Tom Rascal writes

Globalised cinema presents very few opportunities to working men and women to see films that portray the lives and struggles of those individuals who take on the rich and powerful so as to lift ordinary people out of poverty and oppression. Too often, cinema presents a fantasy world in which glamour and celebrity are elevated and in which the interests of the elite are served against the best interest of workers and the marginalised.

But the stories that come out of those heroic struggles by ordinary people often contain all of the elements necessary for compelling drama on screen, and in the life of James Connolly those elements are there in abundance.

"The $256 Question"

Stan Cox, AlterNet

By prosecuting Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, is the Justice Department trying
to clamp a lid on political art or looking to chalk up a win by exploiting fears
of bioterrorism?

S. marcescens: Dangerous Bacteria or Harmless Art Material?

The way William Hochul sees it, the situation couldn't be simpler: "We take an
oath to follow the Constitution and enforce the law. The law says you can't
acquire any property by fraud — whether it's a gun or an automobile or
something biological, it doesn't matter."

As an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, based in
Buffalo, Hochul is leading the prosecution of Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell,
who were indicted a little over a year ago for mail and wire fraud. Kurtz, a
professor of art at the University of Buffalo and co-founder of the
internationally acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), is accused of obtaining
bacterial cultures illegally through the mail.

Ferrell, a geneticist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, allegedly
provided Kurtz the organisms for use in an artwork, rather than using them in
his own research, thereby violating an agreement he had signed when he
purchased the cultures for $256 from the American Type Culture Collection
(ATCC).

Although Hochul doesn't say so, this has to be a frustrating time for him. Last
spring, he and the Terrorism Division that he heads appeared to be setting
their sights on a big-time conviction. Federal agents in biohazard suits had
confiscated laboratory equipment and bacterial cultures from Kurtz's home. And
they had served subpoenas — under the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism
Act — on several of Kurtz's colleagues and a company [Autonomedia] that publishes CAE's
books.

Hacking Public Spaces in Vilnius: Politics of a new media space inside the Lietuva (soviet) cinema

Interview with Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
by Geert Lovink

Ever since I met Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas in 1999, two contemporary artists from Lithuania, they have been in search for an art space where they could establish a media lab, host talks and exhibit new media related art works. In August 2004 their organization, Vilma, hosted the RAM 6 workshop in Vilnius--yet another example which showed how well organized they were, and how desperate in need of their own infrastructure to do critical and innovative projects. This spring, Nomeda and Gediminas suddenly saw a chance--and grabbed it. They occupied the huge voyer of the privatized Lietuva cinema, over which a controversy had arisen. In May 2005 Nomeda and Gediminas were in Amsterdam briefly for the opening of the Populism show at the Stedelijk Museum, a moment we used to catch up and prepare for the following interview, which was done through email over the past few weeks. The situation of their exciting projects is changing on a daily basis and we'll hope to keep you informed. In the meanwhile, if you would like to support them, for instance by sending them taping which they could screen, please contact them (information below).

"The Making of the Counterculture"

Kenneth Rexroth, Bureau of Public Secrets

I

In the winter of 1954–55 America was in an economic, social, and cultural interregnum. One style of life, one mood — like Victorianism or Edwardianism — was giving way to another. The industrial age based on the mechanical exploitation of coal and iron was giving way to electronics, computers, automation — with all the social and intellectual results such a basic revolution implies — but as yet few indeed understood what was happening.

Anonymous Comrade writes

Drowning in Filth

John Chuckman

"We are all drowning in filth…I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth." — George Orwell (diary entry for 27 April, 1942)

I've given the date of Orwell's words lest someone think they were written by a contemporary bearing the writer's name. Recent events surely qualify the United States to claim some sort of title from the Guinness Book of Records such as the world's largest moral and intellectual open sewer.

A man by the name of Ed Klein has written a vile book called The Truth about Hillary. Perceptive readers may require no more information about this book than the fact that Klein is a former editor for The New York Times. The Times reputation as a newspaper upholding genuine liberal values exists only in the minds of those who regard rolling on the floor and babbling in tongues as divine inspiration. For decades, the Times has demonstrated enough dissembling, unwarranted personal attacks, subtle omissions, and tweaking of words to qualify many times over for a J. Edgar Hoover Official G-Man Helper Award. So what would you expect from a former editor?

