11/30/02:
posted by jeremy @ 10:34 PM
:
Airplane notes -
29.11.02, en route to Chicago
**2-level mind
my tendency toward inneffectively transforming parantheses.
there must be a way toward a two-minded syntax
text/image is the immediate predecessor
what does texta/ textb look like? word/ intent? dissonance between eyes and minds??
**i realise that ideally the annotated surf and the daily habit of digitising and layering one's readings with documented, analysed, and collected searches could become an ideal mental prothesis. i blog because i've no ability to remember these things.
**i'm wondering if a singular global langage is in fact the exponential proliferation of digitised and quick bursts of singular meaning, constantly sporadically generated and intended for . While the quality of this conscious (but automated) literature would initially indicate a deevolution from a textual tradition, the multilayered richness of good literature (say the untranslatable psychological prescience of Hamlet) would in fact be replaced and improved with the relevance of an infinitely diffused source of production.
posted by jeremy @ 10:14 PM
:
Airplane notes -
25.11.02, en route to New Orleans
**as the plane floats from birmingham; full of sober stares, fat vowels; this quiet ugly city, small clumps of lights pushed to centre by thick black earth; looks back at faint winter sunset; spectrum cold as a science diagram; every sight from a plane is an abstraction
**i'm realising that hubris is a condition that i was aware of long before I knew there was a word for it.
**"In nature, the new is mythic, because its potential is not yet realised; In consciousness, the old is mythic because its desires were never fulfilled"
- Walter Benjamin
posted by jeremy @ 9:48 PM
:
Two terrifying externals straight from my hyperbolic inner monologue
1. For anyone (like me (especially in Chicago)) wondering if their opinions of the local rent-raisin' mucky-mucks are a little too caricaturised, confirm these stereotypes and more with the often viciously anti-social views expressed by the white-hatted, ray-banned nouveau riche at LPTrixie.com. I honestly thought this was satire at first, but this not-so little society is quite for real. Articles include "Celebrating a new Starbucks" and "Come ride in my Jetta."
2. I'm quick to mentally characterise certain rejected ideas as "fascist," yet refrain from taking this epithet too seriously. However, it becomes a bit disconcerting to read Brian Holmes article "Unleashing the collective phantom" (from Mute #24) arguing that networked culture, while promising democratised channels of access and dissemination of cultural production, actually functions as a conscious but militarised from of "neo-fascism"-
"This work helps us see what the easy money and pluralism of the Clinton years kept hidden: the outlines of a social pathology. It has an authoritarian cast ? like everything that involves the military ? but it does not produce unthinking, stereotyped behaviour of the kind we associate with fascism. What Crandall describes is an extremely intelligent process that, precisely by individualising ? tracking, identifying, eliciting desire, channelling vision and expression ? succeeds in binding the mobilised individual to a social whole. The new fascism discovers a complex, dynamic order for subjective difference, perspectival analysis, jouissance, even schizophrenic ecstasy. It integrates networked individualism."
The article that Holmes sites is called "Fingering the Trigger" by artist Jordan Crandall, also an oddly prescient read.
posted by jeremy @ 9:27 PM
:
Salut from back in Chico...
Some interesting announcements in the bag of 143 e-mails awaiting me (does anyone else generate this much freakin' mail from simply subscribing to newsletters?) -
Here's some punchy new "concept fiction" from Haypenny.com including pieces from my very good Detroit friends Paul and Dennis. Haypenny's a great read for anyone who can handle more than a thousand words of e-text at a time, or anyone who can appreciate a clever use of clip-art men.
Also, Irma Records finally semi-finished their website .
Some of my favourite musical purchases of this year have been from this Italian label's stable, including Grupo Batuque, Bossa Nostra, and Clan Greco. Try these tasty electronic jazz samplings.
posted by jeremy @ 6:02 PM
11/27/02:
Salut from "n'AH-lins"!
