REVIEW: Art in America: Nous Ne Notons Pas Les Fleurs

My review of a group show in Paris, here.

REVIEW: Art in America "Slummer Nights"

My  review of "Slummer Nights," curated by Sadie Laska, at CANADA gallery.

disco party 9-5

Seth Price's bumpin 8-hour work mix here. Tests at my "day job" are already in process.

Seth Price: I didn’t have a particular use in mind. I was thinking about work days, where different sets of working hours represent different kinds of work and different cultural areas: a union job, an office job, an art gallery, a boutique… But it’s true, I liked the fact that the track could be played perfectly, start to finish, during an 8-hour work day, so yes, a work mix, why not.

-from an interview with Boško Blagojević, here.

Dispersion and Jogging.com

I saw David Joselit deliver a lecture on the subject of dispersion and circulation last winter.  He began by asking: How do we produce value and meaning in a world of overproduction? He answered with the following: The only way to derive "meaning" from art is by "moving it"*:

Joselit described how we now rely on an "epistemology of search" to identify value in art. And this value has been untethered from material and assigned to the amorphous bonds that combine unlike objects (telecommunications, human relations).  Rules for this epistemology are as follows:
1. images multiply
2. value is produced by circulation
3. objects are constituted (ie: an object d'art is designated a 'work of art').



With this in mind, I am reminded of a  new crowd-sourced curatorial project on jogging.com:

Jogging will now enter an experimental mode of image distribution called Positive Feedback. ..... 

.......We ultimately hope for the entire blog to become a self-regulatory process, allowing viewers the chance to both create content and vote on the relevance of that content to Jogging’s brand for inclusion. When this end is reached, Jogging will become the first artistic ‘being’ to be associated with an anonymous and endless number of identities– a form of production we feel makes the most efficient use of the possibilities our digital location provokes and is most relevant to the blog’s political aim of encouraging a decentralized system of distribution (and creation) for art.

I am looking through the anonymous images on Jogging.com since the project has been initiated: sliced Jpeg of two baseball hats against one another and two different colored woods. A totem pole with a bear carved into it, fitted with an airline head-rest. Barbara Streisand's home. They are so full of signifiers and so empty at once that they are exhausting, which is good.Value is not derived from these because they are contemplative and significant but if I, and enough people "Like" them/reblog, their value increases.

As surely the makers know all too well, the project is the successful envisioning (as a online curatorial project) of what was discussed in an AUDC (Sumrell/Varnelis) essay,  "Revenge Against Objects" in 2006. Post-modern society, they write, no longer has need for material culture. Of course,  "All objects are now wild signs, free-floating signifiers unable to represent anything specific themselves, part of the mechanism of circulation, which has become a goal in and of itself."

Benjamin Crotty and Gabriel Abrantes

   Poor boy falls for daughter of Chinese neo-colonialists in Angola,  

with the arcs, score, and stilted dialogue of Hollywood narrative film. The improbable is now plausible. 

Liberdade, at the Palais de Tokyo (23 mins). 

Svetlana Boym

#4, A Critic, an Amateur, from Notes for an "Off-Modern Manifesto":

If in the 1980s artists dreamed of becoming their own curators and borrowed from the theorists, now the theorists dream of becoming artists. Disappointed with their own disciplinary specialization, they immigrate into each other's territory. The lateral move again. Neither backwards nor forwards, but sideways. Amateurs' outtakes are no longer excluded but placed side-by-side with the non-outtakes. I don't know what to call them anymore, for there is little agreement these days on what these non-outtakes are.

But the amateur's errands continue. An amateur, as Barthes understood it, is the one who constantly unlearns and loves, not possessively, but tenderly, inconstantly, desperately. Grateful for every transient epiphany, an amateur is not greedy.

More here.

Coming Up!

Paul & Linda in various guises. (Thanks Michael!)
 See also: "Notes on the Paul McCartney Shadow Canon" by Mark Owens, in #20 Dot Dot Dot.

