Hermenautic Circle blog

The weather has been uncharacteristically sunny and mild, lately. ”It’s a lie,” I tell visiting friends.

But really it’s a gift. I’m trying to remember to look and appreciate.

This isn’t what I thought my fall would look like. I had a plan, then the plan had to change. I’m not going where I thought I was going. I won’t be doing what I thought I’d be doing. If I manage to accrete significant words in my manuscript over the next few weeks, I’ll be surprised. Doubt I’ll be around here much either, except perhaps for more photo posts.

But things need doing when they need doing. The words will come. And right now, I’m glad that while I’m thinking about everything I need to do, I can look at the leaves.

xintra: Some dudes are so insecure that if it weren't for all their heavy emotional baggage, even gravity would abandon them for being too needy.

Man gets smartphone dock built into prosthetic arm - Telegraph

(from Uzumaki vol 1, by Junji Ito, 1998)

Vintage Halloween Records:

Happy Halloween from Jive Time! See what monsters were lurking in our record bins. Visit Oldies But Ghoulies.

The London Observer, Monday, November 18th, 1822:

WAR AND COMMERCE.—It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighborhood of Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal…

prostheticknowledge:

Computer graphics is bringing to light the ecosystems of the deep (via Hooded Fang*)

Graphics. The mind’s eye for those who think tomorrow.

Advert found in an old Scientific America magazine.

“The London Metropolitan Police Force uses a tracking appliance that can force mobile devices to cough up their unique IDs (IMEIs and IMSIs) and give the Met realtime views into who is where and who they’re with. The devices can also intercept SMSes and effect denial of service attacks on handsets.”

- London cops recording movements & association with mobile tracking device: “blanket & indiscriminate” - Boing Boing

Memphis, Tennessee, Beale Street

 Wolcott, Marion Post October 1939

New York Public Library 

Underwater Witch

Bonnie Jean Allen 195-

State Library and Archives of Florida 

Hallowe’en

New York Public Library 

19:30 (stacks), 2011 – Aleksandra Domanovic

You’ve
been blogging for VVORK with Oliver Laric, Christoph Priglinger, and Georg
Schnitzer since 2006. How has working with this small collective affected your
own practice over the years?

I was just finishing my design studies
and was invited to post on VVORK. I wasn’t the only one, there was a couple more
who got the user password but posted only a few times. I got really into it,
posting all the time, eventually the guys had to give me the admin password. I
did not make art before VVORK, now I see it as part of my own artistic
practice.

In 2009 you
created Biennale (Dictum Ac Factum). The page on your site includes
anachronistic images, videos, and lyrics from throughout the 20th century and
mixes them with images and video from the 2009 Somali pirate attacks among
other contemporary moments. What was your conceptualization behind the work
and how, in your mind, do you link the varied sources, images, and stories
together?

All of these materials relate to the video–a 3d
visualization of “Dogville” from Lars von Trier’s film–which is the
only component of the work that I produced. It was meant to be a piece by
itself but I did not think it was good enough. Sometimes the making-of is much
more interesting than the work itself or the piece makes only sense in the
context of it’s creation. As I was researching about the film, I found out that
the inspiration for the script was a song called “Pirate Jenny” performed
by Nina Simone, which Trier had accidentally heard. The song was written in
1928 for Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. It’s about a wash-girl who is
ignored and abused by society. One day, pirates arrive and take over the town.
Jenny is placed in command and she orders the pirates to kill everyone. Everything
went form there on. Digging deeper into research, tracing back the sources and
influences, inspirations, past and current connections, technical tools, the
biennial as the exhibition context, etc. The ocean was added at the end, after
I had a dream about it. On the finished website, no hierarchy was applied to
the sources, that’s how things exist online.

The description
in the source code for your site includes a quote by Archbishop Wulfstan from
1014 about the world “getting closer to its end.” What inspired you to include
this quote and how does it relate to your work?

“In Switzerland
they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did
they produce? The cuckoo clock!”

You’ve worked with
ideas of dislocation, erasure of history, and political inequity.
In Turbo Sculpture you present VVORK’s 2009 IMG MGMT essay as a narrated video slideshow.
Outside of this specific historical phenomenon do you think the concept of
Turbo Folk extends beyond former Yugoslavia and occurs currently in other countries?

VVORK got asked to write something for Art Fag City, and
since none of the guys had time and I was already researching this subject, I
ended up writing the essay, which I later turned into a video. One can find Turbo-Culture
everywhere from Las Vegas to Macau, but Turbo is much more politicized in former
Yugoslavia.

