betacorpo.net>>

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I'm staring for long minutes at
Hospital Fluid from Exitwound.com - photos of what ambiguously appear to be an IV bag closely framed and loosely focused to transform this icon of sterility into a rather sensuous obelisk. A colour printer like myself will be amused by knowing the little film/ light trick that turns the clear fluid into a sickly elixer.

posted by jeremy @ 5:55 PM

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Oh, damn my inability to resist linking to Salon. You all see these occasional flashes of familiar eloquence already anyways, don't you? Don't you?

The female gaze by Eileen Kelly puts words to my flaneurie in such exciting yet discomforting terms -

I suppose the idea that I know anything about these women from scrutinizing their bodies is arrogant. Take that chunky Latina, slumped in a corner love seat on this uptown train, complacently tolerating the attentions of her skinny lover. I think, she is proof of a divine hand in creation. I think, if she were with any of the white guys I know, she would call herself ugly. But what do I know about her, really? Every body I see -- on the subway, in the street -- I read in a language I learned at home. This language is historical, demographically determined, and peppered as any language is with racist tropes; I use it according to the quirks of my own screwed-up mind.

posted by jeremy @ 4:00 PM

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Can such a thing as a brand new, non-corporate, independently owned coffee house exist in the Chicago Loop? No atmosphere of maximised product placement for pretending to relax to? No ads simulating art and featured bland-jazz soundtrack (available on CD at the counter) to signify comfort while actually driving you away to keep the millions-served turning over every 15 minutes? A place that needn't be reproduced as Standard Cafe Module^TM on every damn corner of the city?

Apparently Millenium Perk, which recently opened on 78 East Madison, is that rare and long-needed and decidedly non-Starbuckian joint that's betting its house on good coffee, $3 sandwiches and the goodwill of a whole slew of Loop office rats who are sharp enough to see clearly through those overpriced Cosi-CornerBakery-Caribou shitholes that litter this grid like a turned-out shopping mall. It also doesn't expect you to change your personal coffee lexicon when ordering - imagine that!

Chicago readers who can understand these gripes, please try this place.

Here's also a handy little guide to cafes in Wicker Park (it'll load to a plam pilot too) which provides more than enough evidence that the two identical Starbucks in the area needn't be here.

posted by jeremy @ 1:43 AM

1/30/03:

[Please allow me to borrow George Carlin's famous title for a moment]

"It's No Bullshit!!!"

According to a little clearinghouse of Beat-related news and links -

Although this rumour has been around for some time now, director Francis Ford Coppola has confirmed that he is finally making Kerouac's 'On The Road' into a movie. The well-overdue project will be financed by Coppola's company, Zoetrope Films. Early rumours suggest actors Brad Pitt and Billy Crudup may star in the two lead roles. The completed script is being overseen by Joel Schumacher.

Though I certainly gave JK up as a hack by the end of high school, I'm just stunned by the arrogance of turning this overripe legend into a movie. Am I the last or first to know about this?

See also this bit of Kerouac news through an amusing Internet retrofit.

And indeed if I could serve one term as God, then the resources wasted on Coppola's aforementioned
ambitious endevour to adapt a work of crap into a giant heap of really expensive crap would instead go to poor, unlucky Terry Gilliam
and the world would be a smarter place. Also, Coppola's fat ass would meet an unfortunate drowning in a vat of his own overpriced wine. I'd make a cruel God, but a just and fair one.

posted by jeremy @ 2:32 AM

1/28/03:

Oi Samba!
New Rhythms of Brazilian Cinema
- a February film series at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh celebrating the output of yet another brilliant corner in the world of Latin American cinema. Though I'm assuming that none of us are fortunate enough to jet off to Scotland for any of these, I'm keeping this list as an able guide to new Brazilian films to look out for in any local arthouse series or festivals in the coming year.

posted by jeremy @ 3:41 PM

1/27/03:

A subtitle is not a translation [.pdf] - Have you ever watched a foreign film originally made in a language that you sort of know, then noticed that the subtitles are often a completely different statement? This article from Language International details the steps and considerations that a subtitler undergoes - rather than to translate - to convey the intended subtext of a cinematic story. Interestingly, successful subtitles become yet another layer of artistry, as crucial as strong editing or continuity. What the subtitler faces - establishing a consistent reading speed, keeping the foreign viewer's eyesmoving continuously between image and text, working within the cuts, and making sure that the story is still opening up to the reader at the same time as the listener. Sounds like a nice job. [via Enigmatic Mermaid]

posted by jeremy @ 2:25 PM

1/26/03:

No Matter What You Heard, a great weblog on music for the scruffier rock set, just came out with their really quite cool "grammaphone" icon (complete with Man Ray photogram). Click the icon and get a no-strings MP3 from the author's collection of personal live recordings. The first track up there is from Q and not U, but the author has promised some future postings of live tracks from the recently disbanded Built to Spill. Not a bad way to pop up the traffic, for sure.

posted by jeremy @ 1:35 PM

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Go check out the Pseudodictionary - "the place where words you've made up can become part of an actual online dictionary."

I found it wracked with my usual early morning insomnia unable to shake the word "gaper's delay" from my head. The Pseusodictionary defines it as "the traffic delay resulting from a roadside accident or similar spectacle. Derived from drivers' "gaping" behavior when driving near an accident. Heard on the air in Chicago." Browsing the F section (I probably needn't say) brings up some nice results too - f-bomb ("Relates to a situation where someone said "fuck." e.g., The car wouldn't start, so I dropped the f-bomb in front of my grandmother") or my favourite f-commerce ("An alphabetic leap forward in e-commerce. Once internet companies e-enabled everything, now they are f-ing them. e.g., F-commerce is the next logical step for our struggling dot com. I mean, we've f-d up everything else."

one more that I almost, but not quite, get - an S2 is a "Brown-eyed, sweet, cute, hot chick that lives in, oh yeah! Canada. Men have been known to go 5000 miles to see an s2. e.g., "Let's head up to Ontario this weekend to check out some s2." "Mark, now that sounds like a plan!""

posted by jeremy @ 2:18 AM

1/25/03:

The first phenomenon that has really inspired me in a long while - Rem Koolhaas's plan for the CCTV building in Beijing to be completed by 2008 [via Dublog].

