Kombinat!
Sunday, July 31, 2005
  Mother Night. The Movie
Fine Line Features | Mother Night:
Joining Nolte in Mother Night are Sheryl Lee, Alan Arkin, Kirsten Dunst, Arye Gross, Frankie Faison and David Strathairn.

I didn't know the book was made into a movie. It was perhaps because I was too busy working as an Amway salesman and when you work as an Amway salesman nothing else matters.
 
  New Era
Relationship of Humanity to Products of its own making versus Relationship of Humanity to Products of Nature. Who wins? Relationship. That's where the big money is. Kombinat! is at the forefront.

Western Civilization has attempted to commit suicide several times. Each time it has failed because each time it reached some rational way of seeing its own destruction and with it awoke from the madness. I think this time we are going to do it for real. No holding back. Kombinat! will be there to recite the suicide note.
 
  The World I Want

from flickr user:irregulargirl.

The World I Want is a World with the Most Diversity on The Least Amount of Space. I stole that thought from Milan Kundera. I think this pic represents this for me. It happens to be from the Gay Pride Parade in SF. It may be strange that I should select a picture of Gay Parade to represent The World I Want. I don't care of someone is Gay or Straight. I don't care if you put your cock in a pussy or someone's ass. it's all irrelevant actually. What's relevant is Diversity, and not only sexual diversity. I think I am digging an intellectual hole for myself here so I shall dig a bit deeper. In a Homogenized Culture rebellion is an automatic reaction. In a World of Diversity there is nothing to rebell against because I think people would be too busy living the life they want. Actually just forget my train of thought. it betrays me as a homogenistic culturalist. That's all I think at this late hour.

 
  Irreguralgirl

from flickr user:shoegazer.

There is this woman on Flickr: IrregulargirlA great poet with photographs. This pic was taken by her husband. If I ever had a project themed "The World We Want" I would want her (them) on my team. It's is a pleasure to 'know' her. Thanks irreguralgirl for the energy that propels your explorations.

 
  J.M. COETZEE - On the Edge of Revelation
J.M. COETZEE - On the Edge of Revelation: writes about Musil (I snipped some words and bolded few phrases)
"Musil's thinking maintains a remarkably straight trajectory(...) At the core of his thinking is an idea expressed most succinctly in a mathematical metaphor(...) There is an infinity of rational numbers, that is to say, numbers that can be written as the ratio of two whole numbers. There is also an infinity of irrational numbers, numbers that cannot be expressed as any such ratio. But their two orders of infinity are not comparable. The infinity of irrationals is "greater" than the infinity of rationals. In particular, between any two rationals, no matter how close, lies a cluster of irrationals. Stepping from one rational to the next, as we do every day, is (...) like crossing a bridge whose piers are joined by something that does not "really" exist.

To live and function in the world of the rational, we must deliberately banish from our awareness the irrational that lies dense under our feet and about us. We must accept a convention regarding what is to be treated as belonging to the real world. Such a convention will define everyday language (here Musil is close to his Austrian contemporary Wittgenstein). However, Musil proceeds, accepting the fact of a linguistic contract should not mean that we are committed to the repression of the irrational. (...) we can maintain a certain reserve toward the real world, a living sense of alternative possibilities. This reserve defines one as (...) "possibilitarian," someone prepared to exist in "a web of haze, imaginings, fantasy and the subjunctive mode," to live a "hovering life" without ideological commitment, to be a "man without qualities" whose natural mode will be the mode of irony ("With me," said Musil in an interview, "irony is not a gesture of condescension but a form of struggle").
 
  Robert Musil - Man without Qualities
Robert Musil - Man without Qualities:
To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.
 
  The World as One and No One There.
The World as One. That Oneness means only one thing: No One Can Escape Anywhere. The world is brutally, with a vengence being stuffed into Oneness, the vulgar Sameness, the Kitch, the Usual, the Predictable.

