In awe of human madness...

A thousand things I have to do today. Still I spent an hour reading this article Al sent me and thinking about it:

The Dark Side of Dubai

Dubai has been a fascination of mine for years, from its simulated histories to its booming excesses, but this article flat-out destroys me. The portrait the writer produces of the city-state is nothing short of terrifying in the prospects it reflects for humanity. Read this article. Tell me what you think. I'm in awe... impressed and afraid.

Some amazing pictures to augment the article here:




Editorial and subjective though he may be, Johann Hari is one hell of a journalist. This story seems like a life's work to me, I'd love to be able to process the enormity of any place as well as he does, even with a monster like this. I love how he ties the Dubai back to how we run our globalized economy as a whole, just hyper-condensed into one place. Read More......

Yves Klein Lives

For a while now, I've been working on a paper about the amazing Yves Klein. Today I presented my research.


First: an 8 minute lecture on the artist's life, work, criticism.


I then quickly dashed outside and bid the class to follow.


Then, the reading of a manifesto I edited together from Klein's journals, followed by a leap into the void. I was attempting to levitate off the balcony:








Pretty close, eh?

Thanks to Anna for the lovely Photos. Read More......

Point, counterpoint, counter-counterpoint: graffiti bureaucracy and graffiti.

Shepard Fairy was arrested in Boston a week or so back during his largest show to date, which Wooster Collective provided a good account of. This is on top of the copyright kerfuffle his Obama poster has generated, which has provided food for thought.

This latest development is amazing to me. Faced with all the depressing, bureaucratic bullshit that our media/justice apparatus is composed of, what does Fairey do? Keeps right at it, right at the heart.





These billboards were installed around the Boston area. They are an exquisite reminder to me that all that matters is passion, and that you can refute politics with poetics. People will be listening.

This century, by no fault of its own, is gonna try and squash you down in the tension between the enormity of the world and the fragility of its human structures. Keep yo' head up.

via, via, via, photos by Hargo, who took this little jem as well:
Read More......

Poster Boy and media mixing

So when I was in New York I was fascinated by how quickly people jumped on the pasted-up advertisements in the subways. They're sticky and disposible, and within minutes of a new run somebody comes along and slashes away portions, re-assembling them into hilarious and subversive on-the-spot collages.

Photo from Poster Boy on Flickr

It's great. It's like instant counter-capitalism. Some perfected ad campaign is spewed out to get consumers to buy some new thing, and the masses instantly critique and satirize it.

My buddy Luke pointed out Poster Boy to me, who has elevated this practice to his chosen art form:
Read More......

This time last year

The spirits of the dead miss each other.

We know they do, because occasionally their whispered, lost communications go astray and drift across our mind. The human mind sympathizes with the loss, the grief and creates its own story, without really knowing why. That discontentment breeds and broods in the souls of poets and on the minds of thinkers and in the hands of artists until it metamorphoses into something beautiful. Until it does so it is excruciating.

The pain of butterflies is in their fragility, knowing that the slightest push results in a tear, the loss of a crystal so delicate and beautiful that it has no material value. This is our legacy, the production of the crystal, regardless of the pain and the cost, regardless of the value. Read More......