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9/30/03: Sei l?After a whole summer of widdling a thousand frames of negs into a hundred prints then editing that down to something that'll be both interesting and fit into my tiny plot of web real estate, I've finally added some Rio de Janeiro photos to my online portfolio. Do have a look. 
posted by jeremy @ 1:18 AM 9/29/03: A Detroit dispatch
A cool few... Some fabulous new flaneur writing - Rules for wandering and how city planners can best accomodate this urban magic. The 50 most common used CDs [via chicha]. Having quite recently gutted about half of my CD collection for a quick $250, I can now recommend that you needn't bother blowing the dust off of any Beastie Boys, old Radiohead, or Parliament. Use 'em as coasters or hand mirrors or something. There's also no rebate available for your drum n' bass phase. Significant incidents of political violence against Americans[.pdf]. Found erotica [via aberrant.] posted by jeremy @ 12:38 AM 9/26/03: Adeus, Chicago
posted by jeremy @ 10:30 AM 9/24/03:Quanitfying Terrorism - according to a recently compiled database, there have been 188 suicide attacks over the past twenty years. Mostly done for religious reasons? Actually, almost half were carried out by the Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Done toward unspecific, apolitical ends? Actually, most - including Al Quaida - have in common a very similar desire - the withdrawal of an outside military occupier. [via samizdat.] From the Surrealist Compliment Generator - "In caressing your follicles I am only vaguely reminded of the last bitter harvest.". No More Words - a non glossary. Riniart.org is a collection of xerox-able activist art [via socialDesign]. Photographs for blind people. The disinfopedia [via consumptive]. The new and improved Blogilization is looking quite spiffy and worked out of its clunky original design. Likewise, I really hope the new-ish Language Log - with analyses like "Verb semantics and justifying war" - really takes off. Radiohead Rorschach [via followmeHere]. posted by jeremy @ 12:08 AM 9/22/03: Still raining still dreaming20 through 27 of September is banned books week No Alternative to Transcendence - on Kurt Cobain, punk utopianism, and underlying economic relations between the two. Gorgeous - a hypertext reworking of Walter Benjamin's arcades project. Stay for the photos. Very cool - 90 diplomatic maps of the world with all political subjectivity well intact. See this post on Spitting Image for a more precise description. Spanish Civil War posters [via dublog.] The Iraqometer is your one-stop shop for statistics on billions spent, bombs dropped, lives lost, leader status, and WMD sites [not] found. posted by jeremy @ 7:33 PM 9/21/03: Estas coisasI've sold my wonderful old G4 whose keys and components and browsers and scripts and cookies and passwords and cheap littlemostly non-MS programmes fit together so swimmingly I could practically think anything I want into its digital existence. I've now substituted a year-old Dell laptop picked up from a friend for a little bit of money and dinner and I think it's the most miserable little piece of shit in so many ways. I shouldn't complain - I'm lucky to have something, I'd probably have much bigger compatibility handicaps with an Apple in Brazil, and it'll help hold the lesson plans and CVs, but my god - what a design travesty this Windows XP stuff is! It has twice the processing power of my old G4 and runs twice as slow. Some script error on this very page caused not only the browser to close itself, the operating system then proceeded to log itself off then shut itself down without asking me my opinion of this drastic overcomenpsation. Another time some background program, insisting it also be properly exited while the computer shut down caused the machine to freeze about 90% of the way through the process, far enough have already closed down all of its apparently myriad recovery functions. Without a reset button, I had to wait for the battery to die before starting up and pretending to fix it. Yeah, I guess my reluctance to really learn how to use this
