Enter the Roman Room (activate Bourgeois memory potential)

"Legend has it that the poet Simonides recited a soliloquy for a banquet held in one of the great halls in ancient Greece. Shortly after he left the building, the roof caved in, killing everyone inside. The bodies were so mangled they could not be recognized and authorities went to Simonides to see if he could remember at least who some of the people were. Surprisingly, he was able to recall everyone in the hall simply by remembering where the person sat around the tables in the room. He remembered them by their location.
The Roman orator Cicero, around the turn of the first century, expanded this concept by mentally placing ideas around the tables instead of people. He could recite volumes of information by seeing visions and symbols in the chairs. Like icons that we have on our computer desktop screens, his mental icons represented the critical points he needed to recall in his arguments or debates. Cicero became world renowned for his ability to make clear, lucid points in his debates without using notes. This technique became known as the Roman Room method. By projecting onto his mental screen a room equipped with tables and chairs, Cicero could simply walk around the area in his mind and elaborate his key points. He organized information in his mind so that he could mentally go around any table picking up the memories he had stored in various chairs and simply describing those memories to his audience. (...)
When I look carefully at our living room from the doorway, over to my left is the speaker stand in the corner. The TV console is located along the adjacent wall, and the rocking chair is in the next corner of the room. The fireplace is located on the wall opposite the doorway, and my favorite chair in the third corner of the room. The third wall is actually a larger doorway that leads to the dining room, and a lamp table occupies the fourth corner. Along the fourth and final wall is the sleeper sofa. The floor, carpeted, has a large walnut coffee table in front of the sofa, and a fan hangs from the ceiling. (...)
If I close my eyes, I can see this room completely in my mind. If I apply the third Reversible Rule of Engagement and give action to the picture in my mind, I can move the lens of my mind's eye—just like Ken Burns does in his excellent documentaries, beginning with the speaker and moving the camera lens all the way around the room, seeing each object in its very specific location. (...)
The mind doesn't distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined. In my mind there is no difference between looking at a room while standing in the doorway or looking at a room while seeing on the page. To make the room vivid, I mentally dust the room (my wife will tell you that I do a lot more imaginary dusting than I do real dusting). If it's appropriate, I mentally pick up each object, like a vase on a stand, and note its shape, texture, and feel while dusting it with a mental cloth. If it is something like a fireplace or a painting on the wall, I still take my cloth and feel the subtle grooves in the mantel or in the picture frame. Again, I am noting and picking out detail and applying deliberate intensity to each location in the room. Sometimes I even use aromatherapy or light a scented candle to help establish in my mind the overall environment of each room. Smell is a powerful memory stimulant, and it adds to the vividness of the environment. When you apply this technique, you understand how unlimited your mind and memory can be, because there are an infinite number of pictures of rooms in a seemingly infinite number of magazines on the bookshelves each month."
—Scott Hagwood Memory Power (2006)

"Nobody's safe," said the trader. "If I felt safe, I wouldn't be talking to you next to a fridge in a dark space at the back of the stall."

