The Pastrami Drawer

Talked with C.H., a roofer who had worked at Sellafield, had been fired (for taking materials, possibly, and worked in various places including Saudi Arabia 3 yrs ago (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), mostly in aluminum, and re-hired at Sellafield as subcontractor. Because of security and rules, he said it is impossible to take anything out of the fence surrounding Sellafield. But on the other hand he said today nothing is impossible. How?

1. Money
2. Violence
3. Sex

He mentioned someone who had used company materials (from Sellafield?) to build two houses and was now a millionaire by selling them. He would say no more on the issue. When first asked about homers (conversationally, maybe circuitously) he said, "Everyone does it." But maybe he had not completely understood what was being asked. He gave the example of a large wooden spool that would be used for holding cable, especially heavy gauge, and how that would quite easily be used for making a table. Whether or not the material is rough, it can be planed, or covered. In this case C.H. was talking about making things that could be produced with recycled materials. Had he ever made anything with the materials he works with (for home), namely aluminum sheeting, for example a barbecue—well, he has designed a barbecue with some friends, one that could serve 40 people, but that was never built.

Several methodological problems present themselves here: being itinerant; not being professionally related to the man; the question being asked is sensitive; the man is not sure how we are using the "research." (although later he appreciated—in rather drunk state—the "program" as contributing to learning, citing his daughter's new Ipad in terms of the building of knowledge and education, and gave us his name and phone numbers, saying he would do anything to help us.) Plus the fact of our being in a pub and some of us (including the researchers) being a bit drunk—is this part of the research process? Is the problem of obtaining information, and what can be considered information? (must it be corroborated by the subject?)

—Knowles Eddy Knowles sociological research notes after an evening spent in the Kings Arms Pub in Egremont, UK, January 28th, 2012

I'll be watching you

"The story of computer networks, BBSs and various other experiments in electro-democracy has so far been one of hobbyism for the most part. Many anarchists and libertarians have deep faith in the PC as a weapon of liberation and self-liberation--but no real gains to show, no palpable liberty.

I have little interest in some hypothetical emergent entrepreneurial class of self-employed data/word processors who will soon be able to carry on a vast cottage industry or piecemeal shitwork for various corporations and bureaucracies. Moreover it takes no ESP to foresee that this "class" will develop its underclass--a sort of lumpen yuppetariat: housewives, for example, who will provide their families with "second incomes" by turning their own homes into electro-sweatshops, little Work-tyrannies where the "boss" is a computer network.

Also I am not impressed by the sort of information and services proffered by contemporary "radical" networks. Somewhere--one is told--there exists an "information economy." Maybe so; but the info being traded over the "alternative" BBSs seems to consist entirely of chitchat and techie-talk. Is this an economy? or merely a pastime for enthusiasts? OK, PCs have created yet another "print revolution"--OK, marginal webworks are evolving--OK, I can now carry on six phone conversations at once. But what difference has this made in my ordinary life?"

—Hakim Bey Temporary Autonomous Zone

re-living the trauma of abandonment (regional road #7)

WE WENT TO INSTALL AN ART INHIBITION

Squat

Gandhi chair at Occupy Central in Hong Kong, April 28, 2012.

MANIFESTO

FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969!

Proposal for an exhibition “CARE”

MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES

______________________________________________________________

I.

IDEAS

A.

The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:

The Death Instinct: separation; individuality; Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change.

The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.

B.

Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.

Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change;

protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight;

show your work—show it again keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy

keep the home fires burning

Development systems are partial feedback systems with major room for change.

Maintenance systems are direct feedback systems with little room for alteration.

C.

Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.)

The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay. clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again—he doesn’t understand, seal it again—it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.

D.

Art:

Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. “We have no Art, we try to do everything

well.” (Balinese saying).

Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials. Conceptual & Process art, especially, claim pure development and change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes.

E.

The exhibition of Maintenance Art, “CARE,” would zero in on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and yield, by utter opposition, clarity of issues.

II.

THE MAINTENANCE ART EXHIBITION:

Three parts: Personal, General, and Earth Maintenance.

“CARE”

A.

Part One: Personal

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife.

I am a mother. (Random order).

I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, up to now separately I “do” Art.

Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition. (Right? or if you don’t want me around at night I would come in every day) and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soap-sculpture, wall-paintings”) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse.

The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.

MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK

B.

