Kurt Schwitters, the great dadaist of Cumbria

Philip Oltermann

The Guardian, Tuesday 28 April 2009

Panoramic exterior of the Merz Barn. Photograph: Nick May/Littoral

In the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, there is a cheekily doctored portrait of King Edward's eldest son, Prince Albert Victor. Half of his mustachioed face has been blacked out, and a razor blade has been glued across his chest in a reference to the (discredited) claims that the prince was Jack the Ripper. It looks like a piece of pop art, not unlike the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper LP, and so the date comes as a shock: 1947. A scrawl explains that this used to be a portrait of HRH, adding: "Now it is a Merz picture. Sorry!"

The prankster who wrote these words was Kurt Schwitters, one of the most innovative and eccentric artists of the 20th century. In his native Germany, there are schools and streets named after him. In Britain, where Schwitters spent his final 18 years, his legacy has been all but forgotten. Now a group of artists and academics, including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, want to change that - by building a Schwitters museum in the crumbling barn near Ambleside in the Lake District where he worked.

The Merz Barn today with a photo installation of the missing Merz Barn wall art work

The Merz Barn today with a photo installation of the missing Merz Barn wall art work, October 2008

Such a picture-postcard setting might seem an unlikely spot for a museum devoted to an artist now seen as one of the leading lights of the very urban dada movement; but Schwitters' life was anything but straightforward. Born in 1887 and brought up in Lower Saxony, he became Hanover's official typographer, establishing a bourgeois lifestyle by the time he came into contact with the more anarchic figures of the Weimar Republic's art world, such as George Grosz and Tristan Tzara.

Schwitters shared their techniques - cutting up newspapers, magazines and photographs and glueing them back together - but not their politics. His approach was also more wide-ranging, incorporating performance poetry, sculpture and architecture. A compulsive hoarder, he gradually transformed his home in Hanover into a sort of walk-in collage of detritus, incorporating paintings, abstract sculptures and found objects. The Merzbau, as Schwitters called this, grew so big that he had to ask his tenant on the floor above to move out so that he could break through the ceiling. (The term Merz was a contraction of the word Kommerz, and became a prefix for his collages.)

More On : Merz Barn Guardian

Related articles by Zemanta

• Dream by Jaume Plensa: the new face of the North West (telegraph.co.uk)
• Mark Wallinger's white horse is a winner (telegraph.co.uk)
• manifesto! (3quarksdaily.com)
• Paul Klein: Some Excellent New Exhibits This Time Around (huffingtonpost.com)
• Financial crisis good for artists (nationalpost.com)

Cildo Meireles at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on:             16 miles of string       Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

Billy Bang 2000

From UBUWEB

The renowned violinist, composer and improvisor Billy Bang was born in Mobile, Alabama, grew up in the South Bronx, and studied with the brilliant composer-performer Leroy Jenkins. In the 1970's he formed The Survival Ensemble, and later co-founded The String Trio Of New York. Bang has performed and collaborated with such remarkable musicians as Sam Rivers, Frank Lowe, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, Marilyn Crispell and James Blood Ulmer. His enthralling performance on this Roulette TV video opens with the wistfully plaintive blues melody, "Daydreams". Bang extends the opening emotional atmosphere through an astonishing variety of techniques that elicit dramatic and forward-propelling images before returning to the beginning mood. A wonderfully lyric ballad with allusions to play and work songs follows. Dedicated to Bang's friend Dennis Charles who went by the nickname Jazz, this composition is appropriately entitled "One for Jazz". Included in the piece is a poem that was his friend's favorite, authored and spoken here by Bang. The third and last selection is a firey, non-stop cadenza at presto-tempo, "Untitled". Afterwards in his interview, Bang speaks of searching and exploring the components of "Daydreams" and of being "magnetically pulled" into new aspects of the piece. He recalls the combination of Jazz and the European spirit in the AACM, and illuminates the "loft jazz" years in New York, emphasizing the creative persons involved and the development of more open ways of playing.

