In Romero's Dead trilogy (+1), the dead exist as a community with no common bond beyond their hunger for the living. While this is a specific difference and common trait, it is no obstacle for the dead as the living are welcome to cross over and join the dead.

In "Crowds and Power" Elias Canetti wrote:

"It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. The reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest."

As in The Coming Community's discussion of contemporary life living under the sign of fascism, the living react with the worst sort of fascism to the existence of the undead. The dead are hunted, they are rounded up in camps, they are exiled to ghettos and in the Day of the Dead, they are subject to medical experiments . Living friends who are bitten and thus becoming undead are shot at the moment they cross over. They are thus dead, forever, instead of undead. While the dead kill the living and thus a reason to kill the dead is established, those who are killed do not die but instead join the ranks of the undead. What the living fear most, in Romero's trilogy, is not death but the unbeing of becoming undead.


"In the early 1970s there was an advertisement shown in Paris movie theaters that promoted a well-known brand of French stockings, 'Dim' stockings. It showed a group of young women dancing together. Anyone who ever watched even a few of its images, however distractedly, would have a hard time forgetting the special impression of synchrony and dissonance, of confusion and singularity, of communication and estrangement that emanated from the bodies of the smiling dancers. This impression relied on a trick: Each dancer was filmed separately and later the single pieces were brought together over a single sound track. But that facile trick, that calculated asymmetry of the movement of long legs sheathed in the same inexpensive commodity, that slight disjunction between the gestures, wafted over the audience a promise of happiness unequivocally related to the human body."

Sea Sponge

Sponges are also the earliest sexual reproducers; most are hermaphroditic, producing both eggs and sperm, which they release into the water. The sperm drift along until they find their way into the tunnels and caves of another sponge. But the sponge has other reproductive options. If you push one through a sieve, breaking free its individual cells, these cells will drift until they find each other, then stick together and create an exact genetic duplicate of the parent. If wounded, a sponge doesn’t need to grow new tissue; it simply moves old cells into the wound to close it. These techniques have helped sponges survive at least 500 million years.
The sponge is the earliest, most primitive multicelled animal, Sogin says. Some scientists believe the ability to grow different cell types started animals on the evolutionary road to becoming humans. With just a few kinds of cells, only loosely connected, the sponge manages to produce a variety of asymmetrical shapes, from cups and fans to tubes and piecrust shapes. Sponges survive handsomely on their own and can even shelter other sea creatures: Scientists found a large sponge in the Gulf of Mexico hosting 16,000 snapping shrimp and 1,000 other aquatic animals. The sponge’s cells, its calcium carbonate or glasslike silica spicules, and the mass of collagen that forms its visible body all create a network of tunnels and chambers, with little flailing hairs called cilia on the walls that wave the water through and filter out plankton and waste. No matter how large the sponge, it can eat only what its individual cells can absorb.
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/nov/this-is-your-ancestor

Karin Hasselberg

http://www.karinhasselberg.com/2008/hole14/hole14.html

She gets curators to dig a hole in the ground. Artistic practice as digging a hole.

Relational Aesthetics 2

I came across this piece called An Underground Disco Information Organization by Red Design, also photographed by Benjamin Wittner. a loosely statistical representation of a survey of lifestyle choices entitled sex/intoxication/music/fashion. Humorously designed, the poster, from a series by the same title, quantifies lifestyle choices such as 'active or passive seduction.'  "The trivial yet decisive choices of the revelling bon vivant are affectionately mocked through provocative photographic expression"  These were displayed in an underground club as part of the intersubjective experience of mingling with strangers/not strangers in recreational space.

And finally, as Foucault's Friendhship as a Way of Life reminded me of a short film called Non-Love Song that I couldn't find. Here's the poster and the trailer:

it's a short film by short film by Erik Gernand that takes place as two best friends attempt to connect in adulthood and for the first time in their lives share a real moment they both need - and fear

Relational Aesthetics

I immediately thought of this project when I was reading through the Logic of the Lure. It was created by a graphic designer who In photographing men's public spaces in the Midwest, the designer came across a bathroom stall in a truck stop in the middle of Illinois, inside of which he found the text: 'gay fagget (sic) fucker die you know it's a truck driver.' Using the author's existing handwritten forms, the designer constructed an entire alphabet according to his writing style. Then "based on a reflective system and rooted in Western representation of homosexuality in duplicate" the designer "morphed the author's letterforms to generate a homo-sexualized uppercase and lowercase alphabet consisting of same-letter ligatures."