There is no outside of WealthBondage. There are no more undiscovered countries. You can pick up the phone and call Kuala Lumpur and Reykiavik and Padukah, Kentucky and Moscow and Rome and a small village in Angola. The world is within your reach and that means only one thing: there is no place you can run away to. There is no place you can breathe different air. There is no place you can eat different food. There is no place you can make love to different women. The World as One, "united, united financially, united socially, united spiritually in all possible ways, by the power of money and the power of prayers" is a world where No One can Explore.


Update: I just found this book: One World, Ready or Not by William Greider.

 
  Milan Kundera's new book: Le Rideau.


Milan Kundera has published a new book in french "Le Rideau. Essai en sept parties" or "The Curtain. Essay in seven parts". I have found out about it from a polish language site dedicated to Kundera and run by Piotr Budnik. where I read an excerpt in polish translated by Marek Bieńczyk and of which I will mention here.
Kundera speaks of World Literature as a single domain of humans expressing themselves in written language. He calls for the view of Literature as an Art Form that does not exclusively belong to nations, countries and languages in which they were written for in that view they are all disconnected and form no common expression. The current view splits the world into many literatures according to the language or nationality of a writer and offers no commons. In his view of World Literature he follows Goethe who is considred a German writer, yet who himself notes his inspiration was Shakespeare, an English writer. Do you see how crazy this gets, all these separations by language and country? Goethe no more belongs to Germans than Shakespeare to English Literature. They are both just Literature, an expression and they are both Language, an expression.

Here are some hurried translations:

"There are two primary contexts into which a work of art can be placed: either as the history of a nation (let's call it a small context), or above the national history of art (let's call it a larger context). Today we are used to regard music in a larger context. To a musicologist a knowledge of a language spoken by Roland de Lass or J.S. Bach is not terribly important, whereas in all the universities of the world novel is studied according to the language it was written in, solely in the small context of national history. Europe has not learned to think of its literature as a historical unity and I will not stop repeating that this is its calamity."
 
  Bohumil Hrabal. Cutting it Short
Bohumil Hrabal: excertp from 'Cuttting it Short': a very Rabelaisian passage of falling asleep in a room with freshly made sausages from the slaughtered pig:

”That night I slept alone in the bedroom, cold air streamed in through the open window, on planks between chairs the sausages and puddings glittered on their rye straw, right by the bed on long boards lay cooling the dismembered parts of the pig, the boned and apportioned hams, the chops and roasting-joints, the shoulders and knees and legs, all laid out according to Mr Myclik's orderly system. As I got into bed I could hear Francin in the kitchen getting up and pouring himself some lukewarm coffee, taking some dry bread to chew with it, it had been a tremendous blow-out, all the members of the management board ate abundantly, only Francin stood there in the kitchen drinking lukewarm coffee and chewing dry bread with it. I lay in the feather quilt, and before I fell asleep, I stretched out a hand and touched a shoulder, then I fingered a joint and went dozing off with my fingers on a virginal tenderloin, and dreamed of eating a whole pig. When towards morning I woke, I had such a thirst, I went barefoot to fetch a bottle of beer, pulled off the stopper and drank greedily, then I lit the lamp, and holding it in my fingers, I went from one bit of pork to the next, unable to restrain myself from lighting the primus and slicing off two lovely lean schnitzels from the leg. I beat them out thin, salted and peppered them and cooked them in butter in eight minutes flat, all that time, which seemed to me an eternity, my mouth was watering, that was what I needed, to eat practically the whole of the two legs, in simple unbreaded schnitzels sprinkled with lemon juice. I added some water to the schnitzels, covered the pan with a lid, out of which angry steam huffed and puffed, and now I laid those schnitzels on a plate and ate them greedily, as always I got my nightdress spattered, just as I always spatter my blouse with juice or gravy, because when I eat, I don't just eat, I guzzle ...”
 
Saturday, July 30, 2005
  How to Ask for Money with Web Art
This piece of Web Art from YHCHANG elevates immortalizes Nigerian Spam.
 
