“Sogo Ishii’s reputation was by this time spreading across Japan’s
borders, not in the least thanks to numerous festival screenings of
his 1984 feature Crazy Family (Gyaku Funsha Kazoku). It was at one of
these festivals that Ishii came in touch with the German noise band
Einstürzende Neubauten. The band was going to tour Japan in 1985
and wanted Ishii to film their concerts. The result, entitled 1/2
Mensch (Hanbun Ningen), became much more than a concert video. Ishii
filmed the band performing for the camera in a ruined warehouse, made
complete music videos for three songs and combined everything with
footage from the Japanese tour. The result was an admirable
representation of the band’s philosophy that all music is noise and
that all noise is music. Intercut with the performance in the
warehouse were meditations on the similarity between flesh and metal.
Zoom in close enough and the truth will reveal itself, Ishii seemed to
say. At the level of the atom, everything is equal. In Neubauten’s
performance, the human body and all manner of industrial metal objects
combine to make music.

1/2 Mensch was the work of a filmmaker trying to understand his
subject, then expressing that understanding in the shape of concepts
images. But he also took it a step further and tried to expand what he
had found. In the music videos he shot for the songs Halber Mensch and
Z.N.S. (both included in the film) he asked the modern dance group
Byakko-sha to create their interpretation of Neubauten’s music, then
let the band play off them. The result was fascinating and disturbing
at the same time, and took the band’s image beyond scrap metal and
noise.” LINK
Youtube

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————-

Also by same artist

Burst City

Those looking for examples of the importance of Sogo Ishii in the development of Japanese cinema, and his abilities as a filmmaker, need to look no further than Burst City. At first sight a rather eclectic mix of Mad Max-style imagery with yakuza elements, filtered though a punk sensibility, on closer inspection Burst City reveals the seeds of many of the developments in contemporary Japanese cinema and beyond. It foreshadows everything from the works of Shinya Tsukamoto and Takashi Miike to two decades’ worth of MTV music videos. And quite a few things in between.

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Indie media mavericks Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny interview each other. (Part one of two. Part two will be up on Greylodge and The GSpot in two weeks.)Fri, 11 April 2008

22 min. from CloneTheHomeless.com

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Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny chat on the phone and there’s no way these two talkers could interview one or the other. So they rap together, in a concentric hypertextual parenthetical way, TCP over IP, about how to make money by giving away art, where the Internet is headed, changing views on changing protection of intellectual “property”, Joseph Campbell, suing Disney for intellectual property violation, how to self-publish your brilliant books, Tom Jennings, why control of your art is more important than lots of money, how to assemble your own vigilant army of the damned, The Pirate Bay, cease-and-desist letters, the Church of the Subgenius, BoingBoing, the WELL, Creative Commons, sex, cats, art and an incredible amount of more nifty stuff.
Part two will cover the coming collapse of the infrastructure of the world, why Catholics are killing the world with overpopulation, and why both of these guys just wanna do the judo master thing and step out of the world’s way, while still running it all from their rural bunkers.

 Clone The Homeless interview with Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny (part 1 of 2) [21:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Track Listing
DISC 1:
1. Twilight’s Last Gleamings
2. 103rd Street Boys - (from “Junkie”)
3. Benway - (from “Naked Lunch”)
4. I Can Feel The Heat Closing In - (from “Naked Lunch”)
5. Meeting Of International Conference Of Technological Psychiatry - (from “Naked Lunch”)
6. In Mexico The Gimmick Is To Find A Local Junkie With A Government Script - (from “Naked Lunch”)
7. Laboratory Has Been Locked For Three Hours Solid, The - (from “Naked Lunch”)
8. Dr. Benway Is Operating In An Auditorium Filled With Students - (from “Naked Lunch”)
9. Fats Terminal Has Organized A Purple Ass Stick For Motocyclists - (from “Naked Lunch”)
10. Hassan Is A Notorious Liquifactionist - (from “Naked Lunch”)
11. Where You Belong - (from “The Soft Machine”)
12. What Washington, What Orders - (from “Exterminator”)
13. From Here To Eternity - (from “Exterminator”)
14. Evening News, The - (from “Exterminator”)
15. I Was Travelling With The Intolerable Kid On The Nova Lark - (from “Nova Express”)
16. Unworthy Vessel, The - (from “Nova Express”)
17. Do-Rights, The - (from “Nova Express”)