REVIEW: Art Papers: Sam Durant, "Dead Labor"

SAM DURANT
ART PAPERS July/ August 2010
PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK, March 13-April 17 2010
REVIEWED BY MIMI LUSE

In contemporary American popular culture, work is often represented as an innocuous form of incarceration. Television cubicle-sitcoms like The Office give us the comedy of extreme banality in confined conditions. How easily we forget our indebtedness to a much more radical history for the grey creature comforts of the modern workspace. For modular furnishings and humane amenities like the eight-hour workday, we can respectively thank utopian furniture designers and a series of anarchist-led labor strikes in the late nineteenth century. Taking advantage of our collective memory loss, Dead Labor Day is Sam Durant's historical corrective (Paula Cooper Gallery; March 13-April 17, 2010)

"Capital is dead labour," as Marx's gothic metaphor holds, "which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour." For the exhibition’s eponymous work, Dead Labor Day, Durant built a life-sized gallows whose scaffold platform can be accessed by a set of metal stairs. Gallery-goers who climb it will find a water cooler, with paper cup-dispenser, installed on the platform. The concept is a visual pun: distracted by complimentary Dixie cups, the modern worker finds herself an unwitting hangman of the life-sucking forces of capital. But it is also a superimposition of two discrete historical models of discipline: the theater of punishment and the humane, slow-burning incarceration of the modern working environment. Models upon models.

In the front room, Gallows Composite C (Billy Bailey Gallows, Haymarket Gallows, Rarney Bethea Gallows, Saddam Hussein Gallows), 2010, lies on a mirrored pedestal. Just as modernism provided better living through furniture, the model here is a process of refining capital punishment through the rule of averages. The lightbox Break Room with lnternational Mass Meeting, 2010, shows an upside-down spread of an ideal, sleekly modern, open-concept office break room layered over an archival poster commemorating the four Haymarket martyrs who were hanged in Chicago in 1887. Durant also introduces archival materials at the gallery's front desk – documentation of Grover Cleveland's decision to move Labor Day to the month of September in order to disassociate the holiday from its radical May- Day/ Haymarket origins, for one, and sheathes of economic data; two curve graphs overlaid to show, gracefully, the correlation between economic inequality and a decline in union membership. Offering these materials, Durant demonstrates the increasingly elegant ways in which history ironizes itself; while it might profess a true reflection, it instead turns things topsy-turvy. 

Durant's earlier work likewise served to demonstrate this principle. Reflected Upside-down and Backwards, 1999, created a corrupted mirror-image by placing two model- sized versions of Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970 (now mostly destroyed), on top of one another. One was charred – as the structure was in 1975 – and the other was pristine enough to file under the text-book header "sculpture in the expanded field." Meeting Smithson's self- supplied definition of a "new monument" as that which “places both past and future into an objective present," Durant’s composite played with the dualities of perceived history and the archives of art history. These works are a painful remedial that force us to accept coexisting versions of history, and burn neural pathways in the process. In his writings on the "archival impulse," Hal Foster describes Durant's work as a counter- memory for our cultural Alzheimer's: "why else connect so feverishly if things did not appear so frightfully disconnected in the first place?"

-Mimi Luse

Network Culture Chart by Kazys Varnelis

 5 years old but still....  More here. 

	Modernism	Postmodernism	Network Culture
Political Economy
economy	production	service	debt
capital	monopoly	multinational	transnational
regime of accumulation	Fordism	Post-Fordism	Empire
forms of consumption	scarcity	affluence	luxury and clustering
enemy	revolutionary communism	soviet communism	islamic terrorism
Culture
settlement	suburbia	postsuburbia	exurbia
space	abstract	hyperspace	network space
subjectivity	autonomous	schizophrenic/fragemented	subsumed into the object
media	mass media	niche	long tail
dominant mode of art	rupture	critical appropriation	smooth aggregates
authorship	author	discursive field	network
narratives	Hegelian narratives	end of the grand narrative	neo-Hegelianism
music	records	cassette tape, compact disc	file sharing or itunes
portable music	transistor radio	cassette walkman	ipod
sci-fi fantasy	metropolis	star wars	the matrix
past reference	antiquity	19th c.-1930s modernism	1960s contemporaneity
disease	TB	AIDS	Ebola, Anthrax, Avian Flu
war	World War I, II	Vietnam	9/11
computing	mainframe	personal computer	ubiquitous computing
screen-based media	Television	GUI	Web 2.0
urban détournement	the dérive	skateboarding	le parkour
Representative Figures
psychology	Freud	Lacan	Zizek
philosophy	Sartre/Heidegger/Wittgenstein	Derrida	Deleuze
architecture	Le Corbusier/Mies	Venturi/Eisenman	Gehry/Koolhaas

I wish we didn't have to have a "World Debate" on this

Is water a commodity or a public right? In an ideal world the issue wouldn't require a heated debate on BBC World. In the audience, Christopher Gasson, with an organization called "Global Water Intelligence" asked that the panel stop referring to water as a "right". Yikes. 