Part Two: General

Everyone does a hell of a lot of noodling maintenance work. The general part of the exhibition would consist of interviews of two kinds.

1.

Previous individual interviews, typed and exhibited.

Interviewees come from, say, 50 different classes and kinds of occupations that run a gamut from maintenance “man,” maid, sanitation “man,” mail “man,” union “man,” construction worker, librarian, grocerystore “man,” nurse, doctor, teacher, museum director, baseball player, sales”man,” child, criminal, bank president, mayor, moviestar, artist, etc., about:”

-what you think maintenance is;

-how you feel about spending whatever parts of your life you spend on maintenance activities;

-what is the relationship between maintenance and freedom;

-what is the relationship between maintenance and life’s dreams.

2.

Interview Room—for spectators at the Exhibition:

A room of desks and chairs where professional (?) interviewers will interview the spectators at the exhibition along same questions as typed interviews. The responses should be personal.

These interviews are taped and replayed throughout the exhibition area.

C.

Part Three: Earth Maintenance

Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum:

-the contents of one sanitation truck;

-a container of polluted air;

-a container of polluted Hudson River;

-a container of ravaged land.

Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced: purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists. These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Frozen Yogurt

can you spot the sweaty punctum?

Important mainly because of the words in the message.

Stimulators

"She didn't leave. Not that the shrink held any dark power over her. But it was easier to stay. Who'd know the day she was cured? Not him, he'd admitted that himself. "Pills are different," she pleaded. Hilarius only made a face at her, one he'd made before. He was full of these delightful lapses from orthodoxy. His theory being that faces are symmetrical like a Rohrschach blot, tells a story like a TAT picture, excites a response like a suggested word, so why not. He claimed to have once cured a case of hysterical blindness with his number 37, the "Fu-Manchu" (many of the faces having like German symphonies both a number and a nickname), which involved slanting the eyes up with the index fingers, enlarging the nostrils with the middle fingers, pulling the mouth wide with the pinkies and protruding the tongue. On Hilarius it was truly amazing." 

—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Did you write the historical paragraph in white on black at the foot of that advertisement? I published the first A5 format journal in the UK. I remember the troubles I had deciding where the margins had to go.

Sella/Stella/Field/Vista, or, Why do we assume devils have high-pitched voices?

ANNEX A-1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE

FIRST WRITTEN SUBMISSION OF INDONESIA

I. INTRODUCTION

1. The Republic of Indonesia ("Indonesia") challenges Section 101 of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 (the "Act"). In particular, Indonesia challenges the "special rule for cigarettes" in Section 101(b), which banned the production or sale of certain cigarettes it characterized as "flavored" (hereinafter the "Special Rule").

2. According to the legislative history of the Act, the Special Rule was meant to stop cigarette manufacturers from targeting underage smokers with flavours intended to increase the appeal of smoking. One type of flavoured cigarette escaped the ban – menthol cigarettes.

3. Cigarettes may contain a variety of ingredients and flavours that are added to the tobacco or filter. There is, in short, "no logical difference", according to Professor Michael Siegel of Boston University, "between menthol and the hundreds of other flavor additives put into cigarettes", and that includes clove.

4. Clove cigarettes have been produced in Indonesia for over a century. It is estimated that as many as 6 million Indonesians are employed directly or indirectly in the manufacture of cigarettes and the growing of tobacco. The cigarette industry, including clove, accounts for approximately 1.66 per cent of Indonesia's total gross domestic product ("GDP"). Indonesia has exported clove cigarettes to the United States for well over 40 years.

5. Notwithstanding the importance of clove cigarettes to its economy and its people, Indonesia does not object to the United States regulating the production or sale of cigarettes within its borders. Nor does Indonesia object to reasonable measures designed to keep cigarettes, including clove cigarettes, out of the hands of minors. What Indonesia objects to is a measure, in this case the Special Rule, that imposes a complete ban on clove cigarettes from Indonesia, while little or no restrictions are placed on regular cigarettes and menthol cigarettes.

6. The challenged measure is, in short, discriminatory and a violation of Article 2.1 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade ("TBT Agreement") in Annex 1A of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization ("WTO"). For largely the same reasons, the challenged measure also violates Article III.4 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 ("GATT 1994"). Furthermore, the challenged measure is more trade restrictive than necessary to achieve the stated goal of reducing youth smoking and is, therefore, in violation of Article 2.2 of the TBT Agreement.