  Hybrids: Reuse, Recycle, Rearrange, Recreate, Reintroduce
Hybrids > Essay:


«It is no longer necessary to deface paintings or to put a mustache on postcards of Mona Lisa, now art can be downloaded, modified and uploaded again, with absolute delight»
Luther Blissett, Art Hacktivism
isn't production work what constitutes most of what goes into crafting most art these days? Because of this,

Hybrids

(and to some extent also their Copies) highlight the increasing difficulty in distinguishing between artists, critics and producers. Is there really all that much difference, on a technical level, between 0100101110101101.ORG, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol? Putting aside any qualitative judgments, on one level or another they are all just appropriators of images. They are all combining elements of other people's works in order to create new ones, in effect challenging the old model of authorship that presupposes that the building blocks of creativity should spill forth directly from the mind of the artis


Perhaps I should rename Kombinat! into REkombinat!

It's all been done before. Welcome to life.
 
  NIke: How to Fake Brad the Entire City.
Nike Ground Project:
In September 2003 the news went out nationwide: "Karlsplatz, one of Vienna’s main squares, is soon to be renamed Nikeplatz. Apart from the new name, it appears that a huge monument in the shape of Nike’s famous “Swoosh” logo will be built in Nikeplatz." Needless to say, it was all fake. The one-month campaign provoked the reactions of Vienna’s citizens, city officials and, of course, the Nike group, which denied any involvement and started legal action to put an end to the bizarre performance. This almost unbelievable prank is the work of the artist duo known as 0100101110101101.ORG, who this time tricked an entire city: Vienna



"We are pushing boundaries in any medium we can get our hands on."
and they did.
 
  In a Global Network Feelings are Always Local
from the introduction to "Feelings are Always Local"
It is in the first place important to understand how networks organize themselves from the inside out and expand, join together and rearrange themselves - whether they are neurological networks in our brains, evolutionary networks in ecosystems, computer networks or economic networks. With the help of such "thinking-in-the-network," then using concrete examples we can investigate how people live in networks, and how possibilities are created, opportunities seized and escape routes chosen. The first question is scientific in nature: How do networks work? The second is political: How are the networks made manageable at the concrete, everyday level?

The term "network" has replaced the term "system." If a system is an entity whose coherence is preserved through interaction among its parts, networks are pluralities that shoot off in all directions and can lose their coherence without perishing. Despite this distinction, we see local systems arising again and again in networks: these are not kept together by any outside force, but rather consist of spontaneously developing relationships that arise from interaction among the horizontally organized participants rather than the influence of a leader or "editor" (from blogs to neighborhoods). To find form or to see form arise, seek the systems in the network.
 
  Blaumeier Atelier where Mentally Ill are Turning Pro
Blaumeier.de - Mentally Ill are turning Pro.



What an awesome place. I plan to visit. I saw them doing a 'Carmen' by Bizet in Bremen last month.

 
  Rendon Group - The Best PR money can buy
Rendon Group - Wikipedia:
The Rendon Group is a secretive public relations firm that has assisted a number of U.S. military interventions in nations including Argentina, Colombia, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Panama and Zimbabwe. Rendon's activities including organizing the Iraqi National Congress, a PR front group designed to foment the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
In a 1998 speech to the National Security Conference (NSC), Rendon described himself as "an information warrior, and a perception manager. This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"
 
  New Map Game
New Map Game:
The game will follow a turn-based system of play and an evolving narrative will help guide action during the competition. There will be five turns, each representing two years of “real” time. Each team will have a number of potential actions available during each turn, ranging from economic to military to diplomatic activities. At the end of each turn, members of a Control Team will be briefed by the individual teams on the actions they wish to take during the next turn's timeframe. Turn 1 will start in 2006 and the game will end in 2016
 