Hype Machine

By now everyone is familiar with the hype cycle. You know the drill: the ginned-up enthusiasm of publicists combines with word of mouth (and blog) to create so-called buzz. Articles appear, posing one of three questions. For the new artist: is this the next big thing? For the established artist (or restaurateur): will stratospheric expectations be met? For the figure whose stock is down: can a comeback be staged? Then the release date arrives, or the premiere, or opening; at last the thing itself can contend with its reception. But, wait, now backlash surges alongside the ongoing hype. And understandably, too: it’s not nice being force-fed even the tastiest food. But hold on a second, here comes the backlash-to-the-backlash …

 from "The Hype Cycle," April 2008, N+1. More here

Articulate Monsters

Saw Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime at the slick new IndieScreen theatre last night in Williamsburg .

The film could not be clearer in its politics: America is a nation of over-medicated human shells posing as "normals" and living the bland life in Florida. Fine. Not an uncommon viewpoint, especially in independent film. But while Solondz's other films seem morally ambiguous,  "forgive and forget" is a lietmotif in this film, down to the theme song, "Life During Wartime," (lyrics written by Solondz and performed by Beck Hansen*). You could dismiss this as Solondz's ironic sensibility. But the movie reinforced these values so 'sweetly'.

From the child who forgives his pedophile father to the woman who works with (and eventually marries) ex-convicts, Solondz articulates and explains the compulsions of the most gruesome offenders. For example, by linking a pedophile's sexual urges to his seemingly innocent compulsion for gum-drops, Solondz implies that the perv has just as little control over his pedophila than he does over a sweet tooth.

Paul Reubens is also in Life During War Time, and during a q+a after the screening last night (hosted by another L magazine contributor, whom I'd never met before) Solondz said he cast Reubens precisely because of the cultural baggage the actor carries with him. Far from a reactionary or sensationalist artistic decision, Solondz is actually exonerating Reubens by hiring him, while at the same time generating a tension with the audience; forcing viewers who have not yet forgotten Ruben's gaffes to sympathize with this scripted character and forgive him.

* not a Talking Heads cover.

9 to 5, Underground

Some thoughts on two books I read recently; both books exploring "undergrounds" of the American workforce. What does it say about modern labor when a great portion of regulated working class jobs are just as bad, if not worse, as those of the underground economy, and are only humane for the workers if the rules are bent?  


For his exposé working the jobs that most Americans won’t do, Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson spent a year picking lettuce, processing poultry, and working in the back kitchens of New York City restaurants.  During his immersion, Thompson, who is a journalist and former SEIU researcher, operated by the dictum, “no matter how unpleasant, I would stay with each job for two months”.

Like Nickel and Dimed or  A Year of Living Biblically, Thompson's approach is the sincere adoption of prevailing practices taken to their logical conclusions, for the benefit of a larger literary public. Reading Working in the Shadows, the reader's is a task of empathy and endurance, and we trudge through the author's daily pains, which he himself must ease with steady regimen of pain killers. Fine in and of themselves, his tasks repeated ad infinitum deform his hands and give him sore limbs for weeks. In Yuma Arizona, stooping thousands of times a day as a lechugero (lettuce picker for Dole) leaves large welts on his thighs from his metal holster, and charley-horse spasms in his back.

In recent years, books like Richard Sennett’s  The Craftsman and Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft have explored the sometimes liberating ontology of manual labor. To make peace with the brutality of his labor,Thompson finds grace in the acquired skill and tacit knowledge of his Mexican co-workers who swoop gracefully to cut heads of lettuce, and palm them gently before twisting them into plastic bags. In moments of sun-stroked delusion, Thompson himself imagines he is training to be a master of "lettuce martial arts."

But aside from rare instances, the work Thompson does as a laborer offers few opportunities for the satisfaction of a job well done. What emerges instead is a classical case of alienation and estrangement. He describes his time on the graveyard shift at a poultry processing plant: "The graveyard shift at the chicken plant is full of zombies. By two in the morning, nearly everyone on [the] line looks half-dead, with eyelids drooping and faces devoid of expression."  Though Thompson jokes that the painful physicality of his job distracts him from his more existential concerns doing jobs where results are measured by absolutist standards, (eg; 3,000 lettuce heads cut a day, 4,200 chicken breasts in one shift) poetic descriptions serve only to masquerade literally deadening work. For example, everyone at the plant he works with looks 10 years older than they are,  and life expectancy of the average farm worker is only 49.

