make a list of the countries that they would invite into this club, and they couldn’t find a piece of paper, so they found a manila envelope and wrote on the back of the manila envelope a list of countries. And by Paul Martin’s admission, those countries were not simply the twenty top economies of the world, the biggest GDPs. They were also the countries that were most strategic to the United States. So Larry Summers would make a decision that obviously Iran wouldn’t be in, but Saudi Arabia would be. And so, Saudi Arabia is in. Thailand, it made sense to include Thailand, because it had actually been the Thai economy, which, two years earlier, had set off the Asian economic crisis, but Thailand wasn’t as important to the US strategically as Indonesia, so Indonesia was in and not Thailand. So what you see from this story is that the creation of the G20 was an absolutely top-down decision, two powerful men deciding together to do this, making, you know, an invitation-only list.

"And what you really see is that this is an attempt to get around the United Nations, where every country in the world has a vote, and to create this expanded G7 or G8, where they invite some developing countries, but not so many that they can overpower or outvote the Western—the traditional Western powers. So, as this happened, we have also seen a weakening and an undermining of the United Nations. And I think that that’s the context in which the G20 needs to be understood. And that’s why a lot of the activists in Toronto this week were arguing that the G20 is an illegitimate institution and the price tag is—that we, as Canadian taxpayers, have had to take on for hosting this summit, you know, $1.2 billion, is particularly unacceptable, given that we have the United Nations, where these countries can meet in a much more democratic, much more legitimate forum, as opposed to this ad hoc invitation-only club from the back of an envelope in Larry Summers’s office."
–Naomi Klein talking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (June 28, 2010).

2010-06-19T19:59:00.003-02:00

"Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time—total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, nonactivity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected. Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but producers of something... Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art. Just as money is paper, so a gallery is a room. Artists from the East were lazy and poor because the entire system of insignificant factors did not exist. Therefore they had time enough to concentrate on art and laziness. Even when they did produce art, they knew it was in vain, it was nothing... Finally, to be lazy and conclude: There is no art without laziness."
—Mladen Stilinovic´from Documenta 12 Magazine Nº 12 Life!, 2007

the nurturing, comfortable, safe, infinitely promising Holding Environment

2010-06-11T08:21:00.008-02:00

Late stages in the Structural Integrity exhibition as part of the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne.

The laptop in the Holding Environment powered the works of two different pieces by other artists, a radio broadcast by "Sound Research of China" and a video by Guangzhou-based artist Zhou Tao. The heat from the computer's operation helped to produce an appropriate climate for the growth of mushrooms—in this case, the oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus)—inside the Holding Environment. Remember, May is autumn in Australia.

The Golden Flush

2010-05-31T13:38:00.003-02:00

"Although the city was soon choking on its own effluent again, the value of night soil and animal dung was still firmly engrained in people's minds - particularly since seventeenth-century Londoners had discovered the pleasures of fruit and vegetables grown in their own manure."

Hungry City - Carolyn Steel

Check out Spoox Magazine's newest issue #6 !!!! Audio magazine featuring the Knowles Eddy Knowles track "Teddy's World", from "Soundtrack for the Holding Environment" (2008) http://spooxmagazine.org/

2010-05-28T13:01:00.001-02:00

2010-04-09T10:22:00.007-02:00

No results found for artworld:

Did you mean antiworld?

The square peg doghouse with big round catflaps

2010-04-09T00:45:00.001-02:00

Those Patio Lanterns

2010-04-02T02:14:00.006-02:00

Model: Gordon Laurin.

Date: Thursday, August 9th, 1984
City: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Venue: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Cafeteria

In the August '98 issue of "Chart" magazine, Jay Ferguson from Sloan interviews Thurston (and Steve) and they discuss this show:

Jay: The reason I mention Halifax is because Sonic Youth actually came and played here in the early '80s...do you have any memories of that?

Thurston: Yeah, the Nova Scotia College contacted us; it was really early on... They asked if we wanted to come up and do a symposium. I didn't really have any idea what that meant. I just thought we were going to play a gig. I think Kim and Lee had more of an idea but they didn't really, sort of, translate it to me. They just figured I knew as well [laughs]. Anyways, the first thing we had to do is go to this class and sort of talk about ourselves... and then we were walking out, thinking "What are we doing?" There was no real agenda except to go to this class. We just sat around and talked to some students. And then I made a flyer for the gig that night.

Jay: A friend of mine has one of those.

Thurston: Oh, wow... I just took it out of a film book... It was from some 80s horror movie.... [Just then, Steve Shelley pipes up: "Evil Dead?"] ... Evil Dead! It was a picture of this hand coming out of a grave and grabbing this woman like this. [Thurston illustrates by grabbing his throat with his hand, to much laughter.] And I wrote "Sonic Youth Live Halifax," et cetera. We hung them up all over town and all over the university. There was a large feminist contingency there and they were just incensed.

Jay: Oh, really?

Thurston: Like, "Who are these people coming here and putting this obscene imagery all over the place?" And they tore 'em all down and spread the word to ban the show. At the same time, there was a huge hardcore gig in town. I think it was D.O.A. and, like, 20 other bands. So the kids who were going to go see something, they were gonna go to that. And the art students were sort of conflicted about going. So I'd say there was maybe eight people there.

Jay: I think it's one of those shows that 150 people claim they saw but there was only.... Well, eight people.

Thurston: We also, at the time, picked up a lot of stuff from the streets of Halifax and brought it to the gig. We did a lot of banging on garbage cans. A lot of clatter.

(from the Sonic Youth website)

"If you think the quality of tobacco from the factories is bad, think of the counterfeit stuff being processed without regulations in caves!"

2010-03-29T02:27:00.007-02:00

Spa entrance sculpture.