I won’t be around on June 10, but this will be interesting. Promise:
Please join Not An Alternative, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and Upgrade NY! this Thursday, June 10 for the opening of Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus, an exhibition which examines models of participation and participation as a model in art and activism.
Read the rest of this entry »
Saltie, street fairs, steel, strawberries, asparagus, green garlic. Planning for pickles and preserving. Handmade bicycles, lilacs. Pie and peonies. And an invitation to escape to the Catskills. New superadobe stories and these sandy punks swinging by their knees from geodesic domes selling screenprints and copies of Buckminster Fuller.
I have a project. I don’t want to tell you what it is, but I don’t want to get your hopes up, either. It is modest. And it makes me really happy. If you’d like to participate, send me your mailing address. I’d love for you to play along.
My new friend Jen lured me to a panel last night. Part of LMCC’s Access Restricted series. Worth checking out, though I wanted a lot more from Intellectual Property in the Age of Reproduction.
We barely touched on the very interesting questions of copyright transgression, copying and fair use. Which is really too bad. Two quick observations before I get back to work. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m just saying. Maybe you could call it “what happens when systems go terribly, terribly wrong.” And you know I like systems.
You can read the thoughtful blog post (and you should) but you can also just stare at the chart until your eyes start to swim.
Eventually: my promised report back on the Pirate Bay talk, which was great, and after which Mister Mux Tape explained that commercial software is, by its very nature, better than free and open source software and then asked me if I worked for the FSF when I called him on that bizarre and baseless assertion. I’m not even talking about Apache here. Or I am, but at the present moment, Open Office is better documented than the MS Office suite. And calc’s financial functions are just plain better. I didn’t point out that I don’t think that the Free Software Foundation really has the staff resources to travel the Eastern seaboard heckling speakers at community arts talks. I also didn’t point out that there are people in this world (no really, there are!) who hold opinions they aren’t paid to hold and expertise on subjects they are not professional lobbyists on behalf of.
Actually, I could kind of wrap that one up and repeat what we already know which is that the Bureau of Piracy is great, you should take a look at the links on the original post and (this is the part I hope you already know) that the real problem with the prosecution of the buccaneers is about free speech. Not about my right to swap music willy-nilly, copyright be damned (another thing I didn’t say to Mux Man: there is, I think, a big difference between software and music) but about whether a file sharing platform should be held accountable for the files shared over it. Particularly in a world where some musicians do want to make large files (their own) available free of charge and politically significant data sets can be a difficult thing to host on your own little server. Fundamentally, neither the laws nor the recording industry have kept up with the modern world and it is worth asking why that is really the fault of the Pirate Bureau.
That was rough. I might come back and try to make it sound a little coherent. Read the rest of this entry »
ABC NO RIO GALA & BENEFIT AUCTION
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 7 TO 10 PM
ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS
172 NORFOLK STREET
Hungry March Band will be performing along with Aurora Boob Realis, Boobie von Trapp and Jezebel Express, all MC’d by the most excellent Reverend Jen. ABC No Rio has an excellent collection of art that will be auctioned off on the 22nd as well, see the full list of contributing artists to inspire yourself. Bring a friend. Bring your wallet. Bring a lobster!
Join us for cocktails, buffet, burlesque performances, brilliant conversation and spirited bidding!
Proceeds from the benefit will go towards the ABC No Rio Building Fund.
AUCTION
* Bullet Space, Kathe Burkhart, Michael Cataldi, Mel Chin, Maureen Connor, Martha Cooper, Linus Coraggio, Molly Crabapple, CRASH, Peggy Cyphers, Bill Daniel, Arnon Ben David, Mike Estabrook, Robert Flynt, Chitra Ganesh, Brian George, Judy Glantzman, Mike Glier, Robert Goldman (Bobby G.), Mimi Gross, Julie Hair, Jacob Hashimoto, Geoffrey Hendricks, International Graffiti Times, Vandana Jain, Fawad Khan, Barney Kulok, Lady Pink, Anne Arden McDonald, Joseph Nechvatal, Shirin Neshat, Nils Norman, Claes Oldenburg, Alice O’Malley, Tom Otterness, Trevor Paglen, Francis Palazzolo, Anton Perich, Judy Pfaff, Kembra Pfahler, James Romberger, Christy Rupp, Kelly Savage, Kristen Schiele, David Schmidlapp, Andres Serrano, Greg Sholette, Kiki Smith, Chris Stain, Swoon, Seth Tobocman, Marguerite Van Cook, Anton van Dalen, Tom Warren and Lawrence Weiner.
* AND *
Introducing an edition for ABC No Rio by Gregory Green.
