The Meaning of Cern and the Race To Power

A Little XL Terrestrial Analysis of Supercolliders, Toblerone, and The End of The World As We Know Not Better
www.xlterrestrials.org/plog ( for full story )

Excerpt:

" It hadn’t really hit home what was underneath the surface of the much touted and conjectured Big Bang Genesis, Dark Matter and String theories, what exactly might be at the core of the $10bn (£5.1bn) experiment at Cern, until we read towards the end of one of the UK Guardian’s many intriguing articles that the US also has its own supercollider laboratory (soon to be decommissioned?), and that THE RACE was on.

Picture Chicago’s Fermilab, the other multi-billion $ horse shot and sold for glue in a year or 2. Lucky for us global citizens at least the one in Switzerland has a grand “open source” PR campaign and now takes a 27k subatomic victory lap (in both directions no less) on Sept.10th. Of course what exactly should we expect of open source from a project in an underground Swiss bunker which requires eye-scan security clearance, and when not even the secret formula of Toblerone can legally be published on someone’s blog??!

Aside from a Military Industrial Complex illogic which we all know is inherently and incestuously bred with dim logical insanity and Mordor junkydom (pic), we should probably still assume that giving westworld scientists too much money is a very very bad idea.

Ok, we have to admit we were prone to believe that a team of 6000+ Faustian bargainers spliced together by a pretty unwholesome academia ( abundant with career opportunism, upper-class egos and disembodied head-cooked fantasies… all in a gravy of specialist dismemberment and Reductionism) to build the world’s biggest Machine, namely a Nuclear One, could lead to any number of horrible consequences. But after reading Michio Kaku’s article (one physicist with humanitarian principles we sorta trust), we can more calmly analyze this travesty by purely sociological and psychoanalytic and civilian deductions."

cont. at XLT.

the red eye of praha

A short entry from the east block:

Praha was/is phenomenal... this image was taken on a rainy nite wondering through the streets of Zizkov, the neighborhood just outside the old town where a friend of mine manages a restaurant called Kure v Hodinach meaning Chicken in the Clock... if ya happen to be in the hood, be sure to ask em where all those great east blok dinner soundtracks came from ; ) ...

You can find more arts + praxis tales, and a brief glimpse at what the fuk that war-of-the-worlds tower is all about!?? at:
www.xlterrestrials.org/plog

Vote SF Chron Writer CW Nevius Onto the Island of Proto-Fascist Tabloid Think Tanks

From the XLt podopolog:

"The San Francisco Chronicle has reached a new pinnacle of professional journalism this week by giving CW Nevius, sports writer and veteran Rotten Tomatoes film reviewer, a new editorial column on the front page. In a brilliant move to rouse the citizens of our great city to NIMBY extremism, Nevius has been given the noble task of investigating one of the Neo-Con Republicrat party’s most beloved problems: getting rid of homeless people. His new creative style of polling should elevate the discussion amongst fans of Survivor, Fox News, and American Idol. "

read more at
www.xlterrestrials.org/plog

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Future Sex, But Were Afraid To Insert Your Credit Card

This weekend the Viennese group, Monochrom ( think an Austrian arts sector version of the Yes Men) brought together a very weird, wired and sex positive group of speakers to investigate the messy world of pron, the intersection of the porn and tech industries, for the purpose of probing all manner of complex relationships that are shaping human behaviours and social interactions at a very root ( and grotesquely consumer) level. The XL terrestrials were on hand to absorb the mesmerizing results, and are still processing all the data, but already have a couple preview entries (with links) on the subject. www.xlterrestrials.org/plog

( image from Jim Avignon remixed for Pan Optic Radio's show #36 : the ABCs of Disneyweltschmerz, 2001 )

(())(()) the XLT news and praxis letters v.1 + updates (())(())(())

Actions In Solidarity with the People of Burma, Balkan Beat Box, 15 Years Critical Mass, Somart’s Jack Davis Remembered, Naomi Klein Tour, etc.
read more here:
www.xlterrestrials.org/plog

Naomi Klein’s Latest “Shock Doctrine” Should Wake Anyone Still Asleep In The Fire !

(Stills from Alfonso Cuaron’s clip for “The Shock Doctrine”)

Making stops in San Francisco 9/26 and Oakland 9/28, Naomi Klein is on tour with her latest precision analysis “The Shock Doctrine”. Could anyone still sleep through this fire, after absorbing her assessments of free market feeding time in neo-liberal overdrive over the last four decades?!

