Advertise on Earth

Web 2.0 unleashes itself on the physical world. As the earth´s cartography is re-organized according to Google, it still seems to be behaving as a benevolent dictator as it advertises the Google Maps´planes flight paths so the public can participate in the updating of the maps; leading as of yet, to Space Invaders and Spam graffitied upon the globe.

Update: A more puerile example.

Open source death

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has opened their records on executed offenders. The records include the offender´s charge and their last statements. Reading through them is difficult not to be moved, the majority apologize to the victim´s family and with almost no exception invoke godly forgivance. The majority are black (40%), whites in second (31%) and hispanics in third (27%). One can even follow the scheduled executions, today Jonathan Moore will die.

David Lynch and Donovan On The Road

The 'David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace' presents a bizarre yet cosy double header of the noirish-surrealist film-maker, and the erstwhile hippie folk artist. Touring New York (Jan 12th) , Washington (14th) and Los Angeles (21st). And its free.

A New York Times piece on, 'David Lynch’s Shockingly Peaceful Inner Life,' here. Karmic.

Ken Russel In A Scene From A Possible Harmony Korine Movie

Celebrity Big Brother as a catalyst to cultural creation. HERE, a Big Brother conversation over breakfast, between veteran director Ken Russell (The Devils, Tommy ...) and 'disgraced' former Miss Britain winner and footballers wife Danielle Lloyd, which rather recalls a piece of Harmony Korine dialogue or scene making, like his story, HERE, about Old Dirty Bastard talking to Clint Eastwood....

An Excerpt:
"You're an Essex girl?" said Ken. "Fine county. Full of millionaires."

Rolling Sculptures

As their website states: "The BMW Art Car Collection is a series of BMW production models transformed from automobile to art by some of the world's foremost artists." Simple. 'Rolling Sculptures,' someone else labeled them. I am a particular fan of The Alexander Calder model. More on art cars in a more expanded sense, here.

Jason Oddy - Playas

An old mining town in New Mexico was bought by the US Government to be used as a training camp for anti-terrorist activities. Jason Oddy, exhibiting at Photofusion in London, documented this ghost town with furnished houses, school buses and doctor´s surgeries. A film set for the war on terror.



People that used to live and work in this town were used as extras during training; mine workers re-inventing themselves as fictional terrorists, setting up bombs in school buses, kidnapping hostages and learning arabic. The new economy of the Western world, a society of service providers, where no goods are produced.

Hot Chip - Colours (DFA remix)

A somehow atypical remix for DFA of an average Hot Chip track. It´s good.

Hot Chip - Colours (DFA remix)

Vincent Vincent (Gallo) and The Villains

A link, here, to the notorious auto-interview Vincent Gallo conducted with himself in 1997. Penned for The Beastie Boys' magazine, Grand Royal, (which folded in 2001) it was subsequently pulled for containing too many libellous comments about everyone he has ever worked with, or known, or simply heard about. An excerpt, as an example;

"DJ Spooky, New York DJ extraordinaire, never DJs without a copy of the Bohack LP (Bohack was one of Gallo's legendary bands during the '80s). Spooky has said that Gallo's music says it all. Spooky went on to say, 'Vincent was actually a friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jean would have hated me. Good thing he's dead so I can pretend to be him. And nobody knows the difference.' " Etc.

(Thanks Rob)

Karl does Canderel - Sinning Through Aestheticism

Karl Lagerfeld lends his sleight weight to Canderel. Begs the aesthetic question of whether it is in good taste to take your portable 'edulcorant' with you to the club.

The promo-website opens with the Post-Wildean nostalgia: ‘The greatest sin is to not give in to pleasure”. And forthwith, Karl proposes slimline sweetener dispensers decorated with one of five ‘peches mignons’ (“cute sins”). The intellectual framework of the campaign is as rickety as a supermodel in Westwood heels, threatening to dissolve sickly on the tongue like the ersatz sugar it is. How cutely subversive to distract your appalled taste buds by the visual “feast” of Karl’s lurid 80s’designs.

How much hedonistic pleasure can fit in a 0.1 calorie tablet? Is this not rather Indulgence in absolutely nothing – a form of hedonistic nihilism?

Maximal Minimalism.

Les 5 Péchés Mignons de Canderel, here. - (Thanks to Clodagh for the words) At least his H&M collection was better than Victor and Rolf's...

A Manifesto For The New Economy

Wired Editor and Blogger, Chris Anderson expounds upon his theory of The Long Tail from a talk given at the ICA. Considering the death of shelf-space as a dictator for how products are consumed, given the new possibilities of distribution in a technologically joined up world - The fact that YouTube can host more movies than the entire Odeon network of cinemas could ever have dreamed of. The fact that there can be so many more millions of songs hosted on iTunes than the shelving at Virgin Megastore. And the growth in economic value of niche markets as a result.

"The carrying capacity of the megaplex network is 250 films...There are 13,000 films shown in film festivals in the US, but only 250 of them made it to the marketplace - they just ran out of screens...[This is] A distortion of the natural market. If only you didn't run out of screens you could tap all of this. This is the 'dark matter' of the marketplace. This is the stuff there's demand for that we haven't been able to tap because of inefficiencies in traditional ways of getting products out there. This is The Long Tail." Chris Anderson.