DISC 2:
1. Ah Pook Is The Mayan God Of Death - (from “Ah Pook Is Here”)
2. Introducing John Stanley Hart. He Entered The Bar With The Best Intentions - (from “Ah Pook Is Here”)
3. When Did I Stop Wanting To Be President - (from “Ah Pook Is Here”)
4. What The Nova Convention Is All About - (from “Ah Pook Is Here”)
5. Keynote Commentary, Roosevelt After The Inauguration - (from “Ah Pook Is Here”)
6. Chief Smiles, The - (from “The Wild Boys”)
7. Green Nun, The - (from “The Wild Boys”)
8. Tio Mate Smiles - (from “The Wild Boys”)
9. Tio Pepe - (from “The Wild Boys”)
10. As Esperanza Turns To Go Inside; Tia Maria, Tio Gordo - (from “The Wild Boys”)
11. Top Level Conference Is In Progress, A - (from “The Wild Boys”)
12. Firecracker - (excerpts, from “Port Of Saints”)

DISC 3:
1. Virus B-23 - (from “Cities Of The Red Night”)
2. Doctor Pierson - (from “Cities Of The Red Night”)
3. Name Is Clem Snide. Mr Hart Couldn’t Hear The Word Death, The - (from “Cities Of The Red Night”)
4. This Is Kim Carson - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
5. Just Like The Collapse Of Any Currency - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
6. Purple Better One, The - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
7. M.O.B. - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
8. Whole Tamale, The - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
9. My Protagonist Kim Carson - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
10. Salt Chunk Mary - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
11. Like Mr. Hart, Kim Has A Dark Side To His Character - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
12. Progressive Education - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
13. Wild Fruits, The - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
14. Old Man Bickford - (from “Place Of Dead Roads”)
15. Mummy Piece, The - (from “The Western Land”)
16. President, The - (from “The Western Land”)
17. Colonel Bradford - (from “The Western Land”)
18. Every Man A God - (from “The Western Land”)
19. Kim Like The Great Gatsby - (from “The Western Land”)
20. Just Say No To Drug Hysteria
21. Words Of Advice - (from “The Western Land”)

DISC 4:
1. Dinosaurs
2. Sexual Conditioning
3. Dead Souls
4. Cat Inside, The (Excerpts)
5. Captain Clark Welcomes You Aboard - (early 1960’s)
6. Saints Go Marching Through All The Popular Tunes, The - (early 1960’s)
7. Summer Will - (early 1960’s)
8. Outside The Pier Prowled Like Electric Turtles - (early 1960’s)
9. Total Taste Is Here, The - (news cut-ups, early 1965)
10. We See The Future Through The Binoculars Of The People - (circa 1973)
11. Just Checking Your Summer Recordings - (early 1960’s)
12. Creepy Letter, Cut-Up At The Beat Hotel In Paris - (circa 1959)
13. Is This Machine Recording? - (circa 1965)
14. Handkerchief Masks - (news cut-up, early 1960’s)
15. Word Falling, Photo Falling - (early 1960’s)
16. Throat Microphone Experiment - (circa 1965)
17. It’s About Time To Identify Oven Area - (early 1960’s)
18. Last Words Of Hassan Sabbah, 1950-61
19. I Was Fooling Around With These Tapes In Hotels

Album Notes
Includes recordings made between 1971 and 1987. Books excerpted on the box set include JUNKY, THE SOFT MACHINE, THE WILD BOYS, NOVA EXPRESS, CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT and NAKED LUNCH.
THE BEST OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Boxed Recording Package.Download Torrents:

• Disc 1
• Disc 1 - Missing Tracks (12-17)
• Disc 2
• Disc 3
• Disc 4

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The Art of Memetics
by Wes Unruh
Edward Wilson

Description:
We are all part of social networks that are communicating, interacting. And this allows us to start applying cybernetic principles to psychological and social issues. Memes are not about “communication” or transfer of data. Memes are programming instructions. They are tied to actions. Memes are just the packet on this network. And the packets are usually programs which get installed on the system that accepts them. That system is you and I. Because we are components in a very large system and made up of smaller systems and components the percentage of control we are generally capable of at least at first is really small because we are constrained both by our constituting components and the system of interactions within which we are embedded.