Many of Thompson's colleagues are abused in his presence, and are paid less than minimum wage (this,  even after landmark settlements). But not all of Thompson's colleagues are undocumented workers. Many in Arizona are guest workers with flimsy H2-A visas who commute from Mexico, or legal immigrants with work visas, like the Venezuelans he meets in Alabama. Nevertheless, the conditions Thompson describes provide evidence that legal and illegal immigrants' resistance to unionization efforts are ultimately detrimental to the rights of all workers. Suprisingly, however, Thompson discloses that many  'underground' jobs are often well-compensated (relative to the average US hourly wage of $22.46,) precisely because the work is so ignoble and the work is simply hard.  The book will serve as a testimony refuting the claims that immigrants 'steal' blue-collar jobs, since in reality, blue-collar workers would never want these jobs. In 2006, John McCain offered, in mock-seriousness, to pay a group of union workers $50 an hour picking lettuce in Yuma:  "You can't do it, my friends". Thompson could but he asked one of his Mexican colleagues why most  Americans wouldn't.  The honest answer: “ The very simple reason that everyone knows, is that Americans have become lazy”.

What does it say about the state of the American work-force today if the work we rely on cannot be done by Americans themselves? Meanwhile, in a cruel irony, the jobs that Americans are willing to do, that is, service jobs, cannot support the people that work them, though their compensation should technically put them "above the poverty line."  In her book of case-studies, The Moral Underground, activist and Boston College professor Lisa Dodson compiles eight years of interviews with those on the fault lines of an " economy that impoverishes so many people, even as they do the jobs of the nation." Though Dodson initially set out to detail individual struggles of so-called 'wage-poor' workers, many middle class managers whom she spoke with revealed that they would often engage in remarkable acts of civil disobedience to help their employees get by. She speaks with supervisors, managers, day care workers, and grade-school teachers. Doctors give medicine "samples" to the whole family, food factory workers invite employees' children to eat in the evenings, store managers pad pay-checks and "borrow" prom-dresses,  and interns at a Wisconsin highschool  babysit a students' siblings to allow the student to participate in the school play.   The eponymous "Moral Underground" she writes, is a nebulous indeterminate grouping of upper and middle-class managers who constantly grant their employees clemency.

The "Robin-Hood" style acts she hears described over and over again violate labor, FDA, caregiving, and supervisatory rules, and yet Dodson keeps the personal and technical details vague, so that she doesn't 'out' them. A central tenet of her book is that the very conditions endured reverse our conceptions of  right and wrong, and that unsustainable working conditions warrant minor and occasional lawlessness. Her book, which is more suited to policy-makers and social workers than the general public, points to the adverse effects that instability and poverty have on the child's school performance, and prescribes work reforms not merely as cushy band aids for worker morale, but as crucial to closing the 'achievement gap' in American schools.

Though both Dodson and Thompson reveal what is ostensibly 'hidden' from middle class Americans, what they describe is in fact representative of a large portion of the American work effort. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are more likely than not to have a hand in processing the food we consume, and it is estimated that the informal sector contributes to 10% of our GNP. In terms of legal jobs, since 1979, hourly earnings for 80% of American workers (private sector, non supervisory jobs) have risen by just 1% after inflation, while worker productivity has climbed 60%. 39% of the nation's children live in low-income households and one in four US-workers earns less than $9 an hour.  Though a new poverty threshold, set to be implemented for the fall 2010 census report will adjust "poverty" based on the cost of living in a given geography and extend more aid to families that need it, both of these books make clear that the way we pay the workers who bring us the food on our table and  who will care for us in our old age, is unsustainable.

The publishing of both these books comes at a good time, adding to the discourse at a moment when we are reexamining both the Fordist workshop and American work-places stuck in an archaic (1950s) employment model of promotions in return for company loyalty. The regimen of cubicle-culture has become a punch-line in popular culture, its absurdities a ready-made situational comedy. Recent suggestions, from the hokey to the more serious, laud telecommuting, flexible hours, and the most dramatic of all, the "Results-Only Workplace". Of course, some of these solutions, which fit tech-workers and other knowledge-industry workers, may not make sense for service employees and other manual laborers whose physical presence is required. Nevertheless, anecdotal books like these will help as policy-makers and academics move forward with more prescriptive measures.

