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8/8/10
7/9/10
¡CONSIGA IR!
From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks.
The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. We’re beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote. Nothing we’re being shown is adequate to the situation, not by far. In its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about how to govern it. The ramblings of any Belleville chibani contain more wisdom than all the declarations of our so-called leaders. The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure inside continues to build. From out of Argentina, the specter of Que Se Vayan Todos is beginning to seriously haunt the ruling class.
The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyone’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise. The media fable of “banlieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers, but this news was methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people living there. And it’s not even true that the country has stopped burning. Many different profiles can be found among the arrested, with little that unites them besides a hatred for existing society – not class, race, or even neighborhood. What was new wasn’t the “banlieue revolt,” since that was already going on in the 80s, but the break with its established forms. These assailants no longer listen to anybody, neither to their Big Brothers and Big Sisters, nor to the community organizations charged with overseeing the return to normal. No “SOS Racism” could sink its cancerous roots into this event, whose apparent conclusion can be credited only to fatigue, falsification and the media omertà. This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anonymous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened the breach between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to see the purely political character of this resolute negation of politics. Like lost children we trashed the prized trinkets of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the end of the Bloody Week- and knows it.
There will be no social solution to the present situation. First, because the vague aggregate of social milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of antiphrasis, “society,” has no consistency. Second, because there’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language. It took half a century of struggle around the Enlightenment to make the French Revolution possible, and a century of struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome “welfare state.” Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No “problems” framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of “pensions,” of “job security,” of “young people” and their “violence” can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won’t teach them to love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of retirees, making them stew and splutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of youth. And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of a new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for that.
As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens, together with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify. The unmanned drone that flew over Seine-Saint-Denis last July 14th – as the police later confirmed – presents a much more vivid image of the future than all the fuzzy humanistic projections. That they were careful to assure us that the drone was unarmed gives us a clear indication of the road we’re headed down. The territory will be partitioned into ever more restricted zones. Highways built around the borders of “problem neighborhoods” already form invisible walls closing off those areas off from the middle-class subdivisions. Whatever defenders of the Republic may think, the control of neighborhoods “by the community” is manifestly the most effective means available. The purely metropolitan sections of the country, the main city centers, will go about their opulent lives in an ever more crafty, ever more sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction. They will illuminate the whole planet with their glaring neon lights, as the patrols of the BAC and private security companies (i.e. paramilitary units) proliferate under the umbrella of an increasingly shameless judicial protection.
The impasse of the present, everywhere in evidence, is everywhere denied. There will be no end of psychologists, sociologists, and literary hacks applying themselves to the case, each with a specialized jargon from which the conclusions are especially absent. It’s enough to listen to the songs of the times – the asinine “alt-folk” where the petty bourgeoisie dissects the state of its soul, next to declarations of war from Mafia K’1 Fry – to know that a certain coexistence will end soon, that a decision is near.
This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its authors. They were content merely to introduce a little order into the common-places of our time, collecting some of the murmurings around barroom tables and behind closed bedroom doors. They’ve done nothing more than lay down a few necessary truths, whose universal repression fills psychiatric hospitals with patients, and eyes with pain. They’ve made themselves scribes of the situation. It’s the privileged feature of radical circumstances that a rigorous application of logic leads to revolution. It’s enough just to say what is before our eyes and not to shrink from the conclusions.
7/1/10
Historic conviction of cop torturer only partial justice, say activists
In an historic development in the decades-old effort to win justice for more than a hundred police torture victims in Chicago, former police commander Jon Burge was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice on Monday. To find Burge guilty of the perjury/obstruction charges, the jury clearly had to find that Burge lied when he claimed he and his henchmen were innocent of torture.Charges first began to surface in the 1970's that Burge and his accomplices ran torture rings out of two police districts on Chicago's south side. While Burge was fired for misconduct in 1993, neither he nor any of his crime partners has ever been held criminally accountable for those atrocities. There is no law in Illinois or nationally that explicitly makes torture of people by cops a crime, and the statute of limitations has run out on crimes with which Burge COULD have been charged at the time, like assault. Now, human rights groups want criminal prosecutions for lying about the torture ring expanded to the other members of Burge's torture rings, and they're also demanding new federal and state laws that would explicitly criminalize torture by government agencies and their employees — with NO statute of limitations on those crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, dozens of Burge's victims — wrongfully imprisoned after he and his fellow criminals forced false confessions from them — remain behind bars. Read more.
Related Links: Jail Jon Burge | JJB Torture Archive: Background articles by John Conroy, (Chicago Reader) | People's Law Office | Illinois Coalition Against Torture
Video: Democracy Now: Trial Begins For Ex-Chicago Police Lt. Accused Of Torturing More Than 100 African American Men | Labor Beat: Burge is indicted.
Radio: Guilty verdict in Chicago police brutality case. Free Speech Radio News/Pacifica
6/28/10
6/26/10
6/24/10
6/18/10
6/17/10
Louie Death Metal
here's something amazing from boingboing today.
It's a nice dose of cognitive dissonance for the day.
It's a nice dose of cognitive dissonance for the day.
6/13/10
And then go to sleep
My cousins told me what they wanted and I tried to produce their sound the best I could.
And then Go to Sleep by johnthompson
And then Go to Sleep by johnthompson
6/9/10
Thought Vomit
Here is a link where you can download a half hour of my consciousness through music - cut up into 8 songs.