With a forward by Taylor Ellwood and introduction by Joseph Matheny.

More information on this authorized free edition and the upcoming print edition in an article by one of the authors here at Alterati.

Download Torrent- PDF- 4.3 mb.

Update to this post 04-14-08:

• Seth Godin references this post as a good example of “How to write like a blogger“
• Joseph Matheny interviews the co-conspirators of this meme in a recent GSpot Podcast.

 The Art of Memetics: Pirate Edition: Download

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Graham Greene once wrote that a writer’s childhood is the bank at which, in later life, he will cash his creative cheques. In another exploration of the writer’s inspiration, he also declared, in A Sort of Life, that novelists write out of ‘a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order’. If the extraordinary life and work of JG (Jim) Ballard is a case study of these observations, then Miracles of Life, his autobiography, is a detached commentary on a life foretold.

Between the ages of 13 and 33, the young Ballard suffered the kind of experience that perhaps only the 20th century could provide. The child of expat parents in Shanghai, he was interned in a Japanese prison camp in 1943. Having survived, and even thrived, in some gruelling conditions, he came home to a country devastated by the war.

Here, in late adolescence, he was packed off to school (where, he notes, ‘the food was worse’ than in camp), studied medicine at Cambridge, dropped out, joined the RAF, was stationed in Canada and married Mary, settling down to family life in Shepperton. He was just beginning to make a name for himself as a new-wave science fiction writer, while raising three young children, when Mary died prematurely abroad, from a savage and inexplicable pneumonia.

That, in summary, is the meat of this autobiography. Vanity is the curse of successful writers, but Miracles of Life is impressively free from all forms of show (no name-dropping; no index; scarcely any photographs). Moreover, what this brief, modest and occasionally shattering book only glances at is the extraordinary body of work that has flowed from this remarkable life.

For many readers, Ballard is the author of the controversial novel Crash (1973), a surreal exploration of sexuality and the motor car. But before Crash, and before his wife’s death, Ballard’s novels had begun to shape a unique suburban dystopia. In its time, this vision was categorised as science fiction. Now we can see it more clearly as deeper, darker and more prophetic.

To fans of this early work, Miracles of Life will be at once disappointing and fascinating. The disappointment is intrinsic to Ballard’s achievement. He has mined this material so often and so brilliantly in the past that he can hardly have much that’s new to say. Read the 30-odd pages devoted to Lunghua Camp: remarkable enough, but not a patch on Empire of the Sun, the bestselling novel that transformed that experience into art.

Still, there are numerous compensating fascinations. Successful writers in old age are often reluctant to discuss their inspiration for fear of betraying the mystery of their art. Ballard, the former medical student who loved to dissect and has always stood out as an iconoclast, has no trouble with exposing some of his secrets.

Growing up in Shanghai, ‘the wickedest city in the world’, he admits: ‘I would see something strange and mysterious, but treat it as normal’, a juvenile manifesto for his surreal imagination. Ballard writes that his boyhood project was ‘to find the real in all this make-believe’. But then, as a young man in Attlee’s Britain, he found himself in ‘a world that was almost too real’. Hence, he says, his adult determination to treat England, ‘as if it were a strange fiction’.

A few years later, now at King’s College, dissecting cadavers in the Fifties Cambridge of Crick and Watson, Ballard decides that ‘psychoanalysis and Surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality and also a key to myself’.

In the battle to make sense of things, the ‘preposterous society’ of England was no help. To save himself from ‘the suffocations of English life’, Ballard seized on the great modernists, ‘Hemingway, Dos Passos, Kafka, Camus, Joyce and Dostoevsky’. Slowly and painfully, he began to dissect the pathology of his early life, from Shanghai to Shepperton. His ‘entire fiction’, he says, explores a psychic terrain that runs from ‘the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century’.

There, indeed, is the bank at which Ballard has cashed his literary cheques. But, because Ballard is never less than ruthlessly honest about what he sees and feels, Miracles of Life also tells quite another story, unconscious and inadvertent, perhaps, but finally brave in a way that elevates it to a level of greatness.