Cleo de 5 a 7

"They all want some kind of group to come into power which has already been in power"

                                            Jonathan Meese on nostalgia and politics. 

video here.

Underwater, Middle East

Sent by my friend, deployed in Iraq and Kuwait.

D.I.Y. Recluse

Make your own shack. Another Mimi (Zeiger) alerted me to Derek "Deek" Diedricksen's new booklet, the exuberant comic-book and architectural manual. Diedricksen describes his book as Gary Larson meets Bob Villa.   This book could be just the thing to indulge a summery bout of hermitism!

The Political Face

All form is a face, said Serge Daney (apparently) but I can't find where he said that.

Entry-Level Reporters Wanted

TO describe the website Examiner.com, in a recent Ad Age interview, former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan referred to another sort of content production, the meat factory in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle":

"What these sites are producing....You know what it is? It's like sending unchecked meats out to the public."

It doesn't stop me from applying when I see a post on Craigslist advertising an entry-level reporter job for a site called "Mainstreet Connect," essentially a hyper-local version of the examiner, about to launch in my hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut. 

The publisher emails me, asking that I call him at my earliest convenience. The next day at nine am we are talking on the phone. He tells me he is driving and on Bluetooth.  He tells me he is just out of college.  He describes the job to me: "This town is interesting. There's a lot of stuff to write about. I mean, you know Steve Young? I'm not sure  how I know this, but his dad, is a member of the Greenwich YMCA and I heard that everyday he does something like 3,000 sit-ups. That's interesting! " He tells me he wants someone ASAP, who knows the town, and that he would be able to tell how serious I was about the job by how quickly I could turn around a test assignment.

I look online too get an idea of what they're looking for and see a feature on a news site by the same publisher already launched in the neighboring town: "Osprey Alert: Pair Stakes Out Beach." The piece is about 40 words long:

Emilse Cardona and her husband, Oscar, have been watching Osprey at Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk for about a month now. This afternoon they had the opportunity to watch as one of the osprey brought back sticks to add to their nest while the other stayed and cared for their young. Emilse and her husband expressed that watching the birds is a very enjoyable and fascinating pastime.

This gives me an idea of the kind of thing they will be looking for at Greenwich Daily.  I picture myself walking up to a couple just like Emilse and Oscar in my home-town while they are bird-watching and saying "Excuse me, but do you mind if I take a photo? Our editor is looking for content of any kind."

Twelve minutes later I've written a piece about a woman I know in my town who started a toy bear company. I send it in and get an almost immediate response. "This is exactly what we're looking for." In the next email, the editor gives me another test. I am to interview anyone I want in Greenwich, CT, and take a photo. A "Big, face shot," and suddenly the cynicism that had allowed me to write the first piece falls away as I am faced with the actual task of giving the editor what he wants.  I sit around all morning and finally around five o'clock I leave my house and park my parent's car in the strip mall across the street from the McDonald's next to the one of the public housing units in Greenwich that no one ever really talks about. I prepare the kind of questions that I imagine Emilse and Oscar were asked and decide that what the editor will get is an interview with someone who works there.

Inside McDonald's it smells only faintly of food. The place is a circus.  Families of seven or eight, just returned from a day of amusement fairs, have their faces painted like tigers. They mill around the restaurant filling up their drinks and getting napkins.

I stand in front of some potted plastic plants, pretending to read the Value Menu above the counter. I am scared out my wits that someone will discover I have no faith in what I am here to do and whom I represent.  The main newspaper in this home-town of mine does a fine job and has their own website. Their bread and butter is the girls' lacrosse game. Isn't that already hyper-local?   With the rare exceptions where the model is creating a newspaper where there had been none, this "fiesty" entrepreneurial business model that Jeff Jarvis thinks is going to save journalism is ultimately just a coupon flyer with faces in it, an SEO trap for local businessmen Googling themselves, an adsense platform with sophisticated market content. What am I doing here? I watch an employee at the take-out window concentrating on holding a gallon jug of liquid chocolate upside down over a super-sized drink. At the condiment counter an elderly woman with a stylish McDonald's beret and horn-rimmed glasses is throwing a pile of straws half-hazardly at the straw dispenser, and they are catching the wrong way and scattering. She breathes heavily and turns her head when she senses I am watching her. People keep walking in.  It is 5:30 and dinner time in Connecticut and they want their burgers yesterday.

