The Bistro System

"An economist who's agnostic about economics is unemployable"

- Sir Alfred Sherman

FX

Note: butt stamper whose sand is stamped with FX hotel brand, in the foyer outside the elevators.

[Brecht was insisting on the need for what he called a 'smokers theatre' where the audience would puff away at its cigars as if watching a boxing match, and would develop a more detached and critical outlook than was possible in the ordinary German theatre, where smoking was not allowed. 'I even think', says a fragment 'that in a Shakespearean production one man in the stalls with a cigar could bring about the downfall of Western Art. He might as well light a bomb as light his cigar. I would be delighted to see our public allowed to smoke during performances. And I'd be delighted mainly for the actors' sake. In my view it is quite impossible for the actor to play an annatural, cramped and old-fashioned theatre to a man smoking in the stalls.']

- Brecht on theatre: The development of an aesthetic, edited by John Willett

“policy of ambiguity.”

"If you’re not in China, you’re not playing the game."

Lester Thurow, Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Return to sender

"Dear BH Billington,
Knowles Eddy Knowles is an international collaborative art group founded in 2004. We have been invited to participate in a fascinating and well-esteemed exhibition at the West Space art centre in Melbourne. Our idea necessitates the use of diamonds in the gallery space; of course, the diamonds would be on loan and would be returned at the end of the exhibition. West Space is run by good, honest Australians who would make sure the precious stones are safely installed and maintained.
Any colour will do. In fact, the more colours the merrier. Variety is the spice of life- KEK's message- and that's why we would like to construct a buffet table on which the diamonds could be safely displayed behind protective glass. Seeing as how the diamonds will not be adorning anyone's fingers, we have decided that it would be perfectly acceptable if not all of the diamonds are perfect- we welcome the flawed ones.
KEK would like to request to borrow diamonds from BH Billington for our show. Please carefully consider our request and send your reply to us through the West Space art centre.
Thank you and look forward to hearing from you.
Knowles, Eddy, Knowles
Mon, May 9, 2005 at 12:40 PM"

HQ

Windows in the side of a hill in Hogo, Shaanxi Province. Forty million people live in cave houses in Northern China.
"Therefore, we don't consult with the Titito [dear little uncle] any more. He used to appear formerly, but now he can't. He is completely tired out and he can't. It is in vain that they ch'alla [perform ritual] for the Tio. We made him of great stones that had metal in it. He used to look like a person smoking a cigarette just like us. After he finished the cigarette he would chew coca, chewing with the women from their bags of coca. We used to enter before the Tio with our silk shawls. We used to consult him. We reached for the metal in his hands. It was beautiful, like raw sugar."

- June Nash and Manuel María Rocca. Dos mujeres indigenas, Antropología Social Series, vol. 14, pp. 1-130. Mexico, D.F.: Insituto Indigenista Interamericano. 1976. Quoted in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael Taussig

if i don't respond to this by end friday can you remind me to?

"One hundred and forty-four participants were randomly assigned to one of three independent groups, and subsequently performed the Cognitive Drug Research (CDR) computerized cognitive assessment battery in a cubicle containing either one of the two odors or no odor (control). Visual analogue mood questionnaires were completed prior to exposure to the odor, and subsequently after completion of the test battery. The participants were deceived as to the genuine aim of the study until the completion of testing to prevent expectancy effects from possibly influencing the data. The outcome variables from the nine tasks that constitute the CDR core battery feed into six factors that represent different aspects of cognitive functioning. Analysis of performance revealed that lavender produced a significant decrement in performance of working memory, and impaired reaction times for both memory and attention based tasks compared to controls. In contrast, rosemary produced a significant enhancement of performance for overall quality of memory and secondary memory factors, but also produced an impairment of speed of memory compared to controls."