Blockbuster Store - 3,000 titles. Netflix - 60, 000 titles. YouTube - 65,000 NEW video clips added per-day.

A talk on how new industry accelerates, rather than markets, demand for products, as it seizes upon products already proven to be gaining cultural value (on myspace?!) - adding value, rather than monopolizing it. But what happens when nothing is ever out of print again? Will we drown, or rather be forced to specialise? Will we live terminally atomised, or simply form new communities? Anderson again,

"[There is a] rise of the amateur and the non-commercial producer...I think what we are going to find is that talent is much more broadly distributed than old models would allow."

Listen to the complete talk, here.

Magic Marker Modesty

Louis Vuitton ad in Wallpaper, September 2005


Louis Vuitton ad in Wallpaper, Iran, September 2005

The Free Will

A German trailer for Der Freie Wille (The Free Will); A 3 hour feature using a rapist's re-establishment in society after release, as a launching-pad to explore the nature of humanity's capacity for empathy, and the limits of personal choice. Or as director Matthias Glasner terms it - "A tender film about the terror of loneliness." Shot with a mutual reverence and disgust for the physicality of man, that recalls the films of Claire Denis, and combines the brutality of Gasper Noe's vision, with the Dardenne Brothers' distanced and elegant observational tone. Let us hope this film receives UK distribution, after viewing it at the Curzon Soho in this year's German Film Festival, it certainly deserves to be seen by many.

Bas Jan Ader -Fall 2, Amsterdam, 1970

Electronic Audio Visual Adventures

A video for 'Berlin', by Alva Noto (electronic musician alter ego of Carsten Nicolai, and founder of Raster Noton record label) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (of 'Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence' fame). Directed by Karl Kliem.

An interview with Carsten Nicolai can be found here.

Reich or Wrong

Steve Reich interview. Talking in relation to people downloading only songs or parts of a piece:

"In my field, the idea that people are going to get chopped up into little movements is discouraging. On the other hand, Chuck Berry did have it right. "Any ol' way you use it." There is some truth to that. You can go into a coffee shop in Chicago, or New York, or Europe, and hear the Brandenburg Concerto tinkling away in the background, and it works just fine while you have your espresso or latte. That's not to say, hey, Bach just sold out, man."

Also, an interview with Steve Reich on his relationship with visual culture can be found here, from a recent issue of Frieze magazine.

ES - Sateenkaarisuudelma II

In an irregular fashion, mp3s will start being posted at Coulture. The thematic is broad, the unifying link being that they should be good.
To start, Sateenkaarisuudelma II, the second of a three parts piece by the Finnish Sami Sänpäkkilä, head of Fonal, home to "music for growing plants" and "electronic circus music", among others.

ES - Sateenkaarisuudelma II

Art on the Tennis Court

Jon McEnroe and Jenny Holzer (briefly) talk art and consumption. See here for more from the series, Art:21.

Freeeze - I.O.U.

Killer. Although you haven't lived until you've heard the 12" version....

Built

House Attack, by Erwin Wurm. Installed on the external facade of Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna for his current retrospective. A work which thrills with its witty objecthood, and touch of 'Where's Toto?'...However what it also does is illustrate once again how perfect some of the projects undertaken by Site Architects from the 70s truely were, in combining this sculptural slapstick with actual functionality. Their work for Best Products is phenomenal. See below for their 70's showroom, 'Indeterminate Facade Building, Houston,1974.'

Like a utopic premonition of Wallmart doing public art...

Stanley Kubrick's First Film

Flying Padre, 1951.

Constructive Use of Graffiti's Methodology

At the V&A, to the left of the exit, can be found this drawing on the radiator, which attempts to camouflage it's industrial functionality within the hallowed museum's masonry. With the aid of a Sharpie. Not quite SAMO, but definitely quite charming. Speaking of SAMO, here can be found some truly amazing footage of a very young Basquiat on an almost existentially shambolic public access TV show.

A Theme Park In Ruins...

With many thanks to Olivier...More to be found here.

Cinematic Archaelogy

The possiblity of film sets being found as archaelogical remains, Tati´s Playtime modernist parody and Cecil B. DeMille´s The Ten Commandments Egyptian City.

Maunsell Towers

In the middle of the Thames. Anti-Aircraft towers during the 2nd world war. A pirate radio station in the 70s.

Polkadot Polka

After Scott King's dots..this is certainly relevant. Neon. Wait for it...(Busby Berkeley, The Gang's All Here, 1943)

Scott King

The Lazy Nazis Smoking Outside (Nuremburg 1934), 2004. This is what happens when you shut down Sleazenation and its former Creative Director then seeks creative fulfillment. Positive. See scottking.co.uk for more..or browse Sonia Rosso.

Collages for Men

In response to the previous post of the Vuitton ad in Wallpaper, here is one of Pierre Bismuth's 'Collages for Men,' which somewhat replace Hugh Hefner's vision of femininity with that of Matalan. Bismuth remains the artist who gave Michel Gondry the idea for 'Eternal Sunshine..', and won an Oscar for it..For a further Gondry and Bismuth collaboration, do click here.

It is sometimes interesting to observe that a take-away coffee cup fits precisely in the middle of a role of gaffa tape, creating an impromptu heat diffuser.