He returned to the original bathroom stall and superimposed his own text reading 'let's face it, we're all queer' on top of the original.

The exersice attempted to "uncover the latent homosexuality in the author's written homophobia to generate an alphabet 'code' in which the graffiti artist cannot answer back.

An artist's book exploring the experience of growing up gay in the 1960's in the Midwest. The hand lettered book consists of 7 stacks of text which can be recombined infinitely, yielding any possible number of readings. The results are actually quite humorous and I'm pretty sorry I couldn't get more images than this:

Foucault's Friendship as a Way of Life brought this one to mind, although it's only tangentially related. It's Shawn Wolfe's Live Twice the Life in Half the Time! The caption reads: "Introducin Remover Installer Gold. Makes any lifestyle choice easy to dispense. Represents every detail of your life in full dimension, even when you're away. Direct experience is recorded in real time and automatically vouch-safed Plus: Nostalgia for the Right Now...at no additional cost!"

This candid series of photos by Benjamin Wittner kind of invites the viewer make a connection between sexual and musical predilection in order to promote an underground club in Fuerth, Bavaria. It made me think about spatiality and its relation to erotics.

I had seen this postcard before so I searched for more of his images, which are coming in the next post...

 

Corrections

It was Philip Matesic who created a coffee shop in his UIC studio in the Spring of 2008—not Mathew Paul Jinks.

Artistic practices and Relational Art

When I started reading about Affect last week, I thought about the works by the brazilian artist Lygia Clark as a clear example... but as I continued reading, and specially after class, I realized that Massumi's affect was quite different from what I considered affect: (from Merriam-Webster) "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes".

Well, maybe it is just a matter of terminology, but Clark's work could be summarized in the following way: "Throughout her career trajectory, Clark discovered ways for museum goers (who would later be referred to as "participants") to interact with her art works. She sought to redefine the relationship between art and society. Clark's works dealt with inner life and feelings" (from wikipedia).

But then I read the Relational Aesthetics text from Bourriaud, which I found really inspiring, and which actually explained quite more clearly why I found Lygia Clark's work very engaging in relation with the definition of Relational Art "art which takes as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space" (p. 14)

For example, I totally think her work Hand Dialogue (1966) fits really well in the Relational Art description, although it was actually created years before the works Bourriaud takes as base for his theory (I think).



It is an elastic band in the form of a Möbius strip that two people use to connect their hands in a tactile dialogue. I think it could be considered a literal description of what Bourriaud means when he says that art "tightens the space of relations" (p.16). The same could be thought about Clark's work "Dialogue" goggles from 1968, which restrict the visual field of the two participants to an eye-to-eye exchange, merging interactivity and dialog, two of the central concerns in Clark's work.



Julio

http://www.critical-art.net/home.html

Steve Kurtz told me that he did this project, and it was right before he went off to Buffalo and got arrested for bioterrorism the day his wife died, and I was 17 and wanted to smash the state and thought he was _so_ cool, and expected all of my subsequent critical theory professors to also be wild geniuses whose eyes were sunken in to deep dark sockets and who had stories about driving Greenberg around and had books written about them which mentioned their 80's cocaine habits. Anyway, it involves consumables, is in public, and attempts to make work with people/context. relational. Oh so the project's not described well on the site, I just realized. Basically they used some Euro money (important as it is given to artists sometimes) to buy a bunch of beer and smokes. Then for like a week or a month or something they hung out at some train station and there hung out with folks (sometimes unemployed, it's suggested?) who wanted said items.


When I Learned What Relational Aesthetics Was:

I was getting drunk and eating in a bar after friday openings, and sitting around a big table full of people who could talk about art and could accurately read the weather forecast (http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/166597.asp?from=blog_last3 )

One of those people was Abby Satinsky, who runs InCUBATE, a radical non-profit in chicago that my non-profit's like sisters with. http://incubate-chicago.org/

She's smart and has invested considerable amounts of time and treasure into investigating contemporary alternative modes of artistic practice. I wanted to know about relational aesthetics, and so I asked her.

