Inversion

Jamming signals. Radio. Television. This is the etiology of culture jamming. But everything in our information saturated world is ripe for jamming. Culture. Constructs. Assumptions. Images. Introduce a different color of noise into the system. Tool of revolutionaries, but better yet, tool of counter-revolutionaries. Pun. Play. Invert image. Invert meaning. Deeper truth through absurd juxtapositions. Subliminal sandwiches.

Bansky | Wikipedia: Bansky | Project Cyber Punk | Wikipedia: Culture Jamming

Presumably in London, I'm not quite sure where these two works from Bansky are, or if they're in any spatial or temporal relationship with one another. They're both inversions. The cop frisking the necessarily darling girl, replete with teddy bear inverts notions of the police being guardians of peace into being robbers of peace. In the second picture, the girl then turns the tables on the soldier and exerts power and authority over him.

    

In the second half of the 20th century, institutional structures were deemed oppressive. They were subverted and dismantled. Then in their place, and supposedly as a remedy, new institutional structures were erected. These were often just as oppressive. Culture councils that wreck and homogenize culture. Human rights tribunals that take away human rights. Policies of choice that destroy choice. It's time to turn that inversion on its head.

Artist Draws 'Clean' Graffiti from Dirty Walls, which reminds me of a time when I sprayed the perpetually half-clothed, shoeless, grubby neighbor kid with the garden hose. His grandmother came running out of their house screeching, "Don't get clean spots on him. I'll have to wash the whole kid."

Imago Dei

...they're all beautiful...meet them here...

cars, cars, cars, yeah 1.1

art car: n. a drivable vehicle that has been adorned, painted and/or modified to express some sort of artistic expression. These are usually cars that are covered with anything from beads and mirrors to toys and doll parts, but are only limited by the creator's imagination. See also mutant vehicle.

Manufacturing Consent: George Orwell

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. 1984

Although he didn't use the term manufacturing consent, Orwell coined Newspeak, the underlying premise of which is that if something can't be said, then it can't be thought. This suits ideologues, especially those who are either reactionary or progressive or totalitarian alike, and whose aim is to make any alternative thinking or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the prohibited concept.

In Politics and the English Language Orwell lamented the quality of the English of the time (1946), citing examples of dying metaphors, pretentious diction or rhetoric, and meaningless words, all of which contribute to fuzzy ideas and a lack of logical thinking.

Was Orwell a prophet or was 1984 a how to manual? Redefining and eliminating words redefines and eliminates thought. This is the goal of political correctness. Eliminated and redefined thought eliminates and redefines culture, society, institutions, and indeed man itself. Words, thoughts, consent, culture, and man all become manufactured.

The whole climate of thought will be different.
In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now.

Wire

nice streets

nice streets

nice streets above

Manufacturing Consent: Walter Lippmann

Lippmann observed that people make up their minds before they define the facts, while the ideal would be to gather and analyze the facts before reaching conclusions. This in conjunction with an increasingly technological, complex, and interdependent world, points out that the primary defect of democracy is the impossible ideal of the "omnicompetent citizen".

He also maintained that mass media is an ineffective method of genuinely educating the public. The first reason is the ineffectiveness of journalists and the second reason is that "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation."

For Lippmann, the news and truth need not be synonymous, as the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” The news, therefore, is “imperfectly recorded” and too fragile to bear the charge as “an organ of direct democracy.”

So the substitute of genuinely educating the public is for journalist to engage in “intelligence work” and transmit information from an elite class of technocrats to the public for the purpose of forming their opinions. The voting citizen then in turn chooses the policies that they been manufactured into consenting to, thus closing the loop.

The phrase Manufacturing Consent comes from Public Opinion, 1922.

deSchool: II

Why We Must Disestablish School

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

Deschooling Society — Ivan Illich

deSchool: I

1. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern and humanist society corresponds to the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The state shall make no law with respect to an establishment of education. There shall be no graded curriculum, obligatory for all.

