Trevor Paglen writes the kinds of books that get you into weird conversations with strangers. He takes the kinds of pictures that are slightly unnerving until you read the title card, and then it becomes a regular amount of unnerving.
LINK: https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/673403822/the-man-making-art-from-government-surveillance
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While historians have examined the complexity and nuance of the 1960s counterculture, their analyses of the popular culture that was intimately connected to it continue to focus on “hippie” culture from San Francisco. The Doors represent a different side of the experience. They were influenced by ideas that were influential across the movements that coalesced into the popular resistance front of the late sixties, but the band articulated an unorthodox brand of countercultural resistance that affirmed or rejected different aspects of the culture as it was discussed at the time and as it would later be constructed in popular memory. They advocated “sex as a weapon,” while subtly eschewing “psychedelia” and rejecting the more overt elements of hippie culture, especially Woodstock, in favor of “darkness” and “constant revolution.” The band’s extreme popularity in the late sixties points to the wide appeal of their particular countercultural brand.
People have moments like that under normal conditions, of course. Sigmund Freud wrote a famous essay about them way back in 1929, Civilization and Its Discontents. A few unsettled souls will always quit that bank job and sail to Tahiti, and the stoic middle will always suck it up. But Jacobi couldn’t accept those options. Staggered by the shock of his Kaczynski Moment but intent on rising to the challenge, he began corresponding with the great man himself, hitchhiked the 644 miles from Chapel Hill to Ann Arbor to read the Kaczynski archives, tracked down his followers all around the world, and collected an impressive (and potentially incriminating) cache of material on ITS along the way. He even published essays about them in an alarmingly terror-friendly print journal named Atassa. But his biggest influence was a mysterious Spanish radical theorist known only by the pseudonym he used to translate Kaczynski’s manifesto into Spanish, Último Reducto. Recommended by Kaczynski himself, who even supplied an email address, Reducto gave Jacobi a daunting reading list and some editorial advice on his early essays, which inspired another series of TV-movie twists in Jacobi’s turbulent life. Frustrated by the limits of his knowledge, he applied to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to study some more, received a full scholarship and a small stipend, and buckled down for two years of intense scholarship. Then he quit and hit the road again. “I think the homeless are a better model than ecologically minded university students,” he told me. “They’re already living outside of the structures of society.”
LINK: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/the-unabomber-ted-kaczynski-new-generation-of-acolytes.html
The computer you’re reading this article on right now runs on a binary — strings of zeros and ones. Without zero, modern electronics wouldn’t exist. Without zero, there’s no calculus, which means no modern engineering or automation. Without zero, much of our modern world literally falls apart.
LINK: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/5/17500782/zero-number-math-explained
(Fingers crossed?)
If humans continue to pump greenhouse gases at our current rate, “we have no reason to think it wouldn’t cause a similar type of extinction,” said Curtis Deutsch, a UW professor and author of the research.
A new theory of consciousness
Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A bat? A cockroach? A bacterium? An electron?
These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which has resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years.
Presently, the fabric that holds a society together has shredded in the wind. Everyone has their own facts, their own private Idaho stored in their expensive cellular phones. The earbuds are in, the feedback loops are locked, and the Frappuccino’s are flowing freely. Social media provides the highway straight back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The restless natives react to digital shadows on the wall, reduced to fear, hate, and superstition. There are climate change deniers, and there are even more who think that the climate is being maliciously manipulated by corporate conglomerates owned by the Central Bank to achieve global control of resources and wealth. If only that James Bond-style fantasy were true, I would be much more excited about the future, which I fear is more of a slow-death conspiracy of dunces like in Mike Judge’s movie, Idiocracy, the movie Devo should have made.
LINK: https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqek5/devo-open-letter-devolution-rock-hall-trump-2018
It’s possible to think of the director as a troll first and serious director second – this is understandable, but regrettable
Last Wednesday, a hundred-plus American theatres hosted a new Lars von Trier film, in its ‘director’s cut,’ for one night only. It’s impossible to imagine any of Von Trier’s still-working contemporaries from, say, the 1996 Cannes Film Festival (where his international breakthrough Breaking the Waves premiered) having their latest films released this way: no such fate awaits Hou Hsiao-hsien or Mike Leigh.
The House That Jack Built (2018) arrived, carnival-barker style, as a viewer-testing orgy of extreme thrills, but it’s actually a very late-period-auteur movie which continues Von Trier’s longtime formal gambit (a widescreen, performance-foregrounding and conspicuously handheld camera style, courting utilitarian ugliness, interpolated with bits reminding you he can go hyper-formal at will) while self-reflexively reorganizing his general preoccupations. A few grody but brief insert shots aside, The House That Jack Built is no serial killer slasher but two and a half hours of uneasy black comedy carried by Matt Dillon’s unreadable (hence unpredictable, hence funny) murderer, leavened with plenty of discussion about church architecture, art and morality.
On this edition of Parallax Views, Dr. Harold Schechter, one of America’s most prolific and voluminous true crime authors, joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on history’s real-life monsters from Ed Gein to H.H Holmes that attempts elucidate why society is fascinated by serial killers, violent art, murder, and mayhem.
It’s widely known that Marilyn Manson came up with his stage name by combining the monikers of actress Marilyn Monroe and infamous convicted mass murderer Charles Manson. The two names were chosen by Marilyn Manson because he felt that the pair were the two biggest icons of the 1960s. Apparently, the shock rock icon is pretty infamous himself in the mind of Charles Manson, as a postcard from the prisoner to the rock star has been leaked online.
LINK: http://loudwire.com/charles-manson-writes-open-letter-to-marilyn-manson-from-prison/