She described it well, then kind of bashed it as an incomplete theoretical project, then got pretty upset when I suggested that maybe the InCUBATE project listed below might be called relational aesthetics.

Sunday Soup
http://www.incubate-chicago.org/sundaysoupfaq.html

OK so: relational aesthetics?
are we allowed to call it that?
they don't want us to.
Why would they want to avoid that association?
Do people shrink from affiliation with movement in general now?
sigh..

Then there was the dude who graduated last year (Matthew Paul Jinks?) what made a cofeeshop out of his studio for a semester? I think that sums it up; one liners are not always bad.

OK, So:
Some stock responses to relational work:
_RISKY!!_ _ART?!_

Boring, on the whole, I think, a little bit, and I think a lot of people think that too. It should be understood, though, that that table at that bar was doing some of the work that I think we're being asked to do by NB; we were a clan slung together by the art context we were hyper-aware of our implication/participation in. Plus, relational work is being done all the time by the bevy of art/political organizers that anyone in chicago can join. Projects and events are enacted with serious devotion to context creation. All the time. We made an at-cost speakeasy in our storefront... It's a dumb move, but so's writing about and pushing movement that has so little to say. Critical Art Ensemble and InCUBATE don't want to stand next to Rikrit because they want to change the world, not point out how the bourgeois hang out in it. He was married to Elizabeth Peyton for Jesus' sake, how political is she?

relational and related aesthetics part 2

Sharon Hayes revolutionary love 2 from website

This summer, artist Sharon Hayes will gather 100 people at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions to read a text in unison addressing political desire and romantic love

Hayes’ performances are intended to be spectacles, and are designed to mirror the spectacular nature of the National Conventions. Reacting against the tendency of groups to polarize feelings about homosexuality for political gain, Hayes describes these performances as personal addresses to the power structure, or a group of people speaking their hearts as one.



moving forest nl architects




street with a view, from website:

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...

relational and related aesthetics

Marti Guixe-Sculpt me point



"Anything that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish"



boombox bench (bluetooth) by nl architects



sound system (jamaican )



wickerpark dancer, couldn't find another picture, apparently he staged a death hoax.






this is called supergas. from the website:
The orange biogas plant produces biogas from organic materials, such as human and animal stools. For a modest sum, an African family will be able to buy such a biogas system and achieve self-sufficiency in energy. The plant produces approx. 4 cubic metres of gas per day from the dung from 2-3 cattle. This is enough for a family of 8-10 members for cooking purposes and to run one gas lamp in the evening.



dunne and raby, human poo lunchbox for kids, in an alternate future children will have to earn their keep by recycling poo for bio-fuel. from website:

We chose to design a collection of hypothetical products to explore the ethical, cultural and social impact of different energy futures. Photographic scenarios were used to communicate a set of values driven by social as well as technological changes -- value fictions rather than science fictions.

-----

dunne and raby are designers whose practice has been labeled "critical design" "design for debate" they make hypothetical objects designed to foster discussion/debate/dialogue, etc.

Returning to Newman

While thinking about the sublime, the abyss, and Barnett Newman's "zips"—I have created my very own zip-loc zips. It it happening?

Affect and (certain kinds of) Photography

"Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state...it is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption...It is not exactly passivity, because it is filled with motion, resonation. And it is not yet activity, because the motion is not of the kind that can be directed toward practical ends in a world of constituted objects and aims"

Reading through Massumi I immediately thought of the whole genre of documentary photography that aims to be a catalyst of social change in the world by delivering 'the truth' in all its horrifying splendor (the typical NatGeo stuff: famine, war, suffering). The paradox of this kind of photography is that it attempts to elicit an emotional response in a (usually) priviledged audience that seldom translates emotional response into action. A lot of people speculate that this lack of tangible action corresponds to a lack of emotional response from an anesthetized, jaded, already expectant audience. But reading Massumi's text made me think otherwise. I think it is precisely because affect is a state of disruption, because "it is the suspension of the invariance that makes happy happy, sad sad, functi

on function and meaning mean" that the emotional response elicited by this genre of photography doesn't (and can never) translate itself into the kind of action that it uses to legitimate the endeavor to 'aestheticize suffering.'   