  Blogging, a breadless art
Germans have a nice saying: "Das ist eine brotlose Kunst" - "This is a breadless art" referring that some endeavor, most likely an honest attempt at creating something, is not going to feed you. Such is a way of Art perhaps, an activity with 'no money in it'. Such is perhaps 'blogging' a breadless Art. Such is perhaps Caritas, Giving, Caring, Love, 'no money in it'

People make Art. Mostly as an expression of...? - As John Lee Hooker would say "let that boy boogie woogie cause it's in him and it's got to come out"

I used to make Art but I needed Bread at some point and all my efforts now are towards Bread but sometimes I just want to boogie woogie. So sometimes I just blog even if it's a brotlose Kunst.
 
  bushSpeech.org Fun for the whole family
Make up your own Bush Speech at this site. Take a walk on a wild side.




Americans are asking: Who attacked our country?
Americans are asking: Why do they hate us?
Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war?
Americans are asking: What is expected of us?
(Speech to Congress: September 21, 2001)
And the colored girls go,
doo do doo do doo do do doo
doo do doo do doo do do doo
doo do doo do doo do do doo
... hey babe.
 
Thursday, July 28, 2005
  Sleepwalkers of Hermann Broch


"The Sleepwalkers"
is a trilogy, a three-dimensional work with one underlying philosophical unit. The first book, "The Romantic" portrays 19th century realism with von Pasenow as main character, a Prussian aristocrat clinging to ethical values considered outdated. The second book, "The Anarchist," portrays the accountant Esch who is in search of a "balance" of values in unstable pre-war Germany. Both characters will meet in the third book "The Realist," and will find hope in a fanatical religious sect, which foresees the coming of a Redeemer (fascism, Hitler). They will be defeated by Huguenau, an army deserter and opportunist, representing the new ethical standards of a society free of values or to put it correctly "with no values."

According to Broch, "sleepwalkers" refer to a gap between the death of an ethical system and the birth of another, as much as a somnambulist finds himself in a state between sleep and awake. The novel reflects the disintegration of values in Germany between 1880 and 1920, the psychological distress and disorientation of interwar Germany in which Nazism set its foot
The above is from Amazon online review of the book by Esther Nebenzahl.

... and from complete-review.com: The Sleepwalkers
Note also that despite nominally being a trilogy, The Sleepwalkers should be seen (and read) as a whole. Note also that the translations of the titles of the three sections do not completely reflect the German original. Penguin, in particular, by presenting the novel in tripartite manner place even greater emphasis on the titles -- but don't express them true to the original. Dispensing with the names -- Pasenow oder die Romantik (1888) becomes merely The Romantic -- is already a problem. Worse is that they make of, for example, of Esch oder die Anarchie (1903) (literally: "Esch, or Anarchy") an Anarchist And Sachlichkeit is also not quite "Realism" (or Realist) -- a word for which there is also a perfectly good German word which Broch decidedly did not choose -- "Realismus"
 
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
  Quicken for Mac 2005 is Run by Communists


from flickr user: marilink.
Only a Neo Communist could devise a plan to launch a product called "Quicken for Mac 2005" and unleash it on naive American users. The people in charge of this Trojan Horse Naziwear could only have been Nuveau Communisto a la Capitalisto motherfuckers.

Perhaps Quicken for Mac 2005 was stolen from the Museum of Communism. Maybe it was written by Chinese programmers who are secretly in love with Chairman Mao, or maybe by South Korean Freedom loving people hypnotized by North Korean Evil Doctors. It matters not what the method was used to arrived at the intended construction of this program as a doomsday device to frustrate the fuck out of your dog, mother, pregnant girlfriend and an abandoned child in a large grocery store.

It is completely incomprehensible that in 2005 a computer program like Quicken for Mac could not only be devised, coded, compiled, packaged and shipped but also SOLD at a very high price to an unsuspecting public.

Warn your children. Warn your dogs. Use plastic sheathing and duck tape if you have to but beware Quicken for Mac 2005 is out there lurking under the facade of a friendly, helpful program to inject you with shit and make you feel like a total moron. It's not too late.


