Saturday, September 30, 2006

Patti


I've been trawling about wanting to find some sort of confirmation of the glorious rumour that media baron William Randolph Hearst (and his gun-toting, John Waters' films cameo starring, socialite grand-daughter) was somehow tied up with the ongoing presence of an American Naval base - and dastardly prison/detention/concentration camp we know as Guantanamo - on Cuba. What is the US doing on Cuba at all? Fidel must have a view on this.

Then I found: Robert Rodvik, who writes:

"Without going through its many Articles, the one that interests me the most is the infamous Article VII - the piece of US-inspired legalese that maintains sovereignty in US hands, rather than the suggested moral goodness of US declaration. As stated in Article VII: "To enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the Cuban Government will sell or lease to the Unites States the land necessary for coaling or naval stations, at certain specified points, to be agreed upon with the President of the United States. On June 12, 1901 the Platt Amendment was added to the Cuban constitution since, to resist, was to declare that pacification had not ended and US troops to stay indefinitely.
This Article of legislation forced upon the Cuban people was the key to establishing the massive US Naval Station Guantanamo."

Old old stuff, now turned into new nasty stuff. Same as it ever was.
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Saturday, September 23, 2006

Friday, September 15, 2006

Irwin memorial tickets predicted to sell out in minutes

There is a sting in the tail in this report from the Australian Broadcasting Commission:

'Police expect tickets for Steve Irwin's public memorial service to be allocated within minutes when they become available this morning at9am AEST.

Hundreds of people have been queuing throughout the night at Ticketek outlets in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast and Australia Zoo in south-east Queensland.

There is a four-ticket per person limit on the tickets and a headcount by police has confirmed that all of the tickets at AustraliaZoo have now been accounted for.

Five-and-a-half-thousand tickets are being made available for thepublic farewell that will be held at the Zoo's Crocoseum next Wednesday.

Jay-Anne Hughes was first in line at Maroochydore's Ticketek office.

"I wanted to guarantee that we would we were able to go on Wednesdayand I was actually supposed to be having a baked dinner at my mum'shouse, but I saw it on the news that people had started lining up soI missed the baked dinner and shot down here and luckily I was herebefore anyone," she said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1741527.htm

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Disappeared In America

Worth a look, the day after Sept 11 is this project by Visible Collective.

The Gap in New York is also a bit of a rabbit hole:

Disappeared In America:

"DISAPPEARED is a project by Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen that uses films, installations, & lectures to trace migration impulses, hyphenated identities and post-9/11 security panic. The majority of migrants detained in recent security hysteria were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York-- the shadow citizens who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we "see" them is when we glance at the hack license in the taxi partition, or the ID card around the neck of a vendor. When detained and deported, they cease to exist in the American consciousness. This desire to create a sinister outsider with dubious "loyalty" has a long pedigree, witness the World War I incarceration of German-Americans; the 1919 detention of 10,000 immigrants in the Anarchist bomb scare; the 1941 internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans; the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs; the HUAC "red scare" under Senator McCarthy; the harrassment of Deacons For Defense; the COINTELPRO infiltration of Black Panthers; and the continuing rise of the Minutemen militia.

CURRENT INTERVENTIONS Until Dec 1: Above Ground @ Tenement Museum, New York. September: State Of Emergency New York.

Various excerpts from our ongoing projects were presented as installations or lectures in New York (2006 Whitney Biennial; Queens Museum of Art; "Rule of Law" @ Broadway Gallery; Rubin Museum; Location One; Brecht Forum; "Knock @ The Door" South Street Seaport; Cooper Union Art & Censorship panel; "Detained" @ Asian American Arts Center), London (Performance Studies International), Liverpool (FACT Museum), San Francisco (Yerba Buena), Dhaka (Bengal Gallery; Public library), Delhi (Sarai Center/RAQS Media Collective), Houston ("How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?" @ Project Row House), Frankfurt (Staedelschule: "Politics of Image"), Stuttgart, Beirut (Home Works III), Karlskrona Military Museum, Berlin (KunstWerke: lecture by Natasa Petresin as part of e-flux video rental project), Chicago (Artwallah), Amherst (U Mass Amherst), Stockholm (Finnish Embassy), Manchester (Futuresonic), Belgrade, Helsinki (Kiasma Museum; Finlandia Hall) and e-Flux video library (various cities). While our work started in the American context, we have expanded to look at Europe & the Middle East, in recognition that anti-migrant xenophobia, coupled with Islamophobia, is not a new or uniquely American phenomenon. "
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Saturday, September 09, 2006

