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A post here a few weeks ago mentioned Justin Samson (at John Connelly Presents through Saturday June 18) and went off about hippies in the art world. This was rather ignoring the sci fi/surrealist element, which tips the work more into the culture surfing category from the "makin it real" category, although there is still all that sewing, and those God's Eyes. Images from the show:
The Sturtevant show closing Jun 18 (Sat)--Perry Rubenstein, 23rd St, north side, near 10th ave--is unbelievable. Note-perfect recreations of signature Duchamp works (stool wheel, urinal, bottle rack, snow shovel and many less famous ones), coal sacks on ceiling, films of rotoreliefs projected on wall--all very low, dark lighting, a slightly musty antique feel--exactly what a show of historical Duchamp works would look like, although scholar-devotees like Arturo Schwarz could probably find discrepancies and anachronisms. These recreations were made by Sturtevant over the period from the late '60s to the early '90s. Amazing! Did NOT deserve the sneering review from Ken Johnson in the Times ("they love her in Europe"). Sturtevant stayed on the straight appropriation track where Sherrie Levine went astray with exquisite craftsmanship for the collector tribe and hoky bombast (gold plated urinals, etc).
Connections among Vernor Vinge's sf novel A Deepness in the Sky, the film Jean de Florette, and Joe Sacco's graphic novel/documentary Safe Area Gorazde, for anyone else who was wondering: In Deepness the podmaster (bad guy) has a limited amount of water, organic chemicals, and human laborers in his space hideout, so he must fastidiously conserve all these elements as he waits out several decades for the planetbound alien culture to mature and become ripe for exploitation. In Florette the Depardieu character fights like a Trojan to save a business that is carefully and scientifically worked out but dying for lack of water. In Gorazde, the Bosnian Muslims hoard food and equipment, rotate military duty, and rig generators on rafts in the river so they can have electricity, all for a semblance of a decent life in a city under siege. The common thread is players improvising like mad in the face of scarce resources and a ticking clock. That's more of a plot arc than a theme in the sense of "innovation is good and ennobles mankind." If the podmaster had been successful a race would have been enslaved, and in the other two examples people "did what they felt they had to do" in the face of conscious or institutional villainy, so not sure if there are any uplifiting conclusions of the Heritage Foundation persuasion to be reached. Not that anyone said that.
review (half-assed attempt to come to terms with this movie) here.
Open letter to Joe (the weblog vacuums all content):
Dear Joe,*see also Joe Sacco's graphic novel/documentary Safe Area Gorazde
I missed the vertexList opening--were you here?
Finished the 2nd Vernor Vinge book [A Deepness in the Sky]. I liked it better I think [than A Fire Upon the Deep]. It seemed more grounded in realistic physics, as opposed to zipping hither and thither through some new kind of spacetime.
Vinge's very influenced by Larry Niven (and Niven & Pournelle). Niven's (early) Known Space books and N&P's Mote in God's Eye are recommended if you haven't read them.
I like "innovation in the face of scarce resources" stories (Jean de Florette is one of my favorite movies*). In this one, the grinding wait followed by very rapid action--that's probably how it would be in space.
Another thing I really liked was that the fairy story quality of the stuff that happened among the aliens was explained as something filtered through the translator's memories and attempts to find correlations for human readers/hearers. That meta level was missing from the first book.
Best, Tom
You may have read about the bust at Kim's video recently. Apparently our old friend RIAA, the music copyright KGB, was behind the raid, because Kim's was selling....(prepare to be shocked and horrified to the depths of your soul)...mixtapes! (or CDs, whatever). From the MTV story:
The raid is just the latest offensive [excellent word choice] in the RIAA's battle against the growing trend of pirated music sales through small, established businesses. While traditional physical goods or "commercial" piracy previously required large and expensive facilities to produce massive numbers of illegal tapes and CDs, some retailers now possess the potential to yield lucrative returns with only a minimal investment of space and capital, Buckles said.Teenagers, grandmothers, corner video stores... The bravery and ultimate value to society of this organization can not be overstated. And to New York's finest, who helped them shake down, I mean deter, a local business: way to fight crime!
According to the RIAA's Web site, because several retailers — including the owners of convenience stores, liquor stores or corner markets — are attempting "to make a quick buck by reselling illegal CDs, or, in some cases, manufacturing counterfeit CDs themselves," [and because, frankly, they're easy to catch and intimidate] the RIAA has adopted an "aggressive 'zero tolerance' approach to retailers engaged in this activity."
A similar raid late last month in the Albany, Schenectady and Troy areas of Upstate New York resulted in 11 arrests, the seizure of 3,400 illicit CD-Rs and more than $54,000.
"Dude, You Rule" [mp3 removed]. Fortunately I have RIAA protecting me so you will never hear this on a mixtape. Oh, I don't, because I'm too "small"? Well, God bless them anyway for their efforts to stamp out creativity, I mean "piracy."
The New York Times slips the Downing Street Memo into its back pages in the form of a Frank Rich column. I don't really like him--his way of massaging the week's news into a single jocular story line is clever but ultimately toothless. If the column had any meaning, the Times would fire Judith Miller, the reporter who printed the WMD lies from the Iraqi exiles, fire the editors who approved her stories, and go front-page aggressive with Downing Street and other hard evidence that Bush committed impeachable offenses. I mean, the President's not popular any more, his numbers are the 40s, so what's to lose? Anyway, here's an excerpt from Rich's "tough" column. Nice to read, but big whoop.
The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including the Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar WMD hype [uh, how about "spoonfeeding its prewar hype to the public"?], new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by the London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.Yeah, well, you ought to know. Actually Rich isn't a lapdog, more like a court jester. It should also be said that the MSB (mainstream bloggers like Atrios, Gilliard, and the ever-boring Kevin Drum) also passed on giving the Downing Street Memo big play. I think it's different from the Clarke revelations, et al, because no one has a bone to pick or a book to sell. It simply states the facts from that time period.
This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished.