4/29/03:
[A bit late finding this, but nevertheless...]
These 15 Feb photos from Sao Paulo are particularly provocative - very aware of the global cameras.
posted by jeremy @ 8:11 PM
:
Contemplative photography.
posted by jeremy @ 7:49 PM
:
Evanston teachers told not to wear `No war' badges -
"People are afraid to speak out or question anything," said Kathy Fischer, a language arts and history teacher, who wore a "No War" button in defiance of school policy until Americans took control of Iraq. "I thought it was important because by being silent I felt I was supporting the war."
posted by jeremy @ 7:45 PM
:
Beuys/ Logos - from Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, a simple yet surprisingly thorough "hyperessay" on Joseph Beuys's work relating to communication. Even if Mr. Beuys isn't your cup of tea, this site is itself a really interesting and original way to convey essay-like information in a uniquely web-based form (for a uniqely web-based attention span).
posted by jeremy @ 7:34 PM
:
Tom Ze on inspiration -
I dream a sound and then spend my life chasing after it. You always get part of it. But you inevitably miss something. I think this is a device God uses to keep life moving?
- lifted from this American Routes interview.
posted by jeremy @ 11:57 AM
:
A timeline of Artistic Experiments with Technosciences in Brazil beginning with "1833: Hercules Florence invents the photograph and the verb 'to photograph.'"
Plus: many English-language titles on Brazilian Electronic Art.
posted by jeremy @ 11:51 AM
:
Third Text - an exhaustive bibliography of writing on contemporary art and developing nations.
posted by jeremy @ 11:43 AM
:
A big, long page of feature articles on
Latin American music by
Boston Globe writer Elijah Wald. Keep scrolling for sharp introductory pieces on Mexican outlaw ballads (Corridos), Caetano Veloso, Cubanismo, and another well-meaning journalistic attempt to sort out the myriad of fluidly intermingled styles of Bahian music.
posted by jeremy @ 11:40 AM
4/28/03:
Typology, generation three
A complete portfolio of work by Thomas Ruff's students, about 45 undergrad and 6 grad students, at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. Images by grad student Petra Schneider are particularly interesting, each involving limited spaces from which larger phenomena are observed but not experienced. Digitised landscapes by Naruki Oshima are also worth a long look. The guestbook is amusing too.
Also, an 1993 interview with Mr Ruff, in English.
posted by jeremy @ 7:51 PM
4/27/03:
Annotated REM lyrics, wherein public users can expand each of Mr. Stipe's constant andf naturally opaque strings of references. For example, a line from "Fall on Me" -
"Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air"
bury magneyts ha. its a ref. to the towrer of pisa and some exper. about dropping lead weights and feathers. but you all knew that. [Stipe, on AOL] * He said that a hammer and a feather will hit the ground at the same time if there is no air. In fact they tried an experiment on the moon (where there is no air) with a hammer and a feather. The astronaut dropped them both at the same time, and they hit the ground at the same time. It was quite spectacular to watch really. [Joe Locke]
That these users seem hardly accurate keeps the idea from at all diminishing Mr Stipe's intentions.
[via ghost_Machine.]
posted by jeremy @ 3:13 PM
:
Sad, bleak sketches and woodcuts by Lee Gough are propaganda-as-preciousness (which I mean in a good way) or de Goya in a nuclear age.
The above was found through a long post from Social Design Notes on Design Against the War which features links to similar uses of critical graphic art.
posted by jeremy @ 2:42 PM
:
SUPERVERT 32C INC -
...is a consortium of literary, technological, and entrepreneurial interests. Its mission is to utilize the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to research the pathology of novel perversions. A veritable Bauhaus of psychoses, SUPERVERT seeks to invent new kinds of art and literature through the synthesis of abnormal psychology, operant conditioning, sadistic pornography, rationalist philosophy, and modernist aesthetics.
Visited more for its quite perverse flash games like the Shock-o-meter ("a software device for the self-determination of shock-resistance capacity... utiliz[ing] shocking, violent, horrible imagery to... determine your ability to withstand shock") or resources on exophilia ("an abnormal attraction for beings from worlds beyond earth"), Subvert also provides a quite complete source of downloadable Marquis de Sade texts and critical essays on the darker pathologies in certain contemporary artists - Matthew Barney and John Currin among them.
