Academics - fight back!

Academics - your lives are void of meaning. It used to be that your students hated you but at least they felt compelled to listen to you. But now, while most students are busy learning the true meaning of flexible economies, the only people who take notes are future employees of Custom Essays, which has a nice circularity which can be appreciated in some kind of pomo way [and, seriously for a moment, I found this link on ctheory's future site!], but ultimately the face staring at you in the mirror, as much as you defend 'the student's right to resistance and development of survival techniques in a neo-liberal education system' (Hebdige 2007), can't help but see your whole career as pointless. It's time you fought back.

So why not set up a similar company to Custom Essays? But instead YOU will be employing a qualified team to mark the essays that will come from Custom Essays. Overworked academics, more concerned about building up there RAE rating, will pay bucketloads of hard cash for you to take several hundred essays off them at the end of each semester. Maybe eventually, as you establish your company, you will be able to develop a relationship with Custom Essays whereby each essay can be fed directly to your markers - it doesn't have to go near the academic or student! Education without the irritation of people. A utopia. Now everyone can get on with making papers rather than writing them.

[Apologies, too much time on my hands...]

Chris Marker

Yesterday I stumbled across Chris Marker's 'Le fond du l'air est Rouge', known in English as 'A Grin Without A Cat', a cinematic essay on the global run-up to '68 and its legacy (made in '77, updated in '92). An incredible film that tells its story more through allusion than a didactic narrative. Constructed only from old footage it's a bizarre mixture of fast cut-ups to long stretches of interviews/footage of Castro, Allende, businessmen, Stalinists talking (mercifully no third-rate comedians). Not a nostalgic revelling in throwing molotovs at police and more than a melancholic 'what could have been'. One scene that captures its attempt to hunt down the difficulties of the time is Castro's tortuous justification of the repression of the Czech uprising. i recommend it, if you can find it (not on DVD). I'd forgotten but I'd also seen his 'La Jetee', a science fiction film made up of stills that Gilliam's '12 Monkeys' was based on.

Some images

Some have suggested it's an interesting counterpoint to Curtis's The Trap, which had it's final excellent episode last night.

Although I confess I'm ultimately more excited by 300. All together now, in your best Brian Blessed voice: "Spaaarrrrtaaaa!"

radio

two fragments of radio broadcasting from the last day or two, which perhaps I should string together into a general point (like the bankruptcy of the supposedly combative journalism on the Today program and the relative health of the more vernacular Five Live, though both stations annoy me)

post budget, Humphreys to Gordon Brown (I'm paraphrasing here): "When Tony Blair became Prime Minister there was a lot of interest in his informal, 'sofa' style of government; do you think, should you become Prime Minister of course, that your style will be the same? Or will you be using, er, tables and chairs?" (The 'er' is probably poetic license.)

post Euro 2008 qualifier, England 0-Israel 0: presenter reminds his colleague of Steve McLaren's words after the match, "We were only one goal away from a perfect performance". His colleague replies, "Yes, and my Auntie's only major surgery away from becoming my Uncle."

Punk is dead, part 343,655 of a series to cut out and keep

Her Majesty's Consul-General, New York
Sir Alan Collins, KCVO CMG
In partnership with
Creative London and UK Trade & Investment

Requests the pleasure of your company for a

London Music Industry Masterclass
With Guest Speaker
Malcolm McLaren
(Part of the Live from London Showcase)

Followed by a networking reception with representatives
from the British music industry

Tuesday 13th March 2007
5:30pm to 7:30pm

Too much Power 2

Finally uploaded the photos from the Battersea power station day out last year with Q. A fantastic building. The photos don't do it justice - click here - but double click on the photos anyway to bring up the full size

John Lennon fans

I mentioned going to the Baltic in a comment earlier. A beautiful building but criminally empty of both art and people. But there was an extraordinary video installation (not 3 words you often see together) by Candice Breitz.

obits

Baudrillard's passing should not go unmentioned, though I'm not the one to offer a proper tribute (Steven Poole's Guardian obituary is decent). I do remember a very genial, patient man at an event at the Phoenix Arts Centre, Leicester, who refused to rise to the bait of those in the audience who demanded a more 'relevant' theory. I liked his photos too: subdued, slightly mournful, with none of the 'ooh, let's think about signs' nonsense the caricaturists of postmodernism have given us to expect.