An infamous Pulitzer prize winning image by Kevin Carter that immediately comes to mind (and I have many times wondered WHY this image won the prize): 

Reality TV

"Actually, existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of effect." (Massumi, p. 96-97)

I was thinking about affect, because I used to equate it with emotional response but now I'm beginning to understand that an emotional response is subjective. Once formed, an emotional response becomes personal and seated, lodged in my mind/body. Affect seems like it cannot be embodied, but remains necessarily flimsy, because it is temporarily contained in my perception of something. An emotional response also has a clarity which affect doesn't. In other words, when I see something that I respond to but I don't quite understand (like identifying with or feeling sympathy towards a reality show contestant) I am responding to its affect, but when I know that I feel sad, I am having an emotional response.

I recently made a video that compiles "chopping block" moments of reality tv, where contestants wait to see if they will be voted off the show. These scenes are dragged out mercilessly, the music percussive and theatrical (gongs, etc.) shots repeated and broken up by commercials. The elongation of this moment increases the suspense, not only for the contestant, but also the home viewer.

I feel like many people, including myself would hardly admit to feeling sympathy towards most reality tv contestants. There is very little to pity to be had for such a greedy, narcissistic bunch. But during these elimination moments, something, against our will, pulls us in to their plight. I feel like affect is at work, it's not quite a developed and seated emotional response because we all know better than to empathize with these fabricated television faces, and yet, often times, we find ourselves staring back, a bit desperate, and waiting for the ax to fall.

Emo Snowman

I have been thinking about Massumi's example of the snowman- where the more emotional story was found more pleasurable and promoted greater retention than the typical descriptive narrative. This is of interest in making artwork, particularly in film/video. By eliciting an emotional response, the filmmaker can draw viewers in and make them remember what is important and necessary for the greater conceptual/overall understanding. Emotional responses can make viewers feel like they are connected to the material.

Perhaps I thought of David Tutor mostly because of the image of the composition at the top of the Rhizome essay, but if I have some grasp of the rhizome, I think Tudor's music might apply. I think of Cage's comment about abstract expressionism, that he found it interesting because it de-emphasized the center of the canvas as the point of reference for composition, and that his (and perhaps Tudor's) musical compositions were like this also. My understanding of the rhizome is that it does not operate within traditional binaries, dualities, dichotomies, etc; but attempts to instead understand something in light of it's endless complexity, which seems to lie beyond our everyday perceptual experience of the thing (for example, a book, a mind, or a history). The essay seems to suggest that binaries are imposed from without and are a form of unequal power distribution, much like assertions of sociocultural normativity (for example, a professor of mine liked to designate american normativity as "White-Protistant-Hetero-Patriarchal-Capitalism".)

While I feel like I understand this on some level (it reminds me of discussions of quantum mechanics vs. Newtonian gravitation), I don't totally understand the essay's negation of subjectivity. Sure, one can say that a subject is more complex than we experience it to be, such as eastern mystics who will point out that if you begin to "watch" yourself thinking, you will realize that your thoughts are happening whether you are in control of them or not. Still, I don't know if I agree with the extent to which they are subverting subjectivity and objectivity. On some level, I would think (much like mutual gravitation, which still tells us where planets are located with a degree of accuracy) that subjectivity more or less accurately describes the way we experience the world, and is therefore valid, at least as a model.

deleuzeandguattari p.176

podcast and such.

PAPILLON
by ridhadhib

the Art of literal translation.



11 mins in!!
Interveiws about hierarchy vs. rhizome.
Jeff Vail, author of "A Theory of Power,"

The Sensation of Bacon

Did the bird alighting suggest the umbrella or what?
It suddenly suggested an opening-up into another area of feeling altogether. And then I made these things; I gradually made them. So that I don't think the bird suggested the umbrella; it suddenly suggested this whole image. And I carried it out very quickly, in about three or four days.



Can you say what impelled you to do the triptych?
I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs, which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a nonbeliever, it was just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.