Artist Fernando Botero on Abu Graib

Botero on Abu Graib

War, Desire, and The "State of Readiness"

Jordan Crandall

[A short summary of a presentation for "Cinema, War, and a Society of Spectacle,"
University of Cambridge, UK, 8-9 June 2005]

My work deals with spectacle in our present-day culture of security and military
globalization. I want to contribute to the development of a new media theory, which
is able to deal with emerging forms of mobility, attention, and control, and new
patterns of locationing.

stevphen writes:

Anarchitecture Week 2005
London, 17th– 26th June 2005

The Space Hijackers Present:

Running alongside the official 'Architecture Week' we have something much more fun up our sleeves.

Anarchitecture week is a celebration of resistance to corporate occupation of space.

It celebrates the misuses, subversions, and hijacks of contemporary architecture in a fun and informative way, exploring architecture and the built environment from the perspective of those who try to reclaim control over their own environment.

Events include a tour of Oxford Street pointing out the tricks shops use to make us buy, An attempt to double the annual pedestrian count for London's ugliest tunnel, A new product launch from the MUTI corporation, The Nexus Chainstore Massacre (does what it says on the tin), A tennis match across the Thames, trapeese on the tube and A tour of Calafornia in Derby.

Culminating in a Scurvy Ridden Pirate Party on a reclaimed island in Central London, this
promises to be a week never to forget...

more details and final timetable:
http://www.anarchitectureweek.org.uk
http://www.spacehijackers.org

"When Taste Politics Meet Terror:

The Critical Art Ensemble on Trial"

Joan Hawkins, C Theory
"And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has
been created to teach us that first of all." — Antonin Artaud, "No More Masterpieces," 1938. [1]

Setting the Stage

In late September 2001, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus
Ohio, announced that the performances of ~Charlie Victor Romeo~
scheduled for September 26-30 had been cancelled. "We hope you'll
understand that this is not an appropriate time to present this
award-winning Off-Broadway show," the letter accompanying my refund
said. "We will continue to stay in contact with the Collective
Unconscious company who created and perform ~Charlie Victor Romeo~
regarding the potential for rescheduling CVR at the Wexner Center at
an appropriate time in the future."

~Charlie Victor Romeo~ is a documentary play, based on transcripts
taken from the black boxes of downed airplanes, the final
communication between air personnel and the tower. A serious and
sober look at the way people actually behave during a crisis, it won
the 2000 Drama Desk Awards for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and
Outstanding Sound Design, the 2000 New York Fringe Festival awards
for Excellence in Drama and Outstanding Sound Design, and the
Backstage West Garland Award for Best Sound Design. It was filmed by
the U.S. Air Force to be used as a training video for pilots and "has
been invited to be performed for groups of physicians and healthcare
administrators studying the effects of human error and emergencies in
a medical context" (www.charlievictorromeo.com). It also belongs to a
group of experimental dramas — the plays of Anna Devere Smith, ~The
Laramie Project~, etc — which have been mixing ethnography,
documentary (with the emphasis here on documents) and theater in
provocative and compelling ways. Theater which has learned and
borrowed from performance art, one could say.

In late September 2001, I was still badly shaken by the events of
9/11. I had cancelled my planned sabbatical trip to New York when the
apartment I had sublet was needed to house a writer-friend who'd been
evacuated from her flat, and nothing I heard from her about life in
the City in the immediate aftermath of tragedy bore any resemblance
to anything I was hearing on the mainstream news (with the exception
of "Democracy Now", U.S. news broadcasts were all about spin). Weary
of platitudes and patriotic cant, I was looking forward to seeing the
play, to hearing something real (in the street sense of that term)
and to feeling some connection with the New York art scene that had
been. I wanted to be challenged and I wanted to think, to be
addressed as an adult rather than as a slightly addled child. I was
disappointed when the play was cancelled. The box office staff member
who took my call was surprised at my reaction. "Most people have been
telling us they're happy we're rescheduling the show," she told me.
"When has it been rescheduled for?" I asked. "We don't know yet," she
said.