BENEFIT COMMITTEE
* Stanley Aronowitz, Julie Ault, Michael Bank, Melissa Bent, Phong Bui, Garrison Buxton, Alexander Campos, Paul Castrucci, Peter Cramer, Simon Critchley, Ray Cross, Harvey Epstein & Anita Elliot, Jim Fleming & Lewanne Jones, Barry Frier & Stefani Mar, Lia Gangitano, Carl George, Jonathan Greene, Dara Greenwald, Phil Hartman, C. Sean Horton, Cheryl Kaminsky, David Kiehl, Jane Kim, Allegra LaViola, Brooke Lehman, Jonathan LeVine, Josh MacPhee, Timothy Malyk, Mirabelle Marden, Carlo McCormick & Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Barbara Moore, Rebecca Moore, Margery Newman, Wendy Olsoff, Al Orensanz, Christian Parenti, Liutauras Psibilskis, Karen Ranucci & Michael Ratner, Neil Rosenstein, Alix Sloan, Jeff Stark, Sara Valentine, Jack Waters, and Martha Wilson.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES
* Reverend Jen
PERFORMANCE
* Hungry March Band
* Aurora Boob Realis
* Boobie von Trapp
* Jezebel Express
SPONSORS
* Asahi
* ALIAS
* Two Boots
* saké2me
* Honest Beverages
* The Donut Plant
Last night, we went with a bunch of Merry’s apprentices to see Danny Hoch’s new show in a high school auditorium in Bushwick. An auditorium decorated with murals that tell the story of the mankind on earth, in which very fair skinned naked people are blessed by a winged angel (“The Dawn of Civilization”) and then bestowed the flame (“The Gift of Fire”). And with fire the story ends.
Before I start, just so you know, I’m struggling with the fact that last year’s RAT was really inspiring and rejuvenating for me but without something to offer I can’t see myself going again.
So I saw a play finally. Some live theater. Saw it with a couple of teenagers (both named Hector) whose entire previous experience with live theater consisted of a trip to Lincoln Center to see the Nutcracker (shorter Hector) and “we saw this play once at school” (larger Hector). Read the rest of this entry »
My cousin is coming to town and she wants to go to a play. Fair enough: I live in New York City. I ought to be able to hook that up. Only, I don’t go to plays and the people I know who do fall into difficult categories. Either they love Broadway (I don’t) or they are so immersed in theater that they don’t have a good answer. They don’t know what to recommend because they don’t know what to suggest. No one knows how to say “Well, I’ve been wanting to see …” There’s no Good Reads for theater, where I can skim my friends favorites. Which is part of why I can count on one hand the number of staged performances of anything that I’ve seen in the last decade. Actually, that is totally not true. I see more live performing arts than that.
It is too easy to say “gahh, not Broadway” but what I really mean is that I don’t want sparkly musicals. When I was 10 I loved Cats. I also loved Les Miserables. I probably would have loved anything other big bang musicals at that age. It was like the circus, only better. People like what they like and there’s nothing wrong with that (she says with a snicker) but it won’t make me happy to go see Cats today.
Broadway is more complex than that. I saw Angels in America with May and Kiffy. I don’t actually know if it was the Broadway cast but it was a short run in San Francisco. It was great and I’d see it all over again. On Broadway if that is where it was playing.
I loved the Berkeley Rep production of Bright Room Called Day. I do like more than just Kushner, honest. If someone were to stage a production of The terrible but unfinished story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia I would probably faint. I would certainly go. I came across it ten (sneeze. really? yes. ten.) years ago when Jason and I tried to write a play about Cambodia that got as far as Henry Kissenger before we discovered that we weren’t very good collaborators just as our respective lives were intervening to flummox the project anyway. He went on to become a famous playwright. Me, not so much. Pipe Bomb Sonata was excellent, though I never saw it staged, just read it. If I were a more dutiful friend I would have more to say about the rest of his resume but … oh nevermind.
I would have loved to go see Tanque on stage. I don’t actually know why I didn’t. Ganso bought tickets. A whole posse went. We’ll get back to that, later, my inability to just plug in when I know I’d have a good time.
To entertain my cousin I have to look forward, not back. It doesn’t have to be straight theater. Performance art is cool. I’d gladly take Gabriela to see the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea sail down the Hudson, but the flotilla’s nearly mothballed by now. Once upon a time, I went to some spaghetti dinners at PS 122, where I first saw Coco Rosie. They made me weak in the knees. Great Small Works last updated their schedule in 2003, so I’m guessing there are no spaghetti dinners coming up. Everyone else might be over her, but I still think that Laurie Anderson is a genius. Moby Dick was genius. Actually, it wasn’t. It was just good, but I loved it.
On the other hand, family friends took us to see Love, Janis in the West Village whenever it was that it was plastered all over busses and playing in the West Village. It was painful. I might have loved to read her letters home, but seeing them staged all sugar coated was just weird. Also, no one sings like Janis Joplin. Staging a performance based entirely around covers of Janis Joplin is bound to be agonizing. I don’t think better singers or better acting would have improved it. I still think about it a lot. I have it filed away with The Cockettes in my personal history of the San Francisco my mother lived in when she was my age. Except she wasn’t my age yet. She was a lot younger. She’s going to call me up and tell me that actually her life wasn’t nearly as tragic or arty or drug addled as Janis Joplin or Sweet Pam, but I still like to imagine that San Francisco swirling around her. What I’m trying to say is that I got a lot out of Love, Janis, but I would come up with about eight excuses to avoid seeing it again.
Glengary Glen Ross, which we really did see on Broadway, was excellent. But I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have because we saw it on Broadway and I wasn’t in the mood for the neighborhood and the whole sensibility of going out for proper theater. Plus there isn’t anyplace that I’d want to eat anywhere near 42nd Street. It isn’t a scene that works for me. It wasn’t for me, though. It is N’s favorite play and the tickets were his birthday present. So I shouldn’t be whining. Plus, on account of it being his favorite play, we own the DVD and I’ve watched it a hundred times and it isn’t my favorite play so the 101th viewing was just that.
