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Guy Debord's Widow Threatens NYU Professor with Copyright Violation Professor Is Accused of Infringing the Copyright of a Man Who Opposed Copyright By ANDREA L. FOSTER, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i33/33a01603.htm Guy Debord, a Marxist philosopher who died in 1994, was no fan of private property. But apparently his widow is one. A lawyer representing the widow, Alice Becker-Ho, has threatened Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University, with legal action. Mr. Galloway says the lawyer has sent him a letter demanding that he stop distributing his online war game, which the lawyer says infringes a copyright held by the Debord estate. The French philosopher had created a similar board game 30 years ago.
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Living Theatre's Hanon Resnikov Hospitalized The Living Theatre wants you to know that Hanon has suffered a stroke. He is currently at Beth Israel Hospital, with Judith by his side. He faces a difficult recovery with his customary tenacity. Our theatre work continues with a European tour of our Obie Award-winning production of "The Brig" opening in Berlin next week, and here in New York we will let you know about our summer program of films and musical events, followed by our next production in the Fall.
"We Have Won" Copenhagen Free University The Copenhagen Free University ceased its activities by the end of 2007 and in connection with the abolition of the institution we have written the following statement: WE HAVE WON! In the spring of 2001 we demanded: All Power to the Copenhagen Free University. We had just opened a free university in our home in the Norrebro district of Copenhagen. This impossible demand was put forward in the form of a manifesto intended to provoke and unsettle the collective imaginary and open new potential paths of action. We wanted to take power.
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West Virginia Church Now Home to "Armed Joy" Collective By Daniel Friend, Shepherdstown Chronicle SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — Shepherdstown’s Old Episcopal Church at 113 N. Church St. — arguably the oldest church in West Virginia — is now home to a group of young tenants calling it the Armed Joy Collective House. Naming their home of two months after the 1977 anarchist pamphlet “Armed Joy” by Italian activist Alfredo M. Bonanno, the six collective house occupants hope to foster a sense of community and self-sufficiency in Shepherdstown.
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Jules Dassin, Filmmaker on Blacklist, Dies at 96 By Richard Severo, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/movies/01dassin.html?ei=5070&en=b71f41... Jules Dassin, an American director, screenwriter and actor who found success making movies in Europe after he was blacklisted in the United States because of his earlier ties to the Communist Party, died Monday in Athens, where he had lived since the 1970s. He was 96. A spokeswoman for Hygeia Hospital confirmed his death but did not give a cause, The Associated Press reported.
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Crisis From Internal Split in News & Letters Committees Statement from the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of News and Letters Committees - March, 2008 Dear Friends, We are writing to alert all readers and friends of a serious crisis afflicting News and Letters Committees (N&LC)—a crisis that places its very existence in jeopardy. In response to philosophic disputes within N&LC over the past several years, an organized group within N&LC has usurped control of the organization and is acting in complete disregard of the democratically approved perspectives and principles that have defined it since it founding in 1955 as a decentralized, non-hierarchical group based on the unity of worker and intellectual, theory and practice, and philosophy and organization. Those wanting to continue our democratic and humanist heritage have formed the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC. It constitutes almost half of the membership of N&LC, and we appeal to you to support us in our effort to reverse the crisis that threatens America’s only Marxist-Humanist organization.
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HAMBURG´S SUBVISION IS TRYING TO COOPT INTERNATIONAL "OFF" ART PROJECTS A generously state-funded project with leading Hamburg art-institution figures at its helm is planning to showcase international "off" art - "new forms" of artistic activity that have developed at "far remove from the big art-fairs“ - in Summer 2008. Great news? Have you, or acquaintances, already been invited? Just one minute, please. Under http://www.wirsindwoanders.de/files/demo.php
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Iraqi-born "Virtual Jihadi" Artist's Show Shut Down in Troy, NY An Iraqi born artist, now US citizen, Wafaa Bilal's work was shut down at the West Hall Art Department Gallery and will now be reopened tomorrow (March 11), but conservative public pressure threatens to close it once again. Wafaa escaped from Iraq in the early 1990's risking his life by crossing the Iraq/Kuwait border and is now a professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. He was invited to RPI as part of the art department artist residency program and is exhibiting a work entitled "Virtual Jihadi" that consists of a "hacked" version of another commercial video game called "Quest for Saddam." In the real game players target the ex-Iraqi leader, in Wafaa's modified version the artist casts himself as a suicide bomber who gets sent on a mission to assassinate President Bush Jr. "It feels like a military camp, not an educational institution," Bilal, 41, said Thursday night.
'The New Spirit of Capitalism, Value and the End of Critique' An ephemera workshop (www.ephemeraweb.org), 29-30 May 2008 Co-organised by the School of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, and the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. Call for contributions and participation Novelty has, for a long while, been a source of value for capitalism. Writers on management churn out 'new' organisational structures and control systems at a rate that would put a Parisian fashion house to shame: MBO, JIT, BPR, TQM, CoP, Culture, Quality, Flexibility, Outsourcing, virtual, virtuous networks of CSR, PR and RM. Like Klee's Angelus Novus, the shock of the 'new' drives us irresistibly back to the future as the debris of progress pile up in front of us as an indistinguishable mass of failed experiments and outmoded ideas. Indeed, with such a rate of continuous change, one cannot help but wonder whether, like the 'idiot's tale' in MacBeth, the whole discourse of change is 'full of sound and fury' but 'signifying nothing'. In such a context it takes a certain bravado to offer up the grand claim that Capitalism has undergone a fundamental restructuring, and yet this is precisely the argument made by Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, Capitalism found itself in complete crisis in the late 1960s. With students rejecting careers in management and workers no longer satisfied by the prospect of higher wages for higher productivity, the entire capitalist system was on the verge of collapse. From within this critique, however, came the seeds of its rebirth. Demands for autonomy, empowerment and creativity at work were met with a new idea of capitalism, far removed from the fusty, grey-suited atmosphere of 'Organisation Man' and the hey-day of the faceless Goliaths like IBM. The new capitalism is an entirely funkier affair, where surfing has become the ruling ideology and 'excitement' has replaced 'security' as the dominant value.
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