I've chosen to open this essay on the recent harassment of the
Critical Art Ensemble with this older story because it seems to me to
highlight some of the problems confronting the art world in this post
9/11, Patriot Act-hysterical, time. I understand some of the reasons
the Wexner felt it had to postpone the performance. The Wexner Center
for the Arts is small, and totally dependent on public funding and
the support of its patrons and members for survival. It certainly
cannot afford to bring a New York show to Columbus and play to a
near-empty house. And it probably can't really afford the loss of
community good will which such a move might entail.

But the cancellation also served to unmask the ambivalence with which
we (even those of us in the art world) regard truly provocative,
risk-taking art. ~Charlie Victor Romeo~ was rescheduled because of
its content, because it wasn't "an appropriate time" to present the
material.[2] As I indicated above, for me it was exactly the
appropriate time. And my initial reaction of disappointment remains
my final one. But I'm disappointed not only because I didn't get to
see the show when I wanted, but because the cancellation seemed to
trivialize (or at least to contain) the entire project of cutting-
edge art. By cancelling the performance, the Wexner effectively
communicated that provocative and radical theater can be mounted and
tolerated only when nothing serious is at stake. That to mount
provocative art — especially art which deals with disaster — when
something real IS at stake is somehow in bad taste. And that to raise
the question of the politics of taste — the fact that the whole
notion of bad taste is itself an ideologically inflected construct —
is also intolerable in the face of real crisis. This episode, then,
seemed to signal that art and theory both are reduced, in times of
crisis, "to an academic parlor game" — something we do when there's
nothing really on anyone's radar screen.[3] Something we do only when
it's "appropriate."

The question of the appropriate role and function of art post 9/11 is
one which has been framed largely in terms of taste. The removal of
Eric Fischl's commemorative sculpture, ~Tumbling Woman~, from
Rockefeller Center, the elimination of three choruses from John
Adams' opera ~The Death of Klinghoffer~ from a November 2001 Boston
Symphony program, and the quiet de-funding of work by performance
artist William Pope (he lost an NEA grant for a series of works on
racial and social injustice; the Andy Warhol Foundation magnanimously
stepped in and funded the exhibition) all were done in the name of
taste — the fear of offending the public in its still-sensitive,
post 9-11, traumatized state.

But as I have written elsewhere [4], questions of taste are never
ideologically neutral, and almost immediately the issue of taste in
post 9/11 cultural production began to overlap with heavy-handed
manifestations of political corporate and state power. Bill Maher's
television show, ~Politically Incorrect~, was taken off the air by
several ABC affiliates after Maher called the U.S violent response to
the 9/11 attacks "cowardly." John Lennon's song "Imagine" and all music
by Rage Against the Machine were placed on a "don't play" list by the
corporate giant Clear Channel. The woefully misnamed group "Students
for Academic Freedom" launched a number of websites, inviting
students to turn in professors who had made "anti-patriotic" remarks
in class and the U.S Legislature introduced a bill that would tie the
continued funding of area studies programs in American universities
(American Studies, Near Eastern Studies etc.) to governmental
"curriculum oversight." In the bill, renowned scholar Edward Said was
specifically named as the kind of thinker we have to guard against in
these troubled post 9/11 times. Finally, Steve Kurtz, founding member
of the Critical Art Ensemble, was arrested for bio-terrorism.

Turkish Socialist Economics Congress, Istanbul, Dec. 17–18, 2005

The working groups of the Socialist Economics Congress in Turkey are being
formed The first SEC meets in December.

The Socialist Economics Congress in Turkey (SEC) is going to be held in
Istanbul, on December 17 and 18.

SEC is aiming at bringing socialist economists and intellectuals together in
order to analyze the current problems of world economy in general, and of
Turkish economy in particular so as to discuss alternative policies and to
make the socialist alternative concrete.