Srđan Jovanović Weiss writes the following about Turbo Architecture:
“The condition that further separates Belgrade architectural doom from say Greek
or Florida kitsch, is precisely the political and social context in which the
constructions occurred.” He goes on: “What differentiates Serbian Turbo from
architectural amassment of kitsch in California, Florida or Long Island is that
the latter is quintessentially apolitical. Neither official nor public
resistance is projected over these mansions in the US; while in Serbia, urban
and intellectual resistance was immense, defiant and defining.”  Of course he is talking about Serbian architecture
in the 90s and I came up with the term in 2009. Maybe the more precise name for
these sculptures would have been  “Neo-Turbo”.
Turbo-Culture changed after the fall of Milošević in 2000. It lost some of the
negative characteristics like nationalism and xenophobia, while hanging on to
the same stylistic identity.

Your work often includes a multitude
of sources, often with limited or no attribution – unless an image
is watermarked, for example. In your opinion, should artists who source from
the internet be free to use any content they can capture?

They should do whatever they want. Recently, during a studio
visit, a curator was very concerned about the news tracks I gathered for my
“19:30” project. Since I only had the rights to play the tracks in a exhibition
context, how was I to make a party in a club where these tracks would be DJ’d?!
My answer was that if we had no choice but to listen to this music, sometimes
10 or more years hearing the same track on daily repetition, than we had all
the right to at least dance to it.

---

Age:
30

Location:
Berlin.

How long have you
been working creatively with technology?  How did you start?
I joined a computer club at school when I was 8. I was the
youngest and the only girl, there. We were programing the computer to draw the
Olympic circles. I did not completely get it but I think I knew more about
programing then, than I know now.

Describe your
experience with the tools you use.  How did you start using them?
My older brother introduced me to computers and internet. I
don’t fetishize or love computers. They were there so I started using them,
also out of fear not to stay behind.

Where did you go to
school? What did you study?
I went to high school for design and photography in
Ljubljana, studied architecture for a year in Ljubljana and then graduated in design
in Vienna.

What traditional
media do you use, if any?  Do you think your work with traditional media
relates to your work with technology?
None, or at least I can’t think of any. Maybe photography.

Are you involved in
other creative or social activities (i.e. music,writing, activism,
community organizing)?
Drumming and lots of sports.

What do you do for a
living?  Do you think your job relates to your art practice in a
significant way?
I don’t support myself I am supported.

Who are your key
artistic influences?
Yugoslav socialist cartoons and 90s music videos.

Have you collaborated
with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?
With VVORK on curating shows and events.

Do you actively study
art history?
Usually only project specific.

Do you read art
criticism, philosophy, or critical theory?  If so, which authors inspire
you?
I read more fiction and history than theory. Some of the
recent inspiring texts I read were from Chris Kraus, Julian Assange and Renata
Salecl.

Are there any issues
around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you
are concerned about?
It should be exhibited more frequently in commercial
galleries and sold.

Louise Amstrup – Print Vest Top | BENGT Fashion, via Alex.

Hope Larson has a Tumblr devoted to her experiments with homemade ice cream. You know what to do.

hopelarson:

Bizcochito Ice Cream

Inspired by the cinnamon and anise-flavored state cookie of New Mexico. I’m on my second draft of this flavor, and I think I’ve just about got it. I’m excited to road-test it on top of a nice pumpkin pie.

Google/CAB Password Advertisement in Independent on Sunday (by STML)

http://www.google.co.uk/goodtoknow/

And yes: today is, appropriately enough, the 30th anniversary of the release of the Misfits’ “Halloween”/”Halloween II” single. Here’s both sides.

The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry have co-published “New Art/Science Affinities,” a 190-page book on contemporary artists that was written and designed in one week by four authors (Andrea Grover, Régine Debatty, Claire Evans and Pablo Garcia) and two designers (Luke Bulman and Jessica Young of Thumb).

“New Art/Science Affinities,” which focuses on artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology, was produced by a collaborative authoring process known as a “book sprint.” Derived from “code sprinting,” a method in which software developers gather in a single room to work intensely on an open source project for a certain period of time, the term book sprint describes the quick, collective writing of a topical book.

The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Chapters include Program Art or Be Programmed, Subvert! Citizen Science, Artists in White Coats and Latex Gloves, The Maker Moment and The Overview Effect.

Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz. 

