This is totally hilarious. You all know of Marcel Duchamp, even those who may not know him by name, but what you may not fully appreciate is what an evil, evil diabolical genius he was. Marcel was the man who set out to "destroy art" and, if Rhonda Shearer's research is valid, Marcel Duchamp did exactly that with such precision finesse, the rest of us just plainly didn't notice, falling for his stunt hook line and sinker. You see, or rather, what you didn't see, what Marcel so cunningly distracted you from seeing, was that his infamous 'Readymades', those notorious 'everyday storebought objects' he paraded on gallery pedestals, well, sit down: They weren't 'readymade'! We only thought they were because he had the audacity to sign them. And because he said so. And because he gave each one such a fascinating story of how it was 'acquired'. Only, he lied.

Totally freakin' culture-jammin' brilliant. Evil nasty black-art voodoo brilliant:

"There is no identical piece to the one that Duchamp photographed in 1917 in any catalogue of the time, and the reason is simple: because it was created intentionally."
[ Mona Lisa ]

The man who celebrated the 400th year of living in Leonardo's shadow by apparently drawing a moustache and beard and a rude phrase on the world's most beloved masterpiece ... didn't. Look again, says Shearer, look really, really, really closely and do your due diligence: it's bad enough no such 'postcard' was ever printed for him to deface, but the face itself? ... it is Marcel's!  read more »

I've said it for years, I don't have a big-screen, don't need super-high-res and my old DVD player often craps out with the bitrateresolution they pump up in the commercial releases, and besides, it's one thing to like a Gamera now and then, but quite another to want to fork out $15/movie for some grainy cinema print. Why can't they just sell me the films in quality comparable to late-night cross-border antenna UHF? Because I'd buy it. Well, seems someone, somewhere, has started to agree with me.

Sci-Fi Classics 100 Movie Pack: Buster Crabbe, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., David Janssen, Stacy Keach, Jackie Coogan, Richaed Crane, Steve Reeves, Basil Rathbone, Mamie Van Doren, Samantha Eggar, Ken Utsui, James Earl Jones, Glenn Ford, Rock Hudson, Mark Stevens, Roddy McDowell, Anthony Perkins, William 'Stage' Boyd, Peter Graves: Movies & TV.
[ Sci-Fi Classics 100 Movie Pack ]

It's on my wishlist :)  read more »

Out of the day-job, the guys across the (irc) hall have just made their grand announcement: Sportso (beta) is live!

It's been a long time coming, two or three years in the making (depending how you count) but full kudos to Alan and Chris (and Joe and Josh before them) for doing the impossible by pulling together a world-class sports data entry and syndication system and making it both intelligent and affordable.

Sportso is a web-based editorial and distribution system that supports entering results for hundreds of game per day. Power a call-in center, or allow collaborative contributions from coaches, parents, fans and scorekeepers.
[ Sportso: Publish local scores and stats easily and professionally ]

To be honest, I thought they were crazy to even try it. But they did it anyway, and here it is.

What they don't say is how using Sportso buys you entry into a fantastic world of global sports network syndication by speaking the native format of our IPTC Standard SportsML, which can be archived, normalized into an open-standard sports database or fed directly into our XML Team pipeline and broadcast, in syndication or in blistering real-time, virtually anywhere and everywhere, and in any data format, from HTML or RSS for small fantasy-league websites and cellphone services to pro-level type-set ready codes for world-class news agencies and famous portals you all know.  read more »

Two weeks now after the Oct 21st Hymn to the Universe event, and, y'know, I'm really very surprised to see how little traction this received in the web-o-sphere, all things considered. For starters, the show itself was about the inevitable spontaneous emergence of a global network of awareness, aka The Noosphere, yet almost slipped by under the radar of the one present global network which most likes to call itself the real noosphere, and where it was noticed unanimously missed the point and purpose of the show.

Then again, that is maybe not all that surprising: as most any tribal dance/performance, Hymn to the Universe was Bill Coleman's telling of a story, a re-telling of an old myth handed down to us by the legendary archaeologist and Jesuit rebel Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is the story version of Teilhard's scientific observation of the arrow of evolution, and his extrapolation of that arrow of intent into a phenomenon he called Hominization which itself would lead inescapably to a single self-aware sense and heart of the planet, the Noosphere, the sphere of knowing. The cold info-intellectual Internet reviews fixated on details, on solos, on costumes, on pace; I was reminded of McLuhan's comment (on Wm S Burroughs), that such trivial distractions were like criticizing the grammar of the person banging on your door to tell you that your roof is on fire.

sun ra arkestra
noosphere
jazz

Bill, Laurence and company wanted to tell you that your heart is on fire, and that it is about to go brilliantly super-nova, whirling you, me and all of us together into a fantastic Tomorrow's World where an awareness of Us as the whole of Gaia will become as obvious as you now saying you have to comb your hair, as if it was a part of you. Because it is. Marshall Allen and company have been telling us all for 50 years how, of all the cosmos, it is only Planet Earth that lacks this awareness, and they were present that evening as per their long-ago promise, We'll Wait For You.

The event was not intended to cause noogenesis. These people were here to tell us the Noogenesis is inevitable ... and immanent.  read more »

Tonight is Samhain to the Celtic world, the official end of summer harvest season that inaugurates the start of the new year, and to Latin America (mostly Mexico) tonight is the eve of the Day of the Dead when the netherworld of ancestors is closest to the superficial mundane world of everyday, but to much of the western world, tonight is Hallowe'en and the windows are decked in pumpkins and witchery and the children are skulking about the twilight seeking treats. But what is Hallowe'en?  read more »

I saw a ghost last night flickr'd by TeledyN

It will be some time before I really put it together enough to post a proper review, and I won't pretend to have understood all of it (like, who were the big puff hats? And the marionette?) but suffice it for now to say the Palais Royale, once home to the likes of Fletch and Lady Day, was well honoured last night, and those ghosts and spirits approved.  read more »

I don't normally post tech-industry hot-links from the pop charts, but in this case I couldn't resist the temptation to rub this one in the noses of all those startup tech geniuses who rejected my expert advice back when I cared to offer advice on such things, because if they had, who knows, one or two might have still been in business today. So here it is now a mere 7 years later, and net-celeb angel investor Roger Ehrenberg lays out the new rules he now uses to decide who to back with his portfolio  read more »

Millions of recordings on LP and 45, a life-time work of collecting and cataloging popular culture as a labour of love, a $50M collection with more rarities and limited pressings than you can imagine from 1887 to now, now about to be swept away because, well, who cares?:

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.
[ "The Archive" ]  read more »