[oh yeah - don't go to Subvert on your employer's web browser, for god's sake]
Browsing through these texts which, although unrelated, remind me so much of the Damien Hirst-esque "shock" art of the early 90s or Barney's fetishistic neo-baroque, I'm more aware of stark differences in the culture of this decade. They're fascinating, and then really boring as well. The very real/ unreal paranoia and TV-shock, which will always by my snapshots for these past few years, make the fantastic and fetishistic seem rather benign, rather illusory, making up for rather banal intentions that don't quite overcome a certain jadedness, and I can't bring myself to feel jaded right now.
posted by jeremy @ 12:19 PM
4/26/03:
Sei la mangueira
This summer will find me working a variety of stupid jobs every single day, for about 70+ hours per week in order to get my ass back to Brazil (to Sao Paulo and/ or Vitoria this time) and to remain there for a good long while. So today, my last day off 'til July 4, I'm announcing that La beta corpo may experience a more infrequent postification for the next few months. I'll keep up when I can, but please pardon any long pauses. Since I'm planning on life completely sucking for the next little while, do stop by and leave an occasional comment as I wouldn't want to get lonely in all this. Saude, todos.
posted by jeremy @ 1:49 PM
:
A publicly compiled, so naturally disorganised, list of photolog links that's always good for a random direction.
posted by jeremy @ 1:13 PM
:
Hoffman Netter Entertainment, a media company who specialises in "bridg[ing] the gap between traditional film/television and interactive entertainment, taking brands from one medium and translating them to another," has an idea simply called "Bloggers", wherein people with weblogs may submit video footage of themselves in the process of maintaining their sites. Okay, maybe their own words would be a more fair proposal -
We?re looking for fresh POVs, ones generated by bloggers, not the traditional media.
Our philosophy is that any goes. Whatever you want to say and show in your video is fine. After all, it's your blog.
The key is to capture the essence of your blog in video format, and if it's interesting enough, we'll include it in the show, along with the name and URL of your blog.
- and yet, I'm still not quite getting it.... I can only imagine footage of myself sitting at my computer, with pajamas and stubble, and the only event being turning a record over and refilling my coffee cup. That'd be my contribution. I can't imagine it'd be all that different from yours.
[via buffoonery.]
posted by jeremy @ 12:56 PM
4/23/03:
A complicated web of issues for Iraqi artists -
They said they longed for modernity -- the Internet and cell phones -- but felt unsure about the impact of newfound freedom.
"For decades, we were used to watching ourselves. Now you can think with words," said Mohammed Thamer, a poet. "But to talk loudly and to think loudly takes time. Freedom needs practice, and it takes practice to be free."
posted by jeremy @ 12:23 PM
4/22/03:
Salon on Fotologs.
posted by jeremy @ 10:56 PM
:
For Earth Day - the 2003 Don't Be Fooled Awards - this year's top ten most erroneous buckets of corporate greenwash.
posted by jeremy @ 7:55 PM
:
A eulogy for Nina Simone with audio [login:betacorpo pw:betacorpo].
And another -
A pianist, singer and composer, Simone's place among the great divas is assured by her genre-devouring body of work, stormy love life and an often aloof manner that more than once saw her walk out on an audience that showed her too little regard.
And one more.
posted by jeremy @ 11:27 AM
:
Lost Art - a somewhat precious but quite impressively designed portfolio of photography in Sao Paulo's various subcultures.
posted by jeremy @ 12:32 AM
4/21/03:
Matt Tobey, a dear old friend from that god-forsaken Michigan, whose writing you might've already seen in Haypenny or as Neal Pollack's guest-blogger, now has his very own little plot of real estate -
Matthew Tobey in the City of Floating Blogs - and you are strongly encouraged to pay him a visit there.