2. To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude specific tests of competence, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds.

3. A third legal reform would guarantee the right of each citizen to an equal share of public educational resources, the right to verify his share of these resources, and the right to sue for them if they are denied. A generalized GI bill, or an edu-credit card in the hand of every citizen, would effectively implement this third guarantee.

4. A fourth guarantee to protect the consumer against the monopoly of the educational market would be analogous to antitrust laws.

A Constitution for Cultural Revolution — Ivan Illich

Evolve

The political revolutionary wants to improve existing institutions - their productivity and the quality and distribution of their products. His vision of what is desirable and possible is based on consumption habits developed during the last hundred years. The cultural revolutionary believes that these habits have radically distorted our view of what human beings can have and want. He questions the reality that others take for granted, a reality that, in his view, is the artificial by-product of contemporary institutions, created and reinforced by them in pursuit of their short-term ends.

A Constitution for Cultural Revolution — Ivan Illich

Don't oppose the revolution; gain control of it and redirect its ends.

or

Why the rules of this game require that we all become Gramscians.

Procedural conservatism: the generally pragmatic principle of avoiding the upsetting of existing status quo regardless of the status quo's substance; conservatism of form.

or as G.K. Chesterton said, The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

Revolutionary conservatism: the conservatism of function, content, or substance, which is fully and proactively engaged in the culture and its institutions.

Place: New York, New York, New York

New York Images An photo archive of prominent New York buildings.

Forgotten New York The hidden, forgotten, and imperiled: ads, alleys, cemeteries, cobblestones, neighborhoods, signs, subways & trains, trolleys, you'd never believe you're in NYC, forgotten tours, and more.

Curbed In New York City, it all comes back to real estate, rent, and the neighborhoods we inhabit.

Bridge and Tunnel Club Photos and more photos.

NYC Roads Maps, history, and design of NYC parkways and freeways.

2nd Ave. Sagas Transit news, history, and NYC links.

New York Daily Photo New York City - a place of diversity. Visit a daily photo blog of the timely, the timeless, the classic, the unexpected and the hidden gems by a long time resident who shares his love of New York.

Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Department of Sociology, Sociology of Brooklyn Page

Manhattan Neighborhood Map So that's where Hell's Kitchen is.

Queens Neighborhood Map Don't know Bayside form Howard Beach? This map will help.

I gotta new guru

no, no, no, not Ivan Ilyich...

1986
The Death Of Ivan Ilyich
The Cossacks
Tolstoy
-vs-
Grass
Katz und Maus
Die Blechtrommel

...but Ivan Illich

His fundamental argument, widely admired in some quarters and ridiculed and caricatured in others, was that once our institutions developed beyond a certain scale, they became perverse, counterproductive to the beneficial ends for which they were originally conceived. The end result of this paradoxical counter-productivity was schools which make people dumb, complacent and unquestioning; hospitals which produce disease; prisons which make people violent; travel at high speed which creates traffic jams; and ‘aid and development’ agencies which create more and more ‘needy’ and ‘underconsuming’ people.

A Turbulent Priest in the Global Village

Wikipedia: Ivan Illich

The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.

Feeds Performance
William Burroughs' cut-ups
Old Man of the Mountain: Hassan ibn Sabbah: Alamut: Paradise: Persia: Hashish: Hashshashin: Assassin: Marco Polo
Mick Jagger: Blues: Rock
Anthology: Jorge Luis Borges

Eats Performance
Coil: Love's Secret Domain: Further Back and Faster
Big Audio Dynamite: This Is Big Audio Dynamite: E=mc2
I like that, turn it up...It was Mad Cyril...We have been courteous...I need a bohemian atmosphere

Performance tastes like
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
You must merge gentlemen.
What's been puzzling you is the nature of my game.