I'm broadcasting via this charming little CyberCafe space at the Contemporary Art Center, across from the D-Day Museum. I walked through the latter for about 20-minutes + a 45-minute Spielberg-produced documentary (humouring my step-dad, but still interesting nonetheless) and it actually becomes a nice little prologue to the two immediately exhbition-conscious shows at this empty but well-designed new art space.
2nd floor of the CAC is new work by Christian Marclay, anchored by the guitar-drag piece that visited Chicago. The curators allow the din of the room to bleed through the rest of the area, grounding the three other language-based pieces with the randomly generated music that links each work, creating a fluid transition between senses and spaces as one pulls the layers rom each piece.
I'm becoming aware more and more that my immediate cognition is always juxtaposing two levels of concentration. This is always dramatically clear in my web-browser use (2-3 open windows, one loading a new page while i read another), constant media-related sensation that regulates desire with ironic sublimation, and detatchment and bitter surrender that fuels my spoken sarcasm. Having spent most of the past 48-hours in the familiar simulacra of the New Orleans French Quarter, I'm aware more and more of our daily manic sweeps through fantasy and the "practicalities" of the inability for the dirty contexts of the past to exist on their own.
the CAC's first floor is a wonderful installation by Peretti and Day, two glass artists currently based in Germany. The piece consists of five rooms that chronologically become both stages of grief and rites of psychological maturity (of an apparently male orientation). The materials consist mainly of found objects, much like the nostalgic antique tchotchkes found in Cracker Barrel-type restaurants(link via Excitement Machine) mixed with digital prints, video, mannequins, poetic texts woven into sculpted pieces, and yes, a little glass.
In the second room (called something like "Duchamp's Garden Shed") there is a readymade of a log stuffed with vintage pornographic magazines, illustrating a certain male sexual awakening of finding pornography hidden in some outlying woods. As the entire installation plays with notions of universal rites and particular cultural expressions, I can relate the same experience from age twelve or thirteen - my friends and I finding nasty magazines anonymously hidden away in a natural place, a primal awakening, revulsion and excitement, as inevitable as a gaze, as hidden, public, and necessary as bathroom stall graffiti.
Nerve's Grant Stoddard also shares the exact same thing in the opening anecdote of this cheeky essay.
A Gallery For Fine Photography -
Photo-philes, if you're ever in New Orleans, check this place out. A hodge podge of gorgeous vintage prints that rivals even most archives in Chicago (and elsewhere). It definitely favours a salon-style jumble of master photographers over any interest in display and space, but it is a definite treat to peruse the stacks of flatfles for Atget, Bernice Abbot, Jan Saudek, Yousef Karsh, and other personal favourites from the college textbooks. Their Website has lots of information on the artist's, the original editions of their work, and other little tidbits that collectors would concern themselves with. Chatting with the slacker art students watching the counter about Canadian grad schools was also nice. There, I found myself drawn into a few Henri Cartier-Bresson images, although before I'd always associated him w/ slightly higher design postcards. After a few days in these ramshackle neighbourhoods, these pictures of quick, eccentric anecdotes had a greater resonance. If only I could remember all the bizzare little flashes that've popped up and disappeared along these tight crumbly streets. 
posted by jeremy @ 7:32 PM
:
A New Polit-digi-montage from Mad Magazine
(via igorboog.com)
I haven't seen an issue of Mad Magazine in years, and I certainly don't remember their parodies being at all critical. Interestingly, all of my awareness of the hot political topics of the late 80s - Iran-contra scandal, Manuel Noriega, Monkey Business, Ollie North, S n' L bailouts - was introduced to my 9 to 12 year old self through Mad. Whenever I read an article that mentions any of these, the first thing I think about is Mad.
posted by jeremy @ 7:07 PM
11/25/02:
two records i picked up last weekend that are easily in my top ten this year -
Suba - Tributo
Guitar - Sunkissed
Brilliant and unconventional electronic music. Unfortunately I can only leave you with MP3 links 'cuz I'm late for the airport at the moment, but do have a listen and see how yr moved.
posted by jeremy @ 1:23 PM
:
from Salon.com-
The 9/11 movie Hollywood won't let you see -
"The "stridently anti-American" anthology film "11'09"01" is sometimes arty, sometimes preachy and sometimes brilliant. In Bush's America, it's also commercially untouchable..."
