1,000,000 and counting....

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=13794

And so it begins.....

The delicious pant stormer over at Consequence of Monkeys has just posted a great doc -

http://www.aconsequenceofmonkeys.com/?p=214

We're always in the middle of something. Somewhere. Or some-time. It's proof that everything is more connected than disconnected. Despite this, we have vocabularies that persistently designate divisions and rifts, fault-lines and borders. In language, time is bisected into the past and the future. The present is placed in between, like a temporal bridge, whose ends are impossible to discern. Perhaps words are to blame. Maybe words introduce stoppages, when otherwise we'd think in terms of continuities. Words can and do mark out spaces and territories.



- With/Without: Spatial Products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East

- From the Latex for Fun exhibition held in Barcelona in May, eetz another gorgeous Gaston Caba! I'm such a cheesy fan....

It's the quiet religion that has grown to become the fourth-largest faith in North America and much of the Western world. With no crusades or jihads, nor even belief in a Creator, Buddhism has flourished in the West largely unnoticed over the last 100 years.
Always a dominant religion in Asia, the powerful appeal of Buddhism resides in its lack of dogmatism, its flexibility. With the charismatic Dalai Lama as one of its key spokespeople, Buddhism today has become nearly synonymous with inner peace.
Because Buddhism does not require practitioners to renounce other religions, many Buddhists in the West have adopted multi-faith identity, resulting in 'Jewish-Buddhists' and 'Christian-Buddists' who meditate daily and go to Sunday Mass. Many see it as a kind of open-source faith that can be learned and customized to suit one's needs, be it to relieve suffering for the dying or to promote simplicity for high-powered business execs.
With more than 450 million believers worldwide and no central leadership, Buddhism continues to thrive.

- Adbusters

roger, roger

roger that, over

roger, over

roger that, over

roger, roger

roger that, over

roger, over

roger that, over

something interesting
soooommmme thing in ter est ing

hmmmm......

hello?
brain?

how long have you slept for christs sake??

Bluish gloom covered everything. Oddly uneven, that darkness. Lying on the sofa, I tried to remember what came next, but it was long irretrievable. Did the fox cub ever get the gloves?
I got up from the sofa, opened a window to air the place, went to the kitchen, and made myself some coffee.

snap to it

Fursten
Blasten
Owf 'n argh
fruits of labours
beauregaard

spank me pretty
drown me out
pick my eyes
and scream and shout

carnal cabbage
rain on skree
lay me yellow
rabbit me

punch me raw
break the rail
croon the maggard
feel me frail

stand alone
reach the maw
shut my eyes
heal me sore

hold my hand
and leaf my skin
kiss me quick
or kick my shin

tie my pickles
love my shame
empty mind
blown out again

An Interview for Lorne Nudel ...

It seems that you're proposing a profligate ethos (i.e."whatever gets you through the night" or "give into temptation") as an efficient, forceful and above all engaging communicative structure. What are your thoughts then on the question of political correctness, and self censorship?

What are your thoughts on the uncanny, the human, or the monstrous?

The zeitgeist calls for a febrile dissemination of society. Do you view this as a sprint towards extinction or the most efficient of victories? Or both?

Can you tell us a little about the birth of your humour?

The public have entered a completely neutered state with regards to their ability to express genuine, considered opposition to government, what do you feel are the origins of this inertia? Do you propose any solutions?

Are there any conditions under which you would feel moved to war?

If called upon to defend an ideal, what moniker would you consider using to represent yourself? And would you need a mascot?

Given the opportunity to form a fully functional union, who would it speak for?

Let us suppose that you had been born a German, would you consider the introduction of goose fat to your diet at an early age a necessary step in the evolution of a natural citizen of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland?



Go read his blog....
www.aconsequenceofmonkeys.com

Drunkenness, in its most common usage, is the state of being intoxicated by consumption of ethyl alcohol to a degree that mental and physical facilities are noticeably impaired. Common symptoms may include slurred speech, impaired balance, poor coordination, flushed face, reddened eyes, reduced inhibition and uncharacteristic behavior.


Shame is the consciousness or awareness of dishonor, disgrace, or condemnation.

