Site of Reversible Destiny
Arakawa + Gins
ARAKAWA AND MADELINE GINS HAVE LET IT BE KNOWN THAT THEY HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE.
'Can your surroundings prolong your life? Can where you live provide you with good health? Can you actually reverse your destiny? According to Architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins, yes, and for 45 years they have been building on the mantra that dying is optional.
'Artists, poets, architects Arakawa and Gins met in 1963 and since they began collaborating, they have produced some of the most visionary art and architecture of the 20th and 21 centuries. More than simply designing structures, the pair have also investigated experimental biology, neuroscience, quantum physics, experimental phenomenology, and medicine by way of their Architectural Body Research Foundation founded in 1987.
'These structures have been given the name “bioscleave,” “We assign the new name bioscleave to what others routinely speak of as biosphere, desiring with this simple renaming to keep front and center the dynamic nature of prevailing atmospheric conditions,” said Gins. “The word cleave embedded in bioscleave, having everything to do with the term, cleaving, will serve to remind its users of both the attaching of one segment of mass energy to another and the separating of such segments one from the other.”
'The floors are uneven, almost like small hills. The reason behind the unsure footing is to make people use the bodies in way that is slightly abnormal way to maintain equilibrium. This, according to the designers, will stimulate their immune systems causing better overall health. Walls are painted sporadically in 40 or so colors on numerous levels which are meant to provoke the feeling of being on two spaces at the same time. The structures have no interior doors, windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets. All of these design elements are meant to keep the occupants on guard. Comfort, according to Arakawa and Gins, is a precursor to death; the house is meant to lead its users into a perpetually “tentative” relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.' -- d/visible magazine
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Gram Parsons (Archives Vol. 1) by Eileen Myles
from Coldfront
Gram Parsons has lately (for two years now) been my favorite musician and singer – and songwriter. I hear him in line with the killer and enduring Everly Bros. (of whom Dylan simply said: “We owe these guys everything. “) for his own rocky and impassioned style of sweet harmony-singing country pop – Parsons routinely these days gets called the father of country rock. His influence can be heard on country rock legends like Geraldine Fibbers and more obscure but also still working geniuses like the inimitable Vulgar Boatman (of Florida and Indiana) who do the droning Joy Division minimal version of all this. And still you can ¬really hear the Everly Bros. in them. But Gram Parsons, for me, is truly the man, performing his kind of acid country rock, inventing a whole genre out of the time he lived and was productive musically (62-72) and his own beloved and emotional southern musical tradition. He had a sweet sometimes raspy and breaking voice yet his singing was always informed by great force of pure feeling and need; He was a good all around guitar player, keyboardist and musical arranger, a musical visionary for sure. Rumor has it he co-wrote ‘Wild Horses’ with Keith Richards and he surely introduced the Rolling Stones of that time – Exile on Main Street, Sticky Fingers via Keith to a whole lot of country and blues which through them and Elvis earlier widely informed and re-routed the whole mainstream of 50s and 60s rock and roll.
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Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris 'Big Mouth Blues' (2:23)
Eileen Myles 'April 5th' (1:06)
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Czechlist
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3 by Grouper
'A one-woman ambient project from Portland, OR, Grouper -- aka Liz Harris -- first appeared with the self-released full-length CD-R Grouper in 2005. Later that year, and then signed to Free Porcupine, Grouper released the critically acclaimed Way Their Crept. From there, a series of recordings were made available, including a 3" CD entitled He Knows in 2006 and the 12" Weird Forest release Wide in 2007. In the meantime, Harris earned extra props from the genre as a whole with her 2006 collaboration album with Xiu Xiu entitled Creepshow. In addition to releasing work on Free Porcupine and Collective Jyrk, Grouper also saw releases on Type Records, which was responsible for the re-release of her groundbreaking Way Their Crept in 2007, as well as her 2008 work, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill.' -- ATP
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Four cosmetic surgeons
from cosmeticsurgeon.co.uk
Franz Gsell was one of Germany’s most celebrated plastic surgeons and worth a reported $10 million. After his expensive first marriage failed he decided to find himself a plain, chubby girl from a rural Bavarian town who he could turn into his own Barbie trophy wife. When he “created” Tatjana he liked to think he was creating “the perfect woman”. After Franz had performed more than 20 operation to create his dream wife it all started to go wrong for him. First she left him for another wealthy old man called Helmut Becker known as the “Car King of Düsseldorf” and they set up a love nest in Marbella, Spain. Not long after, Franz was robbed and attacked with an axe by a gang. He was so badly beaten he died two weeks later in hospital. Ironically this propelled Tatjana in the spot light and she immediately found celebrity fame in Germany’s gutter press and her plastic looks can be seen adorning many magazines.
