News of the Bizarre

Action News in Philadelphia has its own version of the fait-divers (this is a station notorious for having things like decapitated heads on live TV). Check it out:
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/channel?section=news/bizarre&id=5755544
Note also the creepy woman who comes into the screen to sell Toyotas!

This is my embedded video


This is my embedded audio:

Physical Fitness on Long Island

Amanda Malloy, 29 and Vincent Saunders, 32, while jogging on Long Island, met Shea Rosen, 19, driving his Durango, doped up. They were struck from behind, then dragged. Ah, health.

source: NYPost 11-8-08

Human Resources News

Soo Chun, 61, employee of the university, immigrated in 1977, citizen in 1982, fired in August 2008. Fired himself in October. With gasoline.

source: UW Times (web)

Physical fitness in Arizona

A Prescott woman ran a mile to her car after being attacked by a fox. The fox remained attached.

source: NYTimes 11-6-08

Funeral Arrangements to be Determined

Domenico Leccisi carried on the legacy of Mussolini, but was best known for carrying the corpse of the dictator from an unmarked grave to a more appropriate resting place. Dead in Milan at 88.
source: NYTimes 11-6-08

Missile, but no Mrs.

Despite election results, family values are alive and well. However, the wedding party isn't. 47 civilians, and the bride, casualties of recent air strike. In Kandahar.

source: NYTimes 11-6-08

Blog to Emulate (Maybe)

Since we are reading Feneon in class, here is the blog of Luc Sante, translator of Feneon, and good example to follow.

Posting Audio

We'll go over this a little in class, but in case you want to explore and get started, probably the best way to post audio would be to host it at archive.org.
Below, from archive.org is a lecture I love on squirrels and the cosmos:

Do You Want Fries with that Mortgage?

"Western art, once the celebrator of emperors and popes, turned to serve the newly powerful bourgeoisie, becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois ideals. Now that these ideals have become a fiction with the disappearance of their economic base, a new era is upon us, in which the whole matrix of cultural conventions loses its significance and a new freedom can be won from the most primary source of life." --Constant Nieuwenhuys (1948)

OK, Hacked It

Well I don't know if hacked is the word, but when I found this toy:



. . . my first impulse was to use it in a way that it was not meant to be used. But I tried Mount Rainer and I tried jack-o-lanterns, but this program is smart enough to recognize these are not real faces. Ah, but a baby dressed as a jack-o-lantern! That did the trick. Revealing!:

ideas1

I'll start to send along some info that might be useful to generate ideas for the final project. No need to really start getting things together until we get into groups, but just as ways to start you thinking about project-events that meaningfully interact with the quotidian.
A by-now classic is "The Surveillance Camera Players":
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id323/pg1/index.html
http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html

Notes from Reading Nadja in the Park this Summer; Or, Even Children Understand Nadja if Their Parents Will Let Them

"What monsters!"
I thought, somewhere deep beneath, as the babies in their carriages slipped by. One particularly weird looking baby looked at me with suspicion. Imagine my exasperation! All around me, evidence of parents programming their deep prejudices into these squinting boxes. And then they expect me to teach them! The baby looked at me. I looked at her. Did she sense below my cynicism a bit of fear? That all the babies will rise up and subsume me with their bright futurity? I cautiously kept looking. Why? I don't know. But her look suddenly turned into a smile and not a dumb baby smile but a smile of compassion. Or maybe just a baby smile, not yet saddened. Or maybe a smile that showed a knowledge of time, far more profound than my own, as she slipped by (because the smile came at the last possible moment, to the extent that she had to turn her head), and the details of her face disappeared in the sun light.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXIn any case, this encounter put me in the mind to be less guarded when a more ambulatory little girl came up to my side and started looking at the space to my right.
XXXXXXX"What are you looking at?"
XXXXXXXShe realized she wasn't looking at anything, so picked up a little piece of dirt so as to look purposeful. She stood before a chess board design--I think maybe both of us may have noticed this at once and she started pouring pieces of dirt around the squares.
XXXXXXX"You're doing some magic?"
XXXXXXXShe nodded her head in assent.
XXXXXXXI let her continue her magic.
XXXXXXX"What kind of book is that?" What a clever, courageous girl!
XXXXXXXI am reading Breton's Nadja.
XXXXXXX"It's a kind of magic book." She takes it. Drops it, not confident that I'm actually handing it to her. Opens it to a page with a picture on it. Her thuggish parents yell. She is hesitant to go. How the young are punished for their openness to the world! My only hope is that one day she'll see the orange and white cover in a bookstore, and realize it was the magic book, and it will become one for her.