I know that atmosphere matters to me. So does location. I don’t want to be treated like royalty, I don’t want to feel like I’m dressed all wrong or everyone around me is going to drive back to Connecticut later. I’d like to be able to see the stage. I’d rather not be way the hell up town. Brooklyn would be great. Some of these things are contradictory, I realize. There’s as much society at the Soho Rep as anywhere on 42nd Street, but it is a society I feel a lot more comfortable with. Or a little more comfortable with. Walking distance from home trumps everything else. BAM or a smallish downtown theater, is what I’m saying.
Facebook reports that Jason is planning to go see Oh What War, and Tanque has tickets for A Kite Cut Loose in the Middle of the Sky which is damn useful information to have. Jason’s blog is useful, too, he posted about Blasted at the Soho Rep. Only Oh What War is an option for 9/26.
Creative Time has a whole festival in progress coming up. Some talks about art and politics, which isn’t exactly theater but it is something to do. Good luck figuring out when anything is happening, their website is to sexy for a schedule.
Eyebeam (also too avant garde to offer a usable website. Though they do have a decent calendar.) has some interesting work up but they’re art, so their openings are on Thursdays. Lucky for Gabriela, they won’t be hacking Linux onto PDAs until later in October. I’d ditch her for that. I want a mood tracking database on my Treo.
Between the Lines is back at BAM. Let me know if you want to come: Oct 16, Nov 6, Dec 18.
Other places I sometimes go but haven’t in a while, most of which don’t have anything on tap for the 26th:
Galapagos,
Free103point9, Not an Alternative (okay, NaA is different but I can’t take a cousin to Jelly. BAM
Seriously, though: back to theater. Where do you look? Are there plays or other staged performances you’ve been wanting to see? Thinking of seeing?
Reposting from the IdeaLab. Most of what I write there is either drivel or a comment, and I think I write sharp comments but they’re not really that intriguing out of context. What I didn’t say on the idealab was that I’ve noticed these trends, one being a fascination with aggregation that comes early in a person’s introduction to the vast world of internet resources out there. Aggregation without human intervention. Aggregation like “what if you could subscribe to all the action alerts about polar bears in the whole world instead of engaging with an organization and building a long term strategy to help Americans rethink our relationship to nature.” Except that second clause gets lost in the translation. Also, the people who want to talk about emergent behavior and the wisdom of crowds. And then they show a picture of some bees, and they don’t point out that hives have Queen Bees. And Queen Bees posses intellectual superiority. So do good organizers. Just data, data without analysis, is not superior. It is just data. Smart people, maybe people with communities that make them smarter by challenging them, but smart people are the ones who make things happen. Is what I say, but didn’t say because somehow I don’t know how to say that in a language that is professional enough. This will forever be my challenge, I am guessing.
I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we’re passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC’s astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither. I made the trip to find out more.
While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live data feeds and maps, and has mandated that no city agency may acquire software that cannot publish to the data warehouse.
Two hundred sixty one and growing, while the British Government’s Power of Information Task Force is sponsoring a contest with a $35,000 prize to the best idea on “how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds.” To get folks started they’ve put together a comprehensive list of public data sources in the UK.
The data that Washington DC makes public is the same data that city agencies use internally every day. Unfortunately, it seems to be so obvious to the current administration that this is public information that they don’t have many insights about how other cities might find the political will to follow suite. One interesting observation: that DC has managed to sell the data warehouse as a way that the city can retain control over data. By providing the data as feeds that civic projects can re-purpose, the city has the power to correct data and see those corrections percolate out in a way they never could with figures published in hard copy.
Other tasty morsels from Websites Without Walls? NPR’s API is up and running and mighty robust, Stephanie was the most used word in congress on Monday.
Another challenge: I ran into a thousand people I know and love at the landing of the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea on Sunday night. Because my old networks have come unraveled, I don’t really see Jenny or Joe Tuba or Ashira or Will or Aresh in any natural or organic way. And so I run into them at things like that and we say “it is so great to see you” and then we go back from whence we came. But in between they ask me what I am doing and I don’t know how to say that I’m obsessed with data driven local media. It doesn’t seem all that interesting with Swoon‘s work towering over us and the Swimming Cities rocking gently on the pier. I don’t know how to reconcile these things.
VOICES OF AMERICA
Aug. 25, 2008 – Nov. 5, 2008
free103point9 is pleased to host, Voices of America, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, a US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience. The new site and custom application will launch in late August, 2008. Here’s how it will work:
* RECORD up to one minute samples of election coverage on an over-the-air Voice of America station
* UPLOAD and TAG your recordings
* DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings
* REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website
* LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at the Audacity of Desperation exhibition at the Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles on Election Day
Voices of America (VoA) is created by Lee Azzarello and Sarah Kanouse. VoA is happy to be a participant in The UnConvention, a project of Art Through Technical Alternatives, Carleton College, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Minnesota Institute for New Media Studies, and the Walker Art Center.
If you could vote here, which you can’t, I’d take a poll like
Many Eyes vs. Small Array
You’d vote Small Array, too. Don’t deny it.
have a meeting to go to (there better be cookies!), I’d be at this on Thursday …
Floating Points 2008 Issue Project Room
This Festival, in its third year, (formerly points in a circle) explores the versatility of ISSUE Project Room’s Innovative house speaker system, designed by Stephan Moore.
In the hands of these diverse performers and sound artist, this fifteen-channel installation of hemisphere loudspeakers radically changes the concert experience for both performer and audience.
