“From one of our greatest living writers, Don DeLillo, a brief, unnerving, and hard-hitting new novel about a secret war advisor and a young filmmaker.”

DeLillo starts reading at page 17 of his book (Point Omega, New York: Scribner, 2010).

Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega, Don DeLillo.

“Although YouTube’s birthday is officially February 14, 2005, the first video was actually uploaded to the site exactly five years ago, on April 23, 2005.” (more)

I already posted this video, in relation with an interesting post on the The New York Times’ blog The Medium (by Virginia Heffernan)

Hofstadter’s presentation starts at 13’30”.

“In this Presidential Lecture, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter examines the role and contributions of analogy in cognition, using a variety of analogies to illustrate his points.”

“Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.” (wikipedia).

Previously on Skandalon : analogy

First discovered via Anathema Delight.

About this video:

“A Dpt4D (F.P.S.) Original Series — Part One of an ongoing series that documents our search for the ultimate tastemakers. We begin in Venice, California over a coffee grinder…”

About Dpt4D:

“The Department of the 4th Dimension is a design and production studio that transforms ideas into engaging communications, experiences and interactions. It does many different things, for many different clients, but all of its projects secretly explore the interaction between design and storytelling. […] Established in 2006 by Creative Director Matt Checkowski, the DPT4D builds on more than a decade of experience in the design and entertainment industries.” (more)

About Intelligentsia:

“Intelligentsia Coffee’s mission is to provide our customers, staff, and community with an unparalleled and complete coffee and tea experience in an environment steeped in understanding, knowledge, skill, service and mutual respect.” (more).

The barista featured in this video is Kyle Glanville, winner of the 2008 United States Barista Championship (more here). He was featured a couple of times on Boing Boing TV.

“When this technique of redundancy was used in the films of Godard, it was considered the height of sophistication, a comment on the way movies pile on information: they show, they narrate and they describe. The elephants are unmistakable to viewers, and yet Karim identifies them. Then he names the iconic shape right in front of us — “long trunks” — lest anyone miss that long trunks equal elephants equal long trunks. This founding clip makes and repeats a larger point, too, with every pixel: Video — trivial or important — can now quickly and at no cost be published, broadcast and shared. “Me at the Zoo” also sets a style standard for the classic YouTube video: visually surprising, narratively opaque, forthrightly poetic.”

About The Medium : “With television and the Internet converging at last, who’s going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to pseudo-candid celebrity rants seems to expect an audience. “The Medium” will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images.”

“San Francisco-based video artist Phil Patiris transforms network news footage, clips from Star Trek, and sports coverage (all used without permission) into a devastating critique of the media/industrial complex.”

Artist statement: “To the extent I see the mass media culture drag standards of intelligence, creativity and ethics down to the lowest common denominator… and then turn around and generate more slick and profitable news programming bemoaning the resulting deterioration in our streets, schools and elective offices (not to mention our art and civilization), that’s the extent I will point my own electromagnetic finger.

To the extent self-serving, misleading, and deliberately manipulative psychological associations are made (and not just through advertising) is the extent I will break those associations, since they are subjective, and therefore rightly subject to counter-assault.” (read more).

The video was originally posted on Illegal Art: “The laws governing “intellectual property” have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork—as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s—will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.The irony here couldn’t be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.

The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the “degenerate art” of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court.” (read more). See more video here.

About the video: “Sunday, the first single from Sonic Youth’s 1998 album A Thousand Leaves, features a music video directed by Harmony Korine and starring Macaulay Culkin and his wife at the time, Rachel Miner. The music video for Sunday can be found on the Sonic Youth DVD Corporate Ghost, released on R1 DVD in the US on June 8, 2004. It includes an optional commentary by the band.” (more).

You may already know Harmony Korine for his films Kids (1995), Gummo (1997) or Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) (among others).