‘Merger’ is heard repeatedly in the dialogue, and Mick Brown points to Borges’s theory that “every man is two men,” realized at the end upon the fusion of Chas (the personification of violence) and Turner (pacifism). In the first half of the picture, gangsters (seen reading Borges on their coffee break!), businessmen and lawyers are so utterly lost in their oppressive performance that single-mindedness has left them homosexual. In the second half, Cammell examines what he called “the interchangeability of gender,” via Chas’s overbearing manliness, Pherber’s domineering femininity, and Turner and Lucy’s androgyny, narcissistic characters approaching the liberation of the female-man and the male-woman, a ‘complete’ individual. — Ray Young

Varia: I

xyz = 1

The Genealogy of Morals…or…Nietzsche, Still Dead. How about the Genealogy of:

relativism
reconstructionism
nihilism
death culture

Do you need rooting powder to propagate a meme?

René Girard’s anthropology…by Allison & Wiki…the jury is still out…also, the three modalities in Thomistic anthropology.

the body reveals the person
out of harmony
out of our minds
out of control

elastic love in NoWay Valley

Cremaster 2

cre·mas·ter

1. n: a thin muscle that serves to raise and lower the testicles in response to temperature and other stimuli.
2. n: a hook-shaped protuberance from the rear of the chrysalis casing, by which the caterpillar fixes itself to the pad of silk it has cemented to the underside of a perch.
3. n: a film cycle created and executed by Matthew Barney that has been described as self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation. The cycle unfolds not just cinematically, but also through the photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produced in conjunction with each episode.

Based on the original meanings of the word cremaster, processes surrounding sexual generation, metamorphosis, and continual differentiation are central to the series concept. In this 2nd in a series of 5:

The episode focuses on Gary Gilmore, his girlfriend Nicole, his parents' meeting with a fortune teller, his final homicide at a gas station, and his execution symbolized by a rodeo on the Bonneville Salt Flats. A phone call is made to Gary by the lead singer of Morbid Angel in a studio with Slayer drummer, Dave Lombardo, playing to the drone of bees, a scene said to refer to Gilmore's last phone call from Johnny Cash. The film also connects Gilmore to Harry Houdini (played by Norman Mailer, writer of Gilmore's story The Executioner's Song) and his meeting with Baby Faye Lafoe (represented as Gilmore's grandmother and supposed spiritual medium).

No way, that was not Johnny Cash...never has a film been so inaccessible. If it hadn’t been for the Walker film curator who set up the film, the experience would have been completely unintelligible. Within the framework of Barney’s narrative, the various visual metaphors take shape. It’s really only these metaphors...and the cinematography...that I can speak to.

the metaphor of the metamorphose

I’ll limit my self to recounting bees and execution. Bees, beeswax, and hexagons are everywhere, as well as conceptually, masters and drones. This symbolism points to biologic as well as social differentiation. Execution also deals with such differentiations. Gilmore’s execution...in actuality by firing squad...is depicted as a rodeo bull ride. The sequence was brilliant.

The bull funneled through the chutes was very evocative of guiding the condemned to their execution...
...reminded me of Selma’s execution played by Barney’s wife Björk in Dancer in the Dark.

Barney/Gilmore in a prison stripes rodeo/prison jumpsuit bound to his bull...
...Björk/Selma hooded and strapped to the board at the gallows.

Released from the gate...lurched out of the chute...slowly succumbing to weight and to death...
...released from the gate...lurched through the trap door...immediately succumbing to weight and to death.

Gilmore metamorphosed...
...brown paper packages tied up with strings; these are a few of my favorite things.

panning this film

Clever or not, I’m not sure whether it is I who’s panning this film. Ultimately, it was simply too obtuse, which apparently a saying a lot for me, but it has proven fodder for discussion ever since. It is Barney himself who pans...in, out, over...all so slowly. Whether, this technique was supposed to have had any significance to the story telling is uncertain, but it became intrusive. Otherwise, there is a simultaneous quality of lucidity and dream. Hard focus of surreal sequences and soft lighting of the immovably real.