"But, there were still bits of action. One guy was caught on the same stairway that I had been trapped on. He was caught there with his head under some girl's skirt. Then one of the girls who worked in the cafeteria complained that she hadn't been paid, as promised, for a bit of oral copulation she had supplied to a general foreman and 3 mailhandlers. They fired the girl and the 3 mailhandlers and busted the general foreman down to supervisor.
Then, I set the post office on fire.
I had been sent to fourth class papers and was smoking a cigar, working a stack of mail off a hand truck when some guy came by and said, "HEY, YOUR MAIL IS ON FIRE!"
I looked around,. There it was. A small flame was starting to stand up like a dancing snake. Evidently part of a burning ash had fallen in there earlier.
"Oh shit!"
The flame grew rapidly. I took a catalogue and, holding it flat, I beat the shit out of it. Sparks flew. It was hot. As soon as I put out one section, another caught up.
I heard a voice:
"Hey! I smell fire!"
"YOU DON"T SMELL FIRE," I yelled, "YOU SMELL SMOKE!"
"I think I'm going to get out of here!"
"God damn you, then," I screamed, "GET OUT!"
The flames were burning my hands. I had to save the United States mail, 4th class junkmail!
Finally, I got it under control. I took my foot and pushed the whole pile of papers onto the floor and stepped on the last bit of red ash.
The supervisor walked up to say something to me. I stood there with the burned catalogue in my hand and waited. He looked at me and walked off.
Then I resumed casing the 4th class junkmail. Anything burned, I put to one side.
My cigar had gone out, I didn't light it again.
My hands hurt and I walked over to the water fountain, put them under the water. It didn't help.
I found the supervisor and asked him for a travel slip to the nurse's office.
It was the same one who used to come to my door and ask me, "Now what's the matter, Mr. Chinaski?"
When I walked in she said the same thing again.
"You remember me, eh?" I asked.
"Oh yes, I know you've had some real sick nights."
"Yeh," I said.
"All right, Mr. Chinaski, now what's your problem?"
"I burned my hands."
"Come over here. How did you burn your hands?"
"Does it matter? They're burned."
She was dabbing my hands with something. One of her breasts brushed me.
"How did it happen, Henry?"
"Cigar. I was standing next to a truck of 4th class. Ash must have gotten in there. Flames came up."
The breast was up against me again.
"Hold your hands still, please!"
Then she laid her whole flank against me as she spread some ointment on my hands. I was sitting on a stool.
"What's the matter, Henry? You seem nervous."
"Well... you know how it is, Martha."
"My name is not Martha. It's Helen."
"Let's get married, Helen."
"What?"
"I mean, on the work floor."
She wrapped on some gauze.
"You mustn't burn the mails."
"It was junk."
"All mail is important."
All right, Helen."
She walked over to her desk and I followed her. She filled out the travel form. She looked very cute in her little white hat. I'd have to find a way to get back there.
She saw me looking at her body.
"All right, Mr. Chinaski, I think you better leave now."
"Oh yes... Well, thanks for everything."
"It's just part of the job."
"Sure."
A week later there were NO SMOKING IN THIS AREA signs all around. The clerks were not allowed to smoke unless they used ashtrays. Somebody had been contracted to manufacture all these ashtrays. They were nice. And said PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. The clerks stole most of them.
NO SMOKING.
I had all by myself, Henry Chinaski, revolutionized the postal system."
—Charles Bukowski, Post Office

Democracy Algorithms

"For its competitions, ---- has developed a form of crowd sourced ---- that asks as many as 200 people to take part in the voting process. Our ---- system is designed to be as democratic as possible and the ---- identifies the two winning ---- without any input from ----. ---- read and evaluate ---- online. Each ---- reads a random cross section of all the ----, and our system ensures that each ---- is viewed and voted on the same number of times. All ---- are reviewed without the ---- names attached, and each ---- receives as many as 25 votes."

Community of Experience

"There must be historic reasons for the rise of the compartmental conception of fine art. Our present museums and galleries to which works of fine art are removed and stored illustrate some of the causes that have operated to segregate art instead of finding it an attendant of temple, forum, and other forms of associated life. An instructive history of modern art could be written in terms of the formation of the distinctively modern institutions of museum and exhibition gallery. I may point to a few outstanding facts. Most European museums are, among other things, memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism. Every capital must have its own museum of painting sculpture, etc., devoted in part to exhibiting the greatness of its artistic past, and, in other part, to exhibiting the loot gathered by its monarchs in conquest of other nations; for instance, the accumulations of the spoils of Napoleon that are in the Louvre. They testify to the connection between the modern segregation of art and nationalism and militarism. Doubtless this connection has served at times a useful purpose, as in the case of Japan, who, when she was in the process of westernization, saved much of her art treasures by nationalizing the temples that contained them.
The growth of capitalism has been a powerful influence in the development of the museum as the proper home for works of art, and in the promotion of the idea that they are apart from common life. The nouveaux riches, who are an important by-product of the capitalist system, have felt especially bound to surround themselves with works of fine art which, being rare, are also costly. Generally speaking, the typical collector is the typical capitalist. For evidence of good standing in the realm of higher culture, he amasses paintings, statuary, and artistic bijoux, as his stocks and bonds certify to his standing in the economic world.
Not merely individuals, but communities and nations, put their cultural good taste in evidence by building opera houses, galleries and museums. These show that a community is not wholly absorbed in material wealth, because it is willing to spend its gains in patronage of art. It erects these buildings and collects their contents as it now builds a cathedral. These things reflect and establish superior cultural status, while their segregation from the common life reflects the fact that they are not part of a native and spontaneous culture. They are a kind of counterpart of a holier-than-thou attitude, exhibited not toward persons as such but toward the interests and occupations that absorb most of the community's time and energy."

