Betacorpo.net

Divining the Open City

2007-07-16T17:07:00.000-04:00

A holiday weekend, a "Veranito de San Juan" and the Gallinita and I packed the bikes and took off north along the coastal highway to the Ciudad Abierta de Ritoque (Open City in Ritoque), a sort of architecture and outdoor sculpture workshop along a 1.5 mile section of the coast run by the Universidad Cat�lica and the Corporaci�n Cultural Amereida<7p> The "Open" is more likely the free

step three community

2007-07-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

i come back to this pile of posting, i take a look through stacks of old paragraphs and missing illustrations and at first glance it's all horrendous - rotten links and giant blast holes and horribly unsound CSS layouts from a long history of careless joyride design overhauls - but then there's memories and it's probably impossible for anyone else to have such specific special things, and i blow

new pixels

2007-07-08T15:14:00.000-04:00

I owe this sudden surge of online activity to an occasional weekend job I have watching over a bed and breakfast, shut up in a house at a desk with an Internet connection. It's winter, so no one really comes here except the occasional Santiago couple who need to "escape from the air" for a bit So while making up for lost time in 2 years of not owning a computer... I've re-animated the

pickup

2007-07-08T01:41:00.000-04:00

Whoever's reading this at the moment can see all of the design tropes of a blog and if you've been anywhere around here in the past 6 months or so you've seen a few new changes in fits and starts (you see, I'm doing all of this without my own computer). And yes this blog is brand new, until you dart over and see this is actually a rather old endeavor with hideous gaps in updating and if you

"Tao ruim que e bom" - Susan Sontag in Portuguese

2004-12-28T20:52:00.000-03:00

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

Your seasonal selects

2004-12-21T21:36:00.000-03:00

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

So many things are said

2004-12-17T04:59:00.000-03:00

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

2004-12-15T20:04:00.000-03:00

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].

Wim Wenders in Texas

2004-12-14T06:04:00.000-03:00

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: Wim Wenders: "Written in the West" Wim Wenders: "In Defense of Places" "The City is More Than Skin Deep: On Translating Wenders in America.

It ain't easy living like a gypsy

2004-12-11T05:10:00.000-03:00

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

Seja bem vindo!

2004-11-25T21:02:00.000-03:00

I'm done with this tedious new Betacorpo overhaul and finally have both the old Blogspot and new Betacorpo.net archives connected - two years of erratic accumulations all in one place finally. I've seen a few interesting nuggets in those archives so have a sift through 'em, and I'll be back with some new stuff in a day or two. Welcome back...

Time to kill the Corpo

2004-05-19T02:55:00.000-04:00

Due to some way-too-limited Internet access, the Betacorpo blog will be taking a sabbatical for, most likely, a really good long while. Thank you all tremendously for your frequent visits - creating something interesting to a gallery of strangers from all over the world has been incredibly satisfying, and I'm a bit disappointed that I have to put it down. Take care all - see you when I

Second person plural

2004-04-22T02:55:00.000-04:00

From "How to be a Texan" on Texas Trifles, the coolest writey-type weblog I've seen in a while - Before we begin, I must clarify, sanctify, and preachify about the southern word "yawl". When we say "yawl come" to someone we mean the whole family, when we say "do yawl have really cold northers?" we are talking about the whole town. You never go up to a single person and ask "do yawl have a

Easter eleven

2004-04-22T02:52:00.000-04:00

An interview with JG Ballard [via chicha.] Caterina asks for things to do in Tokyo to many interesting replies. Book of Hours looks promising [em portugu?s] Bombing Starbucks: a downloadable novel. Oculart is the scariest beautiful thing I've seen in a while [via pennyDreadful]. A Reader's Guide to the Underground Press. I've never seen Berlin look like this before [via vignaMaru].

