Yearly Archives for 2010

SOME CONTEXT

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/haitians-eating-mud

….long before the earthquake….

Haitians Eating Mud (cont.)

Buying Cooking-Dirt On Credit [Video]
http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/02/19/dirt-poor-haitians-eat-cookies-made-of-mud/4120/

Geophagy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_eating
“Geophagy is the practice of eating earthy or soil-like substances such as clay, and chalk, in order to obtain essential nutrients such as sulfur and phosphorus from the soil. It is closely related to pica, a classified eating disorder in the DSM-IV characterized by abnormal cravings for nonfood items. The many possible health benefits of geophagy remain under study and are much debated. Many scientists believe that it is only harmful, while others argue that there may be adaptive benefits to the practice, since humans and animals alike have engaged in it for thousands of years.”

Butter-Flavored
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=b7ed2a4ccb7fdae5294a5dbad78a45306d828d99
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html
‘In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute. “It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”’

More from Lanier: " There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia"

From “World Wide Mush” by Jaron Lanier in the Wall Street Journal:

…The “open” paradigm rests on the assumption that the way to get ahead is to give away your brain’s work—your music, writing, computer code and so on—and earn kudos instead of money. You are then supposedly compensated because your occasional dollop of online recognition will help you get some kind of less cerebral work that can earn money. For instance, maybe you can sell custom branded T-shirts.

We’re well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.

And it’s going to get worse. Before too long—in 10 years, I’d guess—cheap home robots will be able to make custom T-shirts from free designs off the Internet. When that day comes, then a T-shirt’s design will be no more valuable than recorded music is today.

…The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?

…I don’t want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they work together, I hope they’ll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos. This is not just so that they and their children will thrive, but so that they won’t become a mob, which, as history has shown us again and again, is a vulnerability of human nature.

REAL-LIFE "AVATAR" 1-3

francisonafrancis_ona

REAL-LIFE “AVATAR” NO. 1: “The Coconut Revolution,” a 52-minute documentary on a successful uprising by original people (led by Francis Ona, pictured above) versus the combined might of a giant multi-national mining corporation, paid mercenaries and two governments’ militaries…

The first few minutes of “The Coconut Revolution” documentary…

This is an incredible modern-day story of a native people’s victory over Western globalization. Sick of seeing their environment ruined and their people exploited by the Panguna Mine, the Pacific island of Bougainville rose up against the giant mining corporation, Rio Tinto Zinc. The newly formed Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) began fighting with bows and arrows and sticks and stones against a heavily armed adversary. In an attempt to put down the rebellion the Papua New Guinean Army swiftly established a gunboat blockade around the island, backed by Australian Military personnel and equipment. With no shipments allowed in or out of the island, the People of Bougainville learned to become self-dependent and self-sustained.

The full 52-minute documentary is viewable here:
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=9073157933630784238

REAL-LIFE “AVATAR” NO. 2: The Dongria Kondh (India) vs. Vedanta Resources (UK)

“Niyamgiri Mountain is a living god for us,” said the father of four who until now had never left the state of Orissa. “It has provided us with food, water and our livelihoods for generations. Even if we have to die protecting our god we will not hesitate, we will not let it go.” Read more here

REAL-LIFE “AVATAR” NO. 3: “Quilombo Country” (above)

“Quilombo Country” explores Afrobrazilian village life among the forests and rivers of northern Brazil, with rare footage of festivals and ceremonies that blend Catholic, African and native Amazonian rituals and customs, including the use of dance, drumming, tobacco and other sacred plants to facilitate the communication between the spiritual and material worlds.

Ranging from the abandoned sugar plantations in the Northeast to the heart of the Amazon rainforest, “Quilombo Country” is alive with first-person accounts of racial conflict, cultural ferment, political identity, and the struggle for land and human rights.

quilombocountry.com

"FELA! on Broadway" cast (incl. Antibalas) performs "Zombie", director Bill T. Jones on Colbert Report…

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Fela! – Zombie
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy
<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Bill T. Jones
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

WE MUST KILL THE HIVE

jaronlanier

From the New York Post (via Joe Carducci), a piece on Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto:

How the Internet is leading toward “digital Maoism” and the loss of individuality

By LARRY GETLEN
Last Updated: 6:07 AM, January 10, 2010

The most popular aspects of Internet life — including Wikipedia, Facebook and digital music — are so detrimental to humanity that they give young people “a reduced expectation of what a person can be.”

That’s the disturbing conclusion of Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist famous for coining the term “virtual reality.” Lanier, a visiting scholar with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, among other positions, says that the Web has reduced communication to the point where we’re molding ourselves to serve it in harmful ways.

Social networking, for example, reduces people from complexities to categories, and subjects them to the will of what he calls the “hive mind.”

“The most effective young Facebook users are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves,” he says. “They must manage off-hand remarks and track candid snapshots at parties as carefully as a politician . . . avoiding the ever-roaming evil eye of the hive mind, which can turn on an individual at any moment. A Facebook Generation young person who suddenly becomes humiliated online has no way out, for there is only one hive.”

The Internet favors the mob over the individual, and group efforts like Wikipedia are prized, even as they peel away personality and perspective. Uncredited bits of information — article excerpts, photos, video, etc. — are stripped of their humanity by being stripped of their context.

“Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the Internet with the rise of Web 2.0,” Lanier says. “The strangeness is being leached away in the mush-making process.”

Lanier regards this as an “anti-human” approach.

“Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society,” he says. In one notable instance, Wired Magazine founder Kevin Kelly posited that society no longer needs authors, and wound up in a feud with John Updike after declaring it a “moral imperative” that all the world’s books become “one book,” available for editing and mashing up by anyone who sees fit.

The result of all this, says Lanier, is that “when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors,” noting how vicious anonymous commenters even have driven some to suicide.

In explaining how we got here, Lanier discusses how computer science tried to replicate complex human activities with inferior results. One example is MIDI, which was developed in the early 1980s for the sole purpose of imitating the sound of a keyboard. Yet MIDI was limited, inherently unable to digitally represent “the curvy, transient expressions” of a singer or sax player.

Nonetheless, MIDI became “the standard scheme to represent music in software,” and is now the basis for all digitized music — including songs on our iPods — despite sounding far inferior to analog recordings.

Rather than search for a better solution, Lanier says that our response has been to lower our expectations of music quality. In the same way, we settle for what the Internet can give us in terms of information, entertainment and personality. The medium limits the message.…

The consequences of letting things persist could be dire, he says, comparing those who believe in the anti-human path to “digital Maoists.”

“History tells us that collectivist ideals can mushroom into large-scale social disasters,” he writes. “The fascias and communes of the past started out with small numbers of idealistic revolutionaries . . . I am afraid we might be setting ourselves up for a reprise.” …

“We have “entered a persistent somnolence,” he says. “We will only escape it when we kill the hive.”

Read more…

Brightblack Morning Light/Lungfish split seven-inch from Harvest…

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From Harvest Records:

Brightblack Morning Light/Lungfish 7″
Harvest Recordings 003

We are excited to finally have this record ready to roll. There is one Brightblack Morning Light track, “Another Reclaimation”, recorded live in 2008 at the South Paw in Brooklyn, NY. The Lungfish track is “You are the War” off their Feral Hymns release. The record is spun at 33 1/3rpm, comes on red/clear vinyl, and is limited to 500 copies.

This is an Anti-War release fueled by Nabob’s continued objection for the ongoing wars overseas; both tracks on the record exist to resist these wars. Nabob says the 7-inch’s purpose is “to make it known the current wars should end & peace should begin by our decisions.”

http://www.harvest-records.com/recordings.php

Jan 15-Feb 25, NYC: Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal #10 at White Columns

ep_journal7

(above: cover of sold-out Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal No. 7)

From White Columns:

ECSTATIC PEACE POETRY JOURNAL – ISSUE #10
Edited By Thurston Moore with Byron Coley and Eva Prinz

White Columns is proud to present Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, Issue #10: an exhibition, publication, and a series of readings and performances.

Artist, musician, poet and publisher Thurston Moore began editing and producing Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal in 2001 as a forum to publish poetry by individuals who intersected the worlds of poetry, music and art. A dynamic range of writings, with various pages of visual work by Gerard Malanga, Richard Meltzer, Chan Marshall, Dennis Cooper, Kathleen Hanna, John Sinclair, Richard Hell, Jutta Koether, Gus van Sant, Rick Moody, Kim Gordon, Anne Waldman, Bill Berkson, Anselm Berrigan, Gary Panter and many others were published in eight issues in as many years.

Moore was inspired to publish Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal after years of appreciation, study and relentless archiving of post-war poetry publishing focusing on the activity of the “mimeo revolution” of the ’60s and ’70s. The stapled mimeo poetry journals produced from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Peace Eye Bookstore in New York City, and Asphodel Bookstore in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as a myriad of other subterranean centers of shared post-beat writing, rage, meditation and experimentation continues to inform the publication of Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal.

Issue #10 of Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal will be published and presented at White Columns as an expanded event/exhibition. A stapled issue will be created during the show. Pages from each of the ten journals will be exhibited as enlarged wall pieces, including the heretofore unpublished issue #9, [in keeping with the journals every-third-issue a theme issue, i.e., #3 was themed “cunnilingus,” #6 was “punk,”—with #9’s theme “pot”]. The main gallery space will feature a selection of historical poetry publications from the last fifty years culled from Moore’s own library, including original editions of Amphora, Change, Coldspring Journal, Copkiller, Fervent Valley, Free Poems Amongst Friends, Gaslight Poetry Review, Kauri, Klactovedesteen, LA-BAS, Outburst, Stance, Sum, The Willie, Trobar, Yowl and more.

Working as co-editor on many aspects of Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, including this exhibition is writer Byron Coley, formidable musicologist, essayist, poet and producer of music and literary arcana, ephemera and beyond. Select pieces from Moore and Coley’s catalogue will be reprinted in limited states for this exhibition. Eva Prinz, editor, co-publisher of Ecstatic Peace Library and curator of Radical Living Papers: Free Press 1965-75 (2007) brings additional organizational and creative force to Issue #10 as a gallery event.

Reading and performance schedule:

Friday January 15th:
6-8pm. Opening performance: Northampton Wools (Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, Bill Nace)

Saturday January 23rd
7-9pm. Reading: John Giorno, Byron Coley. Performance: Thurston Moore

Friday February 5th
7-9pm. Reading: Edmund Berrigan, Anselm Berrigan. Performance: Thurston Moore

Friday February 19th
7-9pm. Reading: Richard Hell, Dorothea Lasky. Music: Thurston Moore + guest

Thursday February 25th
7-9pm. Reading: Thurston Moore and Anne Waldman accompanied by musicians Ambrose Bye and Devin Waldman

All performances and readings are free, admission on a first-come basis.

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