Bush Mix

Congratulations to all people who had courageously counterstroke the National Republican Convention in NY. Furtherfield and Anne-Marie Schleiner had promoted live and online multimedia performances - the first jamming the official media channels with staggering guerrilla broadcasts and the former launching the project OUT (Operation Urban Terrain), an artistic intervention of military games played out in public spaces. (This makes me get ashamed of how idiots are some Brazilian media "artists" who overstate their ridiculous public SMS messages as state-of-art interventions.) Yesterday, Bush Jr. had made his address in Madison Square Garden. How loath and nauseating is his overbearing arrogance! I almost puked when I heard this line: Some people think I have the swagger. In Texas, it means walking. Gosh! Who he thinks he is? Tom Mix? If so, Kerry is right when he says that the soul of America is in Hollywood.

[ Talking Heads - Stay Up Late ]

Orion Drooling Features

Orion Multisystems, Inc. is offering a home multi-thread super computer loaded with drooling features: Orion also announced a partnership with Wolfram Research, Inc., which pioneered the modern concept of technical computing when it launched Mathematica 15 years ago. Millions of users on every continent currently use Mathematica technology. The company's gridMathematicaTM combines the power of the world's leading technical computing environment with modern computing clusters and grids to solve the most demanding problems in mathematics, science, engineering, and finance. And Tableau Software is selling google-type databases with graphics a la Tufte.

[ Dzihan & Kamien - Sliding ]

Burnout Case

Robert Bryce has showed that US lost the Iraq war. Imagine Hitchcock's Saboteur crossed with an Arab version of They Might Be Giants (but instead of the oil galore, imagine a burn out field). Iraq today confirms Baudrillard's statement in Pataphysics of Year 2000, in which one can read that "political (...) exchanges have set loose a tempo of liberation whereby we have become removed from the sphere of reference to the real, to history".

[Bossacucanova - Mais Perto Do Mar]

No Pain, No Gain

If you hear Johnny Cash singing "Hurt" you'll feel a kind of bluegrass pain, spiritual or even physical. But what is "pain"? This question has been poking doctor's minds for centuries. Albert Schweitzer, for example, called it "the most terrible of all the lords of mankind". I've found his statement in a website about a medical Symposium which took place in 1998. More recently, a journalist friend of mine had showed to me The Hedonistic Imperative, a manifesto that proposes eradicate suffering in all sentient life by means of genetic engineering and nanotechnology.

[ Beck - Paper Tiger ]

Future of the Past

I've seen "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" yesterday and I liked. It is a "scriptwriter film", yes, but this is not a problem at all. Because it is also a kind of authorial film well conducted by a known videoclip director. I agree that there is an overacting of twist and turns, but the apparently chaotic narrative mirrors perfectly the to and fro love of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet characters. It is a libel in favor of forgetfulness, an important cultural self-organizing resource, as affirmed by Eco. Nietzsche and Pope almost force the audience into believe that it is possible erase from the brain a sorted out memory. But I guess that Ingram Marshall, American compositor, is right: The all too familiar hymns of my childhood have come back to haunt me ... For me the research into memory is an important tool. We are, all of us, always searching our past in an attempt to understand the present. I’ve recorded his “Steal Across the Sky” piece from Radio@Netscape, which streams in Dolby AAC. Nice capture, if it is saved with a pure FhG codec (not LAME).

[ Unkle - Bloodstain ]

Puerile Dems

I've put some faith in the Blogistanis covering DNC 2004, but this kind of "covering", commited by Dave Winer, is childish and give to the tradicional media types ammo enough to smash them up without mercy: Blah blah blah John Kerry blah blah Kerry Edwards blah blah values values values blah blah John Kerry blah blah blah standing at a crossroads blah blah. There's a din in the room. I had to go get a Dunkin Donuts iced coffee to stay away. Zzzzz. Blah blah K-E-R-R-Y blah blah Kerry Edwards and you.