The authors collectively wrote and designed the book during seven, 10-14 hour-days in February 2011 at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. During their sessions they held conversations with CMU faculty, staff and students from the STUDIO, Miller Gallery, College of Fine Arts, Robotics Institute, Machine Learning Department and BXA Intercollege Degree Program.

“The book sprint method was adopted in order to understand this very moment in art, science and technology hybrid practices, and to mirror the ways Internet culture and networked communication have accelerated creative collaborations, expanded methodologies, and given artists greater agency to work fluidly across disciplines,” says lead author Andrea Grover….

 

Jean-Honore Fragonard, “The Reader” (1770-72)

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The Times’ Pop Goes Art album came out October 31, 1981. Here’s “Biff! Bang! Pow!” from it.

“The secret keeper gloves are a way to fulfill the very human urge to tell a secret, without sharing the secret to others. The wearer speaks the secret into her cupped hands, and then can play it back by holding her hand to her ear.”

secret keeper gloves (by meg grant)

Blue Rondo A La Turk’s “Me and Mr. Sanchez” single came out October 31, 1981. Here’s a rather quiet video.

Hallowe’en Greetings

New York Public Library 

The Pretenders’ Halloween 1981 release was a cover of the Kinks’ “I Go to Sleep.” Here’s a TV appearance from that era.

Of all the high-lowbrow movements to streak across the back half of the twentieth century — the French New Wave, Brazilian Tropicalia, Underground Comics, Punk — it’s the early 1960s revolution in horror which is least recognized, least known and least understood. Even the savviest critics of the era missed this tidal change because the very breadth of it rolled in behind larger cultural and generational waves, and what critical focus it drew came wrapped in moral panic and disapproval.

[First in a series of posts by David Smay on horror movies of the early 1960s.]

Blood and Roses

In 1960 alone, Psycho, Peeping Tom, Black Sunday, and Eyes Without a Face played in theaters. Yet that clutch of five-star masterpieces only represents a fraction of that year’s important work which also saw the Japanese vision of hell, Jigoku, two Hammer horrors in The Brides of Dracula and Two Faces of Dr. Jeckyll, Roger Corman’s first gothic, The Fall of the House of Usher as well as his cult cheapie Little Shop of Horrors, Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses, and Village of the Damned.

There was really no way to see this happening as it occurred. Psycho dominated both the box office and the mainstream press, and the avid and active horror fandom of the time was too busy looking backward in a happy wallowing glut of old horror movies on television. Even as late as the ’80s with Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and the ’90s with David Skaal’s The Horror Show that early 1960s era was seen as a period of horror quatschification, the uncanny cozily commodified by “Monster Mash” and Famous Monsters of Filmland, horror hosts like Ghoulardi and model kits of The Mummy.

The years between 1960 and 1963 not only saw an unprecedented explosion of masterful film horror, but it was also the golden age of the television horror anthology with great work airing on The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller. Even Roald Dahl hosted his own series for one season in 1961, Way Out. If you think of Psycho as the Never Mind the Bollocks of the era, with Black Sunday as The Ramones’ Leave Home, you can see the shorter, sharper shocks of TV horror as the ceaseless spew of fantastic punks singles by Stiff Little Fingers and The Ruts and The Only Ones. (By this analogy, The Twilight Zone stands as the great singles band of the era. In short, it’s the Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady.)

Another complicating factor in the invisible ubiquity of early ’60s horror were the censors’ scissors which snipped away the most potent scenes in Eyes Without a Face and Black Sunday which toured in butchered versions. (Eyes Without a Face infamously played across the south as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus coupled on a double-bill with The Manster.) It was only in the early twenty-first century when Criterion released definitive DVD releases of Eyes Without a Face, Jigoku (long rumored and rarely seen in the West), Carnival of Souls and Peeping Tom and Mario Bava’s work came out in uncut, remastered editions that the impact of the work came into focus.

The Innocents

And still, it’s difficult to wrap your brain around the era because not only did it produce an arterial spray of great films, and iconic television episodes, but it came in such an unwieldy, critically resistant mass. Black Sunday and The Fall of the House of Usher both consciously copied the success of Hammer’s gothics, but one launched the Italian horror industry, while the other set off the most important horror cycle in American independent film. Psycho and Peeping Tom both circled around mentally bent protagonists in mundane, contemporary settings, but Hitchcock had his greatest success, while Powell’s career was destroyed. No single critical theory encompasses the high literary adaptation of The Innocents (based on James’ Turn of the Screw), Psycho killers, the Poe/Stoker/Shelley gothics, the era-capping gore of Blood Feast, the camp satire of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, the Cocteau-derived Eyes or the dreamy Val Lewton influence on The Haunting and Night Tide.

