“Chasing a Bee” (1991) …
“Something for Joey” (featuring Ron Jeremy [!?!]) (1993)…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiwNhizdwT8&feature=related
“Bronx Cheer” (1993) …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JQ_oxYEQpA&feature=related
“Opus 40” …
“Goddess on a Highway”
“Nite and Fog” (totally kabbalistic!) …
http://audiotube.com/file/2095-mercury-rev-nite-and-fog.html
“The Dark Is Rising”…
“In a Funny Way”…
“The roof exists only to conceal what the world is about to heap upon me.”
Monster Island Block Party
Saturday September 6th, 2008
If it rains no worries, we’ll make it a building party..
No Matter what All-day 2 to 10pm
WE’RE SO EXCITED WE CAN’T SLEEP AT NIGHT! WE HOPE YOU CAN MAKE IT!!!!!!!
***Special Art Preview on Thursday September 4th from 8 to 10 pm
“We=Trouble: This is the best thing that ever happend”
&
“Symbiosis in Exotica”
One of the Stories of the beginingof Monster Island
Once upon a time from the sea of monster, rose an island surrounded by a pink jungle inhabitted by only a cat. Kitty lived there in peace until the mighty earth started to shake. From hence grew a state of pandemonium Monsters and Men arose from the sea and battled over caves, forrest, mountains and moon until soon they grew sleepy from heavy armour and too much beer. They slept for centuries and awoke to a beatiful building painted by stars and mermaids… From this time they have lived harmoniously and divided the land into equal parts calling them Kayrock Screenprinting, LiveWith Animals, Secret Project Robot, The O-Cropolis, Todd P. NYC, And Mollusk the Surf Shop. They were so happy that they began inviting their friends in once a year, in September, for a big party!
SCHEDULE: FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO THE FORREST TO THE CAVES TO THE STREET!
Times are real Times
2pm Red Dawn II
2:30 Trilateral Commission
3 Gimmie Five
3:30 Psychothriller
4 Raul De Nieves (art Performance)
5:30 Oneida
6:30 Surprise Band…
7:30 Micki Pellorano (art Performance)
8 Ex Models
Golden Triangle inside or out depending on the time
9:30ishpm Oneida Records new Record Downstairs in Their Studio (limited to 20 tickets…first come first serve)
DJ’s Throughout the day
Inside at Live With Animals: The K-Holes and Temptation (throughout the day)
Downstairs in the caves -Todd P. NYC sound studios- musicians play in their studios all day…
2 art openings- In Live With Animals “Symbiosis in Exotica” and in Secret Project Robot “We=Trouble: this is the best thing that ever happend”
BBQ by Mollusk Surf Shop
The New York Times – September 5, 2008
Brain Cells Observed Summoning a Memory
By BENEDICT CAREY
Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.
The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the very same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event was first experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence.
The new study, experts said, has all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term; the research says nothing about more distant memories).
The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them.
“This is what I would call a foundational finding,” said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. “I cannot think of any recent study that’s comparable. It’s a really central piece of the memory puzzle, and an important step in helping us fill in the detail of what exactly is happening when the brain performs this mental time travel” of summoning past experiences.
The new study moved beyond most earlier memory research in that it focused not on recognition or recollection of specific symbols but on free recall — whatever popped into people’s heads when, in this case, they were asked to remember a series of short film clips they had just seen.
This ability to richly reconstitute past experience often deteriorates quickly in people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and it is fundamental to so-called episodic memory: the catalog of vignettes that together form our remembered past.
In the study, a team of Israeli and American researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy. The electrode implants are standard procedure in such cases, allowing doctors to pinpoint the location of the mini-storms of brain activity that cause epileptic seizures.
The patients watched a series of 5- to 10-second film clips, some from popular TV shows like “Seinfeld,” others depicting animals or landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower. The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person during the viewing of repeated series of videos; the recorded neurons were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a sliver of tissue deep in the brain that is known to be critical to forming new memories.
In each individual, the researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others. About half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least one film clip, and responded weakly to another.
After distracting the patients for a few minutes, the researchers then asked the subjects to think about the clips for a minute and report “what comes to mind.” The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And, sure enough, when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory — signaling to researchers the memory to come.
“It’s astounding to see this in a single trial; the phenomenon is strong, and we were listening in the right place,” said the senior author, Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Tel Aviv. His co-authors were Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Michal Harel and Rafael Malach of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; and Roy Mukamel, of U.C.L.A.
”These patients were on a noisy ward, there was a whole lot happening all around them, but still you see this absolutely robust response in the individual neurons.”
The single neurons recorded firing most furiously during the film clips were not acting on their own, Dr. Fried added, in a phone interview; they were, like all such cells, part of a circuit responding to the videos, including perhaps a million other cells. .
Single-cell recordings cannot capture the entire array of circuitry involved in memory, which may be widely distributed beyond the hippocampus area, experts said. And as time passes, memories are consolidated, submerged, perhaps retooled, and often entirely reshaped when retrieved later. The new study, though it did not address this longer-term process, suggests that at least some of the neurons that fire when a distant memory pops to mind are those that were most active back when it happened, however long ago that was.
“The exciting thing about this,” Dr. Kahana said, “is that is gives us direct biological evidence of what before was almost entirely theoretical.”
“The trouble with the law is that it’s yet to fall into the right hands.”
ADVANCED STANDING
A column by Gregory Shewchuk
“Halfway There”
originally published in Arthur No. 30 (July 2008)
Every time I ride a skateboard, I fall over. I slip out, wheel bite, hang up, over rotate, undershoot, overflip, or misstep in one way or another that sends me stumbling, sliding, or crashing to the ground. It’s not that I’m into pain or macho ideas of self-destruction — in fact quite the opposite. I like skateboarding because it is an ideal scenario for testing the limits of control, repeatedly walking a metaphorical tightrope between success and failure. Falling in skateboarding is not a sign of defeat, it is a sign that you are challenging yourself and learning and progressing. The continuous prospect of eating shit on a skateboard helps keep you humble and awake.
Skateboarding is an ongoing exercise in finding balance, using abstract motions to perpetuate the central principle of a perpendicular stance over moving ground. Courting the edge of frictional stability allows the radical insight and expression of the form. Skateboarding is an accessible state of liberation: the hands are free, the feet are not connected to anything, and the skateboard exists between the skater and the solid earth only by careful positioning in the cradle of gravity.
With development and progression of the form come more and more difficult situations in which the skater is challenged to maintain equilibrium in unforgiving environments. Movement is introduced: you learn to push and ride down steeper and steeper inclines. You learn to ride on the front or back wheels (manuals and nose wheelies). You learn to acid drop and land on the board after momentarily floating through the air. You learn ollies and ways to travel greater distances through the air before landing. You learn how to ride circular transitions up to, and beyond, the vertical plane. You learn how to balance in different maneuvers on edges and lips, often themselves curved or steeply inclined. Variations and “tricks” are introduced: riding backwards, the board locked into subtle positions of sliding or grinding, flipping beneath the feet and caught in the air before landing. Maneuvers are done switchstance, developing ambidexterity. Skateboarders go faster and faster and constantly look for new terrain and ways to approach it. There is constant progress and refinement. Edges and possibilities are pushed and validation is immediate and obvious. When you fall, you get up and try again until you ride away on both feet.
Continue reading“Snack in a sniper’s nest – calm before the storm.”
Arthur Magazine 