Article with links to Cuaron's film and tour info here:
www.xlterrestrials.org/plog

Voice Of Roma events w/ Yuri Yunakov in SF 9/21, SC 9/22, LA 9/23

Voice Of Roma, the organization behind the most important Roma and Balkan music festival on the West Coast brings back Yuri Yunakov & his Romani Wedding Band to play at the Croatian American Cultural Center ( 60 Onondaga St., SF, CA ) on Sept. 21st.

Performing for the Herdeljezi Festival in Sebastopol in 2006, Yuri and his ensemble of master musicians in the Bulgarian traditions transformed the house to a celebratory throbbing mass that one rarely has the opportunity to experience outside of an actual Romani wedding.

“Romani Routes” is the programming and productions side of VOR, a boundless-energy nonprofit which does heroic work creating unforgettable cultural events in service to human rights struggles, with a focus on the plight of Roma refugees living in Kosovo and throughout Europe. Their fans range from Gogol Bordello to Esma Redzepova to Boban Markovic to the latest European world music sensation Kal, whom VOR brought to the Bay Area years before anyone had ever heard of them.

Don’t miss this Friday’s chance to be a part of the Art + Music at its most highly-engaged form! And see Yuri’s full tour schedule, which includes Santa Cruz on 9/22 and Los Angeles 9/23:

www.voiceofroma.com/kal/yitinerary.htm

And since the VOR online shop is still under construction, these events are a great opportunity to pick up very rare CDs that represent the authentic roots of what is becoming the fastest growing wave in world music today, which may remind many of the Asian underground that swept the scenes in the 90s. All benefiting the great causes that VOR has been actively involved with for over a decade.

( story with full links here: www.xlterrestrials.org/plog )

$56 Million and Where’s the Art? It's Dancing in the Dust ! + DQ University News

[ Most recent post from XLterrestrials.org covering Chris Carlsson's series Shaping SF Talks at Counterpulse. At the end of this post you'll read about the DQ University, California's only Tribal College, which is seriously endangered, but also on the verge of catalyzing an exciting DIY base for indigenous struggles and "off-the-grid" sustainable living.This Saturday is a critical Board meeting (Sept.15, 11am ) which I am considering attending to cover for Indybay.org... if anyone is interested in this and/or would like to learn more, please contact me...or see the flyer posted in tribe pics There is also a public benefit show coming up Oct. 13, 2007 at the Intertribal House in Oakland.]

$56 Million and Where's the Art? It's Dancing in The Dust !

“One of my very, very first memories is of my parents’ house in Los Angeles. In the late afternoon, the light would come through windows at one end of the house. There were venetian blinds and the blinds would be open so the light would come into the room in bands of light, because there was a lot of dust in the air in the San Fernando Valley in the summertime especially, and in these bands of light there were motes of dust, dancing in the light; and my first musical memory, I think, is watching those particles of dust moving, and reaching way up over my head to the keyboard of this big old upright rosewood Steinway grand that my parents had, and trying to play notes that would accompany this dance of the dust.”

– From Michael Tilson Thomas’ Viva Voce, Conversations with Edward Seckerson (Faber & Faber, 1994)

That quote from the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony may adequately capture the kernel of where public and private funding goes for the arts: Picture a new Lars Van Trier movie called, “Dancing in the Dust”. Last year the city’s Grants for the Arts program piled on its second largest check of $889,000 to an organization that already has enough assets to operate for another decade without any additional funding ( See Jeff Jones’ article). And this sort of quaint nostalgic drivel above is the same fucking tune you’re going to hear year after year from city bank-rolled art. Nothing against symphonies in general, but if MTT ever utters anything relevant regarding the challenges our society faces today, you can be sure it won’t be at the Davies Symphony Hall, where the specialty is picking the purse strings and pickeling the brains of primarily wealthy and sheltered white morons who apparently like very mediocre classical music to accompany their somnambulism.

This week Shaping San Francisco’s Fall/Winter Talks (in collaboration with City Lights, Indpendent Arts and Media and Counterpulse) opened their new season with a revealing panel of art funding veterans and a potent theme of “$56 Million And Where’s The Art?”, and if one kept awake through the sausage-making and number-crunching tales of arts administration and fiscal water-bailing in the 21st century City of Riches (Misappropriated!), one could draw plenty of bleak conclusions and faintly hear the violins from the deck of the Titanic.