RESOURCES:

This UbuWeb resource is presented in partnership with Roulette

UbuWeb Film | UbuWeb

Two Poems--By Zbigniew Herbert

Volume 45, Number 16 · October 22, 1998

Two Poems

By Zbigniew Herbert

THREE POEMS BY HEART

I

I can't find the title
of a memory about you
with a hand torn from darkness
I step on fragments of faces
soft friendly profiles
frozen into a hard contour
         circling above my head
         empty as a forehead of air
         a man's silhouette of black paper

II

living—despite
living—against
I reproach myself for the sin of forgetfulness
you left an embrace like a superfluous sweater
a look like a question
our hands won't transmit the shape of your hands
we squander them touching ordinary things
calm as a mirror
not mildewed with breath
the eyes send back the question
every day I renew my sight
every day my touch grows
tickled by the proximity of so many things
life bubbles over like blood
Shadows gently melt
let us not allow the dead to be killed—
perhaps a cloud will transmit remembrance—
a worn profile of Roman coins

III

the women on our street
were plain and good
they patiently carried from the markets
bouquets of nourishing vegetables
the children on our street
scourge of cats
the pigeons—
                  softly gray
a Poet's statue was in the park
children would roll their hoops
and colorful shouts
birds sat on the Poet's hand
read his silence
on summer evenings wives
waited patiently for lips
smelling of familiar tobacco
         women could not answer
         their children: will he return
         when the city was setting
         they put the fire out with hands
         pressing their eyes
         the children on our street
         had a difficult death
         pigeons fell lightly
         like shot down air
now the lips of the Poet
form an empty horizon
birds children and wives cannot live
in the city's funereal shells
in cold eiderdowns of ashes
the city stands over water
smooth as the memory of a mirror
it reflects in the water from the bottom
and flies to a high star
where a distant fire is burning
like a page of the Iliad

CERNUNNOS

The new gods walked behind the Roman army at a suitable distance, so
Venus' swaying hips and Bacchus' uncontrolled fits of laughter would not seem improper. Ashes were still warm, ants and beetles solemnly burying the barbarian heroes.The old gods watched the entrance of the new ones from behind trees,
without sympathy but with admiration. The white, hairless bodies seemed weak yet attractive.Despite difficulties with language a summit meeting took place. After
a few conferences, spheres of influence were divided up. The old gods were content with minor positions in the provinces. But for important ceremonies their figures were carved in stone—crumbly sandstone—together with the gods of the conquerors.The real shadow on the collaboration was cast by Cernunnos. Although
he adopted a Latin ending on the advice of his colleagues, no laurel could conceal his spreading, constantly growing horns.This is why he usually resided in distant woods. Often he could be
seen in the dark meadows at dusk. In one hand he holds a serpent with a lamb's head, with the other he draws signs on the air that are completely incomprehensible.
(Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

Escape from the Zombie Food Court

Joe Bageant recently spoke at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University at Lexington, and the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, where he was invited to speak on American consciousness and what he dubbed "The American Hologram," in his book, Deer Hunting With Jesus. Here is a text version of the talks, assembled from his remarks at all three schools.

By Joe Bageant

I just returned from several months in Central America. And the day I returned I had iguana eggs for breakfast, airline pretzels for lunch and a $7 shot of Jack Daniels for dinner at the Houston Airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don't let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free.

Anyway, here I am with you good people asking myself the first logical question: What the hell is a redneck writer supposed to say to a prestigious school of psychology? Why of all places am I here? It is intimidating as hell. But as Janna Henning and Sharrod Taylor here have reassured me that all I need to do is talk about is what I write about. And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

Read More

Playlist 68 -- spring 2009

The Realtime Genie

Image via CrunchBase

The Realtime Genie

14 Comments

by Steve Gillmor on April 14, 2009

The realtime lashback has been surprisingly tame given the emotional challenges it presents. FriendFeed’s decision to double down on realtime streaming of text has had several primary effects: increased usage, swarming behavior around live events, and pushback from some who fled Twitter to FriendFeed in search of more contemplative dialogue.

