Dan Graham – Rock My Religion
Download Rock My Religion (450Mb, AVI)
From UBUWeb
Adrian Toll
Greed is God
Reading about the unfolding credit crunch, a name which now seems rather quaint given the burgeoning catastrophe throughout world markets and personal finances, has been rather like rubbernecking a car crash around the corner, only to realise too late that the car in front has slammed it’s brakes on and you’re about to plough into it. As the consequences of the crisis in financial markets trickle down into everybody’s lives (”trickle down economics” never before contained such bitter irony), it seems an appropriate time to survey some of the more readable and enlightening articles about the crisis, while taking a look at what happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen in the future.
In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.
From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
An excerpt from the introduction to Leonardo da Vinci’s published notebooks, available at the Project Gutenberg website.
Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing – since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme – I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing for himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth.
The Future of the Book
Sven Birkets writes in The Atlantic about his fear that the Amazon Kindle will mean the end of the “deep” contextualisation that physical books give – libraries, book shops, history.
What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs. Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience. But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself. There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake. However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.
Lords of Finance
John Lanchester, in the New Yorker, reviews what sounds like a fascinating book “Lords of Finance” by Liaquat Ahamed, which takes a timely look at the role of central banks and central bankers in the world’s financial markets: Heroes and Zeros
The portrait of Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, reminded me of a piece from the notebooks of Geoffrey Madan, a well-heeled London socialite with many artistic friends. (Harold Macmillan, in his introduction to the notebooks, described Madan as having “something of the look of those young men who stand about to no apparent purpose in Renaissance paintings”).
This morning I saw a magnificent sight. I came up to the City in the Underground rather late, about half-past ten. At Bond Street a man got in whom I just know, and have spoken to three or four times in my life.
He wore loose clothes, a ringed and jewelled tie, a crumpled black hat. His general presence made a most distinguished effect, suggesting all manner of romantic things: a Restoration poet, a historic French admiral, a bearded nobleman of Spain – the ideal which everyone would like to think his own great-grandfather attained, to adapt a famous obituary phrase. This strange being was in a state of high tension. He lay back looking half strangled, as it fallen from a great height, or praying to be supported in some heavy trial; darted a glance away, focussing a distant passenger and slowly dropping his chin; glared round with the queer look of a man swelling with laughter and longing to share it with someone else; or groaned aloud in pain.
I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now
The original 1969 recording of I Am Sitting In A Room by Alvin Lucier.
Lucier records himself narrating a text, and then plays the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have a characteristic resonance (e.g., between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are gradually emphasised as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action – it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice…”, and concludes with, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.
Audio from UBUWeb’s Alvin Lucier page
Quote from the good Wikipedia article about Lucier
Alvin Lucier’s official website
The Beijing Olympics – Envy and economics, then back to normal
We start with a commentary on the Olympic opening ceremony as seen from Egypt by Lelyn Masters, Our Man In Cairo:
Envy is at the root of much racism, against China, against America, against the Jews.
I saw the Chinese spectacle. The Arabic commentator, in the dress of a sheik, explained to us that the Chinese were using the spectacle to intimidate the world. It was quite interesting to me how the Chinese adapted the Greek ceremony. It was as if the far east and the west had joined together and skipped the Arab world.
When the commentators spoke of Arab competitors they spoke of competitors from the “united Arab nation.” They didn’t speak of them as if they were from individual countries. The broadcast was from Dubai, of course, and there was no rhetoric of Emirate superiority in sports, the way it was no doubt spoken of in the US. Again, the key phrase was “Arab unity.”
PanArabism is an interesting movement, often at odds with Islamists, but equally enraged at the existence of Israel. It is in a spirit of Panarabism that Egyptians would feel personally threatened by Israel and the US, whereas these two countries are doing nothing against Egypt, but rather are giving tons of financial aid.
So actually, all this talk of Arab unity could be read as antisemitic, anti-Chinese (who are trying to intimidate us) and ultimately an expression of one thing: envy.
How Google is changing language – and how the Telegraph lost its soul
The dominance of Google is radically changing written language on the internet – through their search engine and advertising programmes such as AdSense they are homogenising the meanings of words. This provides a strong impetus for newspapers to ignore whatever editorial ethics they had left in their desperate rush towards the money from online advertising.
Hillary Clinton’s fat ankles
One theme that has run throughout the Democratic presidential primaries in the USA has been people’s pleasant amazement that, unless there’s a huge upset (remember George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004?), the next president of the USA will be either a woman or black. This is celebrated as proof of how far the country has come in terms of racial and sexual equality. But, certainly in terms of the political commentary in the media, the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama brings a further bitter twist to Yoko Ono’s comment that “woman is the nigger of the world” (later turned into a song by her and John Lennon - watch it, including a great introduction by Lennon, on YouTube).
Clinton’s appearance features heavily in the coverage of her campaign, for example Carl Bernstein’s disgust at her “thick ankles”. If we’re talking about appearances, what about Obama’s fat lips? Can you imagine the McCain audience question “How are we going to beat the bitch?”, to which he replied “good question!”, rephrased as “How are we going to beat that black bastard?” There’s a whiff of suspicion that, admittedly along with other concerns about Clinton, the commentators would prefer a man to win, even if he is black.