- International Journal of Neuroscience 2003, Vol. 113, No. 1, Pages 15-38

"The twin principles of modernism and marketing: seeing fresh promise in familiar things."

lumpen

"16. (Trans.) A paraphrase of the controversial aphorism 'l'art est le plus haute joie que l'homme se donne a lui même', which Lefebvre attributed to Marx in Contribution à l'esthetique (1953), but which he later admitted was his own invention. This 'forgery' was one of the reasons given for his exclusion from the PFC in 1957."
-Henri Lefebvre Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2

George Baker

citing Moyra Davey citing Roland Barthes in 1977: "When we attach a lot of importance to certain networks of friendship it is because we're always trying to reproduce the utopia of a childhood space, that of a child playing around its mother. Ultimately, in an affective relationship, whether or not its amorous, we always simulate a certain maternal space, a space of security which is, why not say it, a gift space."

- via facebook

“The Tao produces the one. The one produces the two. The two produces the three. The three produces all beings.” -Lao Tzu

"The scent of cigarettes became his madeleine. (3)

(3) If we consider Proust to be the first man who articulated the idea of remembrances of things past, then this would be the perfect time for the remembrances of things present - we can contribute the ever-growing list of consumed items through the years (product names, price, serial number), as well as records of chance encounters in shopping malls, travel groups around the world (height, weight, body type). Compared to these overly material-based data, He Shan's involuntary memory of the cigarettes would appear to be more poetic and lasting. That scent of cigarettes surrounding the woman has always allowed him to sense the continuity and reality of life."
–Hu Fang, Garden of Mirrored Flowers, 2009.

see you at CAVE bar and restaurant

HELLO... I'M ON THE TRAIN... NO, THE TRAIN... YOU'RE BREAKING UP...

"It just feels right to hold the internet in your hands as you surf it.
And with a screen this large you can just see more of the web, as
you're surfing it... The whole website... in the cleft of your ass..."
- Steve Jobs

life under a heliocentric regime

Money is now pregnant

Upsidedown Sieg Heil

A Very Young Artist

"Recruited as plantation hands, they frequently showed themselves unwilling to work steadily. Induced to raise a cash crop, they would not react "appropriately" to market changes: as they were interested mainly in acquiring specific items of consumption, they produced that much less when crop prices rose, and that much more when prices fell off. And the introduction of new tools or plants that increased the productivity of indigenous labour might only then shorten the period of necessary work, the gains absorbed rather by an expansion of rest than of output. All these and similar responses express an enduring quality of traditional domestic production, that it is production of use values, definite in its aim, so discontinuous in its activity."

Marshall Sahlins - Stone Age Economics quoted in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael Taussig

"PETER" or "CRUSHING THE SPIDER"

Hidetsu Yagi, co-inventor of the Yagi Antenna.

transitive verb or adjective.

Diagnostic terms invented by two very different 20th C

artists to describe the methodology of rehearsing a

tired (pre-existing) artistic formula for the sake of

market success.

"Your Beautiful Internet"

Given that his character chain-smokes his way through most of Nine, it seems safe to assume that he was smoking off camera as well. "Oh, all the time," he says. "All the time."

Daniel Day-Lewis interviewed in The Guardian

entwürfen für müttergenesungswerke

designs for rest stations for mothers

by Martin Kippenberger

"The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made from a single pearl" –Book of Revelation 21:21

"Analogy, functioning as a circular mode of thought, makes it possible to tour the whole area of art and luxury without ever leaving it. Thus Château Margaux wine can be described with the same words as are used to describe the château, just as others will evoke Proust apropos of Monet or César Franck which is a good way of talking about neither (...)"
–Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 53.

heterotopias

"....the divans and settees in the final room were placed just so to give visitors a spot to rest and discretely breastfeed a newborn baby, or to sink into a space of lazy, navel-gazing thought - as someone might on the therapist's couch."
- T'ai Smith "West(ern) Waste(land): On Franz West at the Baltimore Art Museum" published in Texte Zur Kunst, June 2009

Nothingness in the air

http://www.ccca.ca/history/isaacs/english/68photos1.html

Chess Game Performance
Marcel Duchamp / John Cage

Ryerson Theatre, March 5, 1968

Avrom Isaacs recounts that, after the chess game "performance" between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Duchamp visited his home, and in true Duchampian fashion, "nothing happened."