–John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934.

Otto Dix, Newborn Baby on Hands, 1927

Water Crystal of the Month

THE WATER CRYSTAL FROM THE WATER
EXPOSED TO THE WORDS "LOVE AND GRATITUDE"

I had a vision of love

Holt - Jarmara - Vinegar Tom - Sacke and Sugar - Newes - Ilemauzer - Pyewacket - Pecke in the Crowne - Griezzel Greedigutt

Sigmund Freud's office chair, by Karl Hofmann and Felix Augenfeld, Austria, 1926.

Milton Keynes: More Than Just Concrete Cows

Posted by admin0502 on August 18th, 2010

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Milton economist is a city, a conception of the united dominance of the Borough of poet Keynes, in Central-Southeast England, settled 72 km (45 miles) northerly of author and roughly midway between metropolis and Cambridge. The study of this purpose-built, high-technology 'new city' is condemned from the tralatitious poet economist Village, which is ease there, structure a lovely thatched pub, community hall, and a church.
The close planetary airport, Luton, is settled most 50 km away, which is mainly utilised by baritone outlay airlines, much as Easyjet and Ryanair. city International Airport is also settled most a 100 km away. Most of the condition services are operated by Virgin and Silverlink, and there are regular services to London, Birmingham, Liverpool, metropolis and boost north. National Express maintains long-distance coaches from author falls Coach Station and Golders Green Bus Station, and there are individual another charabanc services to the Midlands and North. Stagecoach, on the another hand, operates a railcar assist streaming to Oxford, poet Keynes, Bedford, and Cambridge.
Milton economist has over 350 dining establishments in and around the city, substance nearly every identify of topical and planetary preparation to meet all tastes and budgets. The Theatre District, for example, has everything from oriental preparation to alacritous matter chains much as Pizza Hut. Smaller, autarkical restaurants can be institute in outlying areas much as Stony Stratford, Wolverton, and Fenny Stratford. Some of the most packed and snappy pubs and clubs are also settled within this district, with venues substance a arrange of modern, thrilling, sporty, laid-back and cordial atmospheres. As for more tralatitious pubs, nous along the Stony Stratford broad street.
There are some places to meet in and around poet economist from small, cordial bottom and breakfasts finished to the customary super hotels. You haw modify intend to wager the famous objective bovine when you meet this new town.
Being digit of the field retail areas in Southeast England, poet economist has an comprehensive difference of shops, markets and superstores. The Centre in poet economist is digit of Europe's daylong shopping centres, which houses a sort of broad street stores and smaller, doc shops. Midsummer Place shopping centre, on the another hand, is a £150 meg organisation which provides the city with an added 430,000 sq ft of city centre shopping. solon tralatitious shopping region can be institute at the senior towns of Stony Stratford, metropolis Pagnell, Bletchley, Wolverton, Woburn Sands, and Olney.
The most visited tourist attractions in poet economist allow Bletchley Park,

where cipher breakers during World War II were sequestered; Xscape, a sports and recreation Byzantine that features interior deceive slopes, rise walls, bowling lanes, a multi-screen medium and a difference of mutual games; Willen Lake, 180 acre lake and park, substance all types of watersports, broad ropes course, undertaking golf, endeavor area, mini railway, taphouse and cafes; Gulliver's Land, a thought park; National Hockey Stadium, where the MK Dons endeavor bag games; poet economist Theatre, where travelling shows and daylong streaming productions are staged; the Bletchley Park museum of wartime cryptography; and the poet economist Museum, which features the Stacey Hill Collection of agricultural chronicle that existed before the groundwork of the new city.