What happens when a realtime conversation is possible? We already know the answer: IM. We are gently queried for permission to engage, and with social contract in hand we answer questions, catch up from where we last left off, and negotiate the outline of our next meeting. Attempts at hanging around on either end are met with increased irritation masked by politeness, until finally a rapid-fire l8r kthxbye cya dance wears out any remaining welcome.

But realtime swarms have new dynamics, not readily understood or guided by agreed-upon ground rules. Where IRCs and attached video chats hew to explicit or implicit boundaries, realtime threads need their own rationale for existence to get much beyond the IM formula. For some, a debate is hung off of a blog post or podcast, with representatives of the pro and con perspectives managing the conversation flow. For others, the “post” is a statement of thesis, a challenge to engage. When oldtimers criticize these threads as nothing new, they’re usually right.

Why, then, are so many of us so energized by this frontier? First, we are tired of RSS, tired of the mediocrity of the good-enough flow of half-facts and pseudo insight. Yes, I’m tired of my own bullshit, but only of my inability to adequately describe what’s in front of us. Normally I expect the pragmatic enterprise……..

Read More

Related articles by Zemanta

• FriendFeed Is In Danger of Becoming the Coolest App Everyone Uses (stephenpickering.com)
• Google Has Fumbled FeedBurner's Real Time Opportunity (costpernews.com)
• How many tweets does an earthquake make? (4cloudcomputing.blogspot.com)
• Twitter-for-business service Yammer moves into lifestreaming for business (venturebeat.com)
• Build an Annotated IM Feed Reader with Friendfeed (micropersuasion.com)

Carnal Nation

 

Masturbation Ad From Botswana

One of the problems facing education about HIV/AIDS and other STIs in the United States is that most agencies seem to work under the assumption that the ideal way to talk about sexually-transmitted disease is not to talk about sex. To the extent that United States health campaigns do acknowledge sexuality, it's usually to emphasize that it's something you really shouldn't do.

That is why it's so fascinating to see something like the ad below, from Botswana, where approximately 23% of the adult population is HIV-positive, a rate that's second only to Swaziland. We found it via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula. A much larger version is here. We can't really provide any context for it, or how typical it is of sex-education efforts in Botswana, but just as the reality of AIDS on that scale is unimaginable to us, so is a response this frank and realistic.  As Myers points out, we still remember what happened to Jocelyn Elders when she dared to mention masturbation. Picture after the cut.

 

Storm by Tim Minchin

The Mad Ones

 

Illustration by Ed Piskor; from “The Beats”

 THE BEATS
A Graphic History
Text by Harvey Pekar and others.
Art by Ed Piskor and others.
Edited by Paul Buhle
199 pp. Hill & Wang.
$22 By JOHN LELAND 

Published: April 10, 2009

The writers of the Beat Generation had the good fortune to give themselves a name and to write extensively about their lives, in novels like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and William Burroughs’s “Junkie,” in poems like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and, later, in memoirs like Joyce Johnson’s “Minor Characters” and Hettie Jones’s “How I Became Hettie Jones.” Jones once said they couldn’t be a generation because they could all fit in her living room, but in the popular imagination they were much more than the sum of their body parts or writings. They were a brand.

When the country still considered literary writers and poets important public figures, these were literary writers and poets who came with luridly colorful lives, full of sex and drugs and cars, “the best minds of my generation,” “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,” cultural avatars who were often linked more by lifestyle considerations than by writerly ones. If they inspired lots of bad poetry set to bongos and little poetic discipline, they have even more effectively escaped disciplined literary or historical analysis. They rocked; they posed a threat to the nation’s youth. Either you got them or you didn’t. What could matter compared with that?

“The Beats” moves this mythology into the comics realm, where it finds a nice fit. In the introduction, Harvey Pekar and the lefty historian Paul

Buhle write that the book has “no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages,” adding that “no one claims this treatment to be definitive. But it is new, and it is vital.”