- Miki Kratsman

http://www.inguine.net/kufia/testomikiinglese.htm

Completion through Removal

It may be harder to overcome the invisible walls separating neighbour from neighbour than to effect the removal of visible ones... however, even at a basic level, opening up spaces within other spaces and creating intersections will psychologically alter interpersonal relations, and corresponds to the will to displace what is rigid and fixed.

Bring down the wall....

dasha shishkin

..for those that may be interested - have decided to upload some of my photos to Flickr...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/72847129@N00/

At the end of the day the most pressing question is how to live your life. It’s a difficult one to answer, particularly when you seem to live more than one life and to have more than one face and more than one friend, when you can do more than one thing, and when there are things that you can’t seem to do (yet) but that you insist on trying anyway. How do you inhabit the existential condition of your own possibilities and limitations in a culture you share with others? How do you go about celebrating, railing against, transgressing and laughing at your own potential and limitations in the public sphere of that shared culture? What is at stake is an ethics of creating a life for yourself and others that seems worth living, a politics of becoming a voice that speaks not just in the presence of but potentially also for and with others, and an aesthetics of operating from a position that is embedded in a singular practice of artistic production.

A Kursk thirst
An arthritic end to a novel idea
A bright melancholy
A northern odelay

Dumb and Dumber
Have visual rants been turned into jingles?

Depending on which end of the telescope you look through, modern art has been a story either of boundless progress or of infinite regress. Actually it is both or neither until you subtract the hopeful or doom-laden adjectives added just to get us off to an apocalyptic start. Even then, the telescope collapses space just as linear historical thinking collapses time and contradictions, magically transporting eye and mind across vast distances while leaving the messy remainder of being in the here-and-now.

Periodically – when ‘mainstream’ culture falters because it has taken its own ‘inevitabilities’ for granted, despite the realities it ignores and problems it can’t solve – progress and regress are confounded. In that context the arrière-garde serves as the ideological and institutional catalyst for avant-garde breakthroughs. So it was with Symbolism, Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and on into the late 20th century. Each ‘step forward’ was preceded by one or more ‘steps back’. Rebellion against the status quo was initiated by tactical withdrawals to the status quo ante that were rich in unassimilated challenges to conventional sensibilities. Before art could advance, it had to retreat; before its fruits could ripen, parts of the orchard had to over-ripen; before art could mature, it had to relive its infancy and adolescence.

Thus were modern primitivisms born, in protest against the failed miracles of enlightenment; thus the art of primordial societies, of children and of the insane were mimicked and celebrated as a retort to pompier taste; thus revolutionaries of left and right mingled in the demilitarized zone of the aesthetic a priori while dreaming their mutually exclusive dreams of bringing the house of bourgeois culture down on the heads of its smug architects and servile occupants.

Each unsettled era gets the primitivism its deserves, or the one it ‘discovers’. For example, the genius of the Pop artists was to realize that the ‘advances’ of consumer capitalism had created a ready-made aesthetic of delectably crude image- and object-making that was begging for appropriation. But just as futuristic styles date quickly, so too do retrograde ones. By now Art Brut is so period, which is also why, like Art Deco, its fast-forwarding counter-term, it is so collectable.

In the 1980s and early 1990s the way ahead for the neo-avant-garde seemed pretty clear: more texts, more reprocessed photos, more opaque exegesis all the way to the roseate horizon. The view behind was a jumble of ‘retrogressive’ post-Modernist painting and sculpture that was too heavy in the aggregate to keep pace with ‘progressive’ post-modernity but, example by example, not weighty enough in repressed desire to hold the neo-avant-garde back. Then along came Puerile Pop, the best of which word-master Ralph Rugoff tagged ‘Just Pathetic’. An art-school-savvy rebuke to the pretensions of Schnabelists and October-ists alike, it was a sure-to-offend, hence sure-to-please, mix of Neo and Retro, and its aggressively cheap qualities made it easy to ‘get’ and almost as easy to buy in bulk. Generally intimist, unlike graffiti, with which it shared much, Puerile Pop was graphic art down and dirty. And so, as style maven Roberta Smith reported in the New York Times, ‘drawing [had] become the new painting’.

Don’t get me wrong: as a critic I am fascinated by the paradoxes this work rudely expresses, and at a base level my id craves it in the way it used to hunger for the loudest, angriest music. (Cageian silence now occupies the void cacophony once filled.) In the learned, harrowingly disillusioned and correspondingly pitiless Raymond Pettibon this tendency has found its true, cursed poet. Meanwhile, the chiaroscuro imaginations of a handful of kindred spirits cast shadows and blinding visions on the walls of galleries and art fairs everywhere.

