from atmgallery

“Expanding Folds of Uncertainty”

“Inevitability of unpredictable outcomes”

“There is a place where things grow with blood of your heart”

GORDON TERRY
The Conscious Reconciliation of Opposing Forces
April 27 – May 26, 2007

atm gallery
619 b west 27th street new york, ny 10001
tel: 212.375.0349 gallery hours: tues -sat 11pm to 6pm & by appointment

Mr. Iboga, Mysterious Crop Formations, and the Approach of 2012

Study for One Thousand Years of Lost History

Cross Sections of Higher Solids Intersecting Our Space

A SUPERNATURAL RIOT OF ASTROLOGY, MYSTERY CULTS AND STRANGE MACHINES

Above: a still from Animal Charm’s “Moving Day”

Thrift Store Movie Night III
7 p.m., Wednesday May 23

UCLA Department of Art Event at
UCLA Hammer Museum, Gallery 6

FREE

“For the third year, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the UCLA Department of Art welcome L.A. Weekly art critic Doug Harvey and other archivists of found media for the presentation of films, videos and slides rescued from the obscurity of thrift stores, swap meets and dumpsters.

The evening includes excerpts from recent and upcoming programs by the Coalition for
Cinematic Conservation and Preservation at the Echo Park Film Center, possibly including
an educational filmstrip on the wonders of the banana, vintage Asian and Indian music
videos, the classic “ABC of S*x Education for Trainables,” and a selection from NY
artist Brian Bellott’s DVD collection of found photographs!

This year’s guest curators include Animal Charm, whose disturbing and hilarious video
jams bring Bruce Conner’s loopy aesthetics into the digital era with such mind boggling
deconstructions as “Slow Gin Soul Stallion,” “Pet Programming” and the amazing “Stuffing.” Animal Charm will debut several brand new works at this screening!

Also presenting will be Brooklyn’s Found Footage Festival, hosted by curators Geoff Haas,
Joe Pickett and/or Nick Prueher, who will provide their unique observations and
commentary on found video obscurities ranging from the world’s worst telemarketers
“John & Johnny” to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s scintillating take on Brazilian culture in
1983’s “Carnival in Rio.” FFF will also be presenting a new full length program at the M Bar – 1253 N. Vine Street (at Fountain Avenue) in West Hollywood on May 24, 25, & 26.

From Technology Review (May/June 2007)

Global-Warming Myths

It’s time to move forward on regulating greenhouse gases and here’s a regulatory plan that makes sense.

By Hoff Stauffer

The debate on global warming is burdened with unfortunate misconceptions that inhibit progress in moving forward.

One misconception is that “draconian measures” would be required to mitigate global warming. This is simply not so, if we implement a prudent program right away. Such a program would include four major strategies: increased energy efficiency (in buildings, autos, and appliances), coal mitigation (which includes increased use of solar, wind, geothermal, and perhaps nuclear power, as well as carbon capture and sequestration for coal-fired power plants), the development of new biofuels (such as cellulosic ethanol), and reversal of deforestation. These strategies can stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at acceptable levels and for acceptable economic costs.

Another misconception is that it would be better to wait to take action until technology provides new options. In fact, we need to start reducing emissions right away. If we delay, the world will face a dreadful dilemma: the choice between adopting draconian measures and passing the “tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences,” as the NASA climate scientist James Hansen puts it.

Another misconception is that a cap-and-trade system is the best approach to controlling the various greenhouse gases. Such a system sets a cap on total emissions and distributes emission allowances (or permits to emit) to market participants. These participants must buy allowances if they don’t have enough, and they may sell them if they have an excess. Such a system has helped reduce sulfur and nitrogen emissions from power plants in the United States.

But there are major problems with relying too heavily on this approach. The biggest is that it is too hard to figure out the economic and environmental effects. Prudent people do not want to risk unacceptable economic consequences. Other prudent people do not want to risk accomplishing too little. A politically acceptable compromise might take a long time and would probably tilt too far toward economic prudence, failing to achieve the necessary reductions.

Performance standards are a simpler approach. They would directly regulate the pollutants from new sources of emissions, such as power plants and autos, and mandate greater efficiency for new appliances and buildings. Performance standards can be implemented right away, without fear of unforeseen adverse economic consequences. They alone would result in major emission reductions over time. Such reductions could then be complemented by whatever additional help a cap-and-trade system provides.

Hoff Stauffer is the managing director of the Wingaersheek Research Group, which focuses primarily on global climate change. He previously worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Printed Matter & Heavy Tapes present

Leaderless

Underground Cassette Culture Now

Exhibition on View from May 12 – May 26, 2007

Opening Reception

May 12, 2007, 5-7 PM

Printed Matter, Inc. is pleased to announce an exhibition surveying contemporary American cassette culture. Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Now will open on May 12 and run through May 26. Printed Matter is located at 195 Tenth Avenue at 22nd Streets.