Here is another brief article from Arcspace [via Pureselipsquarejaw], and my own find - an animated plan of this new site (although the file weighs in at a hefty 10Mbs).

In a world of increasingly pompous ambitions for the built environment, I'm endlessly impressed by this design's eschewing of "world's tallest building" monumentality for a beautifully generous attention to creating a site, not to mention a radical new architectural innovation emerging right before our eyes. Good news, for once.

posted by jeremy @ 10:28 PM

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Snakes and Curtains

From close-to-home to a general overview, I'm feeling quite affected by three recent articles on the US's quite frightening isolation of Muslim immigrants. I'm always loathe to say that current events are analogous to historical precedents (like those that readily reappropriate WWII patriotism into the US's current war fever, ignoring the vast contextual dissimilarity between the two) but as more anti-immigrant policies are absorbed into the US's modus operandi more each week, the crimesand intolerance of the past frequently come to mind and with some quite poignant questions.

Earlier this week, a prominent Muslim leader from a suburb outside of Chicago was barred from re-entering the US where he and his family have lived for 16 years after a brief trip to Jordan. Though alleged to have ties to Hamas, which the man's family fervently deny, the barred re-entry also smacks of political intolerance -

Samirah has been a high-profile spokesman for Islamic causes, lambasting the government for alleged discrimination against Muslims, challenging American policy in the Middle East and rallying fellow Muslims to vote. When First Lady Laura Bush came to town in May 2001, he was selected as the Muslim community's representative to greet her at the airport.

For broader insights into the INS's current policies of selective registration, the Digital Freedom Network posted an article that details the many faults of this policy from its violation of the international treaties, which the US has signed, to questioning its effectiveness as a real security measure -

As an effort to protect US citizens from future terrorist attacks, critics claim that the Special Registration program is misguided at the very best and in violation of human rights at its worst.

"It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack," said a spokesperson for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I don't think the terrorists will go and register."

Amnesty Internaional President William Shulz has criticized that singling out individuals on the basis of national origin is tantamount to racial discrimination and many have equated Special Registration to the internment of Japanese during WWII. In fact, some argue that the US is in violation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which it is a party.

Thirdly, an article in the Nation by Naomi Klein - The Rise of the Fortress Continent - which (taken with a grain of hyperbole) views these aforementioned policies within an emerging and reactionary re-alignment of global power, rather than being simply immediate and temporary measures -

A fortress continent is a bloc of nations that joins forces to extract favorable trade terms from other countries--while patrolling their shared external borders to keep people from those countries out. But if a continent is serious about being a fortress, it also has to invite one or two poor countries within its walls, because somebody has to do the dirty work and heavy lifting.

It's a model being pioneered in Europe, where the European Union is currently expanding to include ten poor Eastern bloc countries at the same time that it uses increasingly aggressive security methods to deny entry to immigrants from even poorer countries, like Iraq and Nigeria.

Broadening the topic further, at the website of immigration and globalisation expert Peter Stalker, I've found an excellent overview of current world migration patterns, its economic impact to both native and destination countries, and answers to common myths like immigrants and welfare, brain drain, and unemployment. Relevant to this discussion - though the supression the rights of a society's vulnerable members may have the immediate political rewards of greater security (imagined or otherwise), Stalker points out grave consequences to those that attempt to isolate themselves while every other social and technological feature of this century necessitates the convergence of cultures and economies. A high cost for an unattainable degree of security, to be sure.

posted by jeremy @ 9:21 PM

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A dig back in the Beta sack

My current record embargo (music and shows are one of the extras I have to completely cut in order to afford to move to Brazil) has me digging way back in my personal vaults for stuff I haven't managed to way overplay in the last year. It's not easy. I tend to keep my collection down to a hundred or so by reselling often, but the following two mixes have somehow managed to survive countless spare-cash raids, not to mention broad drifts in tastes over the years. These two nuggets, both dating from 1996 (which is dusty as far my electronic tastes go) are not only back in heavy rotation, but I'm really quite surprised at how well they inform the edgier jazz grooves that I'd currently favour.

The first is TEXtures, a two-disc mix of early-90s UK and European trance and ambient tracks from the seminal Trance Europe Express series. From this post-millenial vantage, the tracks encapsulate the giddy PLUR optimism of the early rave and Love Parade days in a rather appealing way, despite the whole scene's extinction a long time ago (or youcan prove me wrong). The second side, of hazy swirl tracks and overly cheeky dialogue samples by LX Patterson, is pretty unlistenable altogether (not unlike any Orb album, which I've long since sold), but the first disc, by Underworld's Darren Emerson holds up surprisingly well. The funky throb of the Detroit beat is given a thoroughly warm touch of early digital synthwork and even old tracks by Moby and Joey Beltram still find a comfy place despite the silly excesses both would evenutally realise. I can still get lost in the atonal layers of abstract rhythm in the track "Carino (Silencio)" by Pulse, still a favourite after seven years and billions of listens.

Another that I loved then hated and now hesitantly love again is a comp from Selector called Junglized:JazzyFunkyDrum'n'Bass. This is the first exposure to the dub and drumn'bass sounds that I've long since purged and this disc's seminal experience is quite probably the only reason why I've managed to hold onto it. The tracks that open it up, by still viable producers like Adam F and Subject 13, still sound fresh, and the beats stay quite light and funky throughout, all made early enough to avoid that annoying two-step throb that the entire drumn'bass genre would eventually epitomise. The disc also preserves the sound of the premier jungle nights in Paris, but even as an artefact most of the tracks song great alongside some current uses of the jungle beat -
"Earth" by Brazilian chanteuse Patricia Marx and MC Kontrol, Patife's remix of Fernanda Porto's "Sambassim", or Clan Greco's "My favorite step" are really fresh examples I've heard in the past year.

posted by jeremy @ 8:13 PM

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From Rice Paper - Rephotography - wherein Canadian artist Evan Lee examines a father's collection of family slides against found photos from other cultures and finds many similarities along ambiguous notions of possession and patriarchy.

