Archive for 2005

…meaning, it’s viewable at the Information Clearing House Link below, streamed as a Real Media file embedded in the page (although I recommend you right/control-click on it to play in Real Player). Information Clearinghouse has also provided transcripts of the episodes. – Timothy
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The Power of Nightmares | Adam Curtis
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm
NOTE: Part I, with links to Part II and III, with transcripts and Real Video presentation

Interview with Adam Curtis | CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/powerofnightmares/interview.html
“VIEWER: Are you saying that there is no threat?
DIRECTOR ADAM CURTIS: No, the series did not say this. It was very clear in arguing that although there is a serious threat of terrorism from some radical Islamists, the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. As the films showed, wherever one looks for this ‘al-Qaeda’ organization – from the mountains of Afghanistan to the ‘sleeper cells’ in America – the British and Americans are pursuing a fantasy. The bombs in Madrid and Bali showed clearly the seriousness of the threat – but they are not evidence of a new and overwhelming threat unlike any we have experienced before. And above all they do not – in the words of the British government – ‘threaten the life of the nation’. That is simply untrue. “

Generation Y embraces choice, redefines religion | Cheryl Wetzstein
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050412-121457-4149r.htm
“‘Generation Y,’ born between 1980 and 2000, is ‘bringing [media] industries to their knees’ by embracing IPod, TiVo and other technologies that allow unprecedented consumer choice, said Roger Bennett, co-founder of Reboot, a Jewish group that is examining generational issues. […] Reboot’s study, ‘OMG! How Generation Y is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era,’ was released yesterday in a press conference at the Brookings Institution. The study is based on a survey last year of 1,385 persons ages 18 to 25. To add depth, samples of black, Muslim, Jewish, Asian and Hispanic youths were included, said Anna Greenberg, vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a firm known for its work with liberal political groups. […]The Reboot study found that 23 percent of Generation Y, like Generation X, do not identify with a religious denomination or don’t believe in God. This is more than twice the number of nonbelievers among baby boomers, or those born between 1946 and 1965, Ms. Greenberg noted. Generation X was born between 1966 and 1979. […]The Reboot survey further found that Generation Y was ‘more liberal and progressive’ than older generations, both in political leanings and on social issues such as homosexual ‘marriage’ and immigration. Fifty-four percent of voters younger than 30 voted for Sen. John Kerry last year — the only age group the Democratic presidential candidate carried, the study noted.”

America, Fuck Yeah!
http://tinyurl.com/44mt4
NOTE: A remix of this, Quicktime Mov, 5.6Mb

Ken Lochhead, an apolitical portrait | Tony Martins
http://www.getguerilla.ca/issue4/lochhead/index.html
“In a country composed of powerful regions, Lochhead feels the key challenge for Canadian artists and cultural innovators is ‘to make our way through political boundaries? The arts world is loaded with politics, unfortunately. Everybody?s fighting for power, and not just between east and west but also between north and south.’ […] Though his teaching career is over, Lochhead is not in line with the current direction taken in university art programs, where ‘history is quite second fiddle to theory now.’ For Lochhead, this theoretical emphasis also spills over into much of contemporary art, where irony-rich postmodernism means ‘we’re explaining the jokes.’ Lochhead prefers an approach to meaning that is more coherent and yet more veiled. He offers a telling quotation to help explain: ‘If you want to be a painter, you must first cut off your tongue.'”RELATED: Kenneth Lochhead at the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art database site.

Betelgeuse
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980419.html
“Here is the first direct picture of the surface of a star other than our Sun. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, the atmosphere of Betelgeuse reveals some unexpected features, including a large bright hotspot visible below the center. “

Death is Not the End | n + 1
http://www.nplusonemag.com/theory.html
“Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.”

BTW, also dead – Saul Bellow and Mr. Grace Kelly. – Timothy
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The strange death of Protestant England | Mark Almond
http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,2763,1452368,00.html
“Who would have thought the death of Rome’s supreme pontiff would interfere with the marriage plans of the next Supreme Governor of the Church of England? Until now, the royal family, prime minister and the whole establishment – defined by the 1701 Act of Settlement’s ban on anyone ‘reconciled to the bishop of Rome’ – would always have put an English wedding ahead of any Roman funeral.”

The Vatican
http://www.vatican.va/

500 | Franklin Einspruch
http://www.artblog.net/?name=2005-03-24-06-44-500

Schools of Thought, The Madness of Consensus | Carra Leah Hood
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/08-hood.php
“The world in 2005 bears little or no resemblance to the world that Shakespeare inhabited; however, this lesson still holds true. Today, the free exchange of intellectual ideas?thought to be the primary activity, for instance, of professors and students on college and university campuses’ is constrained in ways similar to those on display in Act 2 Scene II. Those who have less authority might pursue lines of inquiry, both in classrooms and in scholarship, that follow up on, apply, or restate authoritative positions. They are at less risk for receiving a low grade, for being rejected or criticised by their colleagues, and for losing their jobs if they do so. This type of teaching and learning, writing and research creates a sort of consensus, sometimes referred to as schools of thought, that at their best challenge and at their worst prohibit imagination. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could not imagine uttering the words, “Denmark is a prison.” Their language and their structures of imagination are restricted by their economic and their social roles and, because of both, the expectations of their audience. In 2005, those in all social positions can imagine speaking such a critique; however, some might elect not to, self-censoring solely for the purpose of achieving one personal goal or another – a grade, professional recognition, or promotion.”

Which brings up today’s GR – the bullshit roundup. As you may already be aware, Princeton philosophy prof Harry Frankfurt has published a book called ‘On Bullshit’, and there has been some stuff about it on the net. – Timothy
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On Bullshit | Harry Frankfurt
http://www.tauroscatology.com/frankfurt.htm
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.”

Towards a Marxist Hermeneutics of Total Bullshit | Scott Martens
http://pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net/archives/001201.html#more
“I intend to start by sharing what I really think here, then proceding to shed some light on this situation through the application of bovinocoprotics. (From the Latin bovinae – cow, and the Greek κοπρος – feces.) Then, I need to actually start writing. […] we are confronted with the the problem Frankfurt poses at the beginning of his essay: One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. If the Enlightenment has been a war on bullshit, it seems that the bullshit is winning. Orwell, lacking Frankfurt’s work to draw on, actually foreshadows him in 1984: ‘All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions.’ Orwell’s Oceania is not the land of the Big Lie – for the whole point of doublethink is to not lie – but the land of bullshit: A complete disregard for the truth about things and the defense of the processes that sustain that disregard.”
Thanks to Amish Morrell for letting me know about this

At a crossroads: Peter Plagens on the ‘postartist’ | Peter Plagens
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_43/ai_n11852071/print
“It’s no surprise that ‘postmodern artists are caricatures of artists,’ Kuspit goes on to say. ‘Disillusioned about art, they still have illusions about themselves–about what art can do for them (not what they can do for art), namely, make them rich and famous, or at least newsworthy if not exactly noteworthy.’ And out of his discontent, Kuspit comes up with an idea encapsulated in a term that, for me, is the best gloss on the whole current situation: the ‘postartist.’ The majority of art promulgated by serious galleries and contemporary museums in major cities no longer has much to do with aesthetics. Contemporary art has abandoned its function as the visual wing of the house of poetry and morphed into a fecklessly ‘transgressive’ subdivision of the entertainment industry. It’s now commercial pop culture writ esoteric, whiny and small. What Hughes long ago labeled ‘the shock of the new’ quickly became ‘the academy of the new’ (literally, in MFA programs), which has in turn updated itself into ‘the industry of the new.’ At the same time, artists have cunningly made themselves critic-proof.”