12/28/04:
"Tao ruim que e bom" - Susan Sontag in Portuguese
I first got the news that Susan Sontag passed away today through a this BBC Brasil article which also reprinted an interview from October 2003 titled "For Sontag, Lula is the 'most promising thing' in the world" [Sontag achava Lula a 'coisa mais promissora' do mundo]. There, she discussed the significance of Brazil's then-recent presidential election, as well as placing her own much-lambasted statements within a larger whole of dissent within the US - a defense in front of an international audience that would be much appreciated by those drowned out by the outrage that the US continually inspires. Statements like these have buttressed the views of other Brazilian political writing. In an interview in Globo from June 2003 - "40 years of polemics, audacity, and notoriety" [Quarenta anos de polemica, ousadia e reconhecimento] - she offered the same hopeful assesment of Brazil's president.
Finding Ms Sontag elsewhere:
A New York Times obituary [login/pw:betacorpo].
"Notes on Camp".
"Fascinating Fascism."
"Regarding the Torture of Others."
"Against Interpretation" [via spittingImage].
Biography, bibliography, quotes.
"The 'Traitor' Fires Back," an October, 2001 interview.
A June, 2000 interview
posted by jeremy @ 8:52 PM
12/21/04:
Your seasonal selects
Buy Blue:
You may have voted blue... But every day you unknowingly help dump millions of dollars into the conservative war chest. By purchasing products and services from companies that donate heavily to conservatives, we have been defeating our own interests as liberals and progressives....
Buy Blue is a concerted effort to educate the public on making informed buying decisions as a consumer. We identify businesses which support our ideals and spotlight their dedication to progressive politics. In turn, we shine that spotlight on unsupportive businesses in the form of massive boycotts and action alerts.
Buy Nothing Christmas:
Buy Nothing Christmas is a national initiative started by Canadian Mennonites who offer a prophetic "no" to the patterns of over-consumption of middle-class North Americans. They are inviting Christians (and others) all over Canada to join a movement to de-commercialize Christmas and re-design a Christian lifestyle that is richer in meaning, smaller in impact upon the earth, and greater in giving to people less-privileged.
See also: The Buy Nothing Catalogue.
Unsilent Night (The Christmas Piece):
Every year since 1992 I've presented Unsilent Night, an outdoor ambient music piece for an INFINITE number of boom box tape players. It's like a Christmas carolling party except that we don't sing, but rather carry boom boxes, each playing a separate tape which is part of the piece. In effect, we become a city block long stereo system!
[link cribbed from brazilianMuse who posts this description].
Navidad Latina [in portuguese and spanish] with receitas natalinas, and Christmas with Iemanja.
My treat to you, dear reader: Christmas in Hollis [Real Audio].
posted by jeremy @ 9:36 PM
12/17/04:
So many things are said
Words aren't free anymore: Writing poetry with Google Ads[via Book of Hours].
Free words: A book that belongs to whoever finds it.
Psychogeographical Markup Language: "PML is a set of keywords lifted from various sources that can be used to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about urban space. PML is a unified system of psychogeonamic classification that lurks behind the psychogeogram: the diagrammatic representation of psychogeographically experienced space."
You Are Beautiful: "Intention is the most important aspect of the You Are Beautiful project in its idea of purity.... Advertising elicits a response to buy, where this project elicits a response to do something." [via eyebeam].
microRevolt: How to handknit a corporate logo.
Me-Fi asks: "What concepts do not exist in the
English language"
Hanzi Smatter: Dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture [via blogalizacao].
Bush "honored" with "Doublespeak" award : "[The Council of Teachers of English] calls the Doublespeak Award an ironic tribute 'to American public figures who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory.'".
posted by jeremy @ 4:59 AM
12/15/04:
How we work
An Internet archive of James P. Cannon writings.
A WPA photo essay + a Great Depression Art Gallery [both nicked from the easy dreamer].
Watercolors by Geography of Nowhere author James Howard Kunstler.
Rio de Janeiro in antique postcards. Also, 19th-century photos of Rio by Juan Gutierrez
Danchi 100K: Photos of public housing in Japan [via gmtPlus9].
posted by jeremy @ 8:04 PM
12/14/04:
Wim Wenders in Texas
Once
I drove across Texas
for weeks
If I was to define Texas by a single image
I'd say:
An old man with cowboy hat.
Cowboys
are the saddest
and most touching figures
See also:
posted by jeremy @ 6:04 AM
12/11/04:
It ain't easy living like a gypsy
Perhaps the best way to re-inaugurate this little project
is to explain the past six months. After
returning from a place where I've long dreamed
of living, I somehow ended up in the last place on Earth I'd ever think of being, a place I would've thought I hated. And it's possibly the rich part of Texas that I hate, the red state part, the Houston
part of Texas, the Huntsville part with that prison, the Midland part with the Bushes. I haven't been to any of those places yet. I still think I'd hate them. But on arriving to the wide open nothing part, I re-read over a couple of lines by Wim Wenders's Once, where the German filmmaker noted with sad delight that nothing could be more sad and charming than an old cowboy.
Here, in the dusty southwest, where buying food from a proper grocery store requires a 5-hour day trip, I've found I surprising sort of comfort here. Here, away from
those jackhammer cities, I can think with such clarity that the books I read become as clear and sharp in my head as if there were my own memories. I've started cutting my teeth on short stories my Machado de Assis in their original Portuguese and am surprised at how smoothly I can flow through them. Soon the hysterical
Machado will have his own voice in my head too - one that can speak to my own calm detatchment.
I'll get antsy soon too, of course. I'm still an urban bird and still feel naked without tall walls, comfortably anonymous. And I still long for the giddy excitement I felt soaking in the delightful madness of Sao Paulo. It'll be interesting how vivd the city will become when I can finally return - just like the hysterically lucid feeling you have returning home from a foreign country where once again you understand
every single English word chattered around at once.
And so with a calm surrender, I'll bridge the 6-month gap in the Betacorpo blog with some scenes from playing about these hot, silent spaces over the past summer.
Presidio, Texas
Ojinaga, Mexico
Ojinaga
A javalena family
From the top of the Casa Grande, Big Bend National Park, Texas.
Lastly, I rather crudely made all of this blog's images
quickly available with that little Images link on the
sidebar, if in you want to randomly pick out a couple of prior adventures.
posted by jeremy @ 5:10 AM
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