This was found by way of an excellent portal on global documentary photography - Oneworld.net's Photo channel.

posted by jeremy @ 7:37 PM

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The Neo Sophists: Intellectual Integrity in the Information Age - A paper from First Monday connects various contemporary social phenomena - including the erasure of lines between the pure science of academia and the proprietary research of private enterpirse; or the tobacco industry's acquisition of scientific conclusions favourable to cigarette sales; or information age boosterism's effect on education and consumerism - as an emerging culture of specious reasoning not unlike the forms of sophistry that Socrates and Aristotle spent their lives repudiating so many centuries ago -

Although the techniques attributed to the Sophists have been discredited in the intellectual community, recent events provide compelling evidence that the academic community is currently experiencing a renaissance in specious practices, or a "Neo-Sophism." Some developments may simply be attributed to the hasty infusion of business models into non-business venues such as public education; however, others point to a systematic perversion of intellectual ideals and a reversion to deceptive practices.

posted by jeremy @ 5:18 PM

1/24/03:

Bua tarde, all.

Sorry for the infequent postings but I've been sick as shit, fiending for a good digital posting perusal, but my ice-block head can't possibly handle the wobbly monitor pixels right now. The US could be at war right now, and I'd only be thinking about running out of Sudafed.

I'm falling slightly behind on Betacorpo.net, but I'll catch up next week. I'm really excited about it though - so far, it's looking great. A word to the wise though, avoid the Blogger/ DomainPeople domain-name registration service like a 30-below wind chill. One day I'll learn to shop around.

And for lack of being able to find my own links today, I'll pass on one that James from consumptive.org sent me - RickyMalloy.com - of some really amazingly flat typology-style photos. The series on a photocopier has been burning my brain for a while now. I'll give it a good write-up soon once I've shaken this damn flu.

Bom fim de semana.

posted by jeremy @ 7:52 PM

1/21/03:

Betacorpo evades Chinese censors (and other real-time open research metas)...

A Harvard Law school study of Internet filtering in China features an Engine wherein one can type in any URL to see whether or not it is filtered out by the routers that provide online access in China. I'm happy to learn that despite my mutedly liberal views, La beta corpo can be readily accessed in China. Actually, just about everything I typed in went through - Whitehouse.gov, Rushlimbaugh.com, Hustler.com. The only thing that I could get it to block was Playboy.com.

Another fun open research site - [via ExcitementMachine] Columbia University is testing the 6 Degrees of Seperation Theory on a global scale. Sign up, get a "target person" from anywhere in the world, and see how many mutual friends it takes for you to reach your target. Of course this assumes that you (and your string of friends) are all comfortable with freely giving away your e-mail addresses. This Columbia study is based off of the well-known Six Degrees study conducted in the 60's by Stanley Milgram. Ironically, if you were paying attention inPsych101 you may remember that Milgram discovered the frightening degree with which people are willing to trust large research institutions.

And more fun with faith in institutions, a quite mysterious case of form letters-to-the-editor [via Rebecca's Pocket] - go to Google, enter the query "genuine+leadership"+"contrary+to+the+class+warfare+rhetoric" and you'll bring up twenty identical letters to small-run newspapers praising Bush's economic plan , but signed by different authors - John Pinckney in Indiana; Sandra Rauschuber in California; and Derick Mfoafo in Virginia.

posted by jeremy @ 2:39 PM

Bush's job approval lowest since 9/11

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Some excellent news to coincide with a healthy anti-war turnout in Washington (and elsewhere) last weekend -

And another notch on the long list of domestic consequences for this administration's foreign policy - overextended police forces.

posted by jeremy @ 2:02 PM

27 Comments

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From Brazzil - Getting to Know You

- on the marked differences in business cultures between Brazilian professionals and their US counterparts -

Brazil is not a place for beginners or the unprepared.
Americans think that globalization means doing things "the
American way", but it's more a two-way learning process.
Latin America is an American creation for the sake of convenience.

posted by jeremy @ 4:52 AM

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These quite excellent links were posted on the CCM Listserv this morning and are worth passing on here -

For myself, a most appropriate way to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. this year would be a recording of his prescient 1966 speech "Why I oppose the War in Viet Nam [MP3, 5.4 megs, 23:30]. The file comes from Wrybread.com along with the "I Have a Dream" speech) who prefaces "Viet Nam" as follows:

[This speech is] a discussion of America's motives for involvement in Vietnam and a little bit about our hushed history, amazing how little has changed, the speech could have been made yesterday. In 1964, the year Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize, Time Magazine called him man of the year, but they called this speech "a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." Sort of like what they said about Susan Sontag's beautiful critique of America in Afghanistan.

Also, from the Seattle Times, a catalogue of many other speeches and sermons whose topics include poverty, education, and strategies for non-violence.

posted by jeremy @ 3:53 AM

http://home.earthlink.net/~jeremyswells/blog.html

1/19/03:

Correction from Friday

If anyone caught my post from Friday about the forthcoming Betacorpo.net, you may remember that I gave an URL to where this weblog will be relocated. I left out a letter (my middle initial) rendering it useless. Here's the correct new URL for La beta corpo which you can use to update your links/ bookmarks at any time -

- and if you think getting my name in the URL wrong was bad, you should see how bad I've managed to fuck up some Javascripts this weekend. It'll get smoothed out though and I'll have a brilliant little site up for y'all in no time. I'll also make sure that it doesn't crash your browser. I promise. Stay tuned...

posted by jeremy @ 5:58 PM

The Perpetual War Portfolio -

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"The Perpetual War Portfolio is an evenly weighted basket of five stocks poised to succeed in the age of perpetual war. The stocks were selected on the basis of popular product lines, strong political connections and lobbying efforts, and paid-for access to key Congressional decision-makers."

(via Conscientious)

posted by jeremy @ 3:45 PM

1/17/03:

A corpo emedia

Allo again and happy Friday all. I've gotten my ass wrapped up in all sorts of extreme busy-ness right now, so please pardon this log's recent inconsistency.

And I usually hate it when people blog about their blogs, but I feel compelled to announce that by February (hopefully hopefully), this here page will be a part of the forthcoming Betacorpo.net. If you are currently linked to me (which... I very... much... appreciate), you may want to update the URL from the blogspot address to ~~http://home.earthlink.net/~jeremywells/blog.html~~

[Update 19.01.03 - Sorry sorry sorry - I left out my middle initial in the URL - the correct URL for the new location of La beta corpo is http://home.earthlink.net/~jeremyswells/blog.html]

at your earliest convenience. the URL's a little unwieldy, sorry, but it'll eventually hook up to all the other good stuff, I promise.