The critical language itself fumbles trying to parse these distinctions. In Danse Macabre Stephen King articulates a difference between “horror” and “terror” which parallels a long-standing divide between “body horror” and “psychological horror.” But even “psychological horror” is a baggy term that conflates Crazy Killers (i.e., Psycho and its many imitators) with narratives wavering on the edge of the supernatural (i.e., “The Turn of the Screw” and its many imitators). The longstanding middlebrow bias against body horror, violence and gore fueled outright censorship and also a kind of tut-tutting disdain. Both Georges Franju and Michael Powell suffered critical hits for lowering their distinguished careers into the horror gutter, a move seen as both unseemly and crassly money-grubbing.

Within just this four-year span from 1960 to 1963, horror covers a vast landscape, so in my next section I’ll carve a narrower path, looking at the films The Haunting, The Innocents, Blood and Roses, Night Tide, Eyes Without a Face, Carnival of Souls and Burn, Witch, Burn. These movies are linked by an emphasis on uncanny dreaminess over body horror (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), and women who aren’t running from chainsaws, but walking slowly towards their fearful desires.

I’ll explore the porous boundaries between the art film and horror in this era, recruit Italo Calvino to explain the difference between “the fantastic” and “the marvelous,” and make compelling yet insupportable claims for the unethical virtues of horror.

***

SIMILAR HILOBROW SERIES: FITTING SHOES — famous literary footwear | POP ARCANA — spelunking weird culture | SHOCKING BLOCKING — cinematic blocking

Franklin.

If you're searching for the sacred springs of poetic inspiration, your first port of call wouldn’t usually be KPMG, Halliburton or Pot Noodle.

But copywriter Nick Asbury has shown that poetry – hovering between the intended and the unintended – abounds in corporate and brand discourse. He's created a technique, Corpoetics, which involves replicating extracts from websites and business publications, and re-arranging them on the page to draw out their poetic potential.

Here’s an example of Corpoetics in practice:

'KPMG'

I am strong.
I am vibrant.
I am committed to a vision.

I am tremendous.
I am quality.
I will lead people to excellence.

I am delighted.
I am respected.
I am very greatly valued.

What am I?
I am the best.

Read the original KPMG text here.

While gently poking fun at the pretensions of corporate language, Corpoetics isn’t meant to be primarily critical. In fact, it’s the very subtlety of the technique that offers semioticians an interesting perspective.

These poems take existing signs and get us reading them differently, thanks to a minimal act of reframing. It shows that critical thought needn’t always look beyond the surface of the sign to find a hidden truth beneath. Sometimes all it needs to do is stay with the signifier – playing with surface forms to draw out a wider range of meaning.

‘Halliburton’, for instance, reveals a desolation that might not have come through on a conventional reading:

We operate in broad array,

starting with production –

finally to infrastructure

and abandonment.

Corpoetics is a technique everyone can try at home. Readers are welcome to share examples in the comments thread below! Here are the rules as supplied by Nick:

·     Take the text from the ‘about us’ page of any corporate website
·     Rearrange the words into a poem
·     You don’t have to use all the words
·     You can use the same word twice
·     No fragments or anagrams of words
·     Punctuation can be added as necessary

 

Links

To read more about Corpoetics, and order a copy of Nick's book, visit his website here.

Batman Leaves a Sonnet on Selina Kyle’s Voicemail

Your whip was at the crime scene. Break-in, there
at Gotham’s Petting Zoo. Cat burglary—
you took a cage of lynxes. Dawned on me
to search the floor for fur, and I found hair

too long and straight and dark, just like your stare;
been searching zoos, invading surgeries
at animal hospitals all night; I need
you to return my call. I swear

your alter ego’s name is safe with me.
I need it that way, need her to stay clear
and skylined on skyscrapers’ tips, to flee

from me, but not this far ahead. I’m near
now, on the fire escape. Pick up. I see
your shadow on the blinds. I hear your purr.

***

In the spirit of our Epic Wins series, Chad Parmenter’s cycle of Batman poems will be appearing through the week. Photo via Toronto History on Flickr.

Happy Halloween, via John Hilgart’s Supertype! gallery of comic book mastheads.

If Super Tight isn’t your favorite ersatz public access TV series yet, then you just wait… Puppets, gender melt, sketches — and, in this new Halloween special, an interview with my dark side.