Each of the hemispheres radiates sound in all directions, activating the acoustics of this unique concert space. Immersive sonic environments are generated, electronic sounds take on the characteristic intimacy of acoustic instruments, and location is liberated as a musical dimension.
Thursday June 5
title: /body-in-pieces/
performance and installation by tianna kennedy and chad laird
/body-in-pieces/ is a partially pre-recorded, partially improvised performance riffing on two immediately recognizable themes from the horror genre: Bernard Herrmann’s cue to the first murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s /Psycho/ and John Williams Main Title theme from /Jaws/. Both reworked samples reside in popular culture as sonic tropes instantly signifying ‘horror,’ or the anticipation of immanent peril or violence to the body. By isolating, fragmenting, and manipulating these familiar soundtrack elements in space we hope to underscore the process by which sound and mise-en-scene in horror often not only prepare and condition the viewer for violence, but stand-in for or displace the traumatized body itself. /body-in-pieces/ also finds its way through thematically linked material such as Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major (written for a pianist who had lost his left arm in World War I) and motifs from Alice in Wonderland. Additionally, our installation/performance will be set to projections of abstract light sequences culled from 60s Italian Horror films.
Tianna Kennedy is a cellist, sometime-artist, and Brooklyn Program Director for free103point9. Chad Laird teaches art history at FIT and makes zombie movies.
I think this means he can get on with his life, but there could be more too it. His lawyers did file a motion to dismiss all the charges against him in January. I’m assuming this is the ruling on that. To get the backstory, see the CAE Defense fund.
From: http://info.interactivist.net/node/10940
Critical Art Ensemble’s Steve Kurtz is Cleared of Mail and Wire Fraud ChargesArtist and University of Buffalo Professor Steve Kurtz was cleared of charges for mail and wire fraud today in federal court. U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara ruled that criminal charges brought against him by federal prosecutors were insufficient on [their] face.
Kurtz’s College Street home in Buffalo, New York was raided by FBI agents wearing spacey-looking white biohazard suits only hours after his wife, Hope, died of a heart attack in May of 2004. Buffalo police
who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call alerted the FBI that they’d found bacteria cultures and other strange items in the house. Kurtz had obtained the cultures and other biological materials for use in his artwork that criticized the government’s food policies.
If you work with teenagers, you probably know at least one that would love to be taking a black and white photography class, right?
Intro to Photography & Darkroom Technique
Ten Saturday Sessions
April 19 — June 21
11:00am — 2:00pm
This class will introduce the basic techniques of black and white photography: composition, exposure, film development, and printing, while exploring the documentary and creative potential of photography as a medium.
AGES: 14 to 17
FREE — Space is limited
For more information please contact Kate DeWitt at 212.254.3697 ext. 25
Registration form available at:
http://www.abcnorio.org/arts_ed/photo_registration.pdf
Things I’ve been meaning to articulate, (and in Magstock Style, I invite you to vote for your favorite followup.)
And later, maybe someone can explain how I loused up my style sheet again such that lists aren’t. Feh.
I almost called this “Beyond Tufte” since everyone just loves Tufte, but I didn’t. Here’s the thing: In a past life, I spent a lot of time facilitating workshops on technology. How to understand the technology that flummoxes you, ways you could be using technology better in your organizing work. And one thing I often butted up against was that I was supposed to be doing technology workshops, and sometimes I’d get a room full of people who really needed help with story telling.
I came up with a few good activist story telling workshops, but I’ve mostly stopped doing trainings since I started working full time with Gotham Gazette. If I were still doing workshops I would be even more excited about Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design.
Modern life is saturated with ever increasing amounts of information, advertising and media with little time to digest what is being said. Against this background, NGOs and advocates too often find the information they want to communicate, either buried in long reports full of professional jargon and statistics, or overlooked in an endless stream of media releases.
“Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design” is a manual aimed at helping NGOs and advocates strengthen their campaigns and projects through communicating vital information with greater impact. This project aims to raise awareness, introduce concepts, and promote good practice in information design – a powerful tool for advocacy, outreach, research, organization and education.
It is really well done. You should check it out and pass it on.
Later, I will take up the meme. Promise.
First though … last night, WNYC was running a new segment on PS1′s show on the history of feminist art and I kept thinking I must not have missed a lot of breaking news while I was off in the woods. This morning, they’re still running the segment, except that this time I noticed they’re saying (maybe they haven’t been saying all along, but they did just say) that this is the first such retrospective, which reminded me, in the middle of trying to decide what to include in my response to the meme, of those years just after I’d moved to New York, when the world was a place that made me weak in the knees. Reminded me of visiting Dubin in DC where she’d just moved into a sublet that came with a copy of the Re/Search Volume 13 on Angry Women, which also made me weak in the knees. I was thinking, too, about how in those years I was always making babies cry and killing houseplants. Which secretly leads me back to realizing I’d like to go see the Wack! show, even though I know that I went to a pretty comprehensive retrospective of feminist performance art (okay, so it was mostly performance and a few other genres were excluded) which means this isn’t the very first such review.
You want to come?