[Listening to: Jaffa - Star 67]

Fire in the Sky

NRO put out a funny story about the new paranoia that has taken over American citizens: Arab terrorists doing dry run assembling of bombs inside domestic airplanes. It has turned out that the "terrorists" inside Northwest Airlines 327 flight were just a band lead by the Syrian musician Nour Mehana. The situation could be only pathetic, if it was not tragic and has not awaken a new wave of jingoism and racism, as indicates one of the last posts of the neo-fascist Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds: Are we still frisking grandmothers and six-year-olds and letting Mohammed Atta-lookalikes cruise through metal detectors? If so, why? Reynolds got worried about the conclusions of 911 Commission Report and made a "call of action". I suppose he also got worried that America is suffering from a lack of foreshadowing and not just imagination, as affirmed by Tom Kean. God only knows to what sort of snake pit America is going down. If I were Reynolds, I’d vote for Crosby-Nash. (Layman might want begin with this masterpiece. Thank you, Vowe!)

[Listening to: Jim White - Bluebird]

Surreal But The Real

As I was searching for an old entry I've made about Max Ernst, I've found Jerzy Kujawski (1921-98), an obscure polish surrealist painter. Nice to know that my parenthood is not just natural backgrounds in Gunter Grass "Dog Years" (1963). Well, someone has digitalized and put in the Internet all Ernst's "Une Semaine de Bonte" (A Week Of Kindness). Surrealists are more vivid as ever. I guess even more than beatniks and hippies.

[Listening to: Kultur Shock - Tutti Frutti]

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

Not everybody knows Kraftwerk's Hütter bicycle-obsession. It is not by chance that the robot-man and his electronic band made an entirely piece about Tour de France. Speaking of the world's most famous bicycle race, not everyone knows that it has a blog (read all about the last Gilberto Simoni's prowess). I'm very eager to learn what might be Hütter's opinion about the Brompton folding bike...

[Listening to: Sonic Youth - Unmade Bed]

Global Idiocy

Following suit the post The Orkut Curse I have another considerations about how the mob gather itself as a unified mind. In the book "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations", James Surowiecki explains that the "wisdom of crowds" emerges only in groups with many different points of view. Apropos, Thomas Paine has said, in 1783: I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. And, as quoted by Kotke, "the problem with the global village is all the global village idiots" (Paul Ginsparg). That is exactly why I prefer a thousand times the isolated biodiversity of rappers in Senegal than a single group in Orkut.

[Listening to: Sun Kil Moon - Glenn Tipton]

The Orkut Curse

Is it not curious how some people take Orkut too seriously? Hey, this is just a botched social network. Maybe Google never will leverage it to a more efficient application. A friend of mine has said, some years ago, that Internet is not so different from real life. As to say, trolls and baddies in real life tend to be trolls and baddies in cyberspace. How ironic is Orkut environment! People who are profiling themselves as "open spirit" and "free to make new friends" don't think twice before deny a friend addition from an unknown or an indirect friend. Ok, I'm being somewhat bitter with those poor souls, even because I must accept that we live in a neotribalist world. A gang of four will be ever a gang of four, not five, six, or thousand. But is this the best way to combat the orkutsluts? I don’t think so. Six degrees of separation? I don't think so. Better say: eons of separation. This is the curse of modern times.

[Listening to: Jim White - Alabama Chrome]

My Company is Ruled by Sociopaths

In the bull's eye again, Mr. Macleod...

Resurrection

I’m feeling like a flatliner who got escaped from a near death experience. So it seems I’m a bit morbid on these comeback. My first hunch is International Necronautical Society, a group of artists who believe the death is a "type of space" that deserves to be explored by a kind of "craft" (it is, as they say, under construction). Second in the row is a game that should convey its players to a more realistic death realm. S.T.A.L.K.E.R, creation of Russians game designers, is a mixture of Andrei Ujica's "Unknown Quantity", Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 homonymous film and a bunch of monsters that seem like to have been depicted by Ralph Steadman. Death, private and public are the core of Diary of a Star, a critical blog that appropriates selections from the Andy Warhol Diaries.

