==pla|\|ing lakes==

Saturday, June 07, 2003

The last frontier?

Reality show to advertise in fortune cookies

2:31 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Art & America's death mores

Hadn't heard of Thomas Condon's case -- or I forgot about it with everything else going on

Description of Artwork: In 2000 and 2001 Thomas Condon, a 30-year-old commercial photographer and artist, was making a training video in the Cincinnati morgue, while there, he also worked on his private art project on the cycle of life and death. Condon had been working on this project for several years. It included images of childbirth, as well as portraits of babies and young children. Dead bodies were photographed with objects on or close to them: an apple, a music score, a snail shell, a key, a toy ladder.

Description of Incident: A lab worker who was developing the negatives of the photos notified the police. Condon?s studio was searched; his photographs were confiscated. Subsequently the confiscated photographs appeared in the media causing community outrage. In 2001 Condon was convicted on criminal charges of ?corpse abuse.? In Ohio, corpse abuse is vaguely defined as ?treating a corpse in a manner that would outrage reasonable community sensibilities?. Now an artist is actually serving a two and a half year sentence in medium security prison on charges of corpse abuse for taking photographs in a morgue.

Results of Incident: Condon's request for probation in July was denied. He has been serving his sentence since May 2002. An appeal is currently pending. National Coalition Against Censorship has released an official protest against the criminalization of the photographer who "neither had criminal intent, nor did he cause harm to anybody. Regardless of whether or not he obtained formal permission, a photographer taking pictures does not belong in the same category as a criminal dismembering his victims."

According to the Undernews item that started this, his case is at the Ohio Supreme Court and he will go back to jail if they rule against him.

But even if he had the opportunity to exhibit the morgue shots, he says he would not.

"They've lost their value now," he says. "It hurt those people. I can't change that. I didn't want this to happen. It will never go away. I wouldn't do it again. If they (the pictures) were given to me and I was told I could do anything I want with them or if someone offered me a million-dollar book deal, I would still say no."

It's interesting how corpses can pile up and have dreadful things happen to them in movies, but something like this outrages the bluenoses.

2:04 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Situationism doesn't particularly want your help

"The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images... The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living... The liar has lied to himself"- Guy Debord

The Situationists would argue that by means of the spectacular society, all aspects of our culture and experience is mediated in order to disguise and protect the interests of those who hold real power.

2:44 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, June 06, 2003

Reconstructed MOMA in NYC to open on time in 2005 with nearly double old floor space

10:46 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, June 05, 2003

Today's lyric tonic

DEAD MAN WALKING

He swivels his head
Tears his eyes from the screen
As his past puts him back in Atlantic City

There's not even a demon in Heaven or Hell
Is it all just human disguise?
As I walk down the aisle

And I'm gone gone gone
[Gone gone gone spinning slack through reality]
Now I'm older than movies
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
Let me dance away
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
Now I'm wiser than dreams
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
Let me fly fly fly
[Spinning slack through reality]
While I'm touching tomorrow
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
And I know who's there
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
When silhouettes fall
[Spinning slack through reality]

And I'm gone
Like I'm dancing on angels
And I'm gone through a crack in the past

Like a dead man walking
Like a dead man walking

Three old men dancing under the lamplight
Shaking their sex and their bones
And the boys that we were
An alien nation in therapy
Sliding naked and new
Like a bad tempered child
On a rain slicked street

And I'm gone gone gone
[Gone gone gone spinning slack through reality]
Now I'm older than movies
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
Let me dance away
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
Now I'm wiser than dreams
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
Let me fly fly fly
[Spinning slack through reality]
While I'm touching tomorrow
[Deadens my brain falling up through the years]
And I know who's there
[Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly]
[Losing breath from the water when I'm gone gone gone]
When silhouettes fall
[Spinning slack through reality]

And I'm gone, like I'm dancing on angels
And I'm gone, through a crack in the past
And I'm gone, like I'm dancing on angels
And I'm gone, through the crack in the past

Like a dead man walking
Like a dead man walking
Like a dead man

-- David Bowie

1:30 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

"because newer is not always better"

OldVersion.com [edwardmillerdotorg]

MusicMatch Jukebox, RealPlayer, Winamp, Eudora, etc.

3:01 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, June 02, 2003

AOL pulls new encrypted file sharing Waste software leaked by Winamp creator/AOLTW employee Justin Frankel from its site -- but not in time

It allows around 50 users to trade files on a secure and private network, and includes an IM feature.

slashdot discussion.

Other mirrors listed here.

4:20 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, June 01, 2003

Stupid blog tricks

Only Micro$uck would resurrect the lovably useless and transparently Orwellian concept of the CueCat for "automating" blogging

1:17 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Grant Morrison's graphic series The Invisibles apparently inspired The Matrix; if you're new to or confused by the series' layered mythology, disinfo has a new guide: review

1:06 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Micro$oft slicing prices on Office, even deeper on components (Word, Excel etc.)

'Bout time. This has something to do with Redmond's own student version that was half the price of Office when it was introduced, and which they've done little to limit the use of to students. (Yes that's a bad sentence and I don't care.)

But for many home users, I'd suggest trying out Sun's Open Office, if you want an (Word-compatible) alternative to the full Office suite. Susan has been using it with no crash issues on our Win98SE PC, while our old Word97 wobbles and falls on a regular basis. I hear newer versions of Word are better (and the post-98 OS too), but if you have Win98 try it.

Re stand-alone word processors: I use Jarte with no troubles at all, as well.

Both programs are free as the wind.

4:32 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

casa de cyndi

Nice site of engaging, intelligent Mexican-Irish ex-Jehovah's Witness fun feminist.

Thanks to BlogSnob.

4:08 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

eDonkey and BitTorrent et al. amp up file sharing

The second--and main--advance is that the system can break up each file into tiny pieces, allowing them to be distributed independently. As soon as one person starts downloading these pieces, he or she starts offering them to the network at large. That means a movie does not have to be downloaded in its entirety before it can be offered to other people, making distribution of these and other larger files much more efficient.

3:51 AM - [Link] - Comments ()