Moby Dick, which is brilliant and which I’ve been meaning to re-read ever since … actually I just went to Laurie Anderson’s site to find a URL and came up with a wee web radio of One White Whale. I like Laurie Anderson more than anyone else I know does. Anyway. I have been meaning to re-read Moby Dick ever since I saw Laurie Anderson at BAM in 1999, a fiasco unto itself. I think the day I broke up with Ahm Here he said something like “oh, I guess I should just give you these tickets I just got us, because I know you want them more than I do.” and I said we should go together to see if we can still be friends. We went, but he was late and in the meantime I ran into a friend who latched onto us (how could she know?) and it looked an awful lot like I’d rigged the whole thing to avoid being alone with him. He fell in love with someone eventually. I’m pretty sure they’re married. Still, I felt bad about that, because it was mean.
But Moby Dick. That was one. “Drinking chocolate” from Vosages is two. N. doesn’t read this so he won’t know I was there until later tonight. They’re out of the bacon chocolate bars anyway. Moby Dick, hot chocolate, good ideas that actually happen. My mother sending me her ERA bracelet, even if not everyone dear to me could actually tell what the Equal Rights Amendment is. Was. My copy of Moby Dick was my mother’s, too. It is full of her perfectly straight underlining and notes in the margins (“doubt makes belief more secure when finally reached”).
I have a sneaking suspicion that I’d like Josh’s poetry, ever since I found out about Glottopsychiatry. Other sneaking suspicions? Other people are having more fun.
Also, quiz (a survey, actually): what do you know about the ERA?
I’ve edited this since the morning, ever so very slightly.
So, I’m mildly addicted to a few blogs about design and getting dressed in the morning. Bits and Bobbins is one of them. Tricia is pregnant, which is one of those personal things you can know about total stranger, along with where she used to live (Brooklyn), where she lives now (San Francisco), what color her couch is (actually, I forget), and what her husband does for a living (works at Apache). It is a lot to know about a person you don’t know. I’ve been taking note of how much I know about people I don’t, and taking note of just how much any old fool could be knowing about me if they were halfway deft with a google-stick. Myself, I’m not crazy about being quite so exposed, which is one of the reasons I’ve been slowly taking down personal information about myself on the internets. Which is how it came to pass that everyone I know on Facebook magically got a little newsflash with a broken heart on it. It said that I am “no longer married.” This is what I get for deciding that my date of birth and my home town and my wedded state, none of which are exactly a secret, don’t need to be broadcast on my profile. I don’t want you to know that much about me, unless you’d know it anyway. And if you know it anyway, well. You didn’t need the internets to find out. If you don’t know, you could still probably figure it out without trying that hard.
I’m going someplace with this, I swear. Tricia’s husband, though, has an occasional Live Journal where he once linked to an article on CNET about what I should probably call “the famous AOL snafu,” except that I learned about it this morning. So it can’t have been that famous. Should have been, though. They published stored data on a few months of AOL users’ web searching. No actual names, but unique ids. Just enough information to know that the person looking for information on replacement bumper for scion xb also searched for crime stoppers florida. At least according to Declan.
south beach diet
nausea in the first two weeks of pregnancy
breast reduction
how to starve yourself
rikers island inmate info number
I was drifting, contemplating about the storytelling allure of a list like that, or the one that alternates between recipes (“baked macaroni and cheese with sour cream”), calorie counts (if you’re worried about the number of calories in a banana, you maybe don’t want to be making baked mac & cheese with sour cream, okay?) and ideas for how to tell her family that she was sexually abused.
The problem in drawing too deep conclusions from these search results is that we have no idea who was searching when, only that the searches came from a single AOL account. Invent all the narratives we want, we’re still inventing them.
This is what happens, when I take the train to work, by the way. I have time to get far more lost in thought than I ever could on my bike.
Here is where I am going with all of this, beyond that I plan to write some short stories about binge eating while plotting to murder an ex: you really should be afraid of the google borg hive mind. Even if you think that Homeland Security is a sweet deal that will make us all safe, especially if you ever google variations on your own name, your phone number or your email address. I do. I won’t pretend I don’t. I often search for my number and email addresses because I am curious to know how widely distributed they are. If Google ever slipped up an released even a week of stored search queries … I would probably feel pretty exposed. Although I think I probably google myself more like once every few months.
Soon come: a lesson or six on how to be more anonymous, even if you are just trying to keep a lid on how often you search for expensive norse footwear. Because the truth is I don’t know if I want you to know that about me either. The hive mind has come a long way from the children’s ramayana.
wasabi peas, persimmons, watching the leaves on someone’s overgrown deck turn lemon yellow, stumbling upon Orli Van Mourik.
Lynn Stewart talking about poetry
I heard a story about kids and their incredible spelling, but the thing that secretly confused me was this: I thought that Johnny Cakes were a southern thing. And I thought they were sort of a variation on corn bread. I’ve never heard of them having meat in them. It turns out that that is just how you spell it in the DR. Still no word of meats, though.
Things I’ve noticed recently: Vogue is really frightening. You knew this, but in case you’ve forgotten lately, allow me to remind you. When they say “age proof your skin” they mean this literally. They mean that if you start noticing faint little lines about the eyes at 30 you should run screaming to a dermatologist for laser treatment because you must not age. Must not. Must not age. I will confess that from time to time I notice myself aging and it startles me. I use creams at night. And I worry deeply about a society that has eight kinds of specialists to hide the signs of aging from your face. You worry too, that is why we are friends, so I won’t say too much more. This is what I get for buying Vogue in train stations. $300 belts, vacant eyes and eight kinds of specialists to keep you young. An experiment, for if you’re ever bored and have a copy of the magazine handy. Flip through it and look at each model in turn. Look her in the eyes. I creeped myself out enough that I was grateful that my seat mate, hungover from a night on the town with the guys from his supply chain management company, woke up and tried to dig in to the Amtrak Cafe Car spicy ribs, which were apparently revolting and thus gave us something to talk about.