Remember: if you can’t beat them, join them start your own alternative economy slash media ecosystem.

screenshots followed by SUPER TIGHT episode 2: Hollow Weenies.

and here’s a handy breakout video of the interview.

View from Top of Nelson’s Pillar

National Library of Ireland

Have finished all reading for tomorrow (a good chunk of Jonathan Arac's Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, Gulliver's Travels and Terry Castle's essay "Why the Houyhnhnms Don't Write"); must write comments on at least a few assignments before I stop work for the evening, but really I am weary and will have to do the rest of them and prepare actual classes in the early morning tomorrow.

The Philadelphia trip today was tiring but worthwhile (fortunately my trains weren't seriously delayed - all sorts of other Amtrak and New Jersey transit trains were canceled or delayed by hours due to yesterday's storm).  Bonus: the birthday party featured two different kinds of cake, both very delicious! One was daffodil cake, courtesy of E. and the Spring Mill Cafe (it is a very good light angel's food cake with whipped cream and lemon curd); the other (I think I have its provenance right) was the amazingly good red velvet cake from Golosa.  My preferred cake of that ilk is carrot or pumpkin bread, not red velvet, as I am suspicious of the notion of ingesting large amounts of red food coloring (or on the other hand why not just have chocolate cake if you are moving in that direction?); but it is very good, the icing was perfect....

I have a lot to do this week, but on Friday morning I am leaving the country for a week at B.'s place!  Will have to take a heap of work with me, it is true, but it will be good nonetheless: I am taking advantage of Columbia's oddly timed election holiday and a week with no actual teaching or office-hour obligations.  It is fortuitous that I will be able to participate in the Cayman Islands Triathlon a week from today; also, there is an 800m swim race next Saturday, rescheduled from October due to weather, so there's no reason I shouldn't do that also.  Due to a combination of insufficient training on my part and the fact that exclusively quite fast people do triathlons in Cayman, I will certainly be one of the last couple finishers, but it should be enjoyable nonetheless, though I will be cursing my lack of heat acclimation on the run...

Just a week ago, two passenger jets landing at West Country airports were targeted. Heathrow and Gatwick are also trouble spots. Last year there were 1,494 recorded cases in the UK, and in the summer of 2010 there were two “very serious near accidents”, where pilots of commercial flights – carrying up to 400 passengers – were forced to hand over control to their co-pilots and receive guidance from air traffic control after being temporarily blinded. Sergeant Richard Brandon of the Metropolitan Police Air Support Unit said: “This is a massive problem… I don’t think people realise the seriousness of the issue.”

Some 80 per cent of incidents occur during landing, where full concentration is required. In September last year Radu Moldovan, a Romanian strawberry-picker in Scotland, was jailed for four months for shining a laser into the cockpit of an RAF Tornado while it was conducting a complicated landing manoeuvre.

Huge rise in cases of pilots being targeted by lasers - Crime, UK - The Independent

Well, here’s a bizarre story. Evidently, when the Queen Mother died on March 30, 2002, the BBC was roundly criticized for the fact that the newsman announcing her death was wearing a gray suit and a burgundy tie at the time. This was perceived as being intensely disrespectful. De rigeur for Elizabeth II’s inevitable death announcement: dark suit, black tie, white shirt. (Also learned a new British-English folk expression meaning to die via a comment on this story — “pop her clogs.” Lovely.) Let us hope that all decorum is observed when it is time to deliver the obsequies. And such. Via the Daily Mail.

World War II espionage agent and gay rights activist — via the Guardian.

Yup’ik dance diva — via the Anchorage Daily News.

Maryann Sundown 2011 from Dean Swope on Vimeo.

Expert in international criminal law and supporter of human rights — via the New York Times.

Computer scientist — via the New York Times. He coined the concept and phrase “artificial intelligence.”

Theater and film director — via the New York Times.

John Foxx’s “Dancing Like a Gun” single came out October 30, 1981. Here’s the original promo video.

Awaiting Rescue 

Aerial photograph of lifeboat from the SS City of Benares. The passenger liner was carrying children being evacuated from Britain to Canada when it was sunk in a U-Boat attack on the convoy in which it was travelling. Only 13 of the 90 children on board survived and government evacuation of children to the Dominions such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia (the CORB scheme) immediately ceased.