From rust belt to bible belt and fat beltbuckle

2004-04-20T02:52:00.000-04:00

Personal update: I've meandered down to Nashville, Tennessee, hanging out in the dirty south for a week. After that, I'll be making my way over to southwestern Texas. I would be more specific, but seeing as how the town only has about 200 people, that would be more personal identification than what's wise. So that makes me fall from Sao Paulo's 15 million to a Texas 200 in the same month - go

Safe again?

2004-04-10T02:51:00.000-04:00

Safetyville I've been staying for the past week in a sub-suburban town in a space of stripmalled nothing somewhere in the 45-minute drive between Detroit and Ann Arbor. I've been watching CNN and short minutes of Fox News before flinching and having to look at something else. When I first arrived, the quiet was deafening. It's so flat, you can see the curve of the earth. After the noise

Tuesday sweep

2004-04-07T02:50:00.000-04:00

Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy aka the Kerry Report transcripts Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Communications and International Economic Policy, Trade, Oceans and Environment of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundredth Congress, First Session, May 27, July 15, and October 30,

Cities loved by all

2004-04-06T02:50:00.000-04:00

Rio de Janeiro - as shot through a vaseline-smeared lense. This site's overly sentimental introduction calls Rio "the city loved by all" in Brazil. My impression from the many dozens of Paulistas I've talked to indicates anything but. Still, I love the sun-baked grimey side of Rio that these images bring out. WTC Bombings: 1993 Such odd proportions when one

The welcome back set

2004-04-02T03:49:00.000-04:00

I'm back to paying attention to this here log - for the next little while anyways. I'm changing up the format slightly and will finally finish tediously migrating the old Blogger archives over to the new server. Expect new posts about every other day, at least the next couple of months. Links: Zed Nelson Highly topical documentary photographs whose

[updated] Due to my recent transience...

2004-03-30T03:48:00.000-04:00

...posting to the Betacorpo weblog will be suspended indefinitely for the next little while. Anyone is welcome to communicate with me at Jeremy AT betacorpo DOT net. In the meantime, any good links I find will go to Spitting Image or American Samizdat, depending on relevance. There's, of course, plenty of more excellence to be found at the ol' blogroll. Stop back here in a week and

Vai embora

2004-03-24T03:46:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the silence. Just so you know, I will be refraining from any sort of weblog-related activities for at least another week. My visa for Brazil expires in a few days and this puts me once again in a bit of transitional period. So for now, I'm having lots of last beers with the various characters that have popped into my life over the past six months, packing up and returning

Just like ennui

2004-03-03T04:02:00.000-03:00

Lost in Translation is finally showing here (by the name Encontros e Desencontros). It was out in the US right before I left but I was too busy getting ready to split so I hadn't had the chance to see it. It lacks the charm that I thought it would have, although a story about an endless, workless business trip as a sort of diaspora for really affluent Americans becomes a kind of flipsidesd

Snapshots

2004-02-27T04:01:00.000-03:00

.cap {font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom:20px; margin-top:30px; margin-left:0px;font-size:10px; font-weight:bold;} The Carnvalistas descend on Ouro Preto. ? The above is my best way to describe the crazy proportions Ouro Preto took on this week as the quaint spaces of this small, historic mining town were stretched to the seams by hordes of party-goers

Em fevereiro tem carnaval

2004-02-19T04:00:00.000-03:00

Carnaval starts Saturday and everyone in Brazil will be somewhere between either cavorting naked in the streets or at home with an American movie, depending on who you talk to. It's hard to gauge its importance, although compared to Mardis Gras in New Orleans, which I was reminded of in a recent viewing of Easy Rider, I wonder what the latter's big deal is. A friend laughed when I

A pair of skylines

2004-02-15T04:58:00.000-03:00

Saturday morning, I accompanied a couple of friends to their registration at one of S?o Paulo's law universities whose name I forget, although it's housed in a famously hideous 50-story building next to the Viaduto Santa Ifeg?nia overlooking the city's old downtown. Waiting at the 44th floor I found a couple of advantageous windows. Finally seeing this city's endlessly scattered skyscrpaers