And, a thing I’d like to do. First, at BAM Cafe on Wednesday, Between the Lines. 7:30
I want to go to that. You should come. And then also, either tonight or next Saturday, I need to make my way to hear How Goes the Battle, Henry Ward Beecher’s Thanksgiving Sermon. 7 PM at Greenwood Cemetery. Join me.
I meant to try to write something real about anarchy and software freedom and possibly about faith and identity, but it isn’t coming out. It started to be about having friends who think that a conference about Renewing the Anarchist Tradition is laughable, and then about things I don’t explain very well. Soon come.
October 11, 2007
SICKNESS, “ABSURD” DOJ PROSECUTION FORCE SCIENTIST TO PLEAD IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE
Scientist’s Wife and Daughter Comment on Case
Buffalo, NY – Today in Federal District Court, Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, under tremendous pressure, pled guilty to lesser charges rather than facing a prolonged trial for federal charges of “mail fraud” and “wire fraud” in a surreal post-PATRIOT Act legal case that has attracted worldwide attention.
Beth Kanter pointed me to a few videos about Creative Commons licenses and how to use them, but I am still going to share my little rant, thinly disguised as a series of Frequently Asked Questions. These are questions frequently asked of me, by all kinds of people (many of who ought to know better). Questions like … Read the rest of this entry »
It is a scary thing when a bunch of DIY punks start trying to find a million dollars, but here we are, looking for exactly that. Scary like daunting, like an uphill climb, like where on earth are we going to get money like that.
The older I get (yeah, yeah) the more I realize the importance of no Rio not just as an arts space for the likes of me, but as an all ages punk venue. That doesn’t exist in New York City anymore (did it ever? dunno.) — a place were 16 year olds can get together and make music, see shows, be both safe and unsupervised. I think that is immeasurably important and it is a tiny slice of what happens at ABC no Rio.
So I think everyone should join me in supporting the building fund. Read the rest of this entry »
For the first time in a decade, the FCC is opening up an application window to distribute much of the remaining Full Power FM spectrum to non-profit groups, but Free 103 is thinking about applying for a license, which is truly exciting stuff:
In October, the Federal Communications Commission will allow applications for full-power educational radio stations. free103point9 has been working with a few national non-profit groups to see if there is room on the dial in upstate New York for such a station.
We recently got back a preliminary engineering study that shows that there is room for such a station covering almost all of Greene County, and about half of Columbia County, and the very south part of Albany County. The signal reaches very close to Ulster County, especially near I-87 and the Hudson River. The cities of Cairo, Hudson, Catskill and Coxsackie are all well-covered, and the area extends all the way to Chatham and the Taconic Parkway.
That’s all the good news. The bad news is we have very little time, and need to raise a good deal of money quickly to apply for the frequency. To apply, you need to have a full-fledged engineering report done, and you need a broadcast lawyer to fill out the application (the FCC throws out applications if even one line is filled out incorrectly). This costs between $5000 and $8000.
So we are asking you to pledge whatever you can to help bring an art radio station to upstate New York. Anyone pledging money will be in on the first decisions that will shape the station. You want to do a show? No problem. You want to help decide what shows are on, and what direction the station takes, then donate now.
free103point9 will make our new Study Center in Acra, New York the studio for the station, and we want to make sure it is an important voice for local artists of all types, as well as meeting educational, journalistic and musical needs in the community.
Please e-mail Tom Roe at tr @ free103point9.org to make a pledge for whatever amount you can promise. We will only collect on the pledges if we raise enough money to pay for the engineering study and the broadcast lawyer. There’s no guarantee we will get the station just by applying — a church group or a public radio giant could be stiff competition — but we think we have a good chance and the payoff is worth the risk.
We will hold an organizational meeting for anyone interested, this Thursday, Aug. 9, at 7 p.m. at free103point9′s Wave Farm, in the Study Center, for anyone interested in helping organize these efforts. We will stream the meeting on the internet if you cannot attend in person, at www.free103point9.org.
Basically, by Aug. 15 we need to have the money raised, and get the engineers and lawyers working to meet the October deadline.
I recently had the opportunity to meet a famous radio host who happens to grossly overuse the phrase sea change. I hadn’t ever really noticed the trend in his show, but while I was in his office I overheard not one, but two show producers, interviewing potential guests on the phone, ask whether a sea change was afoot.
I thought I knew what the term meant, I even explained it quite confidently to my future mother-in-law (a bit more complex than simply when the tide turns, something about tidal estuaries) but then my upstairs neighbour asked me the same question and insisted that growing up on Puget Sound he’d never heard the term used to actually refer to tidal changes in the sound. We were looking for specifics when we discovered that the Famous Radio Host is wrong, as are so many more.
According to World Wide Words, the phrase comes from The Tempest
Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
And has nothing whatsoever to do with tidal anything. Say what you will about normative linguistics and living languages. I’m jumping ship. I’ve always thought it was self indulgent to ask, over and over, “is this the moment when everything changes? what about now? or now?”