posted by jeremy @ 9:35 PM
4/20/03:
If perhaps the fresh new weather, your religious high holidays, preceeded by a month red terrorism alerts and war-related indignation have got y'all a bit too "twitterpated" [an unforgettable word from Bambi], the dullest blog in the world should be the right dose of inspired banality to balance you out.
posted by jeremy @ 5:03 PM
:
Dick Cheney's obituary prematurely published on CNN's server for twenty minutes + a related Fark Photoshop contest.
posted by jeremy @ 4:03 PM
:
posted by jeremy @ 12:52 AM
4/19/03:
Based On A Moblog - instant and anonymous picture postcards produced with, and for, a mobile phone.
posted by jeremy @ 10:55 AM
:
Apparently, last Wednesday was the 60th anniversary of the
discovery of LSD. If I were 21 still, I'd have known much sooner, I'm sure.
posted by jeremy @ 10:30 AM
4/18/03:
Living in Expatria - a now-retired weblog written between 2000 and 2001 chronicling a Canadian's days in Sao Paulo - will definitely be good reading in my poor saudade-laden purgatory of familiarity 'til I can swim back down to Brazil's magic coast this summer.
Edging on two months now. Back in the land of English and peanut butter and cheddar cheese and the ability to navigate my way around the city in my trademark brain occupied fashion. Two months and I hardly feel as I was ever away. Two months and it seems hard to remember what Brazilian sun felt like on my skin. Funny how life is. When you're someplace you know, someplace that knows where you fit into its stride. where you know how to walk in step with it... it seems like time wizzes by. Brazil seems like stolen time now...
Boy howdy. Say that, but add my depression. I still can't get used to Chicago feeling like a one-light town now - only three millions people? Walking home from the train down Division late at night, stores and bars closed, lights out, no one else on the street and a car or two whizzing by like urban tumbleweed - and this is a city? In Rio, there was never silence, and always people around, no matter the hour. And sometimes dangerously large crowds. But there was always a vibe. Yeah, there was definitely danger there too...
[update: 19.4] I've learned from Expatria this quite cool and slightly-untranslatable Portuguese word - Jeitinho - meaning "the creative and legitimate ways of getting things done in spite of bureaucracy".
posted by jeremy @ 7:19 PM
:
Today the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has announced its recipients for the Jefferson Muzzle Award. Topping the list is Attorney General John Ashcroft whose long list of meriting actions include the following amusing policy -
[Ashcroft allowed] $8,000 in tax dollars to be spent on drapes to conceal two semi-nude statues that often appeared behind the attorney general during press conferences in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. Ironically, the two statues represent "The Spirit of Justice" and "The Majesty of Law.
posted by jeremy @ 9:16 AM
4/17/03:
Seja marginal. Seja heroi
Some links on the often referenced yet still obscure Brazilian conceptual artist Helio Oiticica. He worked mostly in Sao Paulo in the 60s, mostly New York in the 70s, passing on quite untimely thereafter, and whose surviving work presents a wonderfully de-centered variant on the bitterly celebratory aspects of 60s Pop Art. His pieces even today are still strongly sarcastic, usually playing with contradictions between outside idealization of Brazil and it's often violent realities within, importing/ exporting the cultural prodcts from empire to margins, and lampooning the assumed decadence and poverty in both places. He made clothes that combined as banners with oblique statements (often worn by street children), reproduced images of pop icons like Jimi Hendrix and Marilyn Monroe set on the floor with cocaine, and built installations
that required the viewers to recline on hammocks or couches to create the laziest, most indulgent experience of art as possible. The humour and easy re-adaptation of American culture, often provoking the ire of Brazil's right-wing junta, becomes part of the visual wing of Tropicalismo (a name provided by one of Oiticica's installations) known more through musicians like Caetano Veloso and Tom Ze.
