Pulling a Scooter Libby (let's call it a Scooty)

So, this band Arcade Fire is pulling some pretty clever pr tricks for
their newly-released (yesterday in N. America) album, Neon Bible.

Reportedly, the Canadian baroque-pop group accidentally leaked
the wrong single from their forthcoming album onto iTunes...

"On December 26, 2006, Arcade Fire accidentally uploaded the wrong song to iTunes. They were going to release the studio version of "Intervention" as a charity single for Partners in Health. As Win Butler wrote on the Arcade Fire website, "I guess it is sort of charming that we can send the wrong song to the whole world with a click of a mouse... Oh well." The song, "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations," was subsequently removed from iTunes, but was reportedly found on many P2P networks..."


Merging the lo-fi and hi-fi, for their first album release the band set up a hotline which fans can call to hear the single "Intervention": (866 NEON-BIBLE, extension number 7777). The band website is also pretty funky, with an annoying mirror-mouse thing happening when you go to the "black mirror" section (don't stare too long). Et...uhh, ils parfois chantent en Francais!


Anything reminiscent of Bowie, and I'm hooked...

Mark on Pandora

(www.pandora.com is the issue in question)...

"Pandora looks like a great idea.
In '94 my Religious Studies A-Level dissertation was on the ethical
implications of virtual reality. They were predicting how artificial
intelligence, like the one in Pandora (it uses neural networks, and
prob'ly genetic algorithms as well) will add up into an unforeseen
superintelligence - or at least that the danger of this cannot be
logically excluded.

The fact that all computerised learning networks have not yet taken over
the world: does it prove that no giant AI has emerged yet? Or that it did,
but knows better than to reveal itself? Kind of like Pascal's argument for
the existence of God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

and of course

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_programming_language

Which calls to mind that when the French were looking for a
non-English sounding name for 'computer' in the 60s, they picked
'ordinateur': a technical term from Pascalian theology,
unused since the 17th century.

And Pandora's fate, after she opened the box.

D o' D

Drawing of the Day.

Old manila paper dress patterns from the upstairs dressmakers
the back of them turn greenish from the all the
acid in the paper migrating away from UV rays.

The Tail End of the Eclipse

ok, I know these aren't great photos, but I hope there's a bit of the Silence Of The Event communicated. It being a Saturday night and springy weather, there were people all on the street coming and going and I didn't see a single one look up at this! Not even the hobo outside the wine shop, who I thought for sure would notice.


This looks like yolks separating but it's just the movement of the camera. At this point there was a bite on the top right which was still obscured.


A bit of ancient history: "The Moon was represented by a mirror in China. During an eclipse, people beating on mirrors is a very old tradition. It was believed that a dragon swallowed the Moon during an eclipse and beating the mirrors would cause the dragon to cough it up and return it to the sky...."

So we got some mirrors out and started banging on them and sure enough,

after a bit of a struggle,


The dragon finally let it go.

Fasciniceation

Man-made snow sculpture on a tree, Vermont.
I think some of the
snowmaking machine operators at
ski areas do this deliberately, these
wonderlands of antigravity...



Four- day old snow frozen into ice and already being pulled up from the ground.

D o' D

Drawing of the Day.

It's three tuning forks, kind of related to the three various forms of "busy" seen below.

Busy Sunday (After Rem Koolhaas)

Busy(1)

I'm afraid that there is no one here
who has time to meet you.

Busy(2)

I have no time for the avant-garde.

Busy(3)

I have no time.



That's Rem and his project-book SMLXL is 1,345 pages long and ends
with a photo-spread of a Beijing newspaper, with the caption
"Two Billion People Won't Be Wrong". Spooky. Mmm-hm.

The Flower Guy Folds, Unfortunately

Two days after Valentine's, and the flower guy on the 1st
floor of 59 Wareham has a wall of boxes full of flowers he
has to now throw out. His workers didn't show up because of the
"storm", and the stands he'd planned to set up on the street vending
the flowers were all thwarted due to snow emergencies.

The place smells great, though.
He's picking at some still-fresh roses,
skinning off the leaves in one swoop of his
hand, right over the thorns. I ask him if he
doesn't get cuts from doing it like that, and
he says,

"Yeah I get cut up, but it doesn't hurt
if you're makin' money."

Bread and Puppet

Was great. They played it up at the Cyclorama for 4
performances of The Terrorists VERSUS The Horrorists,
with a cast of locally-recruited
puppeteers and musicians.

The cardboard people ("this is your neighbour..."),
the silences, the black and the white, all very lyrical
and beautifully strange.

There was a big flat-puppet flying over head for the whole show,
and after he landed on the floor at the end of the show, we went over and checked out his construction. That's the arm, it says "high arm", so that they know how to arrange it when
they get back to base.



& the manifesto makes sense.

Mark's Valentine

After Petrarch. He made it from 4 keyboards.

Nosnibor

This is how Cheryl Robinson used to sign her paintings.

As part of the "profiles of how to survive" series,
we are pleased to report that she has recently announced
her new goal of becoming a Garbologist.

Many friends of hers have made the connection between
her fascination with Bob Dylan, and her new Garbology
aspiration. And, indeed, she is not the first one for whom
the two have been cosmically aligned; A.J. Weberman writes,
in his bio of Dylan,

"One night I went over D's garbage just for old time's
sake and in an envelope separate from the rest of the
trash there were five toothbrushes of various sizes
and an unused tube of toothpaste wrapped in a plastic bag.
'Tooth' means 'electric guitar' in D's symbology...."

"Dylan's Garbage's Greatest Hits," in Twenty Minute
Fandangos and Forever Changes, edited by Jonathan Eisen
(Random House, 1971), p.179.

New Radio Programme

Don't know how many people are into the Public Radio thing, but
WNYC seems to be a hotbed of interesting programmes. First, there was
the fascinating (and voices-in-your-head-like) Radiolab, which is now in its second season. Tonight was the debut of a new programme- described as a sort of variety show- titled
Fair Game.


Tick here to listen to an audiofile, discussing, amongst other things,
the similarities between journalists and prostitutes.

RockMamaMetamorphosis

Don't know this band Grizzly Bear, but their music video Knife
= both pretty and wild. "I can't tell if I am high or offended"...

The Fill