And in the meantime, stay tuned for Betacorpo.net which will mostly become a photography portfolio, but also essays (mostly saved from college, and mostly on contemporary art, urbanism, tourism, and media studies) and regular first-person postings from Brazil (after March 10... so excited!!) as well as the continuation of this here weblog with more fine links on documentary (and other) photography, brave new sounds, transmissions from infinte global nodes, and other fancy digital perusals.

I also have two other ideas for web-based projects that I want to begin later this year, once I've settled with the move. One is a weblog-ish page of music reviews from just regular record collectors like myself. I'm sure many many other things like this already exist, but I'd like to start one on a small scale, mediated, and hopefully kept on a level of friends recommending to friends some out-of-the-way but relevant finds without drenching the content with overly obscure namedrops as a way to prove one's posture within a particular scene (which most fully public listservs and bulletin boards usually seem to do). Basically I'm trying to figure out a way to learn about other genres that I don't pay close attention to, and to recommend titles from my own current interests - just enthusiasts chatting away about good music.

My second idea is a site similar to Urbanphoto.org (one of my favourite recent finds), but about travel photography. I'd like to host interesting "middlebrow" sections of photographs from various world cities, with each section introduced by a short essay - but I'm very much open to other creative possibilities. Soon, I'm going to make a first chapter out of my Vancouver photos, and I've a friend in Chicago who's going to do the same about his recent trip to Havana. I'd like for it to shape up as an expanding site on photography and place, and different strategies for transmitting, viewing, and understanding the visual particularities of places foreign to all of us. I also want the photographs to lie outside of overly stylised National Geographic photography - snapshots would do just fine - but also images that have more resonance than just banal tourist conventions - no group portraits in front of the Arc de Triomphe.

If anyone out in blogland would like to collaborate on either of these ideas (I'm really not far past the previous sentences) let's start correspnding - Jeremy@betacorpo.net

And finally, I've gotten very very advanced word on how the Lord of the Rings trilogy turns out - it's a bit of a departure from the Tolkien story and it's not at all a happy ending.

Ciao, friends. Have a full weekend

posted by jeremy @ 3:38 PM

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I know I'm linking to Salon way too much these days, but Joey Sweeney always comes up with plenty good musical thoughts that need passin' on. Of particular interest, some additional context on the sad sad sad and rather scary situation for Pete Townshend.

Leaving aside whatever Townshend's intentions may have been and his "research" alibi, Sweeney offers a grave bit of context the surrounding situation (after all, Townshend was picked up in a worldwide Internet-based dragnet) -

But I do know this: We live in a hysterical time, one in which technology has outrun our capacity to come up with the ethics to go with it. There are elements of Townshend's dilemma that reek of McCarthy-era thought crime, where to investigate the lunatic fringe is to be suspect of sympathizing with it. Especially in this sort of neo-Puritan age where to be accused of a sex crime is, for all intents and purposes in the court of public opinion, to be declared guilty of it.

posted by jeremy @ 1:47 PM

1/14/03:

Os confederados

A friend told me this really quite interesting bit of South American trivia a couple of months ago, and last night the World [.wma] ran a story confirming it - that there are sizable populations in Brazil made up of descendents of former Confederate Americans who emigrated to the country after the Civil War. According to Cyrus Dawsey, professor of Latin American studies, about 6,000 Southerners, mostly from Texas and Alabama emigrated to colonies in Mexico and Brazil. These were not necessarily members of the plantation aristocracies, but people from lower classes fleeing the destruction of the South and founding cities with names like Americana and Nova Odessa.

Many cultural features from of the American South are still present today, local holidays (including the 4th of July) are often mixtures of Carnivale with North American traditions, cuisine like fried chicken and grits are still found, and most interestingly, the English these groups often speak is a well-preserved 19th-century antebellum dialect. A posting from the Brazilian Embassy on the history of US-Brazil relations says that names like Jones, MacKnight, and Whitaker are very common in Americana, a city of 250,000 with about 10% of its population claiming North American Ancestry. Also, according to the Atlanta Constitution, Americana (which lies about 75 miles outside of Sao Paulo) is the Brazilian city that claims the highest per-capita income and most developed education system in the country.

And finally, a well-known (in Brazil, anyway) Confederada descendent - Os Mutantes singer Rita Lee

posted by jeremy @ 1:57 PM

1/13/03:

Last month's issue of Digital Journalist features a series of deeply disturbing images (warning - these really are very difficult to look at) by photojournalist Peter Turnley from the ground phase of Desert Storm.

In an introductory essay on media coverage of the war, the tendency toward abstracted arial photographs to describe battles, and the media "pool system," Turnley writes:

I don't recall seeing many television images of the human consequences of this scene, or for that matter many photographs published. A day later, I came across another scene on an obscure road further north and to the east where, in the middle of the desert, I found a convoy of lorries transporting Iraqi soldiers back to Baghdad, where clearly massive fire power had been dropped and everyone in sight had been carbonized. Most of the photographs I made of this scene have never been published anywhere and this has always troubled me.

posted by jeremy @ 3:47 PM

1/12/03:

�

The multi-media art show Illegal Art, which questions the legal conflicts invovled in appropriating from consumer culture, will be in Chicago by January 25.

From the exhibit's introduction -

The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed....

The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the "degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court.

The show in New York last November included performances by Christian Marklay and Negativland's Mark Hosler. I wonder if Chicago will be so lucky.

posted by jeremy @ 11:37 AM

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This collection of photos of
"infill residential and mixed-use development" throughout Chicago becomes (unintentially) an appealingly flat, Bernd and Hilla Becher-ish typological study of this city's otherwise random, stop-gap neighbourood architecture.

posted by jeremy @ 6:33 AM

29 Comments

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The rings around...