Erowid Nitrous Vault : The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide, by William James


Alexander Bard of BwO fame/glory (and formerly of Army of Lovers) also runs a list called philosophy that while often dormant, is sometimes great. This gem found by Rasmus Fleischer provides an intriguing text, excerpted below, by William James on alcohol, nitrous oxide and Hegel. James writes: "Now this, only a thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all..."
It really is worth looking up the whole thing, but one wild para tickled my funny bone...

Erowid Nitrous Vault : The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide, by William James:



"What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -usea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of
criticism -- how criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement --
disagreement!!
Emotion -- motion!!!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how
it doesn't hurt! Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but
othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it's pure onsense!
Thought much
deeper than speech...!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my God, oh God; oh God!

The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:


There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. "

- James, William. "Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide." Mind. 1882; Vol 7.


This reverie in itself is great; the defence of Hegel an added bonus, I guess, if indeed you need to defend Hegel while gassing up.
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Friday, September 08, 2006

recent questions of note


------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: 07 September 2006 12:35 +0100
From: Anna Shaw @ sotelevision.co.uk
To: anthropology@gold.ac.uk
Subject: Tv Enquiry

Dear Anthropology Department,

I am contacting you from a television production company and I was wondering if you might be able to help me. I am developing a series for Channel 4 with our presenter, Justin Lee Collins, exploring unusual and fascinating communities. In a similar vein to the Louis Theroux programmes, it will be more a comedy anthropology series. I thought it would be advisable to contact the experts first off, to find out whether you feel there are any groups of people who would be suitable for such a programme. There is nothing more unbearable than when tv crews charge into remote communities for all the wrong reasons. Any advice or direction you could give me would be invaluable.
Many thanks and best wishes,
Anna Shaw

Ha ha - So Television. Great letter - [my italics].

This person should first make a programme about anthropologists - a strange remote community.

Then make one about TV executives who come up with stupid ideas like
making 'comedy anthropology' programmes.

Can you imagine what the planning meeting on this one was like?

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

J

Monday, September 04, 2006

words of advice for young people... from Mars...


My the world is strange #133....

I got this email below out of the blue a few days ago. Its pretty wild to be thinking, as I am now, of doing something more creative with sound, and indeed I do have a fantasy of some sort of Uncle Bill Burroughs type adventure, but with Mao and hip hop. This label could be ideal - they have some good stuff out already. Would love to do something with Fun^da^mental using some of the texts from my Marx/Representation/Cultural Politics course with acoustic hip hop spoken word mash up. But as its just this surprise letter that suggests the idea, I doubt there would be time to get anything together, or if it would eve remotely work. Actually, I think the idea is totally crazed. So I like it....


>>>Dear John

I've been meaning to contact you since Zoe Irvine
waxed lyrical about you and your work to me earlier this year.

To cut a long question short - do you perform stuff live? Would you be interested in
recording a live set for my strange online label Seven Things http://www.seventhings.co.uk/) at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, preferably 45 mins long, at somepoint on the 18th Nov this year?

We're running a sort of day-long gig at the festival with people like Alessandro Bosetti / Adam Linson / John Butcher playing and recording forus. If in principle this might be of interest, please do let me know and we can talk more about exactly what you might wish to do, with whom, and what the involvement with Seven Things would entail.

With all best wishes
John Harris
Director
--
Seven Things I Daren't Express Ltd
Alison House12 Nicolson Square Edinburgh EH8 9DF UK
http://www.seventhings.co.uk/