[Listening to: Andrew Bird - Weather Systems]

Cantrell & Cochrane's Ginger Ale

Too much work (until July) & rereading Joyce's Ulysses. No time to blog, huh?

The Disobedientti

Receipt for spit the bushites out of your mind: first of all, recite an excerpt from Hakim Bay's CHAOS: THE BROADSHEETS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM (could be this one: They lied to you, sold you ideas of good and evil, gave you distrust of your body and shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization and all its usurious emotions.) with Mariza's Fado Curvo in the background. After that, watch Ron Mann's documentary Dream Tower, Michael Parenti's speech "Terrorism, Globalism & Conspiracy" and read from beginning to end Lessig's Free Culture. Well, for the impatient, cut short and rewrite the history.

[Listening to: Juana Molina - Tres Cosas]

FeedBurner and Realkulture

FeedBurner, among several other things, inserts an image inside blog's feeds. Guess what is mine? Do you remember the old sci-fi TV series, The Invaders? Go figure. Some real culture gunsights for the weekend: a vast and enlightening frontline's interview with David Crosby, the only folk singer legend with guts. PDU-1, a strange and beauty "novella of the remote future" written by F. E. Potts, a founding mother who had built an outpost on the Aleut land. And, last but not least, the new book from the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, a good example of real literature.

[Listening to: Kenny Larkin - Tedra]

The Polymath Girl

Suw Charman, a Welsh girl who began her career writing for BBC Wales, is the new blog queen. Who would say that a girl living now in Dorset would arouse the attention span from high ranking fellows like Sébastien Paquet and Doc Searls? The English word for "welsh" means "foreigner" or "outsider", but Suw is not an outsider anymore. She is the new blog queen. Bonus link: Futurama Panoramas.

[Listening to: a mixing of particulate solids radio from Bratislava/Slovakia]

Sexton, Lies and Video Arts

Art is dead more than ever. Curators, artists and others scumbags ought to put a Bounty's chocolate bar above their loser's egos and wait for the worst. That's why I love Netochka Nezvanova and her iconoclast rants against the "motherfuckers" who insist in exhibit "occident kommercial refuse" in modern galleries. She is the brain who had written Nato.0+55, a software that manipulates video for live performance and installations. She has been accusing Cycling '74, a San Francisco software company, of stealing her code. Has she or not the right to despise the 21th century ennui? In fact, nobody knows if Netochka is really a real person or a group. Whatever is the true, she is my new hero and the one who could prevent me to flee to Gunkanjima. She and Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11".

[Listening to: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter - Troubled Soul]

WordPress Micro Review

After the fresh installing of Apache/1.3.31, MySQL 4.0.20 and PHP 4.3.6 (Zend's terrific job), I finally got WordPress 1.0.2 up and running in my Red Hat 7.1, the box I fondly call of "corral". I won't make a full review here, because I want to let this job for the pros, namely Mark Pilgrim et caterva. In a few words, WordPress is a revolution in the CMS area (pun not intended) due to its feature galore and clean architecture. At a first sight, the code is a cargo cult full of fancy tricks, but with a closer look, one will note that the code is simply poetry. Post searching, categories management, links ranking, placement of GeoURL ICBM location and a truly complete options list are a few qualities to mention. Matt and his gang have rescued my faith in humanity.

[Listening to: Baldwin Brothers - Lava Lamp]

Tuvalu Pythoness

Who could imagine that the Greek Delphi priestess would transfer her temple to Tuvalu? Not exactly to the geographic South Pacific island, but an Icann domain. In ILUVU.TV, one will discover that the priestess is divining the future through television messages with amazing personal accuracy and acute vision. This makes sense, since Tuvalu domain is .tv, right? Quoting the release, it works through a combination of methodologies involving her blue-blocking wrap-around shades and the ILUVU.TV proprietary technique called Th(m)eme Mapping, which uses the remote as a tool for harnessing the meta stories inside the television set, channeling, as it were, the samples of wisdom between the TV scan lines. Don't know how it is true, but the effect is unforggetable.