7. Finally, in adopting the Special Rule, the United States failed to follow a number of additional requirements of the TBT Agreement. The Special Rule is inconsistent with Article 2.8 of the TBT Agreement because it bans cigarettes solely on the basis of descriptive characteristics. The United States also failed to live up to a number of its procedural obligations under Article 2 the TBT Agreement. Accordingly, the United States acted inconsistently with its obligations under Article 2.5, 2.9, 2.10, and 2.12 of the TBT Agreement.

8. The ban on clove cigarettes in the Special Rule created an unnecessary barrier to exports from Indonesia, a developing country Member. The United States was obliged to take account of the special and development and trade needs of Indonesia, a developing country Member of the WTO, when preparing and implementing the Special Rule. It did not do so. As such, the United States acted inconsistently with Article 12.3 of the TBT Agreement.

9. Because the United States has violated the GATT and the TBT Agreement, its actions are considered prima facie to constitute a case of nullification or impairment of Indonesia's rights under these agreements. As such, there is a presumption that the United States' actions have had an adverse impact on Indonesia in adopting and applying the Special Rule. The burden of proof, therefore, shifts to the United States to rebut the charge.

"I seem to remember I was in Leeds station at the time and the choice was whether to have one of their small ones or one of their large ones. I have got a feeling I opted for the large one, and very good it was too."

Shigeko Kubota, Napkin for Next Supper/Flux Napkins (1964-65).

Readymade Robots

museli for the mind

The artist Lawrence Weiner had an apocalyptic dream not long ago. Lava surged up from a hole in the earth and coursed over Chelsea, swallowing art galleries as dealers ran from the devastation. “It was like Pompeii,” Mr. Weiner recalled recently, shaking his heavily bearded head. “Very strange dream.”

Language as Sculpture, Words as Clay, Randy Kennedy (New York Times)

Tsang Tsellars

"...This city, as you know, is built deep beneath the surface of the earth, with only the vomitories protruding. Having paced the platform outside my own room, I took the lift to the next platform and paced that also, and so with each in turn, until I came to the topmost, above which begins the earth. All the platforms were exactly alike, and all that I gained by visiting them was to develop my sense of space and my muscles. I think I should have been content with this - it is not a little thing, - but as I walked and brooded, it occurred to me that our cities had been built in the days when men still breathed the outer air, and that there had been ventilation shafts for the workmen. I could think of nothing but these ventilation shafts. Had they been destroyed by all the food-tubes and medicine-tubes and music- tubes that the Machine has evolved lately? Or did traces of them remain? One thing was certain. If I came upon them anywhere, it would be in the railway-tunnels of the topmost storey. Everywhere else, all space was accounted for..."

THE MACHINE STOPS

by E.M. Forster (1909)

My life has been accompanied by a paper trail of ideas, scribbled hastily in an assortment of notebooks, napkins, or any surface that I can conveniently grab, before the initial impulse evaporates from my mind.


—Annie Lennox (from display in The House of Annie Lennox at the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Psychedelic socialism in a moment of pause and reflection

