Must-See: Les Ballets Jackson Fiesta Hippy 2é Partie,

here, to the tune of "The Beat Goes On" (thanks, Julie!) The pink wigs make it.

(Value add: per Wikipedia, the phrase, "The Beat Goes On" appears on Sonny Bono's tombstone.)

More scopitones here.

Eric White

At right, The One, oil on canvas (2008). The 'puted pop surrealist is represented by Sloan Fine Art.

Lina Scheynius's Photos

More here.

Hajj

The Hajj (Arabic: حج‎ Ḥaǧǧ) is a pilgrimage to Mecca. It is currently the largest annual pilgrimage in the world, and is the fifth pillar of Islam, a moral obligation that must be carried out at least once in their lifetime by every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to do so. . . . [I]n 2009 [the Hajj takes place] . . . from November 25–29." Click on the image for a larger, crisper version; more at Wikipedia.

Falls

New multi-Tube video experiment up here.

Fray #3: "Sex and Death,"

. . . here, includes a piece excerpted from a longer work-in-progress, Diary of the Dead,* by yours truly. Illustration by Mal Jones (see more by Mal in his Flickerstream).

As contributor Jarrett Liotta put it, "I'm happy to get my Fray copies, which have a retail value of $60. (That's a lot of money in the Sudan.)"

Contributors other than me have written for The New York Times, Wired, Salon, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Bust, et al. The quarterly zine is edited by JPG co-founder Derek Powazek.

____________
* I picked that title long ago and wasn't going to give it up just because a cr&ppy movie came along and used it later.

Happy T.G.

Tiny Tim Performing Song Mentioned in Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice"

Via boingboing (thanks, Ben!)

Paris Photo

Find some fabulous photos on flavorwire; article here.

The Maxxi Roma

Inside the new Italian museum of 21st century art, designed by architect Zaha Hadid. More at The New York Times.

Art Gurus Discuss Some of the Challenges We Face

and what artists and/or activists might do about them, here. From Spring, 2005; but many points have only become sharper.

MoMATube: Swoon

Anti-Anti-Immigrant Hijacks Tea-Rally

On Nov. 14, "'Robert Erickson' was introduced to the Minnesota Tea Party Against Amnesty as a Minneapolis resident concerned about illegal immigration."

"[He] riled the crowd into a frenzy about the theft, murder and disease inflicted by illegal immigrants . . . from Europe, upon indigenous populations. In a 'Yes Men' moment, the anti-immigrant crowd sat in silence, trying to figure out what just happened."



More at Twin Cities Indymedia; don't forget to rate the vidi up on YouTube.

The Food Shark Acquires The Cool Bus

"The acquisition combines one of the largest and fastest growing entertainment communities with expertise in organizing and creating new models for delivery. The combined companies will focus on providing a better, more comprehensive experience . . . and will offer new opportunities for distribution to a vast new audience." Oh wait, that was Google.

Jim Schutz on the Fiscal Impossibility of the Trinity "Park"

(in Dallas), here.

Maybe it comes down to a simple typo: they meant "pork," not "park."

UPDATE: What becomes clear from KERA-TV's new documentary, Living with the Trinity, is that regardless of whether any Trinity projects are completed, there's plenty of money to be made half-building them.

General Idea, "Shut the Fuck Up (Part III)," 1984

"The props: three poodles, General Ideas's signature device. . . . We climbed up the ladders, with soggy, dripping poodles." " . . . . [O]n the borderline between content and context. . . . The pieces of the puzzle don't add up. Are you listening? Do you know what to say?"

Ninja Kitten

Re- Stupak et Al.:

Suppose it were possible for a foetus to be implanted in a man's body and develop there until ready to be delivered.

Suppose, for example, a couple had had sex, and they weren't married, and they certainly didn't want children, so the man had used protection, but the protection had failed.

Suppose the recently-impregnated mother is killed in a car accident but the foetus survives, and the authorities are able to identify the father, and the foetus can be implanted in his body.

Does anyone believe it would be right for the state to FORCE the father to allow the foetus to be implanted in his body, to carry it within his body for nine months, and endure the hardships and hazards of pregnancy and delivery?

Does anyone believe it would be right for the state to force the father to subject himself to such procedures, hardships, and hazards – OR to pay extra in order to avoid subjecting himself to them, in effect ensuring that only poor fathers will be forced to endure them?

Even if we were to grant to a foetus with the I.Q. of a carrot the rights of a fully-formed human, are we so sure its rights should relegate its mother (but not its father) to the most abject slavery?