From bedrooms and dorm rooms, garages and dingy basements, Printed Matter and Heavy Tapes have gathered the leaders of the American underground tape culture movement—a geographically and generationally diverse community centered around the thriving noise, psych, and experimental music scenes. Such an exhibition might lead one to believe that “tapes are back” though the truth is that they never left, having been the chosen medium of this particular community from the late 70s onward. Unlike manufactured CDs or vinyl, tapes are analog, cheap and easily made at home with accessible and rudimentary equipment (i.e. no computers), making them the logical choice for a community that is constantly evolving and producing. Tapes also offer a unique perspective for those who are put off by the ubiquity and harsh aesthetics often associated with CDRs.

For the duration of the exhibition, Printed Matter’s back room will be transformed into a cassette shop-with hundreds of titles exhibited and available for purchase. Boom boxes will give audience members the opportunity to sample and explore hundreds of cassettes that will be available. Printed Matter has invited the following five guest curators to present out-of-print cassettes from their collections: Dominick Fernow (Hospital Productions), Chris Freeman (Fusetron), Ken Montgomery (Generator), Barbara Moore (Bound/Unbound), and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth/Ecstatic Peace). Taken together, these curators have assembled a history that branches through several generations of the visual arts, sound art, and music from the 1970s to the present.

Labels to be featured include 23 Productions (WI), AA (MI), American Tapes (MI), Animal Disguise (MI), Bone Tooth Horn, Callow God (CA), Cherried Out Merch (OR), Chondritic Sound (MI), Drone Disco (OH), Ecstatic Peace (MA), Fag Tapes (MI), Fuckit Tapes (NY), Gods of Tundra (MI), Hanson Records (MI), Heavy Tapes (NY), Hospital Productions (NY), Iatrogenesis (OR), Ides (IL), Friendship Bracelet (MA), Loveless Tapes (NJ), Middle James CO (ON/CA), Monorail Trespassing (CA), Nihilist Productions (IL), Not Not Fun (CA), Psychform (WA), RRRecords (MA), Rundownsun (BC), Since 1972 (NY), Sound of Pig (NY), Spite (NY), Stammer Tapes (NY), Swampland Noise (CA), Throne Heap (NY), Tone Filth (MN), Trash Ritual (NY), and Troniks (CA), among many others.

To celebrate the launch, experimental tape manipulator G. Lucas Crane vs Non-horse will perform. Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Now coincides with the No Fun Fest—a four day noise festival that will take place at the Hook in Red Hook, Brooklyn from May 17 – 20th. Now in its fourth year, No Fun Fest features some of the world’s premiere noise musicians and practitioners.

Heavy Tapes was established in 2004 in Brooklyn, NY by musician and teacher Michael Bernstein and musician and visual artist Maya Miller, as an offshoot of the Heavy Conversation label run by the New York band Double Leopards of which they have been a part since 2001. Originally spontaneously created because of ease of access to cassette manufacturers and a desire to release their own solo and duo music, the label has since taken on a life of its own and has spawned a distinctive visual and audio style over the nearly 50 releases in the 3 years of its existence. Combining a fine ear for “out sounds” with a commitment to exposing the deepest noise and sound art underground, Heavy Tapes has since become a stalwart of the non-scene which it proudly participates in. The cassettes have been displayed in an art exhibition in Seattle, featured in an article in Swindle Magazine authored by Tony Rettman, and distributed internationally at record stores, museum shops, internet mailorder stores, and beyond.

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Click here to find out how.

pictured above: Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond, photographed by Nicolas Amato

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Climate change: A guide for the perplexed
17:00 16 May 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Michael Le Page

Our planet’s climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors.

Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.

Yes, there are still big uncertainties in some predictions, but these swing both ways. For example, the response of clouds could slow the warming or speed it up.

With so much at stake, it is right that climate science is subjected to the most intense scrutiny. What does not help is for the real issues to be muddied by discredited arguments or wild theories.

So for those who are not sure what to believe, here is our round-up of the 26 most common climate myths and misconceptions.

There is also a guide to assessing the evidence. In the articles we’ve included lots of links to primary research and major reports for those who want to follow through to the original sources.

• Human CO₂ emissions are too tiny to matter

• We can’t do anything about climate change

• The ‘hockey stick’ graph has been proven wrong

• Chaotic systems are not predictable

• We can’t trust computer models of climate

• They predicted global cooling in the 1970s

• It’s been far warmer in the past, what’s the big deal?

• It’s too cold where I live – warming will be great

• Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans

• It’s all down to cosmic rays

• CO₂ isn’t the most important greenhouse gas

• The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming

• Antarctica is getting cooler, not warmer, disproving global warming

• The oceans are cooling

• The cooling after 1940 shows CO₂ does not cause warming

• It was warmer during the Medieval period, with vineyards in England

• We are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age

• Warming will cause an ice age in Europe

• Ice cores show CO₂ increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming

• Ice cores show CO₂ rising as temperatures fell

• Mars and Pluto are warming too

• Many leading scientists question climate change

• It’s all a conspiracy

• Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming

• Higher CO₂ levels will boost plant growth and food production

• Polar bear numbers are increasing

For further reading, see the weblinks below.