Kaweewat Hengsawat was the owner of Bio Clinic in Pattaya, Thailand and had a unique way of dealing with patients unhappy with their nips and tucks. He has them shot in the head. After former patient Mrs Apassanan began a lawsuit and PR campaign against him accusing him of disfiguring her after he injected liquid silicone solution into her face. It is said he paid to have her killed. And for good measure he had the witness in the case killed as well…or so he is accused. It is also rumored he also botched an operation to enlarge the penis of a member of government.
Alan Bittner gives a new meaning to the phrase ”Living off the fat of the land”. In Alan’s case the fat was from over seven thousand liposuction patients he treated at his Rodeo Drive clinic and he converted the fat of his patients into a Biofuel to power his fleet of vehicles including his Ford Explorer and his girlfriends’ Lincoln Navigator. He has patients forming a queue to take him to court after it also emerged he let his unlicensed girlfriend and an assistant perform the liposuction surgery on his patients as well. She took out too much fat, explaining that she and Bittner were planning a long road trip and needed the extra fuel. Bittner moved to South America after the lawsuit started to stack up.
Priscilla Presley and number of Hollywood high society are just a few of the many thousands of former patients disfigured by Daniel Serrano who claimed to have found a new anti ageing solution (the solution turned out to be an industrial type of low quality silicone that is used in automotive industry) Argentinean born Daniel Serrano was unlicensed to provide any kind of treatment and had little medical training was dubbed “Dr. Daniel” and “Dr. Jiffy Lube” charged thousands of dollars for his treatment. The injections caused lumps in his victims lip that made it hard for them to eat and drink as well as speak. He is currently serving time in a Federal Prison._____________
Interview with Aniruddhan aka my youngest brother Courtney, facilitator of the Divine Diamond Healing.
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Michel Ned Holte, 'The Grit And The Oyster: Ricky Swallow's Sculptures'
In 20 Lines a Day – a book titled more or less accurately – the American author Harry Mathews records a daily practice, spanning from spring 1983 to summer 1984, of unplanned improvisations that preceded the more ‘serious’ work on his novel Cigarettes, and pushed Stendhal’s dictum for writing ‘twenty lines a day, genius or not’ to an almost absurd degree of literalness. ‘It’s a good warm-up exercise I’ve given myself’, Mathews reminds himself on the Day of the Dead:
'There’s no conceivable reason not to write twenty lines about anything or something, and twenty lines are enough (would ten or five be equally so?) to banish the hesitancy that breeds telephone calls and household chores and prolongs the reading of newspapers, L. L. Bean catalogues, and articles in Raritan.'
My reading of Mathews’s book coincided with preparations for writing the essay you are now reading – an essay regarding the recent sculpture of Australian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Ricky Swallow. Maybe it was the unexpected mention of L. L. Bean, but I immediately began to draw connections between Mathews’s nose-to-the-grindstone routine and Swallow’s labor-intensive approach to sculpture (as well as my own tendency to procrastinate about writing).
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Fig.2, jelutong, 2009
Caravan, hand finished Bronze, 2008
Tusk, bronze w/white patina, Brass fixtures, 2007
The Arrangement, English Limewood, 2004
Everything is Nothing, jelutong, Epoxy Putty, 2003
Come Together, jelutong, 2002
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4 from the MegaSuperNoise channel
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Gilles Deleuze, The Philosophy of Crime Novels
taken from The Evening Redness in the West
La Série Noire is celebrating a momentous occasion—its release of #1000. The coherence, the idea of this collection owes everything to its editor. Of course everyone knew something about cops, criminals, and their relationship, even if it was only from reading the papers, or the knowledge of special reports. But literature is like consciousness, it always lags behind. These things had not yet found their contemporary literary expression, or they hadn't attained the status of common-place in literature. The credit for closing this gap at a particularly favorable moment goes to Marcel Duhamel. Malraux had this insight to offer in his preface to the translation of Sanctuary: "Faulkner knows very well that detectives don't exist; that police power stems neither from psychology nor from clarity of vision, but from informants; and that it's not Moustachu or Tapinois, the modest thinkers of the Quai des Orfevres, who bring about the apprehension of the murderer on the loose, but rank-and-file cops".... La Série Noire was above all an adaptation of Sanctuary for a mass market (look at Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish), and a generalization of Malraux's preface.