Last night I watched...

...Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie...a French film by the Spanish Surrealist Luis Buñuel. Interesting.

How old was this movie? I've never heard of it.

1972. It was a film that didn't have a plot so much as a premise, and when it was "fin" I was like, ok...I get it...I think.

Ha ha—that's why Fred doesn't like most French movies. He thinks they're too psychological.

Psychological: true in that what you see is not what you get. That is the motions of the plot were really incidental to what the point was...and the point was rather subtle at that. But also sometimes psychological is equated with complex, and this film was on the contrary rather simple in the end.

It was interesting, because since Buñuel is noted as a Surrealist/Dadaist...and I had seen one of his whacked-out earlier films (Un Chien Andalou — 1929, and that Marxist screed Las Hurdes — 1933)...I was expecting surreal to be trippy and in your face. Instead what it was about was the absurd and absurd situations...representing the absurdity of the bourgeoisie...especially the absurdity of form over content.

There, now I've done it: I gave away the secret.

Hmm, I almost understand what you are saying—

Bauform: I

Says Kermit the Frog, it isn’t easy being green. Sometimes it’s micromanaging pseudo-science, and sometimes it’s a new way of thinking.

The High Line: converting an abandoned elevated rail structure in Manhattan, being reclaimed by nature, into a public green space.

Black Maps: environmentally impacted aerial landscapes as abstract art.

The Dwell Home: a green, modern residential design competition. Not what modern was or what modern is, but what modern will be…that bowl.

This is Granville...doors open on the left at Granville...

...well, actually this is the viaduct between Granville and Loyola on the Chicago red line. For all of your CTA needs and fascination:

• Chicago Transit Authority: the official source. Maps, schedules, news, etc.
• Chicago-L.org: history, historical maps, photos, links.
• Centerstage: Virtual L City Guide: bars, resturants, entertainment, etc organized by transit stop.
• CTA Railfan Tips: facts and photos.
• Flickr: tags/cta: flickr users photos.
• The Gray Line: proposal for a new CTA line...we can hope...as well as for the proposed Circle Line.

The Erasure of Place: There's no There, There

The idea that all new suburban residential and commercial developments in this vast terrain are virtually identical...where if the vernacular has not been obliterated completely, it has been co-opted in the most superficial of veneers...has been much discussed, so I will only raise the issue as a focal point of serious meditation...beyond the vulgarity that is the aesthetics of the bottom line. Pods where we plug in...one space undifferentiated from the next...vast organimetric patterns. From this omnipresence of tangible space we move on to...

...the reordering of how we identify that space. Space, place, thing is renamed due to politics, economics, ideology. The culture is then required to reorder their history, identity, aims in reaction to place. Saint Petersburg > Leningrad > Petrograd. Candlestick Park becomes 3Com Park, but how do San Franciscans identify that place...how will they in subsequent generations? One singular entity has the power to re-identify place...to re-order culture. There's unease, and it's all too common so we have to sublimate...we have to laugh. The Who plays Olde Springfield's historic Yahoo! Arena. The mundane...Northern States Power is now X-cel Energy. Geographical considerations are rendered irrelevant and substituted with attitudes of success. Power doesn't come from a plant, it comes from a grid...a matrix, until we finally reach the evolutionary leap where...

...there's no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor's lecture in the arcology's executive crèche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers. As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied...no there, there.
— William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

   

Cyberspace is where a long distance telephone call takes place, but it's also where the bank keeps your money. Cyberspace is where your medical records are stored. All of this stuff is out there somehow in a relationship to all of the other bits of it, and there's really no point in thinking about its geographical location.
— William Gibson, Interview for Rabid Eye 3, 1995

Project 80 Cabaret Voltaire from The Conversation, 1994. Postscript:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...
— William Gibson, Neuromancer