T.M. Down writes:

"Selective Selling of Ideas in the U.S."

T. M. Down

If anything can be said about the prevailing culture in the United States, it is that commodities infiltrate every aspect of life. Indeed, Americans identify themselves most by those commodities they consume: music, cars, clothing, food, jewelry.

Although popularly characterized as the fleeting attribute of a youthful search for identity, such behavior still carries well into adulthood, and represents the core of identity by which most Americans define themselves. Commodities are so essential to identity in the United States, in fact, that mere ideas and beliefs have been transformed into commodities — traded, branded, sold and sanctioned.

In the United States, nothing is too sacred to be sold: from morality and religion to political ideology and patriotism, all are conveniently pre-packaged for consumption, stamped on T-shirts, bumper stickers and commercial advertisements conveniently disguised as news; that is, at least, those commodities that the establishment wishes to sell.

Nine Minutes in the Yard:
A conversation with Harun Farocki
by Rembert Hüser
Senses of Cinema

This interview took place in Berlin on July 25th, 1999.

Rembert Hüser: In the film-installation you showed recently at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen (I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, 2000), the dead prison convict, William Martinez, is lying in the yard for nine minutes before he is taken away. Everything follows a precise choreography.

Harun Farocki: I'm sure you are using the term 'choreography' because the yard resembles a stage. Guards, ready to shoot, have their guns trained on Martinez; a camera is lying in wait for an incident worth recording. Martinez is an inmate of a high security prison in Corcoran, California. He starts a fight with another inmate and is shot down. The surveillance video is silent. You see the white smoke from the shot glide through the frame. Then it takes nine minutes before Martinez is taken away on a stretcher. Allegedly the yard has to be cleared for security reasons, which takes some time. Though the event looks very different from a movie, it gives the impression that it has to take place and could only occur in this staged, dramatic way; it looks predestined.

"Science Friction for the Multitudes"

Geert Lovink Interviews Christoph Spehr

Much like Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones and P.M.'s Bolo'Bolo,
Christoph Spehr's The Aliens are Amongst Us! is a classic in politcal
underground literature. None of the work of this German writer has yet been
translated into English. Spehr's writing is a mixture of utopian subversive
science fiction and a radical social analysis of today's global capitalism.
Aliens are Amongst Us is a story for the post-deconstruction age where the question What is to be done? opens up new spaces for the collective
imagination and action.

There have been other virtual states, and from the ex-yu specifically there was the NSK state in time which also issued passports. Nonetheless this seems interesting given the particular reasonance that titoism continues to exert in south-east europe.
devin writes
'Titoism Has a New Country, Titoslavia, Available at a Click'


This article is about perhaps the first virtual country...


http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3214,36- 652496@51-646623,0.html

The site is http://www.titoslavija.com

If you can't read French, here is my translation:

The Yugoslavia of Tito, since divided into five countries, will count an additional state on the 25th of May, the anniversary of the birth of its creator, Josip Broz. Nothing will distinguish it in appearance from the others, with its own constitution, flag, anthem and passport.

Anonymous Comrade writes
The BX! Bronx Artist Festival will take place a various locations in the Bronx from June 1st, 05 to June 4th, 05. The BX1 Bronx Artist Festival will showcase the talents of Bronx artists who are past winners of the borough’s BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Individual Artist Fellowship, a product of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ mission to support and nurture Bronx artists. The BX1 Bronx Artist Festival is a celebration of these artists’ continued dedication to excellence as well as to honor those who have continued to live, work and produce art in the Bronx. Please see the Bronx Council on the Arts' website at www.bronxarts.org for all event listings. If you need further information, please contact BCA at 718.931.9500 X 21.

"The Problem With Music"
Steve Albini, negativland

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.

Dan Clore writes:

Garbage Guerrilla

Jon McMillian, New York Press

In the late 1960s, Ben Morea was the notorious leader of an unsavory Lower East Side anarchist collective called Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. As a young historian who studies that period, I'd spent almost three years trying to locate him. All the leads I'd followed went nowhere. It was as if Morea had vanished, every bit as thoroughly as a jet contrail.

Anonymous Comrade writes:
Stephen Wright talks on Use-Value and Art-Related Practice


Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)


When: Monday Night 05.02.05 @ 7:30 Pm Who: Open To All

2. The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade: An Essay on Use-Value and Art-Related Practice


Stephen Wright

In a late text, Marcel Duchamp set out to distinguish several different types of readymades. Of particular interest here is the genre which he punningly described as “reciprocal readymades.” Anxious, he claimed, “to emphasize the fundamental antinomy between art and the readymade,” Duchamp defined this radically new, yet subsequently neglected genre through an example: “Use a Rembrandt as an ironing-board.” (1) More than a mere quip to be taken at face value, or a facetious mockery of use-value, Duchamp’s example points to the symbolic potential of recycling art – and more broadly, artistic tools and competence – into the general symbolic economy of everyday life. For in that respect, the reciprocal readymade is the obverse of the standard readymade, which recycles the real – in the form of manufactured objects – into the symbolic economy of art. Historically speaking, the readymade is inseparably bound up with objecthood: it refers to a readymade, manufactured object Yet, it would be reductive to confine the readymade to its objective dimension alone, if only because it provides such a strong general image of the reciprocal logic between art and the real.

Emrah Göker writes "

Emrah Göker[1]

"There is no right life in falsehood."

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia[2]

I am looking at my screen in a sad, though not perplexed, mood today. Allah knows, I want to get furious, but find myself unable to. I also feel embarrassed for not being shocked; the thought of getting used to all this right-wing nationalist bullshit is disturbing and embarrassing. One of the most adamant Turkish racist electronic venues diffusing hatred in English, Turkish Forum, invites me, along with many other citizens of Turkey currently residing in the US, to protest Armenian-American lobbies in front of the White House. I am told that the "enemy" wants to have the 1915 Genocide recognized, force Turkey pay $20 billion in reparations, have both countries open their borders, and claim a huge chunk of Turkish territory. Curiously, Armenians (I am warned) also want to steal the province of Trabzon. It is the only province mentioned in the text, where, recently, four left-wing prison activists were almost lynched by a 2000-strong, incurably masculine, deliriously nationalist crowd, who were led to believe that these pamphleteers were about to burn the Turkish flag.[3] This propaganda war of denial and falsification (shamelessly borrowing the US imperialist slogan, "United We Stand") is also advertising a hit list of "Turkish turncoats", some of them my dear friends and excellent scholars, who are accused to ignore Armenian atrocities against Turks and for being "bought" by Armenians. The language being used is homologous to the Aryan Power rhetoric about "self-hating Whites"; or the Zionist one about "self-hating Jews". It is strange that the nationalists are selling their version of McCarthyism in the US, at a time the neo-cons are busy brewing their own brand in the universities. Now, there was an English proxy of that Turkish proverb. Ah, of course. Birds of a feather, flock together.

David Rovics IWW Starbucks Workers Union Benefit Show

New York City, April 22, 2005

David Rovics one of the country's most beloved folk singers, will be in New York City for one night only during his international tour!

Come support the union effort at Starbucks by joining us for some great music and cheap beer.

Also featuring political comedian Katie Halper and
spoken-word champion Amina Munoz-Ali. After David
Rovics, dance to inspired DJ rhythms late into the
night!

$5-$12 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds

Friday, April 22
8 pm 'til late

DUMBA
57 Jay St. in Brooklyn
F Train to York, walk two blocks towards the river