 September 1940

National Archives UK

Edwin F. Coffin (1883-1969, MAI staff member) cleaning a stone head at the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation

1916

Smithsonian Institute 

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Architecture and Morality album came out October 30, 1981. Here’s a live performance of “The New Stone Age” from that period. (Late ‘81, not the Stone Age.)

The Blasters’ self-titled album came out October 30, 1981. Here’s a live TV performance of “I’m Shakin’” from that era.

Fun Boy Three’s “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum” single came out October 30, 1981. Here’s a TV performance from that era.

Please check out the Wage Slave’s Glossary homepage, and help us spread the word about our book!

***

October 27: PANEL DISCUSSION ANNOUNCEMENT

On Oct. 27, Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts announced a panel discussion on the representation of labour for November 8th, at 6:30 pm, featuring WSG coauthor Mark Kingwell and German photographer Martin Weinhold. The discussion’s context is Weinhold’s Workspace Canada exhibition opening at Ryerson’s I·M·A GALLERY on November 3. Over the past decade, Weinhold has documented workers and their working conditions across Canada.

The press release notes: “The Wage Slave’s Glossary, written by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell, will be on sale at the panel discussion. Glenn and Kingwell have condensed the language of labour in North American culture into a glossary that articulates the frustrations of being in the labour force today.”

The event will take place at Ryerson University, 285 Victoria Street, Fifth Floor, Room 501.

October 27: LANGUAGE MUSEUM

On Oct. 27, the blog Language Museum posted a nice mention of the WSG.

“In the dictionary are words borrowed from other languages that reflect office life, new words appropriate for our current economic situation and historic words whose meaning has changed (career for example).”

October 26: BRAINSTORMIN’ WITH BILLY THE BRAIN

On Oct. 26, thought leader Mark Kingwell was interviewed about the WSG on the KKZZ (Ventura, Calif.) radio show “Brainstormin’ with Billy the Brain.” Listen to the interview here or click on the PLAY button below (skip to 4:15).

Mark Kingwell on the WSG by HILOBROW

October 25: THE PEOPLE’S LIBRARY

A friend points out that the WSG is well-represented in the People’s Library (the OWS Library’s catalog on LibraryThing).

October 24: @DANDAVIESII

October 23: OCCUPY WALL STREET

Photo taken in Zucotti Park by Flickr user robthoco.

October 23: M’AIDEZ

This tattoo posted to the Tumblr M’Aidez on Oct. 23.

***

ALSO SEE: Rushkoff vs. the 1% (1) | Tactical Utopia | Feral Dissent | Don’t Mourn, Organize | Occupying Our Gardens | Grand Theft Politics | The Black Iron Prison | News about the Wage Slave’s Glossary

Posted in Uncategorized

It is snowing outside, and it’s still October.

I’ll be in London from November 2-10, and Berlin from November 10-16. Get in touch if you’re there too.

And here’s another guest post I wrote on the global reach of disco, for Wired‘s Beyond the Beyond.

that I am mighty tempted to secure a seat for one of these Ring Cycle series in the spring.  I don't know Wagner's music well at all, so it is more a program of self-education than of true self-lavishing pleasure, but it seems as though it might be worthwhile, and I do not know when I'll have such an easy chance again.  I have a ticket (up in the very highest, farthest-away seats, through bargain CU ticket-purchasing!) to the Philip Glass Satyagraha for later this month, I might scope out which of the not-quite-cheapest-but-not-so-expensive seats would seem an improvement on the basics if I were to go to Wagner - there are operas I will see from the furthest distance and steepest and most vertiginous seating (namely, anything Mozart), whereas Verdi et al. I will only see from lavishly expensive seats paid for by someone other than myself.  Wagner might fall somewhere between the two.... On the other hand, there are the HD simulcast performances also, where (as it has been observed) one can slip out to use the bathroom and get a drink of water...*

(It was this NYT review of Siegfried that made me think of it.  It is a minor point, but Eric Owens was my Philadelphia contemporary and the star student of my oboe teacher Susan Simon: I didn't know him in those days other than in passing, i.e. at Settlement music recitals, but he was one of those incredibly talented multifaceted musicians who you are not at all surprised to hear years later praised in print in the most glowing terms...)

* (Actually I have looked up the text of the FT interview with Thomas Larcher that I had in mind, and it is more vivid than my paraphrase: “If a four-hour Morton Feldman quartet is performed in a concert hall, you start thinking after 90 minutes ‘Well, I really have to go to the loo’. And after two and a half hours it’s martyrdom. But if you’re listening to the recording at home, while lying in bed and smoking some dope, it can be great.")

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