The Cults of Brasilia by Juilian Dibbell - on the mystical subcultures that ring the outskirts of Brazil's famous monument to overeager Fordism - like weeds growing out of the site of a Bauhaus structure -

Planning the city down to its minutest details, Brasilia's architects intended it to stand as a monument to technocracy and rational design. But the Brazilian people have turned it into something much more interesting: they have made it a beacon of the irrational, investing the city with a millennial significance that approaches that of Jerusalem, or Mecca, and draws the mystically inclined from all over Brazil.?

Mr. Dibbell's site features other sharp essays on
Carmen Miranda
's particularly seminal form of camp (relying heavily on Susan Sontag's prior assertions) and particularly instructive article on Gilberto Gil and the dissolution of rigid cultural constutions.

A delightful quote from Gil in the latter essay -

"You could define it [Gil's music] as Brazilian in terms of a real Brazil, not an ideal Brazil... A computerized Brazil, a high-tech Brazil, a cosmopolitan Brazil. A rural primitive poor Brazil, a Brazil of favelas, a Kingston Brazil, a Lagos Brazil, a New York Brazil, a Paris Brazil. But so: A New York Brazil? A Paris Brazil? A Nigeria Brazil? Well then it isn't Brazil any more. But at the same time it is Brazil. So there can't be a just-Brazil Brazil. In order for there to be a just-Brazil Brazil there has to be a non-Brazil Brazil."

An important idea that could be transposed to many other places, couldn't it?

posted by jeremy @ 6:15 AM

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Wow! A very succinct and articulate video interview/ retrospectve with activist photographer Allan Sekula on art, globalisation, and his thoughts on the strategies of contemporary activist demonstrations. For what it's worth, both Allan Sekula and Fred Lonidier were artists that I followed most closely when I was in school and whom I still refer back to when I'm trying to sort out new projects.

Why did I search out these old favourites? I was reminded of Mr. Sekula when consumptive.org referred me to the site of Paul Shambroom which is split into two series - one of small town meetings, the other of nuclear weapons. Both create that confrontational potential that I'd always found to be so remarkable in the work of the two aforementioned artists.

posted by jeremy @ 5:58 AM

1/10/03:

Rob Morse writing for the SF Gate has an economic stimulus plan that holds more water than even he realises -

The Morse economic stimulus plan is straightforward and simple. Every man, woman and child in the United States would receive a government check for $1, 000. Now that's a stimulating chunk of money.

Last year, $1,000 rebates from auto dealers helped move cars out of showrooms at record rates. A $300 rebate like the Democrats promise might be enough to move bicycles, but not cars. Which brings us to the one string attached to your $1,000 Morse economic stimulus check.

You have to buy a bicycle...

By purchasing bicycles, Americans will fight the obesity epidemic and reduce dependence on foreign oil at the same time. When the war on Iraq comes, they'll have a way to get around. The only problem is one we'll eventually have to face anyway: China.

The Chinese are just catching up with us in space, but we suffer from an immense bicycle gap. Last year, 21 million bicycles were sold in the United States, and 20 million of them were imported, almost half from China. The Critical Mass Plan specifies that tax rebates be spent on bicycles made in America rather than Axles of Evil nations.

(link via a post on the CCM Listserv)

Enjoy the weekend, everyone. I'm off to happily cut the snow on my punchy little track bike. See you Monday.

posted by jeremy @ 4:57 PM

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This is a great find. A Real Audio history of modern Brazilian music, with commentary throughout from Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

posted by jeremy @ 5:30 AM

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Tupi or not tupi...

An issue of Exquisite Corpse (by the inimitable Andrei Codrescu) published an English translation of Oswald de Andrade's "Cannibalist Manifesto" in all its hysterical, satirical glory. Central to Oswald's boast is that, like the Tupi Indians killing and eating the body of a Portuguese Bishop, so should Latin artists digest and renew the body of Euro-American Modernism.

Some better extractions -

Tupi or not tupi that is the question...

Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation "I" coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the "I." Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism....

Against the vegetable elites. In communication with solitude...

[Native Brazilians] already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age."

Oswald's text, written in 1928, becomes the cornerstone of Brazilian Modernism, concrete poetry, and Tropicalismo. The more I try to understand these texts, or dig deeper into the 60s Tropicalia records I've been collecting for the past two years, the more I'm aware of how obstructed I am from such unfamiliar languages and histories, and the more my art school-derived notions of aesthetics fall to pieces. But I find this confrontation to be so exciting - I don't know if anything else as fascinated me as much as this music, and I've gone through a lot of different music in my life.

Listening to the Brazilian Jovem Guarda, my current impression is that these albums reach the same breadth as the Beatles, but through a whole collective of Sao Paulo artists rather than just four global pop icons. But I'm barely scratching the surface of this music, and even the above impression is going to fall apart in a few weeks.

but for now, some new finds on art and music in Brazil -

A Wired interview from 1997 with the highly articulate Gilberto Gil on Tropicalia, the Internet, and its presence within an emerging global culture.
A page of Real Audio clips of the more landmark Tropicalia songs including Caetano Veloso's deceptively sardonic "Baby" and Tom Ze's "Parque Industrial." This is actually the homepage for the book I'm in the middle of - Christopher Dunn's Brutality Garden.
The paintings of Anita Malfatti, a contemporary of Oswald who shows a particularly antropofagist relation to Kandinsky.
And, included here more for gaping than absorption, an absurd and oddly de-contextualised manifesto that reconstrues the rhetoric of Oswald (and the history of human civilisation. and Quentin Tarantino.) toward a "metalanguage,... a new global language, with no commitments or ties with the past." (I'm only posting, not signing on.)

posted by jeremy @ 4:01 AM

:

Although
this image, which I found on This Modern World, has absolutely nothing to do with La beta corpo's chosen subject matter, as soon as I scrolled down to it I proceeded to remain doubled over my desk laughing for slightly longer than two minutes. I can't help but to share.

A google search for "nipple scarf" only results in 190 pages displaying the same photo with pretty much the same commentary as mine. A true meme if I've ever seen one.

posted by jeremy @ 2:50 AM

1/9/03:

I will not eulogise my neighbourhood again

I'm realising how out of touch I've become with where I live - I just found out through random listserve gossip that Tuman's Alchohol Abuse Center closed tonight. I'm usually proud of my lack of sentimentality when it comes to such matters, but I've definitely had many many good nights at Tuman's over the years and knowing that it's gone actually brings a slight sad weight of getting older.

