Next Week@MIT, Yo

CMS COLLOQUIUM

ADVENTURES IN ILLEGAL ART:
CREATIVE MEDIA RESISTANCE AND NEGATIVLAND

Tuesday, December 7
7pm in Room 6-120

A 90-minute film/lecture presentation by Mark Hosler, founding member of Negativland. Mark will be in person to present the program, with Q and A to follow.

Made by Negativland in collaboration with various other experimental filmmakers, the show is a presentation of a series of short videos in which Negativland carries its love for found sounds and their critical and humorous re-use of mass culture over into the world of experimental movie making. Mark Hosler, a founding member of Negativland, will be in person to show these films in a video formatted lecture presentation that illustrates the many creative projects, hoaxes, pranks and “culture jamming” that Negativland has been doing since 1980. The presentation covers issues of media-literacy, creative and humorous anti-corporate art/activism, the role of advertising and corporate power in our lives, intellectual property issues, and the evolution of art, law and resistance in a media saturated multi-national world.

“Negativland isn’t just some group of merry pranksters; its art is about tearing apart and reassembling found images to create new ones, in an attempt to make social, political and artistic statements.  Hilarious and chilling.”   -   THE ONION

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Sponsored by Comparative Media Studies, MIT Office of the Arts, the DeFlorez Fund, Anthropology, Music and Theater Arts, and the Kelley-Douglas Fund

Hell Is …

I was going to greet you this morning with something about my hellish overnight train ride from Baltimore and that it has convinced me that hell is, in fact, other people, but then I checked my blog stats and noticed an avalanche of hits from Gaping Void thanks to Hugh’s mention so he gets lots of kisses today and I suppose I will alter my mantra to “hell is people on overcrowded 10-hour overnight train rides with no sleeper car.”

Never again.

Happy Four-Day Weekend

I’m heading out on the Acela for Thanksgiving and may or may not be blogging until Monday. Though I’m still here for a few hours so I may or may not be blogging more today.

Keep Chocolate Pure!

Imagine my dismay on biting into a dark chocolate cookie only to find it tastes entirely of ORANGE. Orange does not belong with chocolate, you taste nothing but orange. It is an orange cookie and you wasted that cocoa. Chocolate is perfect, why mess with perfection? You damn gourmands can’t leave well enough alone.

New Directions in Blogging

The dishblog.

Checking In

I am being crushed under the weight of comment spam.

I am also itchy from this wool turtleneck sweater.

Good morning everybody.

Mediated

“Say your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere–the middle of Saskatchewan, say. You have no radio, no cell phone, nothing to read, no gear to fiddle with. You just have to wait. Pretty soon you notice how everything around you just happens to be there. And it just happens to be there in this very precise but unfamiliar way. You are so not used to this. Every tuft of weed, the scattered pebbles, the lapsing fence, the cracks in the asphalt, the buzz of insects in the field, the flow of cloud against the sky–everything is very specifically exactly the way it is, and none of it is for you. Nothing here was designed to affect you. It isn’t arranged so that you can experience it, and you didn’t plan to experience it. There is no screen, no display, no entrance, no brocure, nothing special to look at, no dramatic scenery or wildlife, no tour guide, no campsites, no benches, no paths, no viewing platforms with natural-historical information posted under slanted Plexiglas lectern things–whatever is there is just there, and so are you. You begin to get a sense of what it would be like if you weren’t the center of it all.

But usually you are. That’s why you are a mediated person.”

Thomas de Zengotita, in Harper’s, December 2004

New Quotable Sitcom: Arrested Development

GOB THE MAGICIAN: “It is an illusion, not a trick. Tricks are something whores do for money….”

(sees a gaggle of children standing next to him)

“…Or, for candy!”

One Step Closer To Taking Over The World

Google has just launched a search engine for scholarly sources.

Which Decade Do You Represent?

My friend Serpico came up with this question and somehow was able to nail each of his friends perfectly with it. He feels he represents the Turn of the Century, and he is right. He said another friend was definitely 1940s, and he is right. I asked what decade I represent, and he and another friend said in unison “The Fifties.” I’m not sure why they were so forceful about it, but I have to say, they are right.

Ew.

Apparently “sexy” means “vain and plastic.”

Who is your sexiest man alive? Mine would be

or

or a few non-celebrity people I know.

Not Really True, But …

… in keeping with my recent over-essentializing gender posts:

Men really aren’t so uncomplicated, they just want to be.

via Makeoutcity

Potential Paper Topic

(For someone else.)

The motif of body-slams in I (Heart) Huckabees: What’s with that?

So Hard To Find A Good Man…

I did make some progress last night in learning to follow and not lead. My dance partner says I have gone from overt leading to “leading through following.” So apparently I have gone from aggressive to passive-aggressive. Well that’s what we girls are always accused of anyway, right? This dancing stuff is like a microcosm of gender relations.

So what does it mean, then, that I have no problem “following” when I’m dancing with an accomplished dancer like my instructor?

Submit!

So far my biggest problem with this dancing-lessons stuff is that I’m always unintentionaly trying to lead. There are very strictly-defined roles for men and women in formal dance, and the woman’s job is always and only to “Follow.” I am to wait for his cue on everything and never act without his “lead,” and try to anticipate his moves and act accordingly. I think it’s the only place where this kind of language is still allowed. I don’t have a problem with it, it’s just funny to be using it seriously. And I’m learning that I’m much more of a freestyler than even I knew. If I feel like turning, I start turning, then have to stop myself because he has not bidden it. I did it once even with the instructor and got scolded.

UPDATE: I wrote the previous before my dance class. I have now just returned from class, where I was not only scolded (“DID HE PULL YOUR ARM???? the instructor yelled across the room) but lectured (“Don’t be too generous, he needs to learn to be a strong lead, if you anticipate too much he’ll never learn, you’re teaching him to be wishy washy, you need to wait for him to take the lead … etc).

Metaphor For My Dating Life

I got bit by a dog this morning. It was one of those little nervous dogs. It was leashed up outside Store24 and shaking, so I stopped a moment to coo. And it bit me. Actually it just bit my gloves. The owner came out just as it sunk its teeth into my glove and he made a vaguely chiding remark to the dog and I walked away vowing never to pet strange dogs again.

Fucking Hippies In Court

The Fuck for the Forest couple had their day in court. They’re so adorable. I think I have a crush on that dreadlocked chick.

via Dazereader

Say No To Cupcakes?

Never! Although I agree that it is bizarre that cupcakes have become hip, and have posted about that here. I will never stop with the self-therapy that is cupcake-baking, but I also will never pay for a cupcake outside my home. That’s ridiculous. The therapy comes from the baking and sharing, not the eating.

Dear Manila Code Writers,

Please write something that will make it easier to delete comment spam. There should be check boxes next to all postings in the “discussion” section so that I can just check 12 boxes and then hit a “delete”button that will get rid of them all at the same time, rather than the current multi-step deleting process for each individual comment. It would also be nice to be able to close comments on individual posts, and better facilities for blocking commenters (perhaps by keyword as well as IP address and email) would be great.

Thanks,

Cynthia

UPDATE: Dave Winer just got fed up and wrote his own…

Googling Nightlife

A lot of people are landing here on google searches for “Sauce Davis Square”, the sucky bar I mentioned in a previous entry. I don’t think that is the kind of publicity a new bar wants. But if you are landing here on that search, you should know that it is a bar that might be chic if it were in another town but here it ends up being a kind of dressed-up frat boy bar, I suppose a slight step up from Joshua Tree (if “up” is the direction you want to go from Joshua Tree–personally I would prefer a step or two to the side).