Moog and Theremin

Ok. This is completely irresistible not point out to two thought-provoking documentaries. The first is "Moog" (2004), about Bob Moog, inventor of electronic musical instruments, the most famous one named after his name. The second is "Theremin" (1995), about the Russian inventor Leon Theremin, who created the world’s first electronic instrument, and it also bore his name. Needless say that I’m looking very forward to watch them.

[ Kings Of Convenience - Know-How ]

Je Ne Sais Quoi

Oil crisis is killing giant squids. Who is next? Tiburonia granrojo? Sick capitalism... Some are understanding the Pirate War as a Marxist struggle. Brazil, I'm by your side during the development agenda for WIPO attack!

[ Moss - Semantics is a Bitch ] [ Fantastic Plastic Machine - Beautiful Days (Reprise) ]

AdSense à la Benedict

Congrats, Kuja! Your Google AdSense application has been approved! I know it is a bummer sign a Certification of No U.S. Activities, but, hey, you might even earn some dimes if God help you. Congrats also to Anthony Bourdain, Les Halles chef, for have aroused in Kuja the K-line (see The Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky) of the Eggs Benedict receipt!

[ Belle And Sebastian - Stay Loose ]

Radioactive Knee

My diagnostic was: osteoarthritis of the knee, result of an ancient war injury. The clinic doctor suggested a different approach of the trivial non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, so we've decided for a new technique known as intra-articular injection of sodium hyaluronate (hyaluronic acid), a product extratcted from rooster combs and filtered at molecular level. This is a natural polymer, breed of the glycosaminoglycans family (note that it is not "shenanigan"), radioactive components of extra cellular matrix. Wow! Feeling like Homer Simpson! :) The doctor had shot rightly on the spot, as if the syringe were an acupunture needle. Bingo! I give praises to him and to Hublog, who have had created the code for HubMed, a repository of papers with topics related with medicine and health. There I've found a curious abstract called Reduction of DNA fragmentation and hydroxyl radical production by hyaluronic acid and chondroitin-4-sulphate in iron plus ascorbate-induced oxidative stress in fibroblast cultures. And the classic Hyaluronic acid in the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee, by E. C. Huskisson and S. Donnelly. In this study, they demonstrate that five weekly intra-articular injections of sodium hyaluronate (Hyalgan, in the case; in mine, Polireumin) were superior and well tolerated in patients with ostheoarthritis of the knee with a symptomatic benefit which persisted for 6 month. Beautiful. Hey, folks! I have also survived Service Pack 2!

[ Postal Service - Sleeping In ]

Point-to-Point Tunneling, The Other Way

TeledyN has delighted Ben Hammersley with its "Living Webservices" story. FlickR is really a scale-free network, since it tunnels, somehow, other galleries through RSS channels.

[ Telepopmusik - Genetic World ]

Brighton, 1999

Brighton, 1999
Originally uploaded by Kuja.

My wife, Maria Teresa, shot this in 1999. Before we'd arrived in this Albion gray and metallic coast city, we've stopped at Forrest Row, near East Grinstead. A guy from Scholle Müllerinnenart was returning to an earlier or less mature pattern of feeling...

Black Clouds over the Black Sea

Do you think the caucasian disputes are focused in Chechnya? No. You also have to mention Abkhazia, South and North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Dagstan and Adigeya. Ah! Don't forget Transdniestria and Nagorno-Karabakh.

[ Chichi Peralta - Un Dia Mas ] [ Sensation Junkies - Ollala ]

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]