Bloomsday at The Reading Room

"Bloomsday" is celebrated annually in Dublin, New York, and elsewhere on June 16, the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday celebrations sometimes feature a walking itinerary reproducing that of the book's main character, Leopold Bloom, as well as readings from the novel, which has been acclaimed by some critics as the greatest ever written.

Per Wikipedia, an unabridged reading in 1982 ran nearly 30 hours; but Bloomsday Dallas will last just a few. The celebration will begin at 6 PM with a screening of Harrell Fletcher's video art piece, Blot Out the Sun (wrangled by moi), which was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In Fletcher's video, service station employees and patrons read lines from the novel concerning death, love, social inequality, and the relationship between individuals and the universe. This will be followed by readings from the novel by Jeff Whittington, Charles Dee Mitchell, and Diane Orr.

In addition, Jennie Ottinger's "book" sculpture, Ulysses, will be on view, courtesy of Conduit Gallery. The work is part of her larger library project, which was shown at the 2011 Volta Art Fair in NYC.

Bloomsday Dallas will take place on Thurs., June 16 at The Reading Room, 3715 Parry Ave. (between Exposition and Commerce), from 6 - 10PM.

More at The Reading Room.

UPDATE: Below is scholar Frank Delaney's rap tribute to Joyce (thanks, Karen!):

New Work by Mark Leckey

The trailer for his new show, See We Assemble, at Serpentine:



Leckey won the Turner Prize in 2008. Below is what I believe to be all of his Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). All this should give you plenty to enjoy and digest; but if you want more, size your browser window so you can see both Fiorucci and Cassini Mission in the previous post below, keep Fiorucci on full volume, reduce the Cassini volume to one bar, and start both from the beginning, so they're running at the same time. Re-start Cassini as desired.)



More Leckey on his myspace page or on YouTube.

"Cassini Mission"

By Chris Abbas, using NASA footage.



(Thanks, JP!)

Why We Need Net Neutrality: ISP's Are Already Throttling the Internet

If you had any remaining doubt as to whether and how much this is happening, wonder no more. Two projects have shown that Comcast and Road Runner consistently engage in substantial, discriminatory slowing or throttling of internet traffic (euphemistically referred to as "shaping") both to and from users, and that "Comcast, Road Runner (from Time Warner Cable), and Cox all use downstream shaping." (More at Boing Boing)

They claim they only do it to help manage traffic volumes. But there are many examples of known, wrongful censorship of political or other content, within as well as outside the U.S.; see, e.g., here (Comcast and/or Symantec blocked all e-mails containing URL of site calling for investigation into whether Pres. Bush committed impeachable offenses in connection with the push to invade Iraq, successfully reducing the impact of activists' efforts), here (AT&T censored Pearljam concert by deleting lyrics criticizing Bush), or here (Mindspring and OneNet Communications, successively, blocked site hosting Nuremburg Files).

As Lawrence Lessig stated in a recent article, "The innovation commons of the Internet threatens important and powerful pre-Internet interests. During the past five years, those interests have mobilized to launch a counterrevolution that is now having a global impact."

Bad enough that, as "Napoleon said . . . it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered." But worse, ISP's can suppress any info they choose in ways that make it unlikely that many users will ever become aware that anything's been filtered out.

And as stated at sp!ked-IT with reference to Wikileaks, among others, "when an ISP removes [or blocks] content, it invokes the cyber equivalent to the death sentence. When an ISP acts it can effectively destroy a business or censor a political campaign, by making access to that website impossible.

If you agree that protecting the internet as a source of uncensored political information is one of the most urgent issues of our time, please spread the word about it.

"The Lieder of the Pact"

. . . by Rebecca Carter and Andrea Goldman (3:08 min., 2011).



Goldman writes that the video was "inspired by both the 60s 'bad girl' band The Shangri-Las and radical philosopher Alain Badiou’s 1982 book The Theory of the Subject."

Bloomsday at The Reading Room

This post has been moved here.

What Politics Has in Common with Pro Wrestling: Kayfabe

From Eric R. Weinstein at Edge:

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working."

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. . . .

More at the link. (Thanks, Randy!)

Wikileaks-esque Sites

As of today, LeakDirect lists 23 of them (with links).

Somebody had to be first.