Bars are really stupid, especially in Chicago where they're just default places unless you really work hard at being creative with your nights out. But Tuman's was different. Maybe it's because I wasn't even twenty-one the first time I went there. Maybe it's that it was always my favourite bar during fresher years before I really learned that the whole "bar scene" and shouting inane conversations to random drunk yuppies crammed together in a smokey Saturday crowd is actually quite boring.

But I've spent many nights there - "Meet me at the bar at Chicago and Leavitt. It's this shitty place where everything is $1.50 and they've got Stereolab and Spiritualized in the jukebox."

I've celebrated three of my birthdays there.

It once took me an hour to get home after eating two of the Bread Lady's muffins (from the bottom of the basket, if you know what I mean) even though my apartment at the time was a straight shot up Leavitt to Milwaukee. I could only hope to be that inane or low-tolerance now.

I registered to vote at Tuman's. It was two in the morning and I was talking to two girls who were working for Bobby Rush's quixotic campaign against Mayor Daley and, completely faded, I eagerly gave out my social security number and whatever else that would have made me an easy identity theft victim under any other circumstance. Later the friend I was with, a public policy major at DePaul, told me about the machine days of the first Mayor Richard Daley, all the different working class ethnic groups had their own bars which became the neighbourhood political centres - the machine's many tentacles. A slow Monday night at Tuman's gave a lingering sense this political past. Now we know why there's yet another stupid bar on every corner of this city. My current polling place is at a no-name bar on Wolcott.

St. Patrick's Day in 1999 was also the last day of finals for me that quarter. I met up with a good-sized group of friends there, inviting along an interesting but awkward guy from my last class who was odd and quiet from being new to the country, but a charming guy nonetheless. Right at last call, my friends filter out, my new friend orders 10 Guinnesses for everyone, completely pissing off the bartender, and everyone is gone before she can finish making them. The generous but graceless friend and I were the last ones there, sitting on the torn up couch over the radiator, both of us working hard on the five pints at our side, making ourselves sick trying to gulp these things down in ten minutes (which we did - how dare anyone waste good Guinness on St Patrick's Day) before the bartender came back with a broom handle to poke us out (that last part isn't true, the rest is). It only goes to show how easy it was to get completely blown away at that place, even if you weren't intending to.

But more annoyingly, Tuman's also garnered a sort of dive bar chic, always written up in magazines like Details or Rolling Stone when they'd come out with a "Where to go in Chicago" section. It's never-cleaned heatless bathroom, giant Bela Lugosi painting, barber chair, free pool with scummy sharks you could never beat, and empty kegs for seats - it's so shitty that it became cute. Kind of like this neighbourhood.

And that's kind of my past at this place, a fresher college student, naive, cute, easily charmed. It's not that long ago, but everything is thoroughly different now. The current rumours that I'm picking up say that the owners have sold quite profitably and the corner is going to be a new pink McTownhouse, the kind that pop up like weeds around here, with the high fences and pits in front that drive New Urbanists crazy, always built five feet higher than the buildings next to it. Another rumour says that the space is going to be a wine bar. I could see that, there's plenty of new little mucky spots moving in, but there's still not a whole lot of continuity on Chicago Ave, it's mostly empty furniture stores at night. Another said that the whole block is going to be razed to put in a Dominick's, and a second one said that the owners are just closing up for a few months to make necessary repairs and then they'll be back, same as it ever was. Wishful thinking on the latter, a not unfounded political paranoia in the former.

And it may sound sad, or apathetic, or just a sign of my emerging mid-20's domesticity when I have to confess that the idea of a large grocery store close to my apartment is a lot more appealing than knowing that I can always relive a few memories from the dozens of hilarious nights spent at Tuman's every time I grab a beer on the way to checking out a show at Empty Bottle. By the time I moved in almost six years ago, Tuman's was far from being the "authentic" dive bar of yore. Soft kids like me would never be found in a real dive bar - those would be the tap rooms on Division full of transients and shakey postal workers. But it's still another phase of my life that I'll someday forget and that'll be as authentic and buried and unknown like the scores of yellowed drunks that filled Tuman's decades ago, long before us soft art students made the street safe for the precious professional set.

I can get a sense of the desperately crusty old Tuman's, its real past, in this squalid, beautiful little essay called "Dad's Winter Coat" and it's probably good that it's gone.

Find your own little place, and for chrissake keep it special.

posted by jeremy @ 6:37 AM

1/8/03:

The K Chronicles always says exactly what's on my brain so way way better than I ever could. Urban commuter cyclists everywhere say "hell yeah!!"

the rest of this strip is even better.

posted by jeremy @ 4:00 PM

:

Raise an eyebrow to the amateur

While sorting through sites about photography and Brazil, I happened upon an interesting did-ya-know in an About.com article by Peter Marshall - that some of the earliest photographs, along with those of Talbot and Daguerre in England and France, also originate in Brazil.

Marshall writes -

The first practical photographic process was developed by the French-born inventor Hercules Florence living in the Sao Paulo region. Florence succeeded in 1832 in producing a print by contact and in 1833 was creating images using a camera. Unfortunately he appears to have told few people - his work remained unknown to his European contemporaries, and so had no influence on the history of photography.

Now photography, like the automobile, is one of those advancements that just came about occuring simultaneously through number of different processes by different inventors. According to this article though, it was Florence who first coined the word "photography" - light writing. Florence's idea developed by observing that some dyes on the clothing of native-Brazilians reacted to light and from there discovered the silver compounds that make a more permanent image, just like modern black and white prints. The article also says that the first substance used to fix the image was urine until Florence found that amonia works better.

And I know that Marshall didn't make the last part up. It's true that you can fix an image with urine. You can also develop a photograph with coffee.

In other apocryphalness, an interesting article from Salon - The Chinese discovered America
Or did they? - on an airchair historian's landmark assertion, the mad rush to get landmark assertion published, the easy refutation of methods and sources of landmark assertion, and nothing stops the still mad rush to get it published.

posted by jeremy @ 6:27 AM

1/7/03:

Today's texts for the warm and lazy.