Here is another example of Communist Programming.


from flickr user: tychay.
 
  Not Just Any Corporate Blogging White Paper
In this post Not Just Any Corporate Blogging White Paper Jeneane Sessum introduces us to a guide to corporate blogging "To Blog or Not to Blog: Blogs Help Corporations Answer the Call to Conversation" in PDF. Very well written.
 
  The Body Project : An Intimate History of American Girls
From a reviewer of The Body Project : An Intimate History of American Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg:

Young men tend to only applaud young women's autonomy when it leads to sexual availability, not when it leads to the decision to postpone sex; advertisers certainly only applaud young women's autonomy when it leads them to buy their products, not when it leads them to question consumerism itself.
 
Monday, July 18, 2005
  Steve Jobs Commencement address at Stanford U
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life... more
This is a nice speech from Steve J. Good for him.
 
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
  Do not use Buick nor Chevy to cross the border into US.
"A Cuban family that twice tried to reach Florida with vehicles converted into boats has made it to Miami, this time coming overland via Mexico from Costa Rica

... in 2003 they and others tried to cross the Florida Straits aboard a bright green 1951 Chevy pickup, which Luis Grass had converted into a boat. They were intercepted by the Coast Guard and sent back to Cuba. The Coast Guard then sunk the Chevy-boat.

In February 2004 Grass made a second attempt... -- this time aboard a floating Buick sedan powering another homemade boat.

Again, they were intercepted. This time the Grass family was taken to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo and the other would-be migrants aboard the Buick were returned to Cuba. The Buick was sunk."
What is the lesson in this story? We praise our US Cost Guard for patrolling our borders ready to sink any old Buick or Chevy approaching our shores but we are disappointed in our Mexico Border guards. Had they used a Buick or a Chevy truck they would have surely been intercepted.

Cuban Migration
 
Friday, July 01, 2005
  Make Poverty History by wearing a White Band
Simply Pathetic:

Make Poverty History - White Band:
"The symbol of the campaign is a simple White Band worn around the wrist, your arm - in fact anywhere you like that it can be seen by everyone! By wearing one you are part of a unique worldwide effort in 2005 to end extreme poverty - you're saying that it's time to stop the deaths of more than 200,000 people every single week from preventable diseases."

If they diseases are preventable can we prevent them by wearing White Bands?
 
  The Road to Serfdom
The Road To Serfdom:
"To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man. Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?"
I don't doubt it at all. I have lived in both systems. - Never ever ever underestimate the power of petty stupid bureaucrat in a centralized planned state.
"...when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation"
see the increase in Lobbying industry.

"... in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible."

"... to weld together a closely coherent body of supporters, the leader must appeal to a common human weakness"

"... Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime"

"... The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason. There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem in Britain and America are precisely those on which Anglo-Saxons justly prided themselves and in which they were generally recognized to excel. These virtues were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. Almost all the traditions and institutions which have molded the national character and the whole moral climate of England and America are those which the progress of collectivism and its centralistic tendencies are progressively destroying."
What is the World We Want? What is the World we Have?
 
  New Book from Chris Locke aka RageBoy aka Chief Blogging Officer
Start saving your dollar bills for the new book from Chief Blogging Officer. Ask your father or mother to sell blood. Start selling cans and bottles. Rob the homeless. Sell your child's toys on eBay and pre-pay now: an upcoming great book from Chris Locke, the co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, the author of Gonzo Marketing and The Bombast Transcripts.
The book appears to be titled "Magic Bourgeoisie". The subtitle a bit longer "the unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds of earth and came to believe in signs & portents that would make the Middle Ages blush". - Yes, there is Magic in this.

Step right up! Step right up! We got business! business! Don't miss it
Step right up! Pre-pay now!
 
the pen is mightier when it's filled with piss

Name: Kombinat!
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