Some of the favourite festivals and events in the city allow Gardening Show, Free Events, mythologist Park Fireworks, Sherlock's Excellent Adventure, Salsa Events, Slava's Snowshow, etc.

http://youtu.be/uo2Qr8hjSTI

On Monday the Guardian reported that Pakistan and the US struck a secret deal permitting US military action to capture or kill Bin Laden almost a decade ago, during the rule of President Pervez Musharraf.

Responding through a spokesman and his Facebook page, Musharraf denied that any deal, written or verbal, had been struck.

"The accusation of my having allowed intrusion into Pakistan by US forces chasing Osama bin Laden is absolutely baseless," he said.

"Never has this subject even been discussed between myself and President Bush leave aside allowing such freedom of action that would violate our sovereignty (sic)."

The Mother of Invention

First sighting of a smoking shelter on a Beijing street after the institution of a citywide smoking ban. Photo by Elaine W. Ho.

Clio Coddle

The Corporate Diner: Lunch at Facebook

By April Dembosky

Published: April 29 2011 22:21 Last updated: April 29 2011 22:21

Café X, Facebook Engineering Building, 1601 California Avenue, Palo Alto, California
Food: International and mostly organic Monday-Thursday, American comfort food Fridays
Value for money: Unmatched – three meals a day and limitless snacks are provided free for staff
Corporate mission: “Helps you connect and share with the people in your life”

The café in the engineering building of Facebook is a cross between a university dining hall and a Las Vegas buffet. Coders and programmers, for whom lunch is often the first meal of the day, fill up plastic trays with the assistance of a string of chefs - one hand-carving roasts of pork and turkey, another extolling the virtues of black eyed peas, collared greens and pulled pork. An
unmanned salad bar and a make-your-own panini station round out the options. At breakfast, there is a waffle bar.

Employees in jeans and T-shirts (including the occasional Google t-shirt) eat their meals at simple white tables with plastic orange chairs, designed to complement Facebook’s overall décor – raw and industrial – which reminds employees that their work is only, always, “1 per cent finished.”

Executive chef, Josef Desimone, is currently overseeing the design of the new cafeteria at Facebook’s future headquarters in Menlo Park, but he has already turned down the first draft. “It was gorgeous,” he said, “which is a problem.” He has to anticipate the graffiti and handprints that will come to grace the walls over time, as employees make their own contributions to the industrial aesthetic.

In addition to café design, Desimone is in charge of planning breakfast, lunch and dinner, five days a week, for the company’s 2,000-odd local employees. He entertains himself as much as his diners by experimenting with different themes, from Chinese to Haitian to an all-chocolate menu that featured chilli-ricotta-cocoa ravioli and asparagus with chocolate vinaigrette.

All meals are free of charge, and at the office’s many snack bars there is a bountiful supply of bananas, Snickers bars and Vitamin Waters. Even the reception desks are furnished with hefty bowls of Starbursts, Tootsie Pops and Peppermint Patties. It’s not surprising new employees are warned of the “Facebook 15,” the typical number of pounds gained in the first year of employment. Free toothpaste and toothbrushes are also provided in the bathrooms.

April Dembosky is the FT’s San Francisco correspondent

Postcards from Beirut

Some folks say wow

Another successful KEK venture gets off the ground

"While the eternal-mailart network has no formal rules, it is growing at such a rate that certain "considerations" must be given to the conduct of those individuals hosting mailart exhibitions if the system is to grow in a positive way.
Beyond the dictates of basic human nature, focusing on politeness, mailart shows are a two-way street of communication. We, as practicing mailartists, feel that the following "considerations" should form the foundation of any show that calls itself a "mailart show."
(1) No fee (2) No jury (3) No returns (4) All works received will be exhibited (5) A complete catalog will be sent free of charge to all participants. (Hopefully the catalog will be more than just a list of names.)
If for whatever reason a mailart show curator cannot fulfill these "considerations," then he/she should return, without cost to to contributing artists, all mailings received. As this new art phenomenon emerges and develops, it is our wish to offer clarity.
"Mailart is not objects going through the mail, but artists establishing direct contact with other artists, sharing ideas and experiences, all over the world."
It's time to strengthen this vital alternative avenue of self-expression because we no longer feel that the present-day art structure is concerned with the artist as a sensitive individual, trying to develop within an ever increasing and complex cultural milieu. Art today is concerned with valuable objects and status. Mailart is concerned with communication. Art is magic, magic is fun, art is fun.
Whereas in the past, we mail artists would send works to mailart shows merely because they were listed as such, we no longer find it acceptable to submit material to shows that do not deal—up front—with these "considerations."
Mailart is still the art of "no rules." Only the "considerations" of basic human politeness prevail. It must be remembered that a mailart show show curator receives one of the world's finest collections of art "free: and we feel that the show "owes" hing to those individual threads who compose the final piece. Also, curators get to keep the artist's work and [artists] should get something in return for their energy/time. Without them there would be no show."
–Lon Spiegelman and Mario Lara, 1980