Good morning. Today in Chicago, the nation's chief oil oligarch has arrived and folks of conscience have taken to the streets while I slept in.

Also, Paul Fisher and the mayor of Garden City, MI have finally cut the ribbon outside of What would Koffi Annan do?. Now that there's three- three
! - posts instead of a mere two, WWKAD? is now ready for public consumption. (kidding). Anyway, have a look.

And then you'll be ready for the real deal - the latest issue of Haypenny with smart littles piece like What would Jesus do? and What I learned at my 12 weeks at Victoria's Secret.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid I might spoil the aforementioned leads by spreading the word that sci-fi wunderkind William Gibson now has his very own weblog (via Boingboing). Let's see how this shapes up.

And if acknowledging that the Chief Cowboy is pitching dividend tax-cuts a couple of miles away from me isn't enough for a full day's supply of self-induced indignation, here's some truly (amusingly) off colour thoughts from Jack Chick (via LinkmachineGo).

posted by jeremy @ 2:36 PM

1/6/03:

I just got this announcement a bit belatedly -

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7
11 AM: GREET PRESIDENT BUSH and send him a strong anti-war message, as he
addresses the Economic Club in Chicago.

WHERE: Sheraton Chicago Towers, 301 E. North Water St. - Downtown Chicago
(or as close as will be possible to the hotel)

CONTACT:Chicago Coalition Against War and Racism, 773-209-1187 or
CCAWR@aol.com

The CCAWR's website is www.chicagoantiwar.org

posted by jeremy @ 3:14 PM

1/5/03:

Flaneur.org - despite its somewhat irritating design, this online periodical has procured some really nice art/ text submissions about - what else? - the magic derive through various American cities. Of particular interest is Brooklyn-based artist Joe Tonetti's strangely mute uncaptioned images that tiptoe on lines between photography and drawing - marks made as much by shadows and illegible wall scratches as by careful composition and ambiguously omitted information as to what it is we see in these lovely little jpegs.

posted by jeremy @ 9:52 PM

:

From the New York Times -
Who Owns the Internet? You and i Do - wherein a professor from the Annenburg school leads the cause to de-capitalize the word "internet" (which I'll do gladly, if it matters) and de-Capitalize (in the econ sense) the public/ private relationships within networked culture. (via Follow me here.)

posted by jeremy @ 4:20 PM

:

Blip treats

More pure pleasure for the ears at Kohina.com - a spectaclular array of old 8- and 16-bit video game soundtracks and audio streams of some really groovy live sets made out of the above. (Link via No sense of place.)

posted by jeremy @ 4:11 PM

1/4/03:

Snakes and politics

A Bad Subjects review of the better known electronica compilation Putting the Morr back in Morrissey (which is about Morr records, not the 80's icon, though the title does elicit a double-take, doesn't it?) poses a problem of "political deficiency" that's faced electronic music throughout its development -

"But for all the heat it otherwise generates, politically, techno leaves me cold. With a few exceptions, electronica has an underdeveloped political consciousness and has failed to achieve what other genres like rock and hip-hop have, namely the ability to make politics pleasurable by harnessing aesthetics to generate critical political insight. Thus, for example, the sophistication of electronic dance's political discourse rarely rises above endlessly repeated platitudes about love, peace, and unity. And on those occasions when the scene mobilizes politically, when, say, it's clubs are threatened with closure, it exhibits behavior no better than any other self-interested lobby group fighting to protect its political and cultural turf. Ambient electronica - often represented as the intelligent alternative to electronic dance - has its own distinct political shortcomings. Its producers, far too convinced of their own status as a cultural avant-garde, work less on creating an accessible musical language than on fetishizing new sounds. The result are mute tracks hermetically sealed off from the larger audience that doesn't share ambient's sonic obsessions. In both cases there is precious little reflection on the larger social context - the material and political relations governing the production and reception of their sound - to be heard in the offerings of these representatives of the techno world."

The reviewer then cites the newly articulated critical potential in some of the Morr tracks. Electronic music, with its highly exacting control of sound, sequence, and mechanical rhythm, aesthetically embodies the increasing divisions and exponentially more refined manipulation of the (un)natural world (nanotechnology, genetic technology). Or the music's ability to extract and re-work from (ideally) any pre-recorded source raises questions on the (assumed) spaces between cultures that collapse (or broaden) through increased global mediation and mobility.

An interesting problem, and I would agree that much of electronic/ dance/ rave culture - if reduced to drugs, fashion and "PLUR" - becomes more an analog of mainstream spectacle than an ambivalent mirror. Or the quiet formality of various so-called "IDM," or ambient, or "post-rock" artists become so introvertedly unaware of their own social contexts as to be really quite disposable. But then, isn't the history of rock music (which the aforementioned reviewer cites as ideal criticism for the Ford age) made up of as much forgetable fluff and unquestioning continuity, yet highlighted by a few standout subversives - a thousand empty hipsters for every Dylan, Strummer, or Lennon of the lot (and I'm only mentioning overtly political artists, which even then is hard to truly define)?

I would instead argue that electronic music (from as far back as Luigi Russolo), throughout its existence has always offered subversive challenges by a few daring artists The strategies inherent in the medium - the work of aesthetically positioning mechanically produced music in an increasingly automated and alienated culture - also serve as social/ political critique. Though outspoken or effective critique in music (as in film, television, radio, or other mass media) are rare among a multitude of otherwise homogenous products, critical electronic music is still in similar proportions of viability to that of rock n roll, or hip hop, or whatever other forms have been embraced in the processes of greater social awareness.

See for example - Negativland's critique of mass media's constant self-paraody through stolen sources ( often provoking the ire of corporate rock's "political" bands - see Negtivalnd vs U2); or similar sorts of plays with mediated authority within various artists from Warp Records (I'm thinking of a particular track I found there a year ago wherein an artist records a series of "fictional" public statements using the exact frequencies of George W Bush's voice. Hilarious, disturbing, and thought provoking. Unfortunately, it's not on the website anymore); even early Detroit techno, is easily critiqued along the backdrop of that crumbling post-Fordist city. the music becomes a way of aesthetically re-humanising an otherwise vastly alienating social context, a response to a landscape marked by the abandonment by vast corporate power with abstract, uniconic music, and a musical setting that de-centers the stage or the rock band for an anonymous DJ spinning an archive of nunnamed records from the shadows, attention turned instead to the colour-lit multitude of bodies filling a reconstituted warehouse (okay, so I'm ideally leaving out high-priced rock star DJ's, drugged-up obsession with fashion, increasingly mainstreamed and corporatised mega-raves - but the underlying point can still be found).