Certainly this well-chosen panel of sincere and distinguished and dedicated civil Art Org servants had valuable perspective to grasp the matter of where our arts funding is going and where it should go, but we are inclined to suggest that the one overarching theme of connecting artists to money, economics, and business, is the crux of the dilemma rather than the solution. And these organizations are dangerously off course if they are soley focused on grooming the artist to thrive in the marketplace/butchershop culture. One because there is not exactly a lack of Professional arts in the city; Secondly because if in today’s political climate your work is on the pet list of the Irvine foundation you are likely enroute to an established career in irrelevance ( see MTT above).

From our experience abundant creativity thrives in and flocks to cities where artists can go and disconnect from the financial torrents as much as possible. It has long been known in European and South American circles that where there is a thriving squat culture, and minimal living expense, there are people taking extraordinary and pioneering journeys into community and self-expression. And much of that feeds down the line into the commercial arts. For better or worse, that genius who locks herself away in the attic to tap a fountain of muses will in a year or two find her ideas exploited by the artworld. From one perspective that’s good because the general public will be enriched by it. But for those who catch those Promethean fires in the wild of real lives, before its essence has been flayed on a gallery wall, it’s the real shit! And for San Francisco this reality has been hemorraging in direct proportion to the inflation of housing and basic living.

So here’s a thought for those people who have access to the mega funders and to those who are working on those pioneering ideas of micro-patronage from the neighborhood. Land and properties need to be purchased in the Bay Area and turned into sanctuary spaces in the same way one reconstructs and then protects a marshland like Crissy Field ( well, not exactly like Crissy Field, but we don’t have time to deconstruct That one), so that life returns to it. And not merely as temporary art residencies, but where long-standing artist communities will re-inhabit the culture and replenish it with non-market Art. Until that happens you’re going to very likely bear witness to a symphony of lame ass million dollar dust bowls and an exodus of talent to those places which understand the value of the wild habitats. Sadly such human environments are more endangered than the (non-professional) artists themselves, but they Do exist and can be cultivated everywhere, anytime, here and now.

( Additional material from panel and Q+A will be added , time-allowing… and at some pt. in the distant future Shaping SF /Arts + Media will post the audio online )

Here’s an URGENT footnote, or shall we say, a TRUE SCREAMING SYMPHONY on this theme: Want to know WHERE one such place could exist in the Bay Area???? We will be having an upcoming story about the DQ University, California’s only Tribal College, just outside of Davis. It has recently lost its accreditation (issues of a corrupt board of directors, more research required ) and some former students are currently occupying it and attempting to run their own independent programs, which will legally prevent them from being removed. This situation is urgent and needs your support before real-estate predators force them off this huge piece of land.

For NOW read more at DQ’s Myspace… And get involved while the chance is still ripe to create a free zone of creativity and education and art outside the factory culture.

BM analysis part 2: Sandbox Insurrections in the Burning Kingdom

From the upcoming XL Terrestrial BM analysis part 2:

"In Baudrilllard's theories on "Simulacres et Simulation", he once wrote with both irony and penetrating perspective that Disneyland was created so that Americans would think that the world they live in is real. Is it possible that the Burning Man festival has upped the game? Now a version of sandbox liberation has been created to give Americans some security that freedom and chaos are only things that can happen in isolated laboratories and controlled experiments, and for those who are the happily jolted/rewarded lab rats their petri dish cultures are now an essential perfume for the reinvigorated marketplace of more vacations at home."

coming soon to :
www.xlterrestrials.org/plog

Devendra Banhart in SF at the Palace ( on Gira's Young Gods label ?! )

Anyone going to Devendra Banhart's concert 2morrow nite?? I'm still contemplating it. Usually "white folk" affects me like a kind of insidious rash upon the brain and eardrums, and hippie aesthetic, that's a whole nother peeve, but I have to say i'm competely mesmerized by what i've heard. And it seems like an impossible fit that Michael Gira ( formerly Swans and Skin , and now Angels of Light ) would be gushing over this - www.younggodrecords.com/prodtype.asp
- well yes its his label and he's cashing in big time - but yes i'm starting to agree, it's transporting and loaded with talent. Like Billie Holiday meets Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome?? First heard his voice at a friend's house in Prenzlauerberg, a swedish dj who was studying guitar and all into a wide array of americana music influences, which thru her outsider take looking in and her great collection of oddities began to open up my previous blocks to music from the Heim(lich manuever)-lands. And more recently Rani Singh's documentray " Old Weird America" about the art and music legacy of Harry Smith also re-tuned my senses to find "the jewels in the mouth of the corpse" (John Giorno)

BTw: check out Devendra's cover of "Summertime":
www.youtube.com/watch
( note for the hippie-phobic: just close yur eyes and listen to that voice)