Thought Vomit
also, THANK YOU CLARK
Thought Vomit
also, THANK YOU CLARK
6/8/10
Hummus 1.2
Hummus is good, to make a delicious batch simply read further with a food processor or a spoon and a lot of ambition.
1 15 oz. can of Garbanzo beans (Goya Organic are smooshiest)
1 Fresh lemon
1 Hearty Garlic Clove minced
3-4 tbsp Tahini
1 tbsp Olive Oil
1 tsp Salt
¼ tsp Ground White Pepper
¼ tsp Ground Cumin
For a thick texture, almost peanut butter texture, strain the beans and pour them all into the food processor. Juice the lemon and pour that in their too. Run processor on high. Almost immediately the beans get too thick to flow. Trickle olive oil in there for like 3 or 4 seconds, that should do it. Rub lemon peels on hands. Mmmmmm, right? Remove the lid of the processor, add minced garlic and tahini. If the tahini is too thick, only add three tablespoons. Too much tahini is embarrassing. Replace processor lid and run on low. While it’s running, slowly dump the olive oil through the glory hole. A slow and consistent pour adds a frothy fluffiness to the batch. Without any grace, dump the salt, pepper, and cumin.
1 15 oz. can of Garbanzo beans (Goya Organic are smooshiest)
1 Fresh lemon
1 Hearty Garlic Clove minced
3-4 tbsp Tahini
1 tbsp Olive Oil
1 tsp Salt
¼ tsp Ground White Pepper
¼ tsp Ground Cumin
For a thick texture, almost peanut butter texture, strain the beans and pour them all into the food processor. Juice the lemon and pour that in their too. Run processor on high. Almost immediately the beans get too thick to flow. Trickle olive oil in there for like 3 or 4 seconds, that should do it. Rub lemon peels on hands. Mmmmmm, right? Remove the lid of the processor, add minced garlic and tahini. If the tahini is too thick, only add three tablespoons. Too much tahini is embarrassing. Replace processor lid and run on low. While it’s running, slowly dump the olive oil through the glory hole. A slow and consistent pour adds a frothy fluffiness to the batch. Without any grace, dump the salt, pepper, and cumin.
6/3/10
5/21/10
Golan Levin
flong.com
Golan Levin makes software that allows the user to interact with music and video as comfortably as an instrument. This reminds me of David Byrne's "Playing the building" project where he hooked fans and hammers throughout a dilapidated building. In an interview with Boing-Boing, he said he was most excited that no matter who sat down at the modified organ, that served as the controller, no one was better at it than anyone else. This software strips line and sound from its familiar context which allows the user to interact instinctively, having nothing to reference, and therefore nothing to trace. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon at the department of Creative Inquiry.
Below is a quick video of what Yellowtail did to a couple spirals I drew and pictures of random moments. Also, there is a link to a java version of the program as well as a link to his website 'flong' at the top. Sorry for the Sonic Youth, but I think it actually fits quite well.
Yellowtail (1998)
Golan Levin makes software that allows the user to interact with music and video as comfortably as an instrument. This reminds me of David Byrne's "Playing the building" project where he hooked fans and hammers throughout a dilapidated building. In an interview with Boing-Boing, he said he was most excited that no matter who sat down at the modified organ, that served as the controller, no one was better at it than anyone else. This software strips line and sound from its familiar context which allows the user to interact instinctively, having nothing to reference, and therefore nothing to trace. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon at the department of Creative Inquiry.
Below is a quick video of what Yellowtail did to a couple spirals I drew and pictures of random moments. Also, there is a link to a java version of the program as well as a link to his website 'flong' at the top. Sorry for the Sonic Youth, but I think it actually fits quite well.
Yellowtail (1998)
5/20/10
Things the Wheels on the Bus do
how will we all? Or lettuce, anise, but that's okay, because after all...it's sober. We can just do something else. I dunno, play mario? I dunno, find something else to do? because we have to.
5/19/10
Wegman
The Television audience watches the off-screen object in an exacting and loyal fashion. Notice despite their exhaustion or boredom their attention is fixed. The object is revealed, and we can't believe that it was just a ball the entire time.
The commercial break appears, and we see a jolly man holding a dog. "You trust me because the dog trusts me."
Finally, a new object is visible. At first we say "awwwww" then, "hey, that's enough, give it to him!" We finish off with the horror of the possibility of canine injury. We remain just as attentive as the two dogs in the beginning, despite our concerns.
Even if the dog had been injured, what can we do now to prevent that? Our relationship to this video is altered by the 40 years that have happened since it was recorded.
Television entrances us in suspense by showing us a lived in world that we have restricted passes to. We try to catch glimpses, but fail to will the camera further than it has already gone. We trust the camera because we have no reason not to, but also because the on-screen performer, those we are sharing it with, and the dog in our lap trusts the camera and where it's going. It ends up like a game show, watching the struggle. The object is obvious and visible. We begin with joy until the contestant breaks the fourth wall with exhaustion and frustration in their eyes. We demand their victory until we realize how they are going to attain it. We aren't sure who to blame for their violent climax. Could it be true that it is our fault?
5/18/10
Virtual Rhythm Videtapathon
Video/Tap Collaborations. We are gladly part of it.
See "On the City Feet"
Vote if you feel democratic
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