Matter and Memory: A Conversation with experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison

"A (nitrate) print goes through various stages of "decomp," as it’s called for short in the archival world. And they also have terms for those various stages, the first one being that the print gets "tacky," then stickier and then they call it "donut," because a ring has formed. And then something that maybe came from a Canadian archivist, it's called a "hockey puck". And then at that point there is nothing to do with it, you can't even play hockey with it. Then it eventually turns into dust."


(via GreenCine Daily)

Real Mince Pies

"Take veel ysode and grynde it smale. Take harde eyren isode and ygron and do thereto with prunes hole; dates, icorved pynes and raisons corance hool spices, and powdor, sugar salt; make a litell coffin, and do this fars thereinne, and bake it, and serve if forth."  

just in case you haven't seen it by now, the magnificent online Early and Clairvoyant Journals by Hannah Weiner...

Bookseller's Plates

(via Coudal Partners) 

Anodyne on Steven Shearer at the CAG--

"That young dude posing down with his prize pot plant, his eyes glittering vampire-red from the camera’s flash? Irony. The painting of the greasy lunk whose hair highlights spell out H-A-S-H? Irony. Shearer’s fake Port Coquitlam basement metal band, the Puff Rock Shiteaters? Irony, baby. The alternative – that these works might actually be as transparent as glass, that Shearer might find something worthwhile or even appealing in his subjects – is too worrying for most institutional viewers to contemplate. Thus the unsigned wall panel at the CAG, whose anonymous author spends several densely worded paragraphs discussing systems of representation, and Shearer’s hopscotching jumps among them, without ever once discussing the artist’s subjects, a list apparently designed to bait the dependably liberal conscience of the Canadian art bureaucracy: longhairs; burnouts; suburban rednecks; decayed child stars; Kiss tribute bands; drunks, and assorted other “high”-culturally challenged folks."

Balance in the service of falsehood

" By promoting schools of journalism, media owners could claim that trained editors and reporters were granted autonomy to make decisions based on professional judgment, rather than on the needs of proprietors and advertisers. As a result, owners could present their media monopoly as a service to the community."

S/FJ on IDM

"The addition of "intelligent" and "music" to the category of original music composed and performed largely through cut'n'paste reproduction strategies is the history of the bleaching and bourgeosification of the tradition, and meanwhile I am still waiting for something as intelligent or musical from Sean O'Hagan (or Squarepusher or Shadow) as "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel." As for "dance," don't make me laff, it hurts my jaw.

There is a social content to IDM -- produced entirely by the drama between sonic composition/production technics and the name! -- and that social content is racism, and particularly the racism that takes the form of the most traditional, desecratory narrative of denial, recuperation, piracy and despoilage one could imagine, one that's been played out not just in artistic genre but in, hmm, the history of colonization? "

The Third Unheard--Connecticut Hip Hop 79-83  

beautiful photographs of Marcy Avenue, one of my favorite subway stations.

(via Gothamist) 

High-tech rat hole

" Ever since March 1983 when Ronald Reagan got it into his head that we could build an astrodome over the earth and created a crash program with almost no respectable scientific or expert input, this albatross has been nothing more than a welfare program for generals and defense contractors -men who often turn out to be the same person, see under "Tauzin" for a domestic allegory- but the scale is really something to behold. This particular administration's obsession with Star Wars crowded out any attention it might have been willing to pay to terrorism during the 9/11 days, but even with all of the evildoings discussed above, it still finds money to pour more and more billions down this high-tech rat hole while at the same time pretending it is not the unarguable failure it has proved to be at virtually every moment of its existence for the past 21 years--and counting. "

Silliman's Blog

"The degree of work involved in creating a couple hundred couplets on the topic of constipation & bears is not inconsiderable--and to do so with wit & humor all the more challenging. "

The Rebel Sell

"Thus the kind of ad parodies that we find in Adbusters, far from being subversive, are indistinguishable from many genuine ad campaigns. Flipping through the magazine, one cannot avoid thinking back to Frank's observation that "business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching." "