In this book, we discover a little boy who grew up with ‘patriotic newsreels, suspicious of all British adults’, a nine-year-old steeped in GA Henty, Dickens and Charles Kingsley, who transcribes pages of Westward Ho!, and for whom ‘home’ was the England of AA Milne, Just William and Chums . To this child of the British empire, ‘reality was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment’. A lesser character might have been overwhelmed, but that was no problem for ‘a 12-year-old who thrived on change’. Shanghai Jim, as he was known in camp, made the most of internment. It was, he writes, ‘a prison where I found freedom’. When the war was over, he was the boy who ‘knew that childhood had passed for good’.

But, of course, it hadn’t. When Ballard began to write, he would be shaped by his inheritance. ‘At heart,’ he confesses, ‘I was an old-fashioned storyteller with a lively imagination.’ This, perhaps, is the key to Ballard, an outcast of empire who found self-expression scavenging the fertile wasteland of 20th-century modernism. Tellingly, however, as an Anglo-Saxon narrator, he cannot conceal from his readers at the end the devastating news that this may be his last book. (via)
Download Torrent- 4 CDs as MP3- 642 mb.

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A classic and trendsetter in the independent film world, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” celebrates it 20th year anniversary this year. Included in the DVD is a bonus disc that includes some things of interest to GreyLodgers.

• “Portrait: The Making of Henry” Documentary
• “The Serial Killers: Henry Lee Lucas” Documentary
• Deleted Scenes and outtakes with commentary

All included in this torrent.

Download Torrent- DivX AVI- 956 mb.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet.

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RIP Dr. Hyatt

Alan R. Miller
Scottsdale, AZ–Alan Miller, Ph.D., into eternity at 9:09 AM, February 9, 2008, after a heroic battle with cancer.

(Damn Doc. I was just telling people about the boat too...)

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BINGO On YouTube

Back in the 1980s, Chris Landreth, a postgraduate student in engineering, was faced with an employment dilemma–work for the American military because no one else could utilize his talents or find work in some unrelated field. Landreth created for himself a third option. He made his way up to Canada. That this country is a power base for comedy and animation hardly comes as a surprise: both stem from the nature of observation–one verbal, the other graphic. It was, therefore, inevitable that Landreth would find his way to Alias/Wavefront in Toronto, although there is a delicious reverse-flow irony to the idea of us taking one of the best of them. Nor is it surprising that within a year of arriving at Alias, he was working on the end, the seven-minute wonder that was nominated for an Oscar in the animated short film category. Then in June 1998, he delivered Bingo, which has again been lining the mantelpiece with awards.

Of the five pieces that Landreth has completed to date, the end and Bingo are his most notable. the end, also written by Landreth, is a tongue-eloquently-lodged-in-cheek satire on animation festival films. It focuses on an animator who becomes a participant in his own work as he and his drawn characters parry over what would be the best ending. “I do not exist for your animation,” one character tells the animator. Bingo is based on a short play, Disregard This Play, by Chicago’s Neo-Futurist Theater Company. The story is a little ditty of existentialist hell in which the central character, Dave, is told he is a clown. At first he denies, then he argues, then he dispairs, and ultimately, he concedes. MORE

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Had you been watching Czech Television on June 17, 2007, you might have seen what appeared to be a nuclear explosion on your television screen. A mountain resort in the Krkonose region of the Czech Republic appeared to go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke. The video was a hoax, cleverly perpetrated by Ztohoven, a local art group. They later released a statement on their MySpace page claiming responsibility for the event:

“We are neither a terrorist organization nor a political group, our aim is not to intimidate the society or manipulate it, which is something we witness on daily basis both in the real world and in the world created by the media…We hope our action will become an appeal for the future and remind the media of their duty to bring out the truth.”

The performance, entitled “Media Reality” sparked controversy throughout the country. The Czech National Gallery awarded the group with the newly created NG 333 prize for their work. ”This piece—alongside all of the art the group Ztohoven is making - is crossing the border from art into something more social. The artists are trying to escape from the cage of art, and into real life. They would like to influence their own lives, and other people’s lives.” The cash prize totaled approximately 333,000 KOR, or US$18,350.  REST OF STORY

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