8/31/03:
Vamos lá
In this past week I've turned in resignation letters, sublet my room in this dope $300 Wicker Park apartment, procured a one-way Delta Airlines Buddypass, and have my passport spending the weekend in the Brazilian Consulate's office. Everything's rolling now - the magic date is Friday, October 4 - and then I'll finally be landed in São Paulo all set to start this whole new crazy life, wandering about the crackly tiled sidewalks with the mad beats of Suba's "Samba do Gringo Paulista" rocking my head. Aside from that, I've no idea what's going to happen after October but I'm ecstatic to find out.
Enjoy your Labor Day, or your labor, whatever the case.
posted by jeremy @ 7:45 PM
8/28/03:
Sweetness, I was only joking
•On feminism's third wave - "an audacious sense of entitlement."
•Building the DC Metro [via meFi]
•On the history of Urban Outfitter and its ties to the paleolithically homophobic Senator Santorum.
• Dissent among the troops.
•Military operations as urban planning.
• 1/1000 scale models of New York and Tokyo [via nsop].
•Veteran adult film insiders reconsider Boogie Nights.
• Beneath my Feet are photos by Marc Schiller of exactly that - and ever the fascinating banality. Compare these from (I assume) an NYC portfolio with these taken in Vietnam.
•Lastly and bestly - a picture of George W Bush getting coiffed. And allow me a personal anecdote - when I was in Rio de Janeiro last March, it was of course during the breakout of Iraq #2, and a Globo evening news story was mentioning Bush's address to the US. The footage they used briefly showed - I shit you not - Georgie being primped and primmed by three simultaneous stylists. About ten other people were in the room watching with me and we were all dying laughing. Such a great relief of the frustration of such a futile month, when the outside-the-US camera pulls back the curtain on the wizard for a moment. This Smoking Gun link includes similarly priceless footage. Do go there today, if nowhere else.
posted by jeremy @ 7:41 PM
8/27/03:
Personal vouchers
[I'm in a busy busy week, in case you're wondering why the tumbleweed's been blowing through this blogade lately]
James from consumptive.org posted "Adjustments" - a short piece on his years printing evidence photos in a custom colour lab. This just happens to be the very same job that I have printing evidence photos in a custom colour lab (I replaced him a couple of years ago). But my last day is next week (glory be!).
James describes the sordid pimping of one's art school skills well.
I can personally vouch that Masked and Anonymous, although an intriguing an idea, is by far the most convoluted mess of a film I've seen in a good long while. I feel like such a sucker for thinking that, even though I couldn't be less interested in Bob Dylan, the film's setting - a post-apocalyptic United States transformed along the same precarious political dynamics of a Latin American junta - would be intriguing enough. But seeing as how I don't particularly care for Bob Dylan, rock music, americana, or Val Kilmer cameos, I feel like quite the sucker for having bothered with the thing. Don't be a sucker - read movie reviews.
However, if you're lucky enough to have Madame Sata playing in your selected city this week, do consider checking out this devastating and gorgeous new(-ish) Brazilian film. It concerns a "family" of outcasts in 1930s Lapa - a prostitute, a motherly transvestite, and a streetfighting pimp who eventually re-emerges as legendary Carnaval queen Madam Sata. It's often brutal treatment of the contradictions of poverty and family, and more overtly sexuality and race really transcend its achingly romantic setting (though this never ceases to be pure pleasure). As an outside northerner long-enamored of Brazil, I'm always quite fascinated by the seeming fluidity of race and sexuality when considering the culture, never the one/zero rigidness of that of what I come from. A film like Madame Sata is important for confounding those impressions, and profound enough to really transcend the particularities of place for deeper conditional insights. A rare work, for sure.
I saw this film first about a year ago when it took first prize in Chicago's International Film Festival. It made an interesting contrast to City of God the other Brazilian entry in the fest - here, the more Hollywood treatment of Rio's underworld that seemed to come off as glib to most folks despite the producer's good intentions.
Lastly, I'm characteristically late mentioning this, but Paul compares the "Boil Water Advisories" of US and Canadian websites in one of the funniest Great Blackout accounts I've read.
posted by jeremy @ 9:56 PM
8/24/03:
Hold on
I somehow @#$&ed up my Blogger tags. Pardon this horrid layout mess while I get everything back how it was
Okay, we're back online now - pardon La beta corpo's unforseen interruption of service.
posted by jeremy @ 4:13 PM
8/22/03:
Happy Friday
•"Como uma virgem" [mp3] [via enigmaticMermaid]
posted by jeremy @ 7:40 AM
8/20/03:
A quick one plus three
From Banksy -
Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.
This is from easily one of the wittiest graffiti sites I've seen a while. I'm tempted to pull out links to the particularly clever pages in this mostly linear site (like remixed thrift-store paintings and some really incredible "cut-outs" onto various urban sites) but that would spoil the fun.
•The Bamboo Bike is utterly gorgeous [via rebecca]
• Lost English words - they are considered part of standard modern English, are listed in the Oxford dictionary, but are completely nonexistent on any readily accessible web page. I'll add that, based on what I saw skimming, the words are completely inelegant and it's not hard to imagine why they's be out of favour [via randomWalks].