In better news, I've a job waiting for me in Sao Paulo. My interview was over the phone and began as soon as the call snapped me out of a sound sleep at quarter to six in the morning. The interviewer forgot about the time difference. I still can't remember what I said but it apparently worked. Not that you would, but if you rifled through the trashcans in the alley behind my building, going through big piles of stuff I've thrown out while packing, you'd be the proud new owner of 200 tiny black and white photographs of Chicago's Kingsbury street, a mirror ball, 500 party flyers from between 1996 and 1998, photographs of every sign on every buiulding between 1822 and 2021 North Milwauke Avenue, about 270 sheets of expired unexposed photo paper in about 268 seperate boxes, and the compete text of Debord's Society of the Spectacle printed and bound entirely in pilfered office supplies. Outras coisas Today's Leonard Cohen's birthday. People falling--imagined and real [via samizdat.] Project censored's top ten most quashed news topics for 2002-2003, including "Argentine crisis sparks cooperative growth". History of anarchist texts [via ]. "No more fucking ugly buildings". How to be a historical re-enactor. A list of Gangsta-to-Pirate translations [via bitterGirl] posted by jeremy @ 11:43 PM 9/16/03: Faire MousserSome political action sites to watch - Electronic Frontier Foundation watches RIAA-related legislation, Misleader.org is a "daily chronicle of Bush Administration distortion," DontSpyon.US organises news about travel restrictions and resulting boycotts, OneTermPresident.org turns an impending Bush defeat into iconography, On the importance of losing - "Recognition of this mistake [the war in Iraq] - one that may prove as great as the decision to embark on the Vietnam War-is essential if the best (or at any rate the least disastrous) path out of the mess is to be charted." Today's Front Pages - the simultaneous display of 252 newspapers from 34 countries updated daily. Planespotting - "The airport is an annex to the corporate park, a terminus for the highway, not much else" [via douzeLunes]. Is Portuguese endangered? Mark Twain and the art of swearing. More obscene expressions in Brazilian Portuguese than I could possibly know in English... ...although the Sex Dictionary should bring my English up to speed. Adriana Bertini - this Sao Paulo-based artist uses thousands of expired condoms in works that easily breeze between sculpture, fashion, and household decoration. Despite a rather hackneyed web presentation, I do enjoy these interesting juxtapositions - an anti-septic material compromised by a public rather than personal use, women "wearing" condoms, a tounge-in-cheek inclusion in the polite display of household display - all quite delightful [via apprendiz.] posted by jeremy @ 4:44 PM 9/15/03:From Milton Michado's "Art that makes me come" - "For Brazilians, as for those who speak Portuguese, art is a woman: "A Arte". For people who speak Spanish, art is a man: "EI Arte". For those who speak English, art has no gender. This does not mean that people who speak Portuguese and people who speak Spanish make art differently as woman is different from man. They make art in a way that is equal, as a woman is equal to a man. Art in English has no gender, but this does not mean that art done in English is neutral as woman and man are not neutral." From a new interview with Douglas Coupland [via caterina.] "Not being American, I don?t know how it feels to be American but I think it is a different thing to be an American now." / "It feels like national identity is in flux for many people who haven?t been knee-jerked into saluting the flag?"
"Saudade does not travel, it is precisely what stays, left behind. The traveler who has saudade says 'I'm not sad, I'm ill'. It's like mumps (positive, more or less...)" Eyegasm - all train graffiti all the time. Why am I excited about a Pixies cover band but apprehensive about a Pixies reunion? [2nd via travelers] An oddly exhaustive day-to-day history of Nirvana. Conceptual art under military dictatorship in Brazil. Cubism and Cameras - this paper is a sudden flash of insight that the current digital camera is quite unnecessarily confined to its mechanical father [via dublog.] Cincinnati's abandoned subway [via beyond] posted by jeremy @ 12:49 PM : HumsIt's about every six months or so that I'll read about some idea or phenomenon that's so unbelievably profound, spinning my head around feverishly in so many directions, that my reaction becomes slightly physical - goosebumps, slightly watering eyes, a day's worth of excitement from the mental gymnastics of trying to wrap my head around something so utterly confusingly ecstatically new. That said, last week's much-circulated story of the B-flat Black Hole came just about on time.