Apples

"Psychological level
Living in this powerful authoritarian culture, common Chinese have to develop their defensive behaviors and feelings to cope with it adaptively or not. For example, every Chinese adult may have the experience of dealing with his or her leader's over-dominating orders or comments (e.g., asking employees to do some work for the leader's private needs; ordering subordinates to make his or her mobile phone be available 24 hours a day; giving some work on weekends without respect for the subordinate's private time), using a splitting way of definitely agreeable attitude on the surface and disagreeable thoughts in his or her mind. Instead of directly refusing or fighting with the leader, the latent social authoritarian rules unconsciously influence Chinese to repress their true feelings in order to achieve surface harmony in social conversation, and, at the same time, unconsciously promote the inhibition for the inner psychic need of autonomy, which may lead to more latent aggressive feeling. Hence, the authoritarian system, which is the dominating component in Chinese culture, has the function to persuade Chinese people to repress their individual wishes and sacrifice oneself to the collective or family, if the authorities find some conflicts between the individuals and the group. In my opinion, this kind of repression is not mainly about the feelings of guilt, but about fear, which means the anxiety of being abandoned or destroyed by the authorities in fantasy.
"At the same time, parts of Daoist and Buddhist beliefs may be helpful for the Chinese to repress aggressiveness and feel more peaceful, I think, at least on the surface. Different with Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism offer the philosophic and operational ways for Chinese to escape from the inner conflict and splitting feelings when they meet the powerful authoritarian social context. Instead of choosing fighting, with the help of Daoism and Buddhism, Chinese culture gave common Chinese a good way to escape and helped Chinese keep their repressed private wishes or fantasies, provide an acceptable chance to deal with their defensive feelings or repress their aggressive emotions. For example, the idea of reincarnation is a typical Buddhist belief which helps Chinese bear the suffering in his or her current life and gain the hope to get happiness in his or her next life. The basic Daoist idea of oneness, to integraate with nature, promotes lots of Chinese people to escape from their psychological conflict in their life span."

—Zhong Jie "Working with Chinese patients: Are there any conflicts between Chinese culture and psychoanalysis?"

procession of dead horses

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empty touch

Jointness is defined as a dynamic process representing an emotional system for attachment and for communication between separate individuals who jointly approach each other in a third, joint, virtual space. Jointness represents an encounter between mother and infant, psychotherapist and patient, or any partners experiencing simultaneously mutual intimacy, while concomitantly safeguarding separateness.




the sound of uploading sound while wearing leather while wearing leather

Conceptual Virginity

Amnesia Palindrome

"Secondly, proper names are transmitted by hearsay, in the same way information in general is propagated. We hear art spoken about as we hear So and So spoken about. One speaks of art as one spreads rumors, without necessarily verifying them, without knowing from whence they originate, without remembering from whom one got them, and without bothering about where they will go. A large part of culture, understood as acquired knowledge, as familiarity, as habitus, even as savoir-vivre, is woven of such rumors. Proper names posit themselves in this culture in order to maintain systems of refer­ences; this is their only function, as Kripke has shown. One knows of whom or what one speaks, even when one wouldn't know exactly what is understood or what is being said. Among proper names in general, cultural rumor circulates names of artists and names of works, to which it attaches the name of art. But rumor is not enough to make a tradition. Not that it lacks a sufficient amount of translations and betrayals, since, to the contrary, noise is the most probable state of all transmission. Rather, de jure if not de facto, the chains of transmis­sion woven by cultural rumor imply no judgment other than the initial baptism."
Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp, p. 68

Excerpts from the museum of salt and tobacco