• Trek Earth compiles huge amounts of amateur photogaphs (of a tourist snap sort) categorised by region. This will be a quite fascinating work place diversion for me in the coming couple of weeks (then I'll no longer have a workplace) [via meFi].
posted by jeremy @ 7:16 PM
8/19/03:
Superbacana
•I came upon this image last night via Greg.org and was quite powerfully reminded of Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg project in Detroit. Follow the credits back from Greg to a post on Wooster Collective, and sure enough, it turns out that this Detroit News column through which the tank piece was discovered came from Heidelberg.org.
A witness to the tank in Iraq conveyed the following -
The sergeant, who didn't have permission to be quoted by name, said a pack of what looked to be 10- to 16-year-olds "were having a great time and were so proud. They waved at everyone who passed and had paint on everything." He assumed adults were in charge, but he didn't notice any. What he did see was an explosion of color from the treads to the dome-shaped turret.
On the front of the tank, beneath the barrel of the 100mm main gun, half a dozen smiling people hold hands in a field of flowers. There's a purple wheel near the right front and a yellow one in back.
Pinks and blues cover the base of the turret. Flowers swirl up the barrel and more flowers dot the pavement. What you'd think of as a fender, if you weren't looking at a tank, has pale blue hearts and a sort of white shamrock against a field of orange.
It looks like it was painted by children with no training and no plan. It looks fabulous.
To Gattorn, it's a reminder that "so much life and hope comes from the simple things people do in the face of death."
•I was probably about 12 or 13 years old when my dad took me to see the Heidelberg's first incarnation before it was demolished by the city of Detroit in 1991. It consisted of a pair of houses in one of Detroit's nearly vacant east side neighbourhoods, among mostly burned out shells of former buildings. It was covered in polka-dots, bright paint, and surrounded by various sculptural contraptions pulled from junkyards and re-animated - a colorful dream world/ ghost world in the middle of cruel neglect where the obsolete consumer objects of the past reclaimed their original fascination. Seeing it through those car windows was a seminal moment for me - still a kid enamored of the surrealism of comic books and Salvador Dali, it was when I first learned that art can exist more meaningfully beyond the sanctioned space of museums and frames.
Twelve years later, and I've yet to accomplish this idea of art outside of sanctioned spaces (or any art for that matter). But it's a wonderful feeling to see the digital photos of that inspired tank in Kirkut and be reminded of my original fascination with images before I started reading too much about them.
Also found along the way...
posted by jeremy @ 9:27 PM
8/17/03:
A fairly balanced list o' links
posted by jeremy @ 8:10 PM
8/12/03:
Postponing a bit
So after careful consideration, I decided to postpone the Great Relocation until around the first week of October. The plan for the past few months has been to haul ass through a morning job, a night job, and a project or two for friends, then add on sorting out my things, tossing them out, and blowing out of the windy city like a thief. The closer I get though, the more I see that manic work followed by a giant culture shock might not be the wisest way to pace things. I'm dying to be back in Brazil right now, but a couple of weeks spent relaxed among familiar surroundings makes a dull but good sense. I'm a resilient kid, for sure, but one has to mind their psychological health a little too. And September really is a rare and beautiful month to be a Midwesterner, an ideal way to leave it.
Noticing changes to la beta corpo lately? I'm switching out computers, storming the Internet quite a bit, and trying to make this place a more coherent read. I'm also seeing it more as a way to document what will be some really pivotal months for me. Plus, I predict that things are going to get a bit more journal-y here once I'm blogging through Internet cafes with less interest in long surfs and more to report back home. Hopefully this will make the transition a little more consistent. And I love organising around this bullet motif •••
Lastly, may I subtly point out that those comment boxes are back?
Elsewhere...
And an add on...
Speaking of changing weblogs, Chrisafer's new domain
is looking quite spiffy.
posted by jeremy @ 10:56 PM
:
Lists for puckfists
posted by jeremy @ 2:06 PM
8/11/03:
Space and longing
Apartment is a flash project "inspired by the idea of a memory palace" wherein users submit text which activates a program that transforms the words into a blueprint based on the logical relationships between ideas in the text. After that, the user can see the blueprint as 3-dimensional space.
Unfortunately for me, the site takes exception to a Macintosh computer. Otherwise, I would have enjoyed seeing a room designed around the phrase - "I really wish I could leave now..."
Elsewhere...
posted by jeremy @ 10:32 PM
8/5/03:
Agora vou divertir...
I can safely promise again that posts to la beta corpo will be slim to zilch this week. Do check out my halfway completed portfolio section if you haven't yet (more should be up in a few days).
And for some alternate weblogs that haven't petered out this month - a Rio de Janeiro blog Vigna Maru has been a favourite read lately for a quick daily batch of design-related links (and Portuguese practice); Joerg and Mr. Ceicel are keeping Spitting Image consistently scary; and at WWKAD, Paul is still skewering current events ever precosciously.
posted by jeremy @ 9:45 PM
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