One wants to do this thing of just walking along the edge of the precipice, and in Velasquez it's a very, very extraordinary thing that he has been able to keep it so near to what we call illustration and at the same time so deeply unlock the greatest and deepest things that man can feel. Which makes him such an amazingly mysterious painter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/sep/13/greatinterviews

Dubai: Nothing but Spectacle

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Tschumi

Bernard Tschumi's Parc de la Villette

The Continuing Gong Show that is This Week...

..., Situationist-style.

So, in addition to the other things I'm managing to mung up, I also managed not to scan one of the more important Situationist texts for this week, "A Report on the Construction of Situations." It's available online here. You might also be interested to check out "A User's Guide to Detournement."

Oy.

Ranciere: From the Politics of Aesthetics

I call the distribution of the sensible he system of self-evident acts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes, one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. (p.12)

Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. (p.12)

(about the Distribution of the Sensible)

It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (p.13)

There is no criterion for establishing an appropriate correlation between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. (p.62)

From what I understand, the specific politics of every historical moment influence and determine how the politics or apolitics of a work of art can be interpreted.

Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll (1970)




The work MoMA Poll by Hans Haacke asked viewers to answer the question “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for you not voting for him in November?” Viewers could vote and the results were visually represented in transparent boxes. The artwork served as a form of political engagement in two ways. Not only did it function as a political poll (testing the unpopularity of Vietnam) but it also served as a form of institutional critique, as the Governor also served as a trustee of the Museum.

The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation, 1999

The website www.alzado.net enabled any Internet user to design light sculptures over the city’s historic centre, with eighteen searchlights positioned around the square.



Antony Muntadas

The Boardroom," 1987

In "The Boardroom" (1987), tables and chairs became the charged accoutrements and signs of a quintessential corporate entity: in this case, organized religion. Fulfilling the convention were thirteen portrait photographs of television evangelists, like Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts and spiritual leaders like Pope John II and Ayatollah Khomeni. Tiny video monitors mounted in the thirteen portraits where the mouths of these leaders would be, delivered public messages of symbolic and commercial appeal from the walls of the private, privileged room (The Works of Antony Muntadas)

"Words: The Press Conference Room," 1991



Before the Ethical regime of images and then the poetic regime of art, art identification occurred via a division within the ways of "doing and making".

The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doung and making affiliated with art from other ways of doingnad making... (p.23)

About the aesthetic regime of the arts:

The aesthetic regime of the arts did not begin with decisions to initiate an artistic rupture. It began with decisions to reinterpret what makes art or what art makes. (p.25)

Malevich, Black Square, 1915



Wassily Kandinsky. Untitled (first abstract watercolor), 1910



Fountain de Marcel Duchamp, 1917

Documentary film, film devoted to the 'real', is in this sense capable of greater fictional invention than 'fiction' film, readily devoted to a certain stereotypes and characters.

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought

Julio

Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?— Jean-François Lyotard

Situationist Texts

In reading these I got to thinking on pg 10 about old neighborhoods, tourism, and adventure.

Debord says "In old neighborhoods, the streets have degenerated into highways, and leisure is commercialized and adulterated by tourism....We require adventure. Not finding it anymore on earth, there are those who want to look for it on the moon."

I find this interesting because it speaks to the insatiable thirst of always wanting more. Recently visiting New York times square as well I examined the thirst for tourism. It was much like the thirst tourists have for the Chicago BEAN or other touristy sites. People always want more!!!

It is impossible to imagine being confined for our entire lives

More reality TV coming to you, on a cheaper budget

...as Americans are clipping coupons, eating at home more and doing whatever it takes to cut their budgets, they can turn on their sets and find that TV is being frugal too...Paris Hilton and a camera crew behind her wait for shooting to commence on the set of the reality show "Paris Hilton's My New BFF," in Beverly Hills, Calif., Monday, March 23, 2009. Even in the luxury world of celebutante Paris Hilton, the economy is tamping down the glam. As networks grapple with smaller budgets and cash-strapped marketers are looking for free exposure, a popular solution has emerged in the downturn: Even cheaper reality TV..."The economy's a mess, so all of us have to work more efficiently. ... We have a reality show that is 40 percent cheaper than this show that just got green-lit."...The economics of reality shows benefit from cost-saving "trade-outs" from sponsors, like free helicopter rides, air travel and dinners at fancy restaurants. And the shows are more malleable to advertisers who are pushing harder to integrate their brands directly into shows, as a way to get in front of consumers who can skip commercials with digital video recorders. Garnier Fructis sponsors a beauty makeover segment on "American Idol Extra," and Charmin gives toilet paper to contestants in remote places on "Survivor."..."It's a great platform for me, because I can show a lot of my products," she said. "All the kids have my perfume. They're all wearing the clothing line, they're all wearing my shoe line, they're all wearing my purse line, my belts, my accessories, Paris Hilton sunglasses. It's kind of like having a free commercial."