• Climate myths special, New Scientist

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

• FAQs, IPCC (pdf)

• RealClimate.org

• How to talk to a climate skeptic, Grist

• Common arguments by climate sceptics, Logical Science

Diggers mandala.

Love and Haight
In 1967 San Francisco was the world capital of the hippie revolution, a melting pot of music, sex, art and politics. Forty years on, Ed Vulliamy meets the survivors of its Summer of Love to find out if the dream lives on.

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday May 20, 2007
The Observer

‘Give us an F!’ shouts Country Joe. ‘F!’ they reply, then U, C, K, as is the custom. ‘What’s that spell?’ demands Joe. ‘FUCK!’ they retort. And Country Joe McDonald duly strums the opening chords to the most celebrated anthem to come out the San Francisco Summer of Love four decades ago, broadcast to the world from the stage at Woodstock two years later. In fact, ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag’ by Country Joe and the Fish had been first performed to a huge crowd in jovial jug-band fashion at an anti-war demonstration in Oakland in October 1965, and now the audience duly joins in again: ‘And it’s 1-2-3, what are we fighting for?/ Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam …’
But this is not San Francisco in 1967, this is Anna’s Jazz Island, a cosy club in Berkeley, on a Saturday night late last April – Country Joe in his mid-sixties and many in the audience not much younger, apart from a few children, including Joe’s son, in charge of the merchandise table selling ‘Fuck Bush’ badges for a dollar. But the occasion is charged with passion and humour – a tribute night to Joe’s main inspiration, Woody Guthrie; just one of the multifarious influences that flowed like tributaries into the river, the phenomenon of music, psychedelic drugs, politics, anti-politics, art, sex, rebellion, celebration, squalor and calamity that rushed through the Haight Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco 40 years ago to reach what was for some the revolution’s climax, and for others its nadir and moment of dissipation during the Summer of Love in 1967.

It had begun as a subdued explosion, really, in the early 1960s, when a new generation of bohemians began to adapt and mutate the culture of the ‘Beats’ – Jack Kerouac et al – which had installed itself on North Beach during the late 1950s. A singular city on America’s edge, San Francisco had a singular history of counterculture, and while the convergence of rebellions, energies and experiments of the early Sixties erupted variously in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and across Europe, San Francisco would go its own way.

From 1964 to 1967, in and around the cheap Victorian housing of Haight Ashbury, a student quarter, something akin to what Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead calls a ‘little renaissance’ occurred, with still incalculable repercussions. ‘Ripple in still water/ Where there is no pebble tossed/ Nor wind to blow’, as the Dead song went. Except that there was a wind – a gale of ideas, music, appearance and lifestyle which would leave its indelible mark on Western society, and beyond. The drugs began with pure LSD initially manufactured by the CIA but documented and famously ‘tested’ by Ken Kesey. A core of Haight Ashbury bands played with each other, for each other, for free and at Chet Helms’s Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham’s Fillmore. At their core were the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding company (with Janis Joplin) – leaving Country Joe and the Fish, and the Sparrows (later Steppenwolf), slightly to one, political, side. Artists illustrated the sound: Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin, and others. Revolutionary activists, the Diggers, propelled by Peter Coyote, Emmett Grogan and others, endeavoured to demonstrate a new way of reorganising (or dis-organising) a society without money, often working with and as street theatre and the famed ‘Mime Troupe’. And there was a ‘look’: tie-dye came only later; costume was a pastiche, often mutating Edwardian and Victorian fashion, gleaned from various thrift shops. And these are only some of the things that those who made it happen remember …

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24 May 02007 London Review of Books

The Things We Throw Away
Andrew O’Hagan

By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds. Looking through the stuff I felt how secret the story had been. I’d gone looking for the end but had always been brought back to this, the rubbish on the floor appearing grave and autobiographical. The seasons are like that and so is our trash: you examine their habits of repetition for long enough and you begin to think of lost time.

It began one night in Camberwell when the orange of the streetlamps was fighting to show through the fog. Alf started up his van and weaved past some roadworks, dodging the cones but not the sleet that flew to the windscreen and vanished. ‘My goodness,’ he said, ‘if this is life I don’t want it.’ He was talking about the way he felt when he worked as an account executive in a marketing design company. ‘I finally found out that it was only worth living for love, not money.’

‘What do you mean, living for love?’ I said. He ran a hand through his hair and stroked his cheek.

‘Putting other people’s needs before my own,’ he said. ‘When I left that hideous job I got a sense we were all interconnected. Freeganism tries to connect with people’s needs – putting community first. In 2002, I decided to devote my life to getting the message out and living as sincerely as possible. Instead of using money and all that I wanted to tread more lightly on the earth. I took everything to extremes in my old life.’ Alf is 33 years old. His friend Martin, a fellow Freegan, popped his head through from the back of the van and pushed his glasses up his nose. Martin is 36 and comes from Sydney. He said he was disillusioned as a teenager by the way everyone was obsessed with money and ownership. ‘You’ve got to take everything to a logical conclusion,’ he said. ‘We’ve given up all our possessions, because, like Mill said, if you want to bring down a corrupt system then you might want to stop buying its products.’

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