The pages that follow, mostly written by Pekar and illustrated by his frequent collaborator Ed Piskor, live up to both of those claims, while also living down to the caveats. “The Beats” is plainly celebratory. The writers and artists don’t try to untangle the Beats’ hazy history — which is often drawn from works of fiction — or to examine their writings. There are almost no quotations.

Read More

Related articles

• The Mad Ones (nytimes.com)
• James Franco Beings To 'Howl' (pinkisthenewblog.com)
• Eisenberg Set to Play Poet (screenhead.com)
• Howls (nytimes.com)
• Chris Evans to Play Jack Kerouac in Sexy-Gay-ish Kill Your Darlings (queerty.com)
• Upcoming biopic to examine Beats' dark beginnings (pastemagazine.com)
• Jesse Eisenberg is Allen Ginsberg! (cinematical.com)

Victor Jara: Manifiesto

Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside

Image via Wikipedia

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Now widely regarded as Robert Silverberg's masterpiece, "Dying Inside," first published in 1972, has just been reissued in a handsome trade paperback with a new preface by its author, one of science fiction's most distinguished writers. Yet this book is hardly what most people think of as science fiction. As a character, Selig has more in common with Philip Roth's Portnoy than with the more typical superwarriors of, say, Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." Instead, Silverberg's novel offers an eerily evocative picture of New York life in the late 1950s and '60s: a time of bisexual professors, swinging singles, Black Power, psychedelic drugs and all-round social and political upheaval. Given Selig's bookishness, the novel is also suffused with buried quotations from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and many other literary eminences.

Above all, though, "Dying Inside" is a pleasure to read, full of that dry humor so common to melancholic intellectuals. Selig's taste in music, we learn, runs to "pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you'd be likely to whistle after one hearing." At one time he contemplates writing a novel about -- what else? -- alienation in modern life.

More here.

Related articles

• Hugo and Nebula Award Winners (tor.com)
• Robert Heinlein's softer side (guardian.co.uk)

Nathaniel Kahn: My father, my architect

Cadie: the world's first Cognitive Auto-Heuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

Technorati Tags: it,web3

Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

When you walk into a dark field in the middle of the night...

and look up into a black sky and wonder how many stars there are in the universe, let's be honest: in all likelihood you don't have the faintest clue, and even if you're one of the few who do, you lack any real capacity to comprehend the figure save for the same vague sense of stunned wonder that our earliest human ancestors felt when they looked up from the African savannah at the same starry sky.

Our species' journey toward tonight's epochal announcement had much less to do with that awestruck moment than it did with the moment those same ancestors woke up hungry the next morning and started studying animal tracks in the savannah mud, thereby inadvertently developing concepts like time and causality which, by abstracting both location and temporal context into a unique reconning tool within the brain, sparked the set of responses that, ages later, we now call reason.

From there, mankind's journey toward artificial intelligence took place over so many centuries and in the hands of so many thinkers that it is possible here only to pause to mark a few of the moments when one of our genius forebears expanded the edge of our species' technological envelope: Aristotle's system of reasoning based on means, not ends; al-Khowarazmi's algorithms; Descartes, Locke and Hume's monumental insights into the nature of knowledge; Church and Turing's theory of a machine capable of computing all functions which are computable; the Allied code-breakers who, struggling to crack the fiendish Enigma machine amid the horrific irrationality of World War II, inadvertently facilitated the birth of the modern computer.

The decades that followed saw an acceleration of innovation not seen since the Industrial Revolution. Computing pioneers from the game theorist von Neumann to the economist Morgenstern engaged in a tumultuous Hegelian rondolet in which probability theory mated with utility theory to spawn decision theory. Operations research and Markov decision processes tackled actions taking place in a sequence. Neuroscience shed light on the parallels and differences between electronic and human brains. Cognitive psychology delivered sound specifications for knowledge-based agents. The now-legendary summer workshop at Dartmouth in 1956 birthed automata, the first neural networks and the invention of a program capable of thinking non-numerically.