I'm sure many of us are waiting for this to find its way to Chicago somehow. The only two films I've seen that deal with this (besides watching fifteen cringing minutes of that horrid CBS Special wherein two French filmmakers stumble upon footage from inside the WTC while filming some otherwise inexplicably banal documentary on New York firefighters) was one series of shorts "personalizing" the events, but resulting in a rather vain two hours of navel gazing (I can't remember the name of this, and I haven't the time to look up this title right now, but it screened at Facets last April) and a second one of unnarrated footage from a videographer wandering Ground Zero on the day after. The second film complicates the typical news coverage of sweaty flag-raising heroism with a strong sense of the events sheer chaos. to be quite honest, after these, I really haven't any interest in 11Sep as a film subject, though i'm sure this won't stop hundreds of bad attempts in the next few years.
While on the subject of the political documentary, I had the chance to see The Trial of Henry Kissinger in Vancouver last month. I'm not familiar with the book that it's based on, but I found it to be a powerful use of subjective filmmaking that mining documents and popular footage toward a chilling indictment of Kissinger's will to power. If you need a few good quivers in your sack left-leaning political arguments, there's plenty to pull out of this film.
posted by jeremy @ 12:49 PM
:
i'm out to New Orleans to miss Chicago's first week of snow.
I leave you with a slice of life from Michigan's Upper Penninsula (from Pasty.com)...
posted by jeremy @ 12:31 PM
11/22/02:
A recent Harvard survey finds more hazards faced by bike messengers than meat packers or pro football players.
posted by jeremy @ 5:17 PM
:
A hot topic that you'dve probably heard:
On both NPR's All Things Considered and CNN, a story ran 'bout the National Geographic Geography quiz taken by groups of 18 to 24-year-olds from various countries. I'll leave the links to tell of the US group's horrid geographic illiteracy, and point out that the general public can also take a SAMPLE quiz and see whether they're a cartographical wunderkind like Sweden or as lost as an American or Mexican Gen Y-er.
Me? Only one wrong. Apparently Christianity is the world's most popular religion. I answered Islam. I'd hoped for Islam. In high school, I vaguely remember checking out some book on History's Hundred Most Influential People (or something like that), where it ranked 100 (or 500?) scientists and prophets and despots and Men-of-The-Years etc by how many people that they've influenced. The reader could then look through the index and see how well Einstein does against the Buddha or Ghandi vs. Churchill or if any US Presidents made the top 100 (or 500?, or a thousand? can't remember). anyway, what I confidently remembered is that Jesus came in third, trailing behind Isaac Newton and the most influential mind in all of human history (according to this book) - Muhammed!! A political as well as spiritual leader, founding a major religion under which great advances in learning, politics, and art spread throughout a huge area of the world in a relatively short period of time and whose innovations all modern thought and science hinges on.
Unfortunately, the above is only my vague memory of that forgotten author's assertion and is greatly distorted. There are more Christians than Muslims. As neither, I'm greatly disappointed.
A final thought on the National Geographic quiz - I'm noticing that the public online quiz is only a SAMPLE quiz, not the one that the 18 to 24 year old sample group took. I suspect that the online SAMPLE quiz is designed for us general public to freak out, say "those dumb American kids got THIS wrong!!", and immediately cough up a pledge to National Geographic to further their mission of Geographic Literacy (complete w/ snazzy colour photos of exotic pre-industrials to insulate our post-colonial fantasy worlds). My guess is that the kids had some tougher questions.
posted by jeremy @ 3:08 AM
|