How is state-enforced pregnancy not the worst kind of involuntary servitude?

Stupak is aptly named.

(And while we're at it, why is a weeks-old foetus with the I.Q. of a carrot more deserving of protection than a chimpanzee capable of sign language?)

Best Thing I Saw Today:

This video was subjected to one of Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin's Lossless experiments.

U.S., Still Richest, Only 42nd in Life Expectancy, & Lags in Quality of Life

A few facts per the most recent American Human Development Report, which compares health, education and income in different nations:

• Despite having the second-highest average income per capita in the world, the U.S. has slipped to 12th place – from 2nd in 1990 – in terms of our basic quality of life.
• The richest fifth of Americans now earn nearly 15 times the average of the lowest fifth.
• We're ranked 42nd in overall life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants' surviving to age one. Citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one live longer than Americans. Infant mortality in the U.S. is on par with that in Croatia, Cuba, and Estonia. If we could match Sweden's rate, some 20,000 more babies per year would live to their first birthday.
• We have a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's other richest countries. 15% of American children live in families with incomes of less than $1,500 per month.
• The U.S. lags far behind many other countries in the support given to working families, particularly in terms of family leave, sick leave and childcare.
• 14% of the population lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks such as understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.
• Among the 30 rich countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. has the greatest number of people in prison, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total population.

More at The Guardian.

Bird Song

Nicely done; from Jarbas Agnelli (thanks, Julie!)

"How the New Museum Committed Suicide"

per graphic talking heads (legible version here), by William Powhida; brought to you by the Brooklyn Rail.

Wrap-Up Re- the 22nd Annual Dallas VideoFest

As always, although I was there most of the time, it was impossible to see everything I'd have liked.

But of the things I saw, I loved American Casino by Leslie Cockburn, Space Ghost by Laurie Jo Reynolds, Dropping Furniture by Harald Hund and Paul Horn, In Transit by Lisa Abdul, Gogol Bordello – Non-Stop by Margarita Jimeno, Beaches of Agnes by Agnès Varda (opening soon at the Angelika Dallas), The Art Guys Retrospective by The Art Guys (get the anthologie DVD here), Chickenshit by Ricky Gluski, the Nicolas Provost videos, Gravity and The Divers, the Lossless videos by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, 14 Americans by Michael Blackwood and Nancy Rosen, Blank City by Celine Danhier, Chase by Liz Magic Laser, a selection of YouTube videos entitled, Click Play: One Billion Times a Day curated by 2 UTD grad students whose names I don't find listed (I think they're going to make a list of URL's availabe through the VideoFest's website), The Glass House by Hamid Rahmanian (which will soon air on the Sundance Channel), Body Trail by Willi Dorner and Michael Palm (the performance on which the video is based, Bodies in Urban Spaces, played at the Fusebox Festival in Austin earlier this year), Burma VJ by Anders Østergaard (I believe this will air soon on HBO), Burning Palace by Mara Mattuschka and Chris Haring, Evening's Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin by Jem Cohen (available on DVD here), and Western Brothers' Adventure Story by Andrew Xanthopoulos.

And I missed a bunch of others I'd probably also have mentioned.

Totally Awesome Mars Pics

Click on the image to enlarge; and see more here.

VideoFest (f.k.a. Dallas Video Festival) '09 Is

so far (like the others past) great.

The Art Guys were actually in town for their retrospective tonite, among other cool (in the highest sense) people.

Michael Steele's Prediction

More hilarious than you might expect:



Thanks, DailyKos!

basic_sounds

Cool site, here, "welcomes submissions from musicians, djs, artists, photographers, and other talented people from around the world who are pushing the boundaries of digital and electronic media." (Thanks, Ben!)

Congrats to Glasstire

. . . for First Prize in the voting for projects entered in the National Summit on Arts Journalism organized by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the National Arts Journalism Program. Presentations on the ten finalists can be seen at najp.org/summit, and a slightly larger version of Glasstire's presentation can be seen on YouTube.

Bloodwork

Last time I checked online for blood cell animations, pickings were slim. Now one need look no further than YouTube. I rec. you get as many onscreen as possible (these are formatted so that, if you have the option of making this window big enough, you can get a nice, tight 3 x 3 array of embeds), play them all simultaneously, here or otherwise, then click replay as needed to keep them all going for a bit (audio desirable). (Happy Halloween.)

UPDATE: I made a vidi of my own results here.