I am still standing in the plants and the cashiers are now asking me for my order. They ask me and then forget they've asked me and ask again and I keep shaking my head because because I don't want to tell them that I'm not here to eat and I'm a journalist just looking for "content".

I don't really say anything back, I just keep leaning against the plants. A slight man with two soccer daughters in cleats and shin-gaurds thinks I'm queueing and starts forming a line to the left of me, ushering his family behind him.
"Go ahead" I say.
"Oh, no!" He says. He is indignant with politeness. "You were here first!"
"NO. I need more time." I say.

 I am sunk by grief and I can't decide who I hate more, the guy who is turning news into phone-book listing of everything that has ever happened here or myself for making a mockery of a job assignment and a full-time writing job with benefits. When the circus dies down, I walk up to a young Hispanic cashier wearing a red McDonald's shirt.

"Hi, Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? For The Daily Greenwich, a site on Main Street Connect?" The words are out and I am consciously regretting their delivery.

"I don't know about that.... Hey Colleen…!" He is asking his manager. Super Size Me just came out on DVD and there is no question that a memo to "refer all journalists to McDonald's Public Relations" is posted behind the counter. Colleen comes out from behind a broiler and looks at me suspiciously.  Why is a reporter in a McDonalds?

I try again, barely convincing myself.

"I am here with Daily Greenwich and I want to interview people who work at the Greenwich McDonald's."

Colleen tells me to come back Monday. I don't insist. As I walk back to my car, I think of other story ideas for the day, but somehow, in what is perhaps a subconscious self-defense mechanism to keep me from getting this job, I don't allow them to make any sense. On the Post Road, there is an old Howard Johnson's motel with a sign that has been rubbed out to just say 'Johns'. It's my favorite thing in town. I could write about that. I pass by a tiny house with a hummer parked in the driveway. "That hummer was blocking the whole house," I think. "Funny. Maybe I could take a picture."  And then I actually stop and try to. I stop and do a three-point turn and try to find the house again. But then I change my mind mid-way. A Volvo is in the intersection behind me.

"Go ahead" the driver motions to me.
"No you go ahead," I motion back.  I need more time.

I go back home and look at the osprey article again. The next day I write to the editor and tell him thanks for the job opportunity but I think I'm going to pass.

Loose Club-Going Women

Last year a group of activists founded the Consortium of Loose, Forward, and Pub-Going Women in India. It was not formed for fun, but in response to the the hyper-conservative Sri Ram Sena and the group's violent campaign to chastise bar-hopping women in Southern India by beating them physically.

In America calling yourself a loose, forward, pub-going woman is simply your alignment with the status quo, the freedoms afforded by third-wave feminism. We can now dress badly, drink until we black out and wake up with whomever caught us falling (1). Nonetheless, going out to a bar (as the consortium organizers in India worked so hard to defend) is a public stage to demonstrate women's liberation.

In America, there have so far, been few pop-culture patron saints of this excessive, debauched proof of freedom.  Though pop singers mention clubs, these spaces always seem abstracted. The 'club' is less an actual venue than an a romance that is really just a backdrop for meeting that one special someone.(2) You are not going to be annoyed by stuff they say to you, and you are not going to get beligerantly drunk.

But in 2009 someone gave us a more realistic reflection of a teenage-bar hopper; one that celebrates the parental dissapproval, binge-drinking, the run-in with the law, and the morning-after eye-crust. These are freedoms we take for granted. Hello Ke$ha, patron saint of the American Chapter of the Consortium of Loose, Forward and Pub-Going Women.

(1) Beyond the circular arguments and the moralizing that "hooking up" (Tom Wolfe's term here) incites in some ways, bar culture is now the 21st century version of "coming out" to your town, society. You may find this charming or you may find this offensive. But there it is, public space.
(2) The club in these videos is not a place where people you know are. It is a mysterious anesthetized zone where you meet good-looking strangers only.

Tiiiightrope.

Well, to start: the saddle shoes!

Night People tape covers

More here.

three super conductors

1) Rashad Newsome's amazing new videos, at PS1's Greater New York show. 