Wal-Mart Got Millions From Workers' Life Insurance Policies

Poll: Americans still planning vacations

Caribbean Villa Rentals raise bar on vacation experience

Caribbean villa rental guests have become a valuable mainstay of the current travel scene. Their continued devotion to the ultimate vacation experience has been a saving grace to many Caribbean destinations...Nancy feels that the villa rental industry survives because it provides value, luxury, and the opportunity to see island culture in an upfront and personal way...Villas pull their collective weight by providing multiple layers of financial support to communities by creating local jobs in maintenance, painting, plumbing and electrical, housekeeping, extermination, landscaping, and pool care, to name but several. In addition, island utilities such as power and water, telephone, and the Internet receive income.


Guest luxuries seen as recession remedy, Hotel hopes decor creates ‘sense of arrival’

“As soon as you come in, you know you’ve escaped,” he said..."People are always attracted to what’s new, and the brand’s fans will be able to take advantage of St. Regis hallmarks such as high tea".

Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins by Wal-Mart

The Sam's Club, a Wal-Mart subsidiary, had locked its overnight workers in, as it always did, to keep robbers out and, as some managers say, to prevent employee theft. As usual, there was no manager with a key to let Mr. Rodriguez out. The fire exit, he said, was hardly an option and management had drummed into the overnight workers that if they ever used that exit for anything but a fire, they would lose their jobs.

"My ankle was crushed," Mr. Rodriguez said, explaining he had been struck by an electronic cart driven by an employee moving stacks of merchandise. "I was yelling and running around like a hurt dog that had been hit by a car. Another worker made some phone calls to reach a manager, and it took an hour for someone to get there and unlock the door."

Magazines Blur Line Between Ad and Article

The April issue of Scholastic Parent & Child, scheduled to come out on Monday, will carry an ad on the front cover for the first time in the 16-year history of the magazine. The ad, for a company called Smilebox, will appear in the lower right corner of the cover and carry the label “advertisement” in small type...“We’re certainly conscious of industry standards, and in retrospect, did we push the envelope a little bit on this one? Maybe,” said Gary Hoenig, the general manager and editorial director of ESPN Publishing. “But we keep looking for ways to help our advertisers out, so we’re not going to be unwilling to listen if there’s an interesting idea.”... mix of editorial content and advertising. Entertainment Weekly and Time included editorial photos and coverage of the DreamWorks Animation movie “Monsters vs. Aliens,” mixed with ads from Hewlett-Packard, McDonald’s, Intel and RealD. The advertisers were all “Monsters vs. Aliens” sponsors, and some of their ads included the same movie characters that were shown in the editorial material. Time, Entertainment Weekly and People ran cover lines promoting the section. And the ads and some editorial content were produced in 3-D (glasses were included with the issues).

Battle boredom by planning vacation now

The next month or so is going to be tough for local outdoorsmen. There will be rain and snow, blustery winds, bitter cold days with little to do but look out the window and wish spring was really here. There's one thing you can do during the coming days, and that's plan for a spring or summer vacation.

Zoos: Boredom behind bars

It is impossible to imagine being confined for our entire lives, as captive animals are. The very essence of freedom is being able to come and go as we please, decide when and what to eat, hang out with people we like and avoid those we don't, choose and court our mates and decide whether or not to have children.

Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?— Jean-François Lyotard

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.

Celebrity Jeopardy-Cage,Flockhart,Connery - These bloopers are hilarious

Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?— Jean-François Lyotard

Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren

Jason Rhodes

Duchamp