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.