This Metafilter thread spoils the fascination slightly but finds many other interesting implications for the B-flat black hole. Another story that brought similar cognitive ecstacy is related - this one from my all-time favourite This American Life Episode. The theme of the program was on mapping. Among many absolutely incredible alternative maps, one was a sound map by a man who noticed that the pitch of the fan on his computer was an A, the hum of the heater a C, and the whoosh of the air vent in his office and E (or something like that) - forming an A minor chord, a rather morose sound to be hearing for so long. Okay, now you should listen to the Real Audio 'cuz I'm mangling the story. Fascinating these also... On reconstructing ancient Greek music from scant artifacts and further insights into the hypothetical nature of ancient history (those sculptures weren't conceived to be white marble, after all). Germany remembers Theodore Adorno [via artkrush]. It's too bad I'll have already split for Brazil before I can see the new twenty. The Labor Arts Sampler [via dublog]. General Wesley Clark's push for the latest military bicycle [via ghost_Machine] Gallery of Hippy Horrors are some of the most fascinatingly overcaptioned photos I've seen in a good long while [via spittingImage]. Diane Arbus Reconsidered also has a bit to say on posthumously publishing a deceased photographer's work [via chicha]. These answers to "Whatcha listening to?" make me slightly sad that now I'll never meet these fellow Chicagoans. posted by jeremy @ 12:40 AM 9/9/03: Three come around
posted by jeremy @ 10:02 PM 9/8/03: Well into the liminalEven though I've been accused before of being overly eclectic with what I post here, I'm pretty sure links to information on traveller's insurance and expatriate bank accounts are outside of this weblog's subject matter, however loosely defined. Unfortunately, that pretty much describes all my Internet time these days, so pardon the light posting. I'll make it up with this page - a loaded timeline of art about urban disruption - which is all the quality reading you'll ever need from me this week. And some... Chicago gang symbols [via gapers]. American memory As diferen?as idiom?ticas entre portugu?s e ingl?s. posted by jeremy @ 9:56 PM 9/5/03: OtherwiseAs vacas comem duas vezes... - São Paulo artist Priscilla Davanzo transforms her skin into that of both a cow and a map. How to write photo captions. Some satire: "Mecha... is the spaniard translation for macho" [via samizdat] Jean Baudrillard complains about the Matrix [en francais]. An 1847 map of the Southwest and its relevance to current immigration debates. The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - if I had the time, I might try to count the number of words here now in standard English [via Caterina]. Photos of Carandiru, the largest prison in Latin America. An interview with Gary Trudeau. Matt Tobey has a little piece running in Nerve this week. posted by jeremy @ 1:15 AM 9/4/03: I had a one-day weekendand managed to get many more Betacorpo.net tweaks accomplished. Most notably, there's a new portfolio section called Armour Squares, documents from one of Chicago's south side neighborhoods. This is by far my favorite piece here, finished about two years ago through an independent study grant at the Art Institute of Chicago, and so far the best chance I've had to explore the visual problems that particularly interest me.  I made these photos during the only time I've had in my life where I could put off mundane considerations - job, classes, etc. - and truly concentrate full-time on finishing a series. I was able to use equipment far more amazing than my own, but the best part was the opportunity to stare for hours at these images and truly fall into them, to flatly and precisely transcribe every detail of a place exactingly enough that it can't actually exist. I wanted to find structures that seem more littered than built, convoluted and indifferent, and try to give them a more human cohesion. It's the closest I've come so far to any sort of residency or situation where I can consider the most minute details of a project without distraction from any other concerns. As an undergraduate, the projects that excited me were always undermined by the myriad other hoops one jumps through in school - research papers, exams, tedious assignments from, say, recreating Cezanne's palatte with swatches for Advanced Color Theory. After graduating, food and health insurance are more the concern. This causes me to still see the things I've made more as sketches, once-intruging ideas that won't get done, usually not even worth accomplishing. Still, these Armour Square images stand out against other frustrations - nothing profound for sure, but they still hold up to my intentions, still strong and precise and it's very satisfying to put them up here. And satisying these too... Anecdotes about eponyms - meet the people behind the words chauvinist, shrapnel, silhouette, guillotine, fallopian tube, and crapper. And, in case you're not reading Dan Savage regularly, I'm happy to pass on the definition for the newly coined "santorum. Some darkly witty protest posters from Israel lampoon crisis and disillusionment in all directions [via geishaAsobi]. A stroll through Ground Nothing. The Mondrian Machine. A couple of very political reads by expats - Exile and the Little Red Cookbook. Mid-East policy and Sesame Street[via robotWisdom]. posted by jeremy @ 12:20 AM |
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