Some resources -
I'll be posting more linklists like these on contemporary art in Brazil to La beta corpo in the future, mostly because the libraries around me don't have a whole lot, and mostly intended for my own reference, but hopefully the annotations will be interesting to you too, friendly readers.
posted by jeremy @ 9:49 PM
:
I'm diggin Blissblog lately - a not-quite-old bit of posts on politics and fresh UK Garage tracks - not quite things that one often thinks about at the same time.
posted by jeremy @ 9:34 PM
4/16/03:
Photographs of
Afro-Brazilian religion - although a more than probematically National Geographic-esque presentation of "natural" history, these are still an interesting overview of Bahian cultures.
posted by jeremy @ 8:58 PM
:
La crony corpo
Cult movie hero, Haypenny contributor, and beautiful people insider Deckie Holmes is throwing down the wild Hollywood exploits in his very new weblog. Be sure to visit and tell him you'll never forget his Sam Samly in JFK.
posted by jeremy @ 8:22 PM
:
April 15th wisdom from Mr. Popp and from Haypenny.
posted by jeremy @ 12:17 AM
:
Pioneering Cartoonists of Color - bad scans, worthy effort - a quite fascinating archive of early 20th century comic strips by African-Americans.
posted by jeremy @ 12:11 AM
4/15/03:
Onward Christian soldiers - more on Iraq, occupation, and close ties 'tween Bush and Christian fundamentalism.
The above article refers to the following pamplets from the highly "Christian Nationalist" (and mainstream) organisation In Touch Ministries - A Nation at War and A Christian's Duty in Times of War. I was going to pull a few salient quotes, but that would be a little hysterical. Follow the links and scare yourself.
And a related send-up
from Bartcop -
"You mess with Jesus - you get a Texas Lead Enema".
posted by jeremy @ 10:50 PM
4/14/03:
From my junior-high years, hopelessly addicted to first-season Saturday Night Live re-runs, I remember a spoof commercial for the "Price is Right Stamp Gun," wherein grocery shoppers re-tag items with their own price tags, so simple and obvious with the 70's technology that the joke had to have come out of someone actually doing it.
Hopelessly dated? Re-code.com has the post-millenial solution, a database of barcodes and web software that can be used to generate new prices for any merchandise (organised into categories) and print them onto stickers. One of the site's designers says: "We think of ourselves as a friend of Priceline.com, making good on their promises of naming your own price. We're carrying out their goal to its logical extreme." This Salon article describes re-code's statement further and Wal-Mart's lawsuit intending to shut the site down.
posted by jeremy @ 9:49 PM
:
Photos of blackened cities and oddly detatched architectural details by Rieko Akatsuka.
posted by jeremy @ 9:48 PM
:
Michaelangelo Matos on the unassumingly erotic side of Microhouse - profiling the more/less regular sounds in my disc player like Herbert, Closer Musik, and the brilliant Triple R mix -
Track titles like "Muff Diver" and artist names like Narcotic Syntax play up microhouse's libidinous quality, frequently with a wink. But the genre's sexiest quality may be its deviant playfulness. On Dimbiman's "Hokule," half a dozen particles zip in and out of the mix before an exhaled male uhhhh signals post-orgasmic contentment . . . or is it confusion?
????
So subtle, so nice. And these sounds are certainly on my very short list of things that I missed when I was in Brazil - a country which, although home of some of the most dynamic sounds in the world, only offered the most godawful Booty House tracks (dismissively referred to by the Cariocas as "funk") to the gingros on the more lame contemporary dancefloors.
posted by jeremy @ 9:45 PM
4/13/03:
Another letter to President Bush that's been spread quite far already and will continue here - this one from Mozambiquan author and activist Mia Couto that does well to describe the rebuke one feels seeing the US and its recent history from afar.
Don't worry Mr. President. We - the small nations of this world - do not intend to demand your resignation for the support provided to all those dictators. The larger menace lying over America is not the weaponry of any third party. It's the lies in the heads of your own citizens. The danger is not Saddam's regime or any other regime. But the sentiment of superiority your government seems to have. Your major enemy is not on the outside. It's within the USA.
And that war can only be won by the Americans themselves.
posted by jeremy @ 9:06 PM
:
A pivotal moment in today's Doonesbury
posted by jeremy @ 2:31 PM
4/12/03:
With my sad abundunce of newfound freetime, I am now also contributing to Spitting Image, a really excellent group blog on events and reproducible images. The authors of the quite similar Consumptive.org and Conscientious also post.
