Have you seen the You Are Beautiful campaign?

In this installation, they put cups in a fence to spell out the phrase, and then they tracked the changes people made by rearranging the piece:





In other news, there is a new edition of Rabbit Light Movies, featuring a host of great poets.

My brother sent me this funny cartoon:



Blake Butler has issued a manifesto, of sort.

The Living Library is coming to America:



Also, in case you were wondering, there is such a thing as a Human Calendar.

Coconut 13

is alive!!!!

—with new work by
Me, Rae Armantrout, David Lehman,
Ariana Reines, Teresa K. Miller, Kate Colby, Carrie Olivia Adams,
James Belflower, Anne Marie Rooney, Kristi Maxwell, Jason Zuzga,
Megan Kaminski, Nellie Haack, Claire Donato, Ravi Shankar,
Emily Anderson, Laynie Browne, Jonathan Doherty, Kathleen Jesme,
Matina Stamatakis, Mike Young, and Terence Winch.

Ratatat's album Classics is justly named.

Wow.

Seriously.

If you don't already love it, you should check it out.

"More and more I strive for simplicity. I use worn metaphors. It's what's basically eternal. For example, stars resemble eyes or death is like sleep." (Borges)



Those are the opening images of Jean Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), which I watched for the first time tonight.

I'll be straight with you, it's the most effective anti-war film I've ever seen.

But for some reason it's a film you never really hear very much about; nobody ever talks about Godard's Les Carabiniers; but I'm thinking people should start. Maybe I could get the buzz going: put Les Carabiniers on your Netflix queue!

There are parts in this movie that will make you wince.

Also, there is a sequence where a character goes to the movies for the first time and it is probably one of the best sequences I've ever seen in a film. I don't want to spoil it for you, but trust me, it's deadly.










ps - If you happen to be interested in the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari, I'm participating in a summer-long reading group dedicated to their work; we have a website where you can come and visit and share your ideas. Right now my argument is: "Disengagement is the only truly revolutionary action."

Russian artist Alexander Kosolapov:

Hero, Leader, God

*

Blake Butler and Ken Baumann have combined forces to produce a new print journal called NO COLONY, which promises to be excellent. You can now preorder it for only $11. It is imperative that you support a journal that uses images from Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain in their promotional materials. This means they know what's up.

*

Here, too, is some recent work by Sr. Garcia:

You probably never thought you'd see this combination of artistry, but yet here it is:

David Lynch - "On Ideas"




"Much On The Cliffs: The Philosophies of John Ashbery"




Raffi - "Baby Beluga" live




Ann Lauterbach Reads Barbara Guest's "Nudes" @ St. Mark's




Starship - "We Built This City"

Canadian electronic musician Milosh:

"The City" - Directed by Walter Robot

If you like things that are awesome, you really must listen to Christian Bök read Hugo Ball’s poem “Karawane.”

New issue of the Lacanian journal The Symptom is up.

Click here for Lee Rourke's top 10 books about boredom.

Click here for China Miéville's top 10 weird fiction books.

Also, Johannes Göransson has an interesting post about "the avant-garde" vs "the grotesque".

Illustrations by Nick Dewar:





Check out Heather Green's two fantastic new poems in Sixth Finch.

Hopefully you've already purchased your inexpensive subscription to The Cupboard. If not, you should do it right this instant. I just got my copy of their first installment and I must tell you, it's a super cool pocket-sized collection of tales from Jesse Ball. I can't wait to devour it.

While I'm on the advertising front, you should probably also purchase Julie Doxsee's Undersleep, which just came out from Octopus Books. I would like to be reading it right now but Caitlin won't let go of it.

If you're a writer, Opium Magazine is looking for tips you've gotten from other writers.

According to The Guardian, British avant-garde fiction is having a comeback.

Enrique Metinides is Mexico City's most famous crime scene photographer. Below is the first of a five part series on him:

Here is the link to the other parts.

Illustrator Michael Walton:

Blossom

Decline

Salvation

The Independent asks a very smart and intriguing question: Is art running out of ideas?

Keith Gessen has an essay at n+1 about that thing we never talk about: How much money does a writer need to survive?

The new issue of Jacket is alive. In it you'll find an essay by William Watkin called “Though we keep company with cats and dogs”:
Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben.

Joshua Heineman animates historic pictures from the New York Public Library:

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG:

Radiohead's new video, for their song "House of Cards," was made without a camera. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created by visualizing that data with the use of lasers. It was Directed by James Frost:

Feist on Sesame Street, revising her song 1,2,3,4 to teach kids how to count:

Caitlin came across this really amazing media pioneer and audio documentarian named Tony Schwartz, who unfortunately passed away last month.

One of his projects was called "Nancy Grows Up," in which he recorded audio of his daughter from the time she was born until she was in her teen years, and then compiled it into one continuous track that expresses her development. It is stunning. You can listen to it here.

You can also hear a radio program about Schwartz here.

Schwartz is probably most famous for this crazy, now infamous, "Daisy Ad" made for Lyndon Johnson's 1964 re-election campaign:

But I also like this ad he did against Spiro Agnew:

Sonnet to Science
by
Edgar Allan Poe

Music written and performed by Alex Colwell
Directed by Jeff Burns

The Tramp & The Blind Girl
(1931)

WALL-E & Eve
(2008)

Last quarter I taught a course called Critical Analysis of Nonverbal Cinema. We watched Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, Ron Fricke’s Baraka, Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, Simon Pummell’s Bodysong, and a few others; but my students’ favorite film of all was unanimously Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.

Even though few of them knew who Chaplin was before the screening -- none had seen any of his pictures -- afterwards they all seemed smitten, which is how I felt leaving the theater last night when Caitlin & I went to see the new Pixar movie, WALL-E.

Since there are moments of dialogue in WALL-E, it’s not, strictly speaking, a nonverbal film. But it’s close – like Triplets of Bellville close. So I would think that anyone interested in nonverbal cinema or pantomime would absolutely love this picture. I sure did. And I don’t think it’s totally farfetched to compare it to Chaplin.

To my mind, WALL-E is like an updated version of City Lights: a story told primarily through visuals in which a lonely eccentric falls in love with a beautiful and intelligent woman who appears to be out-of-his-league, and then struggles through various trials and tribulations to prove his love.

I don't know. It's something to think about.

I don't think I'm related to the British artist Russell Higgs, but he seems like an interesting fellow.

Here are a few examples from his project entitled A Fresh Snapshot Of Myself Every Single Day.

from his artist's statement: "As it is exceedingly likely that there is no almighty point to Existence other than to Explore the Experience, my work tends to be heavily informed by ideas around SELF CREATED PURPOSE, SELF OWNERSHIP and LIVING AS ART (Transhuman Automorphism)."

11 September 2006

26 June 2008

7 February 2007

German artist Sarah Illenberger:

Schwein

Painted Love 3

Neon Food 2

Here are some deadly musicians who will tickle your ears:

Madagascar

Gregory Pepper & His Problems

Beach House

Grouper

Babe, Terror

Lexie Mountain Boys

Swedish photographer Linus Ricard:

Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick:

The Blue Knight
(2007)

Ghost of a Chicago Fish Shack
(2006)

Araña
(2007)

Chicago Caterpillar
(2005)