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Geffen Sells Pollock to Pay Paul
"[In addition to selling a Pollock for $140 million, j]ust last month Mr. Geffen sold two other 20th-century paintings — a Jasper Johns and a Willem de Kooning — for a total of $143.5 million. Given that he is among many business figures who has expressed interest in buying The Los Angeles Times, media industry analysts speculated that he was trying to raise cash for a potential bid." [via]
So, a man who made his pile robbing musicians in one old tech milieu (pre-Napster CDs) sells his holdings by artists who make even older tech objects, unique (uncopyable) paintings, most of which value never accrues to the artists directly, to buy yet another old tech (dying) business (newsprint), premised on gatekeepers choking the flow of information.
What a guy!
Republican-tied Bechtel Corp. Doesn't Stay the Course; "Cuts and Runs" in Iraq
This is interesting:
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:When will Bush be questioning the company's patriotism?
Bechtel Corp. went to Iraq three years ago to help rebuild a nation torn by war. Since then, 52 of its people have been killed and much of its work sabotaged as Iraq dissolved into insurgency and sectarian violence.
Now Bechtel is leaving.
The San Francisco engineering company's last government contract to rebuild power, water and sewage plants across Iraq expired on Tuesday. Some employees remain to finish the paperwork, but essentially, the company's job is done.
 Tomorrow, Thursday, Nov. 2, after Olia Lialina's talk at Bryce Wolkowitz I'm heading over to the Lower East Side to hear David Humphrey and Adam Hurwitz do DJ sets at Spinart. This series has been featuring artists who also spin records; Humphrey is a great painter whose work is in the poster above. Adam sez: Please come out and join David Humphrey and myself for what will be the last in the Spinart Thursdays series at Loreley Lounge in the lower east side. David is a returning Spinart veteran and he will definitely be getting the party started right with his hip hop infused eclectic selection. I will take over with the ass shakin' beats that will bust your bass-bins!As in bratwurst, etc, not auto-fellatio. An excellent Hurwitz mix of dubby techno house can be downloaded at the blog A Brooklyn Life. I can't name individual tracks but I especially like the growly thing at 25:00, the weirdly pitch-shifted thing at 29:20, the the Rhodes thing at 38:50 and the Berlinoid electro trance thing at the very end. |
Jonathan Horowitz looms large in the "art as mediacrit" field. He currently shows with Gavin Brown gallery, and has been an influential force on the New York scene since the early '90s. Although he now uses the Internet as a tool and playing field, his work came to prominence during the VCR era. In his piece Maxell, a tape made in 1990 and projected on a large scale at Greene Naftali gallery in 1998, a black screen with the single word MAXELL has been dubbed and redubbed on a VCR so that it gets progressively grainier. But it isn't just degrading--random visual and audial noise is being picked up and amplified with each copy that begins to aggressively overwhelm the original source, in a way that is almost performative. When projected on a large screen, ugly violent electronic sounds and wrenching, spasmodic lightning zaps build dramatically, so that by the end of the tape the video becomes assaultive, almost scary in its sense of total abject breakdown. The piece shows the unintended consequences of mechanical reproduction, data transmission that is supposed to be seamless taken to its most extreme conclusion, so that it actually feels toxic. In other words, Art reveals a dark side to technology that has been there all along. The ultimate irony is the use of MAXELL as subject matter, a brand built on clarity and trust.
guthrie says on his del.icio.us page: "...youtube is totally reaching its golden peak (like napster did..), really gotta download all my favorites before they vanish....."
No kidding. They're vanishing as fast as copyrightholders decide they have had enough free (grainy) exposure. As far as saving them, the thing is, you won't, and I won't. File that under the best of intentions.
I have some Quicktime vids that I created up on this page--this marks me as a pre YouTubian dinosaur, yet most have been made since 2005.
I avoided YouTube because I dreaded that uniform rectangle and feared the Procrustean distortions that odd-sized formats would suffer. Also, I knew some evil f*ckw*d like Rupert Murdoch would end up with all my content on his server. Turns out it's google, but I don't have a gmail account, either.
I'm enjoying the YT ride, finding out what bands actually look like that I listened to a million times on vinyl and CD, and otherwise glomming onto bits of my cultural heritage, past and present. I'm filing them away in my mind because I don't trust that I'll find them again.
update: some ordinary vulgarities trimmed so the blog maintains its lofty tone
another lunchbox from Kristin Lucas' Happy and Sad Sack Lunch Series 2005...
...and an inhaler.
YouTubin' by categories (mine)
* removed thanks to some dildo
**removed by user
Tornados
Near Attica KS, May 12, 2004 (watch house get sucked up into sky)
New Wave/Postpunk
Throbbing Gristle Discipline
Wall of Voodoo Ring of Fire (live)
Tuxedomoon Desire / Jinx / In a manner of speaking
Suicide Ghost Rider ("America, America is killin' its youth") ('77-'78) / Another version
King Crimson *Elephant Talk
Progressive/Psychedelic Rock
Gentle Giant Give It Back
Van der Graaf Generator A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers, Part 4
*Yes Astral Traveler
*Procol Harum Homburg
Anime
Wings of Honneamise Opening credits (music by Ryuichi Sakamoto--wish the resolution on the ink wash drawings was better)
Excerpt from Patlabor 2 (dialogue dubbed in German)
*Another Patlabor 2 Silent Tokyo
Gunbuster - Buster Beam / Die Buster
Film
John Carpenter Dark Star Trailer
*Deleted Bank Robbery Scene from Escape from New York
Tarkovsky - Stalker - the rail trip into The Zone
Art
Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty (excerpts)
"Prophet without honor" award to George A. Romero for his 1973 no-budget movie The Crazies. He lives in Pittsburgh and doesn't have Hollywood smoothies vetting his pictures so he gets to say anything he wants. The premise of this one: plane carrying US government-developed bioweapon crashes near a small Pennsylvania town. The pathogen--an "encephalitic mutation"--causes insanity that either comes on full strength or appears intermittently but eventually results in death, after several days. The bug gets into the town's water supply. The government is late on the scene and the best it can hope to do is declare martial law, round up all the citizens, and contain them in the local high school gym while searching for an antidote or an immune person. The Army, wearing hazmat suits, enters into pitched battles with the locals, crazy and not crazy, many of whom are armed and don't want to be "rounded up."
The main protagonists are a group of sympathetic townspeople, including two firemen who are 'Nam vets, who don't know the full symptoms of the virus or which of them might be infected but attempt to blow town. If they succeed, it means "breaching the perimeter" and spreading the infection to other cities. Suffice it to say, in a packed 90 minutes, everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the film is nonstop strife and carnage--but funny, too, that's Romero's gift. The main "villain" is the bumbling ineptitude of the Army and the utter callousness of the government towards the townspeople.
What seemed like overwrought science fiction in the '70s has become all too familiar in the '00s with the neglect that led to 9/11, the government's abandonment of New Orleans to chaos, the Washington sniper, anthrax, and the devastation in Iraq. What The Crazies does is wrap all this horror in one explosive package. A movie like this still could never be made in Hollywood--we have to look back 30 years for an unflinching portrait of our own present.