Have a look.
posted by jeremy @ 1:07 PM
:
I'm quit excited to see that Ucomics.com (which, although faithfully delivering my Doonesbury every morning, does so on the most annoying of conditions) is republishing the entire archive of Bloom County Strips.
However, it apparently costs $10 a year if you didn't already get a free account back in the salad days.
I think I was still in the 5th grade when Bloom County retired, so I probably didn't quite get the political humour. I was more enamored with the drawings and remember spending hours trying to copy images of Opus, Steve Dallas and (god, what was his name? the one with the hair?), trying to imitate Bereke Breathed's delightfully loose lines and slack postures. Now, looking back on these, I can't think of any other source of political humor that blends events with such entertaining whimsy. No wonder Bloom County appealed to me so much as a kid. In a recent conversation about Gary Hart with other fellow mid-twentysomethings, I was the only one who knew what "Monkey Business" referred to. I have Bloom County and Mad Magazine to thank for that slight precociousness.
I've searched a bit for some ghetto alternatives to the pay-per-view archive, and I've dug up some bad scans of old strips. Mr. Breathed also has some old favourites on his site. He's likewise quite an delightful smartass in interviews, so chats with the Onion or the Christian Science Monitor are a worthy read. Okay, sorry that those links are subpar, but Ucomics is still too annoyingly over-advertised to deserve anyone's $10.
posted by jeremy @ 12:25 PM
:
A rare night of turning up lots of useful indices for all things Brazilian and musical -
Although slithily commercial, Hot 100 Brasil is an interesting archive of the top 100 songs for any given year. 1977 was especially good.
The Jazz Site has an alright page on contemporary Jazz in Brazil as well as a rich page of WMP samples with older introductions to favourites of mine like Bossa Nostra and S-Tone Inc..
Rare Brazilian vinyl from Mara Records
a BBC radio documentary on new eletronica in Brazil.
And lastly, I've been looking for quite a while for a site like Bossa Nova Guitar, a massive database of composers, profiles, lyrics, chords, and a whole lot else else for your record buying legwork.
posted by jeremy @ 12:14 AM
4/11/03:
In red hot bullshit months like these, Get Your War On and the A Room of Jean's Own are, like, comfort immaturity.
posted by jeremy @ 11:43 PM
4/10/03:
I've found for you another levity break from the sick sick cynnicism of current events -
The MajiK Clarinet Agshodo.
A brilliant appropriation of commercial stock photos from my new favourite weblog.
posted by jeremy @ 11:47 PM
:
Test your skepticals -
A post-millenial moustache revival?
[Salon login required for now - sorry].
How 'bout a talking fish?
posted by jeremy @ 8:21 PM
4/9/03:
Another quite amusing public Photoshop contest stemming from -
"What if Fox News were around during other historical events?"
posted by jeremy @ 7:27 PM
:
During my too-short weeks in Rio, I had the auspiciously good sense to bring along my copy of Once by filmmaker Wim Wenders which I re-read on many mornings in the shady park surrounding the Museo Republica. On this last perusal of Wenders's sad vignettes, I was more aware that, rather than buttressing his images, they're describing more the things he can't photograph. It inspired me to write similar vignettes, mostly to remember the many truly fascinating people I'd met there whom I could never bring myself to violate with a camera.
Now, back in Chicago with negative money and plenty of time by myself, I'll hopefully inaurgurate the still-empty writing section of this site by finishing those journals there. I also have about five hundred frames of negatives to sort through, so stay tuned some sort of Rio series or two depending on what the better photos turn out to be.
posted by jeremy @ 9:19 AM
4/7/03:
Walking Tours - a new project from NYC's Surveillance Camera Players.
posted by jeremy @ 8:32 PM
:
Bem vindo
Yesterday I got my very first taste of American news for the first time in five weeks (oh yeah - I'm back in Chicago now. And I'm depressed) being forced to endure constant CNN on an eight-hour layover in Dallas. My disappointing little re-introduction to life in the US involved an inability to somehow find a quiet nook in the mile-long curving hallway of uniform gates that passes as Dallas's airport architecture. Absolutely every waiting area had CNN Airport Network facing each row of chairs, blaring out the same series of war stories within every possible earshot. The US was (is?) on the highest terrorism alert that day, so leaving the waiting area wasn't really an option. In an ironic contrast, I'd just spent most of the previous evening waiting in two Brazilian airports, both of which still used analog flip-tile clocks.
But, sitting forever in Dallas, I was quite surprised at the CNN tack on US soldiers and Christianity.
Today I've happened upon a couple of other articles (among many more, I'm sure) that also describe similarly strange features of war on a Muslim nation by a fundamentalist Christian president.
From Newhouse News Service - "Plans Underway to Christianize the Enemy" wherein:
two leading evangelical Christian missionary organizations said Tuesday that they have teams of workers poised to enter Iraq to address the physical and spiritual needs of a large Muslim population.
[snip]
[Franklin] Graham, the son of legendary evangelist Billy Graham, has been less diplomatic about Islam than his father has been. Two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Franklin Graham called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" during an interview on NBC, the television network. In his book published last year, "The Name," Graham wrote that "The God of Islam is not the God of the Christian faith." He went on to say that "the two are different as lightness and darkness."
...Rev. Jerry Vines, a former denomination president, told several thousand delegates that Islam's Allah is not the same as the God worshipped by Christians. "And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah, either. Jehovah's not going to turn you into a terrorist," Vines said.
And (via Consumptive)
"Army chaplain offers baptisms, baths"
-
'You have to be aggressive to help people find themselves in God,'' [Army chaplain Josh Llano] said.
He calls himself a ''Southern Baptist evangelist,'' and justifies the war and killing with a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, which he often recites: ``Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.
''This means we are called upon by our government to fight and that is giving unto Caesar, as the Bible tells us,'' he said.
So this is what I have to endure 'til I can get my ass back to Brazil as soon as humanly possible.
posted by jeremy @ 8:02 PM
:
Three images from O Globo
And more here
posted by jeremy @ 6:19 PM
4/3/03:
So, while my weblog continues to suck ('cuz I'm too busy and having too much fun to care), y'oughta go see Ms Zulkey's really quite bar-raisin' post from April 3rd on dreams, public submissions, and uncannily photoshopped images of pigs that'll stay seared into your fragile mind for many therapy-filled years.
posted by jeremy @ 10:12 AM
4/2/03:
Dammit dammit dammit!! I can't get the image files in the last post below to come up. I'm not exactly dealing with a state-of-the-art computing situation down here. Sorry.
Perhaps once I get back home to my trusty G4 I'll repost the images. They're really quite amazing.
posted by jeremy @ 3:00 PM
4/1/03:
A roda
A few day's ago I put up a link to a quite excellent review of Susan Sontag's new book. An article from Christian Science Monitor and an audio feature from Wisconsin Public Radio have also been quite interesting.
My time here in Rio has been full of thoughts on violence and pictures. When everything I see from the language to the toilets and lightswitches is completely foreign, the little displays of power become that much more salient. This is easily the most beautiful place I've been to, and often I actually feel a bit safer here than Chicago, but I'm constantly being reminded of the violence that hangs in the air. Armoured cars, assault rifles, helicopters, many tiers of military and civilian police, cops in riot gear, cops with guns drawn - to anyone who lives here, these little points seem unnoticeable. Between living in a place so strange to me, with violence in front of me, mixed with a constant barrage of violent images coming from home, my head is swirling with yet unnconnected thoughts from each. But I'm warming up to Ms Sontag's newly outlined notions of certain images that, unlike the desensitisation that she described in On Photography, stay seared in the mind. After a month, I still stare in awe at the airplanes that fly over downtown Rio to the runaway across the bay.
And with that in my head, I come across these two indelible images on the cover of today's issue of O Globo - the first taken in Rio last night, the second from Baghdad.
update 3.4.03 - Sorry, I can't get those damn images up. I'll repost again when I'm using a more cooperative comp.
 
These are the respective stories behind them - Rio and Baghdad - but I can't really decipher the portuguese.
posted by jeremy @ 6:33 PM
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