For a really succinct contemporary outline on the social function of aesthetics here's the transcript of a speech called "The Social Responsibility of Artists" by Carol Becker.

posted by jeremy @ 9:41 PM

:

Chega do inverno Chicago

I'm excited to announce that, after March 10th, I will be broadcasting this here weblog from Rio de Janeiro!!

And Caetano Veloso's "Onde o Rio e mais baino" is rockin' my happy mood.

posted by jeremy @ 4:08 PM

:

Two new works by activist artist Krzysztof Wodiczko addressing issues of space and silence for the non-native urban dweller.

posted by jeremy @ 5:03 AM

What Would Koffi Anan Do?

1/3/03:

And now for the latest gas leak in the fire-n-brimstone of satirical punditry -

who was kind enough to link to me, but missed the "La" in La beta corpo (my fictional romance language looks funny without articles in front of the nouns. L'anal corpo, to be sure.)

posted by jeremy @ 10:53 PM

:

Situation chic...

Another excellent eulogy for Joe Strummer from Salon -

As the music industry collapses under the weight of its own avarice and mediocrity -- not just the suits, but the artists and patrons as well -- the drums of war pound ominously, homeland security reads like Orwell, and the environment is once again available at discount rates. The time is ripe for an artist or group to emerge that actually matters.

Here, Salon puts a little more honest light on some of the contradictions that emerge from the Clash's position as both iconoclasts and young darlings of the late 70s corporate rock world - "Rock the Casbah" as an anthem for Desert Storm troops, "London Calling" serving an Anglophilic ad campaign for Jaguar, reworking the styles and slogans of the Situationists into rock-fashioned "terrorist chic"....

The Salon article quotes Billy Bragg's recent evaluation -

"[The Clash] were also a self-mythologizing, style-obsessed mass of contradictions ... no one struggled more manfully with the gap between the myth and the reality of being a spokesman for your generation than Joe Strummer."

Of course these re-appropriations only appear well after the music is absorbed into mainstream familiarity, and mediated mainstreams (as opposed to actual public space) rarely ever become a site for any lasting criticism - only initial shock - no matter how cleverly one manages to manipulate mass media.

posted by jeremy @ 5:26 PM

:

Joyeux vendredi!!

And to fellow cold-weather northerners, I wish you all a gray but thoughtful weekend of hot tea, a favourite blanket, well-baked food, listening to the wind whistle, and any other smelly hibernating relaxers to keep you far from scared.

posted by jeremy @ 4:46 PM

1/2/03:

Some
Detroit snapshots taken in 1999 by four refreshingly fascinated music tourists from Lelystad.

posted by jeremy @ 2:36 PM

:

From Brookelyn I found Chicago Uncommon, a heavily precious but still quite interesting site for photographs of this here chilly gray city. To be sure, it's "high calendar art" (as a professor of mine would say), but the little texts and details, most of which are quite familiar from my daily walking/ looking jaunts, will be a warm reflection for me when I say goodbye this here dirty brick grid in a few months.

posted by jeremy @ 4:59 AM

:

My very good friend Matt Tobey is performing blogging duties for Neal Pollack this month. How exciting...

Also, Mr Pollack's outgoing guest blogger offered an urgently necessary list of resolutions yesterday. I shall perform all ten of these for every week of 2003.

posted by jeremy @ 3:48 AM

1/1/03:

Light and lucid

Ouch, New Year's was too good. Lots of little apartment parties, met an interesting cross-section of drunken Chicago twentysomethings. I was hanging out w/ a friend who came back from a trip to Mexico w/ an unlabeled, corked bottle of someone's personal homemade tequila, which was pretty much moonshine from Mexico city, but AYE! it was good stuff. This tequila is a light gold brown like any familiar Cuervo-type fare, flavourless except for a bright twinge of sweetness and strong fumes, and it's pretty thick - slightly less viscous than maple syrup - making it slips slowly down your throat, coming up to the head as a warm, light, clean, an almost high sort of buzz than a typical drink's quick slip into lost focus. And, expectedly, I'm writing at 4:30pm with a wonderfully dulled and lucid hangover, wiser mind, a married caffeine, background music richer, soft red eyes - a wonderful holiday. Happy new year everyone.

Some tunes that are hitting the sonic spot heavy on this colourless day - "Confidence in Scoober" a remix by Mice Parade from the Slicker remixes and Joseph Malik's Ibotribe [mp3].

Malik's label Compost features a stingily edited but usefully broad assortment of MP3 samples for most of their jazzified electronic offerings. Some personal recommendations (all MP3 files) - Rosalia De Souza (produced by Nicola Conte), Truby Trio, Ursula Rucker remixed by Jazzanvoa, and Minus 8.

An astonishing concept -

An anthropological image of Jesus -

...a team of researchers started with an Israeli skull dating back to the 1st century. They then used computer programs, clay, simulated skin and their knowledge about the Jewish people of the time to determine the shape of the face, and color of eyes and skin.

They turned to the Bible to determine the length of his hair. In the New Testament, "would Paul (one of the apostles) have written, 'If a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him' if Jesus Christ had had long hair?" the article speculates.

(link via Ghost in the Machine).

And now for some final interestiques on the more trite side. While perusing the visitor stats for this page I happened upon an electronic translation of La beta corpo from the French Google engine. Here some interesting findings pulled out of yesterday's post -

The author of this weblog is "Puits de Jeremy". (When I first saw Puits it reminded me of Putain, the word for "whore" and I sure did treat my poor alchohol-drenched brain like "Jeremy's whore" last night)
There's film about "Les Jeunesses Sonique" next month...
There will be an "eposition des tortues" at the Metro...
And X's frontman was "jamais-pleine d'esprit de John ".

The stark literalness of a romance language sounds so funny on my foggy little anglo mind right now.

posted by jeremy @ 7:34 PM