But close though we may have come to a theory of the brain, the body - computer hardware - wasn't capable of handling the extraordinary processing demands that any reasonably "intelligent" brain would place on its circuitry until Moore's Law really kicked in a few years back and the modern ultra-dense machinery of atomic scale-sized gates and their light-based interconnections finally reached the scale of brain neurons - and then surpassed it, when, in early 2007, a tight-knit, vaguely feared quantum computing group here at Google extended computers with quantum bits of Einstein-Bose condensate, polynomially speeding up our machines' data-processing ability.

Now we were finally ready to begin the painstaking work of building the first evolving intelligent system. We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity (as we decided to refer to our Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity early

More

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google beings trek to Ariticial Intelligence on the web (jerichooncbs.blogspot.com)
• Edge: ENGINEERS' DREAMS By George Dyson (via Diigo) (edge.org)
• Repent! The Singularity Is Near! (plastic.com)

In the Mood For Love -- Wong Kar Wai

edible nation

Publisher Brian Halweil, Editor Gabrielle Langholtz, and photo editor Michael Harlan Turkell tell the story of launching Edible Manhattan.

Edible Manhattan website.

About Edible Communities

EDIBLE COMMUNITIES, INC. creates editorially rich, community-based, local-foods publications in distinct culinary regions throughout the United States, and Canada. We connect consumers with family farmers, growers, chefs, and food artisans of all kinds, and believe that every person has the right to affordable, fresh, healthful food on a daily basis. We are a for-profit, member-driven corporation - individuals who own our publications are local-foods advocates and residents of the communities they publish in - a business model that not only supports our values, but also preserves the integrity of our member publications and the communities we serve.

More info >>

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sustainable Agriculture (chefann.com)
• Brooklyn's Culinary Rennaisance: Hungry For Change (takepart.com)
• Isabel Cowles: What Alice Waters is Missing (huffingtonpost.com)

The Great Buck Howard

Niyaz -- The Hunt

Mandana sent this

G20 London Summit: The New Face of Finance

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In countering U.S. lobbying for increased stimulus spending, European countries advance two arguments: (1) that their generous social-welfare programs are functionally equivalent to stimulus packages, and (2) that stricter financial regulation is the best way to restore confidence in the market and increase demand. Regardless of the merit of this second argument, the American Congress is unlikely to support the levels of financial regulation desired by the Europeans, even if President Obama embraces the idea.

April 1, 2009

By Joseph S. Germani, Contributor

In the midst of the global financial crisis, the worldwide economy stands to take on a new personality. The debates and decisions at the London Summit of G20 will help determine the new face of global financing and international trade. Already, the buzz preceding the conference indicates some of the themes that will shape its discussions.

Addressing the alarming trend towards protectionism should be a major priority of the leaders attending the Summit. When this group last met, in November, leaders pledged to avoid putting in place protectionist measures in their countries. This pledge, at least to some degree, has amounted to merely paying lip service to the virtues of free trade. A recently released World Bank study reports that 17 G20 members have put in place 47 trade-restricting measures since the November 2008 Washington Summit. These range from “Buy American” restrictions on bailed-out U.S. companies, to EU export subsidies on butter, cheese, and milk powder, to an Indian ban on Chinese toys, and many other trade restrictions.

Whether these policies amount to major trade restrictions, or are simply a drop in the bucket, is not really the point. What they do represent is a troubling spirit of protectionism that, if pushed too far, could have devastating effects on the global economy. Most economists agree that protectionism, by limiting the range of products available to consumers, decreases economic efficiency and hurts the economy.

If world leaders continue to bend to increased pressure from insecure populations that believe protectionism is the answer to their economic woes, a series of trade wars could erupt. The beginnings of such a problem are already apparent in some trade battles already underway.

Read more

Related articles by Zemanta

• The European Single Market Is Showing Its Seams (nytimes.com)
• Worries Voiced Over Economy (nytimes.com)
• Diplomatic Memo: Parsing the G-20's $1 Trillion Pledge - So Far, Only on Paper (nytimes.com)