The Revenge of The Referent (Or: Mind the Gap)

We talk about a variety of forms of creative appropriation in class. But in the past couple weeks, the election has engendered a weird sub-genre of the culture jam. Usually, these techniques involve taking some mainstream, usually blandly consumerist message, and rejiggering it to say something of political import. So what's happening when Roseanne Cash, Heart, and a Texas cattle dynasty are complaining of the Republican reuse of Johnny Cash songs, "Barracuda," and the wily sobriquet "Maverick?" Basically, the Republicans may be turning culture jamming on its head, taking a song or concept with origins in the counter-cultural and turning it into something more in line with their message. It's something you too may do while driving on the 405: the artist on your iPod may have gone to the heart of death and debasement in order to crank out that particular tune; you, however, are on the way to Bed, Bath and Beyond. And there are plenty of university professors, myself included, who make money mincing on about artists who have died in the gutter. But while it may be something we are all guilty of, it may be just deserts for the party who came up with the name "Clear Skies Act" for something that reverted the previous pollution control measures of the "Clean Air Act" (the friendly skies haven't complained to the press corps yet.) Such enjoyments are a little tone-deaf to meaning and history, and this is what Debord was talking about--everything leveled in the currency of the spectacle; Jim Morrison pressed up against an ad for Geico Insurance. But where is history? It may be an era in which we can be reassured that, after committing various crimes against humanity, we can still go back to the compound and listen to Ani DiFranco or maybe Lisa Loeb and act like nothing happened.

Higher-Than-Fi

In the 50s, mix suburban boredom, postwar affluence, and stereo technology and you get lounge music for the "jet set." Nobody went anywhere listening to the exotica of Martin Denny or the Latin version of "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads," except for maybe passed out drunk on the couch. In a certain sense, it was like the couch itself: a music that formed the background environment, along with the tiki ashtray . . . a latter-day version of Satie's "furniture music." A genre to think about when considering the multifarious shades of art intersecting with the everyday. My friend Glen has a show of on Mondays, which you can listen to any day of the week here. And I would make it homework, if I could, but listening to "EZ and sleazy music" might encourage your delinquency. (He also includes "juvenile delinquent music" so I would encourage you to listen with the utmost anthopological detachment, of the type you reserve for dérives in the Country Village.)

game time

Play a game. Think about how the game structures time. How does the "game" effect or reflect the "real world." What do games have to tell us about "everyday life?" What does your particular game tell us about your "everyday life?"

Interstitial Spaces

When Henri Lefebvre says "[everyday life] is . . . the time and the place where the human either fulfills itself or fails, since it is a place and a time which fragmented, specialized and divided activity cannot completely grasp, no matter how great and worthy that activity may be . . ." (27) I think of how the city of Bothell has so many maps, so many specialized ways of seeing, knowing and experiencing the city. Yet what eludes the Bothell elders? Terra incognita does not necessarily have to be at the end of some unimaginable frontier. Places like Seattle mark the point at which the western expansion into the unknowns of America would come to an end; but are those unknowns really abolished? As we can see, terra incognita is right here, in the blanks and lapses of each particular map. What are our own terra incognitas? They are created when the tools for seeing a landscape are only trained to see certain things. (N.b. the little triangle formed by the young woman between her piano lessons, school and home that Debord talks about.) For the Situationists, "the city would have to be surveyed for those elements, constructions and interstitial spaces that might be salvaged from the dominant culture, and, once isolated, put to new use in a utopian reconstruction of social space" (Ross, 45). Later theorists would be less idealistic about the potential these spaces had for revolution and change, but that is another story . . .

prepare thyself

spectacle and everyday

"We believe that politics is the way you live your life, not who you support. It's not in terms of rallies, or speeches, or political programs. It's in terms of images, and in terms of transforming people's lives."--Abbie Hoffman

The Banality of Evil

When I had a WaMu mortgage (fixed rate, mind you), if I dialed 1-800 instead of 1-888 to reach them, I got a porn service.














The topiary of a failed bank . . . (wait, maybe topiary is not the right word. but then again, maybe bank's not the right word!)

recent bathtub reading

scan's not great, but pertinent to the class. From Make Magazine:

Luck and Life

Since I have so many blogs on my aggregator, I decided to create a new tab on iGoogle for all your new blogs (see below.) New features appear with quiet regularity on the web, and you really just have to jump in and try them. I noticed that there was an "I'm feeling lucky" button (this is a Google trademark of sorts) which would add things to my new tab based on what I called it. "I'm feeling lucky" is the mainstream version of aleatory art forms that we'll talk about in class. What I ended up lucking out with was an interesting little digital life form (a cellular automaton) and a blog called "Dumb Little Man." Note that to create this image (on a Mac), I just held down shift + apple + 4, dragged across the image, and then the resulting file was created that I could just upload into Blogger.

new image

First Class

I would like you to do nothing for 20 minutes. Blog about it.