AUGUST 25 — GERARD LEBOVICI
Radical French Champ Libre publisher, martyr.
AUGUST 25, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
Lake Champlain, New York: FEAST OF THE GREEN CORN, a pageant
presented by the Society for the Preservation of Indian Lore,
performed by actors from the six Iroquois nations.
ALSO ON AUGUST 25 IN HISTORY
1893 — “Colored Peoples’ Day” at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
1899 — Metaphysical writer Jorge-Luis Borges born, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
1900 — “Mad” German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche dies, Weimar, Germany.
1932 — Radical French publisher Gerard Lebovici born, Neuilly, France.
1968 — Lincoln Park, Chicago scene of riot during Democratic Party convention
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Another glamorously doomed blues serenade, with a rare chord change, from Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions’ forthcoming second album, Through the Devil Softly, out in late September from the good people at Nettwerk Records.
“Dude… this is your captain speaking. Apparently one of you jokers has slipped something into my coffee and we won’t be landing today at all.”
I’m not saying there’s a news blackout or anything, but why are these two insane, recent articles relegated to “Wired Magazine”? How are these camera friendly phenomenon neglected for the dailiances of an ugly mother of octupletes?
According to both articles neither the “opalescent horror movie sky” or the “big rolls of big smoking clouds” has ever been described in the entire course of whichever history you accept as definitive.
The first time I heard Fuck Buttons I was in a house that was belching smoke from a smoke machine and there was a guy swinging from the rafters by his hands, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. The friend who delivered me to this party — you may know his work as the author of Arthur’s “Do The Math” column — disappeared into the gloom, only to pop back through the fog moments later yelling incomprehensibly over the music and swinging a giant bong around. He was also wearing a flight helmet, while another guy behind him was fast approaching in a fencing mask. So needless to say the band’s videos for their glistening kaleidoscope noise jams have a long way to go when it comes to trumping the images I already have in my head. Luckily, this video for “Surf Solar” — the first single from Tarot Sport, their Andrew Weatherall-produced sophomore release due out in October 2009 — delivers with penguin races and pulsating symmetrical neon signs or something. The video was directed by Fuck Button Andrew Hung.
Their first album, Street Horrrsing is also just grrreat, and yielded this wonderful video for “Bright Tomorrow,” directed by Hung, and comprised entirely of camera phone photography asplosions.
• AFRO SCI-FI: Sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor is talking with all of her pals about whether or not “Africa is ready for science fiction” as a guest-blogger on the Nebula Awards website and it’s chock full of clever anecdotes about creating sci-fi that appeals to non-Western audiences. As Notre Dame professor Naunihal Singh puts it, “Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running.” There’s also lots of great jumping off points for exploring other African sci-fi writers and absolutely bonkers-looking Nollywood B-movies like Across The Bridge; that’s the trailer up top there, sample line: “Are you willing to suck the breast of ever-flowing milk?” [Nebula Awards via Harper’s]
• ATTN NEW WELFARE QUEENS: If you spend a lot of time reading Rushkoff’s commentary here in Arthur on the current death throes of American laissez faire capitalism, you probably know that when the unemployment numbers go down it’s often ’cause people STOP looking for work, rather than b/c they got jobs. But that doesn’t matter right now, ’cause “California’s jobless rate reached a fresh post-World War II high in July, climbing to 11.9%,” as the LA Times reported last week. WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN DOLE, you deadbeats. Here’s a great blog that’ll show all you n00b unemployees how to work it: UNEMPLOYMENTALITY has all the tips, tricks and hacks you’ll need to navigate California’s EDD. E.g. If you’d like to quickly bypass the robots and talk to one of the live drones, call the Vietnamese language line. BRILLIANT. [Unemploymentalitiy]
• MORE LIGHTNING BOLT NEWS: Did you know that lighting sometimes strikes up? See images of a “gigantic jet of upside down lightning” over at the Nature blog. [The Great Beyond]
• MINIMALIST CHRONICLES OF WESTERN DECADENCE: Do you guys read Texts From Last Night? It is a website where American exhibitionists offer up short form narratives about their bad trips, pregnancy scares and a super gross thing called “sharting.” On the one hand it’s as dumb a time-waster as LOLCats, but on the other it is like Ayman Al Zawahiri’s darkest fantasies of Western Decadence rendered in minimalist text-messaging prose, the area code from whence said texts were typed being the only identifying detail. [TFLN]
(813): I think dad’s getting high again. His last google search was “awesome ping pong shit.”
(323): The idiot babysitter thought my dildo was a teething toy and gave it to our child. (1-323): Did you put it in the freezer again?
• AWESOME PING PONG SHIT: As it happens, that “high dad” had the right idea, Googling “awesome ping pong shit.” Case in point, the John McEnroe-caliber table tennis antics seen below:
A brief illustrated history of the U.S. presidency told by the presidents themselves in the style favored by modern social networking web sites, Forty Four Presidents imagines 220 years of presidential succession pancaked into a single moment — documented simultaneously by each commander-in-chief in status updates designed for easy consumption by their Facebook friends. Each status update is accompanied by a jaunty, high-contrast profile picture intended to reflect something of the essential personality (and hotness) of the president.
AUGUST 24 — LEO FERRÉ
French anarchist songwriter, composer, popular performer.
August 24, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
England: BARTHOLOMEW FAIR. Originally a 12th-century
cloth fair, opening with the snapping of shears, but by the
15th century it had become a raucous, rowdy pandemonium
of midways, freaks, sideshows, performing animals.
After 1640 London theaters shut down to go perform at the fair.
ALSO ON AUGUST 24 IN HISTORY…
79 — Vesuvius erupts, southern Italy.
1814 — British burn U.S. Capitol building and White House.
1902 — Annales “long-durée” historian Fernand Braudel born, Lunéville, France.
1916 — French anarchist songwriter, composer Leo Ferré born, Monaco.
1943 — French writer, activist Simone Weil dies, Ashford, Kent, England.
1954 — U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower signs Communist Control Act.
1980 — Solidarnosc union founded, Gdansk, Poland, a challenge to Commie rule.
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