Roger Ebert seems to think this documentary is authentic. Others are speculating that it could be a big artistic hoax, something similar to Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop documentary. But Casey Affleck says it’s all true (Time). Watch the trailers and visit the official website.
 | Mais l’accusation a buté sur le pourquoi des actes de celui qui, comme l’avait indiqué à l’audience le témoin Jean-Pierre Mustier, « vivra et mourra comme étant le trader au monde ayant fait perdre le plus d’argent à sa banque ». « Fou ou incompétent?” a demandé Jean-Michel Aldebert. Philippe Bourion avait évoqué une autre hypothèse: celle d’une « variante financière du bovarysme, qui consiste à se voir autrement que l’on est, à se donner des sensations fortes”. “Il y aura un avant et un après Kerviel dans les banques”, a affirmé le procureur, tout en s’interrogeant sur la capacité du système à lutter contre un nouveau « génie dévastateur ». |
The New York Times: Harvey Pekar with a copy of “American Splendor” in 1986, photo by Mark Duncan for the Associated Press
Harvey Pekar, whose autobiographical comic book “American Splendor” attracted a cult following for its unvarnished stories of a depressed, aggrieved Everyman negotiating daily life in Cleveland and became the basis for a critically acclaimed 2003 film, died on Monday at his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He was 70. […] Mr. Pekar (pronounced PEE-kar), who toiled for nearly 40 years as a file clerk in a Veterans Administration hospital, applied the brutally frank autobiographical style of Henry Miller to the comic-book format, creating a distinctive series of dispatches from an all-too-ordinary life. His alter ego, introduced in 1976, trudged on from episode to episode, quarreling with co-workers, dealing with car problems, addressing family crises and fretting over money matters and health problems.(“Harvey Pekar, ‘American Splendor’ Creator, Dies at 70” by William Grimes, July 12th, 2010)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The Statue of Liberty as a female counterpart of Hobbes’ Leviathan (Lazarus’ poem is mentioned in Auster’s novel Leviathan); the United-States as the land of the “wretched refuse”. Is this the “community of those who are without community” (“all of us, from now on” writes Jean-Luc Nancy) ? Read more about Lazarus’ poem on wikipedia.
About the exhibition From Haven to Home:
From Haven to Home is a Library of Congress exhibition marking 350 years of Jewish life in America. The exhibition features more than two hundred treasures of American Judaica from the collections of the Library of Congress, augmented by a selection of important loans from other cooperating cultural institutions. (more)
| By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”. Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour. |
| He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn’t realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn’t planned on this. Where was the life he’d always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all direction were the same? |
Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo
| The identity of an individual is a product of human reason: it is not anything other than a rational self. Therefore, losing identity equals losing reason. So ‘communicative cognition’ is cognition as an event which occurs in a (critical) moment not controlled by reason. It belongs to the realm of affect which transcends reason or occurs due to the drive of affect. According to Bataille, the sense of an individual losing identity is also what characterizes communication with the other. |
“Nami Ohi is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies (GSIIS), the University of Tokyo, supervised by Prof. Toru Nishigaki. She studies literature from the systems theory perspective. She is especially interested in haiku and analyzes it by using fundamental informatics as a theoretical framework.” (more)
| [F]or as Earth, so he the World Built on circumfluous Waters calme, in wide Crystallin Ocean, and the loud misrule Of Chaos farr remov’d, least fierce extreames Contiguous might distemper the whole frame: And Heav’n he nam’d the Firmament: So Eev’n And Morning Chorus sung the second Day. |
| Unlike, say, her performance at the Grammys, which was a perfect fusion of spectacle (a nine-months-pregnant woman rapping in a see-through dress) with content (Maya’s fervor was linked to the music), the video for “Born Free” feels exploitative and hollow. Seemingly designed to be banned on YouTube, which it was instantly, the video is set in Los Angeles where a vague but apparently American militia forcibly search out red-headed men and one particularly beautiful red-headed child. The gingers, as Maya called them, using British slang, are taken to the desert, where they are beaten and killed. The first to die is the child, who is shot in the head. While “Born Free” is heard in the background throughout, the song is lost in the carnage. As a meditation on prejudice and senseless persecution, the video is, at best, politically naïve. “The video was more than fine with me,” Jimmy Iovine told me later that night. Despite Maya’s efforts, he had seen it. “I didn’t even have a blink.” A canny showman, Iovine knew that the video would get attention, that Maya would get her visa (which she did) and that all the noise was good for business. He has a long history of driving record sales with violent imagery: in the 1990s, Interscope was home to Death Row Records, where Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur made millions rapping about all things gangsta. Iovine also appreciates the outrageous: Interscope’s biggest artist is Lady Gaga, who has melded big-time theatricality with disco-based pop, a kind of love child of Elton John and Madonna. |
Excellent article by Lynn Hirschberg and a great follow up on the “Born Free” music video controversy.