But lately the infernal glow of such work, and the frustration and fury driving it, has been bleached out or diluted by pale imitations and worse, glib commercial illustration masquerading as cheerfully perverse ‘kids’ stuff’ for which industrial-strength cute Manga and anime has much to answer. It is as though banks of white fluorescents were suddenly turned on in a club previously bathed in black light, revealing it as a showroom not a club, and the dancers as groomed professionals not punks.

If slumming were the only problem, there wouldn’t be much to worry about; you’d just look for a place with fewer tourists and different sounds and décor. The depressing part is that gut-guided regressions no longer seem to be the predicate for risk-taking leaps; ‘informe’ no longer presages new form; the pathetic no longer conceals the ambitious; the primitive no longer anticipates the never seen. Instead visual rants have been turned into jingles, hot spots of down-and-dirty have devolved into chequerboard panoramas of dumb, dumber and dinky. It’s enough to provoke a Nauman-like tantrum of ‘No! No! No! No!’

- Robert Storr - Director of the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Caba again - from his 'people posing as a definition of group personality' site

http://www.gastoncaba.com.ar/bizarre/index.htm

..growling

siddown and stump up the bloody dollars
whaddya think this is? Bush week?



money money money
leaking, dripping, dropping
from the ever widening holes
in the corners
of the pockets picked clean
sewn shut
then unravelled
pinched, squeezed
but no fucking use

jahhhh he's so gooooot...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gastoncaba/

In this 'information age', we have access to vast amounts of information, but the quality of what we have access to is increasingly questionable. Real news reporting is buried under a landslide of prepackaged news planted by corporate PR, ideological groups, government and other entities interested in manipulating how we act and consume. Real news is buried from one side by a river of PR and from the other side by pressure from the dominant media conglomerates to select news for its entertainment value.

Our sources of belief have become less trustworthy. Once they were mainly our parents, elders, teachers, neighbors, and other people we grew up with and spent time with personally. Those sources were sometimes right and sometimes sadly wrong, but at least they didn't systematically exploit or deceive us by the millions, for purposes unrelated to our own well-being.

We're stressed out by unprecedented levels of environmental and social destabilization: 500-year floods, devastating hurricanes, increasingly severe water shortages, unexpected crop failures, resurgent diseases and war. Often the reaction to such stress is to flee - not just physically, but emotionally and cognitively. People who have money often flee from the pain of their lives by consuming.

Our world has been turned inside-out by entertainment. Once it was built around work, now it's made up of thrills. In industrial countries, entertainment has become the kind of dominant business that manufacturing once was. The loci of our entertainments are artificial environments - stadiums and auditoriums and the interiors of cars, instead of canyons and vales and dells; earphones instead of the sounds of birds or wind; and the false fictions of TV ads and sitcoms instead of reality. If we're not astonished by the gradual extinction of our world, maybe it's in part because, being constantly cut off from it, we no longer have any strong expectations to begin with.

The disconnection is worsened by systemic misuses of technology. Consider, for example, the soaring dissemination of automated toys and games that provide the propulsion, conflict or imagery once provided by children's arms, legs and imaginations. In a Toys-R-Us world, we spend more and more to bring up kids who are less and less connected to what keeps them alive.

What to do? Good policy is not enough. It does for human behavior what end-of-pipe control does for pollution. So, just as pollution is more effectively attacked at the source, attitudes need attacking at their sources - in the education of kids by parents and schools, in the learning environment we grow up in, in the curricula of universities, in the accountability of media. We need to revisit how people learn (or don't learn) from the first gasp of life to the last, because today's average upper-middle class college grad, when you strip away what he knows about entertainment and technology, has a medieval understanding of the world. That understanding won't get us through the next century.

With thanks to.....

A paucity of principles
A plethora of ponticles
A pinch of purple pinnacles
A pudding for the brave

A burst of bronzed benevolence
A bash of brashed vehemen-ence
A barnacle of insolence
A birch for brighter days

Bondi, Sydney, Australia

Go to bed and read?
Or slather myself in goose-fat and throw myself from a second story window?

hmmmm....

Freestyle Friends - Matt Furie