In the old conception of the detective novel, we would be shown a genius detective devoting the whole power of his mind to the search and discovery of the truth. The idea of truth in the classic detective novel was totally philosophical, that is, it was the product of the effort and the operations of the mind. So it is that police investigation modeled itself on philosophical inquiry, and conversely, gave to philosophy an unusual object to elucidate: crime.
(continued)
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Melt Banana in ... 'Melt Banana Goes to Sherwood Magazines'
photos: Brendan 'Blendin' Lott
... but first ...
8 short songs (2:58)
'Free the Bee' (3:00)
'A Dreamer Who is Too Weak to Face Up' (2:46)
... and now ...
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Elaine Sturtevant's House of Horrors
'For the first time in France, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris has dedicated to artist Elaine Sturtevant a monographic exhibition in which she presents her pivotal works, bringing to light the principal problems of her way of working, as well as some previously unseen works especially conceived for this event. In particular the new "House of Horrors", an impressive and life-size ghost train is arranged like the haunted house ride at a boardwalk carnival: viewers wait in line to board small vehicles that then enter a dark and mysterious tunnel… (I won’t ruin the surprise).' -- gogoparis.com
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Two boys wrestling
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'The New Narrative movement, founded in San Francisco by Bruce Boone and Robert Gluck, was forged in response to the stagnation of contemporary experimental poetry of the late 1970s. Wishing to bring the vigor and energy of the gay rights and feminist movements, Bruce Boone’s writing of the late 1970s is as fresh, funny, witty, and self-reflexive as it was thirty years ago. Boone is the author of Century of Clouds, My Walk with Bob, The Truth about Ted, and LaFontaine (in collaboration with Robert Glück). He has translated works by Georges Bataille, Pascale Quignard, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.' -- UPNE
Bruce Boone Weekend
by Thom Donovan
This past weekend in New York City I will always remember as the Bruce Boone weekend. On Friday night Boone read as part of a launch event for Nightboat Books at Metro Pictures gallery in Chelsea. He was preceded by Evelyn Reilly and Marcella Durand, who read from the Eco Language Reader (co-published by Nightboat Books and Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, edited by Brenda Iijima), Stephen Motika, the publisher of Nightboat, who introduced the readers and their books, Edwin Torres, who read from his book In the Function of External Circumstances, and Rob Halpern, who read from his forward to the Nightboat reissue of Boone’s 1980’s New Narrative classic, Century of Clouds. Triumphantly, Boone read from the final pages of Century of Clouds, wherein he breezily recalls the social atmosphere around the Marxist study group in which he, Fredric Jameson, and others participated.
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Antonio Urdiales unleashed
THE WEAKLINGS Deadicated 2 Dennis Cooper (3:27)
CUPID (5:11)
OLDE ORBE DISAPPEAR (2:38)
DEMO (3:44)
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The killers
Russian Satan worshippers murder, devour four teens
September 16, 2008: The killers carried out the brutal killings in June, but the victims' remains were not found until last month, Russian police have revealed.
Each victim was stabbed 666 times — the biblical sign of the devil — before some of their limbs, breasts and genitals were cut off and their hearts ripped out as part of a ritual.
The remains of Anya Gorokhova, Olga Pukhova, Varya Kuzmina and Andrei Sorokin — aged between 16 and 17 and described by police as "Goths" — were found in a pit branded with satanic symbols and an upside down cross in the Yaroslavl region of Russia, 255km north-east of Moscow.
Kuzmina reportedly called a friend from the apartment of the gang’s leader, Nikolai Ogolobyak, shortly before her murder and said "I don't like it here, something's not right".
Police believe the killings were executed in two separate rituals on consecutive days and all the victims and killers knew each other.
Crime scene
Eight worshippers have been arrested over the murders, but have since claimed Satan would help them "avoid responsibility".
"I made lots of sacrifices to him," one member of the gang was quoted as saying.
Another member claimed he turned to Satan after his prayers to God were not answered.
"It didn’t bring me any money... I prayed to Satan, and things improved," he said.
The victims
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