2) John Underkoffler (via Fast Company, via TED)

3) The Meissner Effect 

The End of Major Combat Operations

My buddy Nick McDonell gave a graceful talk this evening at 826 NYC about his new  book,  The End of Major Combat Operations, which is essentially a humane mirror to the 'hard-news' approach he took as a war correspondent in Iraq for Time magazine. The book is great. Oh yeah, and Nick is only 26, no big deal!

Must we Monetize Every Waking Moment, So That We Must Now Call Moments without Recompense "SURPLUS?" Yep.

In the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged 'immaterial labor' labor that creates immaterial products such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response.


-Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri.



These words were written in 2001 and should be familiar to any service or knowledge worker. Meanwhile a new book out by techno-idealist Clay Shirky, called Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin Press, June 2010) purports that today we are so flush with immaterial labor we now find ourselves in excess of it.  At a book talk tonight, Shirky tasked himself with categorizing activity of cognitive surplus online into a social spectrum online.*

As its title suggests, Shirky's first book, Here Comes Everyone, had a-give-it-up-guys tone for the content producers who cherish their bottleneck on information (journalists!) while outside the teeming net-masses storm the barracks of proprietary content. Likewise, in Surplus Shirky maintains his faith in wise crowds and collaborative amateur enterprise, but here he zooms in on why we donate time for free. These ethonomics have been discussed ad nauseum by all the pop economists who look at irrational motivations in human behavior. So much do we value our self-worth that we are compelled to contribute cognitive labors in our free time. If you've ever been promoted from underpaid intern to salaried employee, and found your enthusiasm zapped, you will understand this concept.

 In the beginning of his talk, Shirky said that collectively, Americans spend about 100 million hours every weekend watching just the advertisements on television. Just the advertisements.They spend far more watching whole shows. This same figure, he says, also reflects how much time Americans spend yearly on Wikipedia, contributing to the creative commons, and the most trenchant bit Shirky dangled before the audience last night was the question: What if we tapped into that surplus? He didn't answer, but it is worth asking it if would supply the world with more LOLCATS or more social justice?

-Cognitive Surplus- the word sounds snappy and at one point in the evening's Q &A  Shirky politely corrected an audience member who used it as a catchphrase: "I don't want the term to turn into a Longtail type phrase" he said, quickly. But thinking about it, what exactly does the fact that we call this a cognitive surplus imply? How different is it from the brain power that ordinary humans may have logged into an old thing called 'civic engagement'? Must we 'monetize' every waking moment so that the moments without recompense we now call 'surplus?'.  

This was another question untouched in Surplus, or at least, not in the talk Shriky gave last night (Hardt and Negri would answer yes).   Since I'm not getting paid to write this, I didn't buy the book. By the time it would have taken to obtain a press copy, some unprofessional (apologies guys!) online would have already scooped me. Or the wikipedia page. Plus I'm lazy. Pretty unprofessional huh?  Well I'm doing this for free! For self worth. Wht do you expct? Copy-edited prose and fact-checking? If you would like to know whether or not Shirky addresses this question in his new book, it will cost you $39 dollars, and at 256 pages about a weeks' worth of your own cognitive surplus in order to find out. 
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*At the base level, he spoke of the personal (1)  contribution; sites like LOLCATS where anyone can upload a cute photo and add text. Next, we see the communal (2)  level of activity in organizations like "Yahoo Groups"while revolve around a topic of interest that is shared by many but ultimately self-serving,  third (3) the Public, a space where ideas (and in his example, code) is exchanged, and finally (4) the civic, demonstrated in groups where participants work actively to change the hegemonic culture for the good. For the last example, Shirky refers to  Patientslikeme.com, a site where people afflicted with a specific disease (Lou Gehrig's for example) congregate and talk openly about their symptoms and feelings. In a culture where disease symptoms cannot often be discussed openly, especially around healthy subjects, the site fosters within itself a culture of acceptance, and from without, helps to shift perceptions of the condition in the social sphere. Not only that, but the aggregation of like-patients under one roof is unheard of in typical medical tests, and PatientsLikeme has the potential to provide doctors with instant test groups, helping them advance treatment. Shriky cites another civic example in the tongue-in-cheek "Pink Chaddis" Facebook group started by an Indian journalist to shame a group of social conservatives whom had started a campaign to beat "loose" pub-going women in Mangalore. Shirky applauded the power of social networking to effect change. Admitting that this applause was 'old news', he put a fine point on it by saying that what really interested him was the political power of the movement, which was strong enough to lead to the arrest of the Sena group's leader.