Anyway, the point was to note that the deaths of these epochal figures always seem to be obscured by lesser ones. Baudrillard dies: so does John Inman! 2004 - Jacques Derrida: Robert Palmer! Is this some sort of conspiracy of distraction? (1994: John Smith and Kurt Cobain...)

p.s. also interesting to read about winemaker Ernest Gallo who died the same day as JB. What I didnt know was that he was a key player in the dodgy tradition of marketing cheap alcohol to poor black Americans - specifically Thunderbird, introduced 1957. Obituary quotes the jingle: "What's the word?/ Thunderbird/ How's it sold?/ Good and cold/ What's the jive?/ Bird's alive/ What's the price?/ Thirty twice."

Another side of Dr Seuss

I realise that I may be the only Dylan nut here on Bendythree - so I may be the only person who thinks this is a work of genius (for the first few minutes at least.... after which the novelty does wear off a bit). If that doesn't float your mash-up boat, and you ever played Super Mario World, then this may be more up your street - though I have to say I didn't go beyond hearing snippets of it on someone else's computer (I get the same experience when people wax lyrical about old videogames as I do when they wax lyrical about 1970s kids shows: do I actually admit I never watched Swap Shop / Chorlton and the Wheelies / Bagpuss, or do I nod and grin and hope no-one notices that I don't know what the hell they are going on about?).
I did read Green Eggs and Ham, however, so the Dylan site works just fine!

Chiho Aoshima

From the New York underground to the London Underground...While Q & I were passing through Gloucester Road sometime late last year, we were treated to a display by this Japanese artist's here
I really enjoyed the display, although the LU website pictures do not do them justice...almost like a cross between Manga and Terry Gilliam...Anyone got any more info on Aoshima or been to any exhibitions....M-A perhaps?

sewer history

Detail from Julia Solis's book New York Underground:

A report from the lyceum of Natural History from 1831 very matter-of-factly estimated that 100 tons of excrement were deposited into Manhattan's soil every 24 hours. The resulting contamination of the groundwater posed a great risk to public health. By then New Yorkers were so used to the foul taste of their drinking water that fresh water was greeted with suspicion. 'This water is like wind - there is nothing substantial in it; nothing to bite upon,' was one memorable comment.

Numpty

Col - I believe you are getting into the idea of utterly unusable inventions (I might go into business with you selling my secret recipe for light bulb polish if you're up for it...). Anyway, for everyone's perusal here is perhaps the most pointless invention of recent times. What a total numpty!

Too much Power

Being fairly useless at blogging of late, I still have yet to show the photos that Quynh and I took when we went to the chinese art exhibition at the Battersea power station back in November...(http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2006/08/china_power_station_part_i_8_o_1.html)
This is not really a jibe at verbal diarrhoea from the marketing department, more of a sad-shake-of-the-head: "Battersea Power Station echoes post-industrial art venues in China and the works on show have been chosen to activate the enormous scale of its spaces. The exhibition will be filled with sound and moving images, arguably the most prolific and strongest type of work being created in China today. There are three floors to visit and the art will engage with each of these distinct areas."
Although I'm not really certain of the claim "post-industrial art venues in China" (with massive rural-urban immigration a serious problem, I'm not so sure about the widespread existence of such venues...interestingly enough, reflected here: http://www.redmansion.co.uk/exhibitions/residencies.htm),
I just thought it was a shame that despite the fact that some of the works were pretty damn good (including stuff from Marianne's erstwhile colleague Yang Fudong), they were overshadowed by many people - myself included - who were just gagging for a close up of the power station and to get inside (regardless of Pink Floyd album covers/last baby born-Armageddon type movie...) - for example, the longest queue was for a machine in which visitors inserted a 1p piece, which was then flattened out completely and stamped with a Battersea power station logo....
Anyway, I'll try and stick the pictures up on Flickr soon...