[UPDATE - August 16th, 2010] Apparently, M.I.A. didn’t like the article by Lynn Hirschberg:
MIA is upset about a New York Times Magazine cover story about her, so she tweeted the phone number of the piece’s writer, Lynn Hirschberg.
“917.834.3158 CALL ME IF YOU WANNA TALK TO ME ABOUT THE N Y T TRUTH ISSUE, ill b taking calls all day bitches ;)” she wrote.
Because MIA presented the number as her own, Hirschberg has been deluged with calls from fans wanting to hook up with MIA. (The Huffington Post: “M.I.A. Freaks Out At ‘New York Times,’ Tweets Reporter’s Phone Number”, June 2, 2010)
Rodgers late paintings are somehow reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis novel Glamorama.
About Terry Rodgers:
“Rodgers’ current work focuses on portraying contemporary body politics. His rendering of the upper-class leisure life stands as an iconic vision of today’s society. The resulting paintings are not snapshots or slices of life, not verite records of actual moments in actual party or family situations, or diaristic records of his life, but carefully constructed and composited fictions, designed to elicit the most meaning and sustain the maximum amount of ambiguity.
Terry Rodgers attended Amherst College, with a major in the Fine Arts. His strong interest in film and photography influenced his style in the direction of representational realism in art.” (more)
Artist statement:
“Importantly, however, is that nothing I create is meant to judge or criticize. I am merely looking closely at who we are, the density of influences upon us, the choices we make, and the recognitions that occur in trying to comprehend a universe with no signposts.” (more)
First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.
| Not content with the merely weird, the DSM-IV also attempts to claim dominion over the mundane. Current among the many symptoms of the deranged mind are bad writing (315.2, and its associated symptom, poor handwriting); coffee drinking, including coffee nerves (305.90), bad coffee nerves (292.89), inability to sleep after drinking too much coffee (292.89), and something that probably has something to do with coffee, though the therapist can’t put his finger on it (292.9); shyness (299.80), (also known as Asperger’s Disorder); sleepwalking (307.46); jet lag (307.45); snobbery (301.7, a subset of Antisocial Personality Disorder); and insomnia (307.42); to say nothing of tobacco smoking, which includes both getting hooked (305.10) and going cold turkey (292.0). You were out of your mind the last time you have a nightmare (307.47). Clumsiness is now a mental illness (315.4). So is playing video games (Malingering, V65.2). So is doing just about anything “vigorously.” So, under certain circumstances, is falling asleep at night. The foregoing list is neither random nor trivial, nor does it represent the sort of editorial oversight that occurs when, say, an otherwise reputable zoology text contains the claim that goats breathe through their ears. We are here confronted with a worldview where everything is a symptom and the predominant color is a shade of therapeutic gray. This has the advantage of making the therapist’s job both remarkably simple and remarkably lucrative. |
L.J. Davies is the author of A Meaningful Life (1971). Read more about it over at The New York Times.
See also Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993) and more recently Rampage by the infamous German director Uwe Boll.
| In less than two months, China has seen six cases of men charging into schools and kindergartens to kill and hurt children. On April 28, 29 and 30, there was one incident per day in three separate cities. Last Wednesday, a man with a cleaver killed seven children and two adults in a central China kindergarten, while on Saturday the man behind the April 29 attack was sentenced to death for stabbing 29 children in an eastern province. The situation has become not only very dark but very surreal. |
“Huang Hung is a columnist for China Daily, the English-language newspaper in China. She is also an avid blogger with more than 100 million page views on her blog on sina.co”
Herostratos torching the temple of Artemis. Learn more on Wikipedia and by reading Albert Borowitz’s essay Terrorism for Self-Glorification. The Herostratos Syndrome. More on that later.
| Gus Van Sant and author Bret Easton Ellis will team to write a feature about the double suicide of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. PalmStar Entertainment, Celluloid Dreams and K5 Film have acquired screen rights to “The Golden Suicides,” a Vanity Fair article written by Nancy Jo Sales. Van Sant, who helmed “Milk” and is prepping the Columbia Pictures drama “Restless,” is involved only as writer at this point. Ithaka Entertainment’s Braxton Pope will produce with PalmStar’s Kevin Frakes and Celluloid Dreams’ Hengameh Panahi. Duncan and Blake formed a popular couple on the downtown New York and Venice, Calif., art scenes. She was one of the first videogame designers for girls, and his “digital paintings” — kaleidoscopic images shown on plasma screens — established him as a rising star on the circuit. The couple descended into a paranoid spiral when the artists developed a consuming belief that government and religious organizations were conspiring against them. She killed herself in 2007. Blake found her body on the floor of their bedroom, and walked into the Atlantic Ocean a week later, ending his life. |