"Curiously, my thoughts now shifted from Spadolini to Goethe, the German patrician whom his countrymen have adapted and adopted as their very own literary prince, as I had observed to Gambetti when we last met. Goethe, the honest burgher, the collector of insects and aphorisms, with his philosophical mishmash. (Gambetti did not know the meaning of mishmash and I had to explain it to him.) Goethe, the petit bourgeois of philosophy, the man on the make, of whom Maria once observed that he did not turn the world on its head but buried his own in German parochialism. Goethe, the classifier of stones, the stargazer, the philosophical thumbsucker of the Germans, who ladled their spiritual jam into household canning jars, to be consumed at any time and for any purpose. Goethe, who assembled commonplaces for the Germans, to be published by the house of Cotta and rubbed into their ears by schoolmasters until they were completely blocked. Goethe, who betrayed the German mind more or less for centuries, paring it down to the German average with what I had described to Gambetti, in our last meeting, as Goethean assiduity. Goethe is the philosophical pied piper, the German for all seasons, I told him. The Germans take their Goethe like medicine, believing in its efficacy, its health-giving properties. Goethe is nothing other than Germany's foremost intellectual quack. I told Gambetti, her first intellectual homeopath. The Germans swallow their Goethe, as it were, and are healthy. The whole German nation ingests its Goethe and feels better. But Goethe is a charlatan, I told gambetti; Goethe's writings are the acme of German charlatanry. Be careful, Gambetti, I said, beware of Goethe. He gives everyone indigestion, except the Germans. They believe in Goethe and revere him as one of the wonders of the world. Yet all the time this wonder of the world is a philosophical truck farmer. (Gambetti did not know what a truck farmer was and laughed loudly when I told him.) Goethe's work as a whole is a philosophical truck farm. Goethe never reached the heights in any sphere, I said. He never rose above the mediocre in anything he attempted. He isn't the greatest lyric poet, he isn't the greatest prose writer, and to compare his plays with Shakespeare's is like comparing a stunted dachshund from the Frankfurt suburbs with a tall Pyrenean mountain dog. Take Faust, I said—what megalomania! A totally unsuccessful experiment by a megalomaniac whose ambition went to his head and who imagined that his head could encompass the world. Goethe, the Frankfurter with big ideas who moved to Weimar, the megalomaniac patrician in the world of women. Goethe, who turned the Germans' heads and made fools of them and has had them on his conscience for a hundred fifty years. Goethe is the gravedigger of the German mind, I told Gambetti. Compared with Voltaire, Descartes or Pascal, for instance, and of course with Shakespeare, Goethe is an alarmingly small figure. The prince of poets—what a ridiculous notion! Yet how utterly German! Hölderlin is the great lyricist, Musil the great prose writer, and Kleist the great dramatist. Goethe fails on all three counts. But now my thoughts returned to what Spadolini had said about my mother's being a special person."

– Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

A bystander saw him collapse while out on a walk in Brentwood shortly after midnight and called paramedics, who rushed him to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center where he was declared dead.

bran dance n old-fash

A dance or dancing party on a surface that is sprinkled with bran.

1833 Sketches D. Crockett 148 wTN, This is the famous bran dance of the west, and derives its name from the fact that the ground is generally sprinkled with the husk of Indian meal. 1883 (1972) McDowell Dialect Tales 152 Sth,They’re going to have a bran dance to-morrer over in the settlement [Ibid 155, We found the dancers in a rustic arbour… Floor there was none save the smooth earth covered three inches deep with wheat bran. Slightly dampened, it was pleasant to dance on; but Heaven preserve them when they danced it dry.] c1960 Wilson Coll.csKY, Bran-dance – an old fashioned solo dance, done on an open space at the country store or on a barn door [sic] properly sprinkled with bran or sand.

- Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume I: Introduction and A-C

51. DRǍGHICENI Hut

County Olt 19th century

            The oldest form of dwelling, of Neolithic origin, the mud, hut was widespread all over Europe in the Middle Ages. Climate, historic, social, economic and cultural causes have determined its existence in southern Romania until the beginning of the 20th century. This one, built around 1800, was brought to the museum in 1949, having been inhabited until one year prior to its transfer. By preserving an ancient building technique, as well as by the environment of life it presents, this mud hut from Drăghniceni village, county Olt as well as the neighbouring one brought from Castranove, county Dolj, are real documents of great historical, social and cultural value.

Muzeul Satului, Bucharest

The New Media Art

“It is always from the depths of its 

impotence that each power center 

draws its power, hence their extreme 

maliciousness, and vanity” 

― 

Gilles Deleuze

SMOKING MACHINE BY KRISTOFFER MYSKJA


http://kristoffermyskja.com/

the manchunian forager

Jamie Oliver finds Joy Division and New Order master tapes in restaurant basement

The tapes were found alongside guns and gold during an excavation in Manchester

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Photo: PA

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Ordermaster tapes when digging up the basement of a new restaurant in Manchester.

The new restaurant, which is being built in a former branch of Midland bank, was being excavated when the tapes were found, alongside guns, gold and jewellery. The total value of the haul is £1.1 million, reports Holy Moly. Oliver has since given everything found in the basement to the treasury.

New Order have just been announced as the Saturday night (September 8) headliner at this year's Bestival. Bestival will take place from September 6–9 at Robin Hill Park on the Isle Of Wight. For more information about the event, seeBestival.net.

Prior to that, the Manchester band tour the UK for the first time in over five years.

New Order will play:

O2 Apollo Manchester (April 26, 27)
Birmingham Ballroom (29)
O2 Academy Brixton (May 2, 3)
O2 Academy Glasgow (5)

To check the availability of New Order tickets and get all the latest listings, go toNME.COM/TICKETS now, or call 0871 230 1094.

Bang!