(See, also, Dennis Reid, "Duchamp in Canada", Canadian Art [Winter 1987]: 52-54).

Yuppie Flu: "a psychological stress condition that paralyzes the performance of talented people and produces long-lasting flu-like symptoms."
–David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990

The art dealer says: "I like that Jeremy and Neil come from a kind of urban-downtown-punk-skate-band based kind of culture"

"Note that billion in traditional British usage means a million million, not, as in American usage, a thousand million. Editors working with material by British writers may need to query the use of this term."
–Chicago Manual of Style

Pavlov's Platypus

One of my colleagues told me about the lake outside the GlaxoSmithKline building in Ware, Hertfordshire. The lake is stocked with Koi Carp and spanned by a wooden bridge. For nine months before the building opened, a man was paid to walk over the bridge every day, feeding the fish as he went. Now, when clients of the company arrive, they are obliged to cross the bridge to reach the building entrance. Schools of fish suddenly appear beneath them and follow their every step across the lake.

JUNK

Bobo International

"A well-cultivated person will not stoop to compete for the No. 1 place with average Joes and Janes. A bobo is well-cultivated. His notebook displays a style of simplicity. Bobos love country folk, a weathered fisherman, a craftsman in the remote coutnryside, or a short and plump artist who dances simple folk dances and sings simple folk songs. For bobos, those simple-minded country folk look serene and peaceful. Although they are poor, they lead a rich life... Corresponding to the fundamental spirit of the bobos is the simple but smart-looking E100. It is clothed in simple dark blue, but its keyboard and LCD screen shines in fashionable silver. A contradictory colour scheme like this matched with a daring design delivers to the bobos a jazzy sense of romance."
–advert copy for Legend Solei Notebook E100

Rottercouver or Vandam???

the Other likes to drink red wine too!

"With the extenuation of the political sphere, the president comes increasingly to resemble that Puppet of Power who is the head of primitive societies. (Clastres)
"All previous presidents pay for and continue to pay for Kennedy's murder as if they were the ones who had suppressed it–which is true phantasmatically, if not in fact. They must efface this defect and this complicity with their simulated murder. Because, now it can only be simulated. Presidents Johnson and Ford were both the object of failed assassination attempts which, if they were not staged, were at least perpetrated by simulation. The Kennedys died because they incarnated something: the political, political substance, whereas new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film–curiously, Johnson, Nixon, Ford all have this simian mug, the monkeys of power."
–Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981

Encouragement for Dioxin sniffers

"The conceptualists liked to propound the following question: suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old automat at Union square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for - and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording the greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: of course, it was. "

- Tom Wolfe, "Up the fundamental aperture", in The Painted Word, 1975.

DID YOU HEAR RADIOHEAD WILL COLLABORATE ON A NEW CITY WITH RICHARD FLORIDA?

"Noise can make sleeping difficult on occasions, whether from snoring, sexual activity, someone either returning late or leaving early or the close proximity of so many people. This can be solved by carrying earplugs." – From Wikipedia "Hostel" entry.

The ten pound garbanzo bean

Inevitably, when addressing Knowles' diversified oeuvre, one is drawn to the authorial presence of the artist as it is self-consciously inserted into the work. This entry point is encouraged by Knowles' practice of deploying his signature in the spectacular form of a logotype, a practice in which the artist's monogram is stylized into a symbol like those that are commonly used by corporations for brand-marketing purposes. During a decades-long refusal to attain a consistent and identifiable morphology, "KEK" at once stands as a nexus bringing together a diverse array of projects and providing a stable chart for translations into meaning.
–Alexander Alberro, Meaning at the Margins: The Semiological Inversions of Knowles Eddy Knowles

Pantomime Individualism

Canary Wharf Seasonal Reassurance Patrols

As a regular seasonal response, the Metropolitan Police Service is increasing the number of high visibility reassurance patrols around the Canary Wharf estate, including armed police officers, mounted police and specialist dog units. The increase in patrols is not in relation to any specific information or incident and colleagues are advised that there will be random checks of pedestrians and vehicles. If you are stopped by a patrolling officer, please be patient and cooperative.