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Win $1000 for your webpage! Contest rules are here. Contestants submit the URL of their personal website and in September a $1000 prize is awarded for the best. The site can be a fixed page or a blog, and must be in either text or Flash (what does that leave out?). The jury consists of Emma Davidson, Olia Lialina, Kerstin von Locquenghien, Mouchette, and Vika. Olia wrote that great article about the early vernacular web I discussed a while back, and Emma dj'd at the Bent Festival I still plan to post pictures from. "The site, time and the form of the award ceremony are open and will depend on the location of the winner and the political situation this summer." Some examples of the kinds of submissions that are coming in are here (that's the 1000$ contest page for 2005, which you go to if you skip the amusing Alpine intro).
"Waiting for Stevie to get ready, I ponder the question, what would life be like without music and comedy? Or without Nicks and Henley???"
Recommended: Saving's live blogging of a recent Don Henley/Stevie Nicks show. I tried excerpting more from it but couldn't do it justice, you really need to read the whole thing. Good reporting, with the tone constantly shifting from funny to reverent to thoughtful to smartass. OK, one more excerpt: "Holy shit girls are totally screaming! They love Don Henley so much!"
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.