(Indeterminate, yet sharply delineated noise; perhaps of gunshot or fist thumping table or boot contacting stone)


"I refute it thus."
--(Dr. Samuel Johnson, kicking a stone; rejecting Bishop George Berkeley's idealist philosophy.)


Furniture


No matter what the debate, whatever its content or its medium (text or talk), there is likely to be some furniture around. While we talk about things and events, principles and abstractions, cognition and reality, or read about construction and objectivity, we do so in chairs and in rooms, at desks and tables, or even out in the open, where the rocks and trees are. The appeal of these things is that they are external to the talk, available to show that it is just talk, that there is another world beyond, that there are limits to the flexibility of descriptions. Hitting the furniture also works as a nonverbal act, offering the advantage of getting outside of language; its force is that it avoids the rhetorical danger of appealing to nonverbal reality by putting it into words.


The Realist's Dilemma


Of course, the hitting is not just a slapping; not only words signify. The table-thumping does its work as meaningful action, not mere behavior. All the pointings to, demonstrations of, and descriptions of brute reality are inevitably semiotically mediated and communicated. Rocks, trees and furniture are not already rebuttals of relativism, but become so precisely at the moment, and for the moment, of their invocation. We term this the realist's dilemma. The very act of producing a nonrepresented, unconstructed external world is inevitably representational, threatening, as soon as it is produced, to turn around upon and counter the very position it is meant to demonstrate.
The solidity and out-there-ness of furniture (etc.) makes it a hard case for relativists to deconstruct. And just as commonsense observation is the hard case for relativism, it is the soft case for realism. Furniture arguments are realism working on its chosen soft ground. However, there is a cost for realism in this strategy: for in resorting to these cases, realists appear to be setting aside, conceding even, a huge amount of more contentious stuff to relativism--language, madness, the social order, cognition, even science. And it is generally disputation about these sorts of things that ends in table-thumping, the point of such gestures being to bolster a realist defence of something more contestable. In the rhetorical situation we are describing, the relativists may be winning the Epistemological Wars, but are in danger of losing the final battle. The forces of relativism are gathered about the last and best-defended castle of realism (Fortress Furniture), laying siege to it, and in the process suffering a blistering bombardment--Bang! Bang! Bang!


The Bottom Line: The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations - Malcolm Ashmore, Derek Edwards, and Jonathan Potter

PTSD

"Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them".


Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 15

La Cochon Culturale

The commonality of animal rearing for food is rooted in the peculiarities of local history. Ashington’s history as a significant urban centre dates back only to the early twentieth century. Rapid development of the local mining industry in this period required the colliery owners to import a labour force from outlying rural areas and from their agricultural estate lands in places as distant as Ulster. Continuity of the rural subsistence skills that these people brought to the area was facilitated principally by the emergence and resilience of the allotment movement and stimulated periodically by the shortages of war, recession and unemployment.


Having said this, rearing of animals is more than a mere matter of subsistence. These semi-domestic animals are subjects of an array of beliefs and practices whose logic is intimately related to local experience, and, in particular, to the threat of mining death. Above all, the pig is simultaneously the most revered and feared of animals. In some accounts it is attributed with the powers of prediction. Charlie Burnsey: ‘You can tell when there’s a storm comin’ when a P.I.G. turns its arse to the breeze.’ In other accounts it is characterized as the purest of animals. Jackie Thompson: The pig eats nothing but ‘rubbish, muck and shite, but when you cut it open it’s as clean as a whistle’. Indeed, among the varied ingredients, the Guinness, the virgin’s urine, and the rabbit droppings, that are used to nourish prize vegetables, pig’s blood is regarded by many as the very best. Charlie Burnsey: ‘A bucket of gissy blood on your leeks works wonders . . . it’s like rocket fuel.’


Contrastively, for fear of inviting death many people refrain from using the word pig, referring to it instead as ‘P.I.G.’, ‘gissy’, ‘grunter’ or descriptively ‘round fat thing with stumpy legs’. On a number of occasions the taboo has been used effectively. For example, one man relayed a story of the last days of the strike of 1928. Many of the men at Newbiggin pit were weakening and returning to work. In response, a group of men broke in and nailed the decapitated head of a pig to the entrance of the main shaft. Before the management had time to remove it, one of the returning men saw it and beat a hasty retreat. Word of the event spread and the strike remained firm for a while longer


Leisure and Change in a Post-mining Mining Town - Andrew Dawson