[tags]letters_home, art, audio, learning[/tags]
Martha,
I hate to do this to you. I know you’re trying to get tenure someplace, trying to behave like a real grownup and maybe not wild about having a cyber stalker out there whose only connection to you is a scrap of paper found in a vacant lot a decade ago, but restraint has never been my strong point.
I’m wondering whether this is your kindergarden class picture hanging in my kitchen? It is framed so I may not scan it right away.
This, though, I thought I’d lost. I had just tucked it away for safe keeping. Tell me it isn’t great?
[tags]brooklyn, art, storytelling, letters-home[/tags]
Martha Peach found me.
When I was little, my mother got it into our head that we needed some quality time with an old lady, and signed us up for this “adopt a grandma” program. We’d go visit with a Venezuelan woman with linoleum everywhere in her house. She had a lot of small dogs and a lot of parakeets and she told me that in her alphabet, “ch” was one letter, so there were 27 letters total.
My mother also has a photograph of a total stranger, a big oval tortoise shell frame with a very stern woman, that she got at a garage sale or something. It used to hang in our foyer; now it is over the couch, surrounded by much more modestly sized family photos. We call her the insta-matriarch. I’m pretty sure we have no idea who she is, but she suits the frame. There is something kind of soothing about keeping her around. Sure, your blood matters, your family matters, that is all who you are, but we’re all also borne of a long line of anonymous neighbors. It is important not to get to stuck on who is, or isn’t, yours. It helps that my great grandfather (great great?) Hickman was adopted. So who I am and who I’m not is a little vague anyway. I mean, I am a Hickman, sure, but the idea that my name has anything to do with who I am gets a little muddled when you inch back a few generations and find out that the Hickman I am descended from got his name from adoptive parents that he never did get along with. I think he was fairly young when he left them (ran away? I forget). No one ever asks what kind of name Hickman is, so I never get to tell about how it doesn’t matter.
What has all this go to do with Martha Peach, Secretary/Treasurer of the Junior Class, who isn’t my grandmother either, and isn’t nearly old enough to be my grandmother? I’m not sure. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.
[tags]art, storytelling, letters-home, family[/tags]
How much would I love to head to the Wave Farm?
OPEN CALL:
free103point9 AIRtime residency applications due April 1, 2007
Coined by free103point9, “Transmission Arts” is defined as a conceptual umbrella that unites a community of artists and audiences interested in transmission ideas and tools utilizing the electromagnetic spectrum for creative expression. Transmission practices harness, occupy and/or respond to the airwaves that surround us. There is an inherent “liveness” to this work. In a performance-based setting, audience members are newly engaged, becoming
participants rather than passive viewers and listeners. Installation or sculptural transmission works are often dependant on the present, reacting to whatever occupies the surrounding frequencies in a single instance, or changing that information by adding new signals to the spectral environment.
The AIRtime workspace residency program at Wave Farm provides media artists with valuable space, physical and intellectual, to concentrate on new transmission works and conduct important research about the genre using free103point9′s resource library and equipment holdings.
The AIRtime program serves artists by providing space for research and creation with technical support, and audiences through the presentation of works developed during AIRtime in conjunction with free103point9′s exhibition program PETS. Selected artists and projects are invited to install long-term outdoor installations as part of free103point9′s Transmission Sculpture Garden. The
free103point9 Dispatch Series provides distribution for selected projects completed during AIRtime residencies. Artists-in-residence also interact with free103point9 Online Radio, presenting live on-air programming during their stay. free103point9 shares resources regarding preservation and archiving models with our residents. Artists are encouraged to archive recordings and other reproducible media with the free103point9 study collection.
Ten artists (or collectives) are selected from an open application each AIRtime season. Residency durations are flexible based on the schedules of participating artists, but typically last one week. The program is active July – October.
Residents are provided with a stipend of $150. Meals are provided by free103point9 as well as local transportation for supplies. One resident is on-site at a time. Both program directors are available on site during the residencies for technical assistance and critical feedback.
Artists are required to archive completed works related to their residency with the study center research collections. A performance and exhibition program from works made during this residency period will be held at Wave Farm in Oct., 2007.
For a complete list of equipment, resources, and technical support associated with the AIRtime residency program, see:
http://www.free103point9.org/airtime.php
The Clothesline Show, Darkroom Folio Project, Cycle Craft: you can get your shopping done and cover most birthdays through March to boot.
The City Reliquary gift shop, which carries the Cycle Craft line of jewelery, also has very cool trinkets like actual schists of Manhattan Island and Statue of Liberty Sponges.
The Clothesline Show
a benefit art sale for ABC No Rio
Thursday December 14 and Friday December 15
7:00 – 10:00pm
Works on paper, 11×17, proceeds support the no Rio building renovation fund. Read the rest of this entry »
Crank through your holiday shopping list in one fell swoop. Seriously. Sixteen prints, on gelatin silver fiber based paper and signed on the back by each artist. The edition is limited to a total of 10. Total price? $250, but no one will stop you, should you decide to pay a bit more to support a vibrant volunteer run community arts center.
a major source of distraction. I know I’ve talked about this before, I want it so bad I had to password protect it, but the Freitag Factory is back:
Thanks for catching that one, Scott.
This here, it is some funny shit. Married to the Sea was almost my favorite website until I read this part which is some decidedly bogus yoga[1]. Let me get this straight: you make derivative collage art out of public domain graphics, but no one else is allowed to use the images? Whatever.
The NYPL Digital Gallery has a great archive of public domain Victorian Lithographs.
[1] another great literary reference that I can’t even google because Lynda Barry doesn’t transcribe her comeeks. There is one, however, which is about Bogus Yoga with Marlys and Maybonne, which is funny.
I’ve been trying for a while to find this story I read in McSweeney’s about a soldier, presumably in Iraq, though I think they never say that explicitly, who goes crazy. He deserts and changes his name to “Helps People.” He starts out sort of normal, just rescuing people from roadside bombs, nursing them back to health and sending them on their way, but eventually he starts helping people by locking them in cages in this underground bunker. I wish I could find that story, because sometimes I try to explain it to people but they just stare at me.
I keep my back issues, I probably have the issue that the story appeared in.
I am not sure whether this fits under “to do” or just art and activism, but here it is. These are things I am thinking about lately, questions about what is art and why it matters what is (and isn’t) art.
If you aren’t down with the City Reliquary, you should be. They want radio from you:
Radio Pieces Wanted: We would like everyone to consider doing interviews, spoken word and/or music to the tune of: Outrageous Moving Stories, Luggage Tales, Art Moving Experiences, Driving Related Anecdotes, Gentrification Woes, A Few Words About Boxes, A List of Your Favorite Packing Materials, Interviews with people Moving in, Moving out, Moving on, Urban Myths about Craigslist for our upcoming broadcast of the WCRM Radio Show. Live from the Basement of the Reliquary, on http://www.cityreliquary.org. I’d like to have your raw audio files by next Thursday, November 24th. If you are producing your own tracks and doing your own mixing, you have a little more time and can get it to me by that weekend. Nov. 26-27th.
Please drop off CDs at the City Reliquary or email to make special arrangements. Contact Jesse James Arnold, wcrm@cityreliquary.org.
Listen: http://cityreliquary.org/wcrm
Maybe one day they’ll get on the ball about telling me this stuff before the Nonsense List comes out. Noah’s on their board, you’d think I’d get an inside track, but no.
I’ll confess that I had forgotten about Steve Kurtz. I haven’t heard a peep out of the Critical Art Ensemble in a while, but word is that Kurtz has been released from pre-trial supervision–meaning that since he was released from jail after his arrest in May 2004, he has been under court supervision–subject to random searches of his home and random drug tests.
Imagine for a moment that someone you care very deeply for (perhaps your wife of 20 years?) were to die suddenly and altogether unexpectedly. Imagine you called an ambulance. Imagine the paramedics came and noticed a project you’d been working on. A science kit, something you were tinkering with. A microscope and some petri dishes. And your whole life changed.
Read the rest of this entry »
During the ungodly hours of 4am – 12pm Sunday Nov 20 cultural counter-intelligence agents TMP will launch the next phase of their unobjective research in the fields of anarchitecture and atmography.
Street sounds from seven cities (Zurich, Frankfurt, Nantes, Athens, San Francisco, Lima, New York) will be channeled through the free103point9 space in Williamsburg and into the surrounding streets. Read the rest of this entry »
What is lost when photography is taught as a technical skill and not a miracle of light and image? I read a good essay about this recently that I’d like to find.
ARTIST’S/PANEL DISCUSSION
including curator & writer, Karen Wilkin, critic & writer, Eric Gelber, and the artist KARLIS REKEVICS
Place & Placement, Wooster Art Space
show curated by Karen Wilkin
gallery hours Tues-Sat 11am-6pm show runs through Sat, Oct 29
To the Danger Makers,
You are invited to join The Concrete Rituals.
You probably already know this, but we’re fucked. It’s not the type of fucked that can be fixed by voting, blogging, protesting, donating, or drinking until delirious. We’ve tried all that. We’re still fucked. This goes deeper.
Our nation is cursed.
It all became clear after the second hurricane hit, after the second war erupted, after the second tower fell. It all became clear in the path of the H2, in the glare of the Jackson trial, in the face of the new Pope. It all became clear in the seconds after the second election. We are a nation crumbling under the curse of fiasco. Despite many attempts to turn it around we continue to fail fantastically. So now it’s time to try something wildly different.
Welcome to the Concrete Rituals.
>From Halloween Night to Fat Tuesday we will be hosting one hundred twenty one nights of art, ritual and wild abandon to lift the fiasco from this cursed nation. These rituals will be tiny and vast, sincere and preposterous, beautiful and drastic and all in the streets. Anyone can create a ritual and we hope everyone will.
This is how we save ourselves.
The start of this is obvious. Halloween. New York City. A Renegade Parade. A night of fire and brimstone and elaborate walking effigies. We bring the battling tribes, brown-bag-liquor, big brass bands and back-pack stereos. You bring the nefarious energy, your elaborate costume and others like you.
Our first ritual will be:
The Ash Masquerade, October 31st
This is not just a party, or a passive night of performance watching. You are invited to be with us, in the NYC Halloween parade and on to an undisclosed after-location.
You are the artstar and the street is your stage.
For the artist call see:
http://www.concreterituals.com
To parade with us come to our artist meeting where we will go over the plan of action, performance aspects, costumes and the big surprise at the end. This is less a meeting and
more of a pre-performance party.
Everyone is welcome, regardless of experience.
Come to:
Bar Thirteen : 35 East 13th St. @ University Place
Wednesday, October 26th : 7pm to 9pm
Come late if you need to.
Two for one drink specials, just for us.
More details on this project will be posted next week.
You are the danger makers and this is your era.
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