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]