The Intersection of Culture Jamming, Hacking, and Hacktivism--
Pan, Phineas Narco, Tim Maloney, %20, Fred Church, Steev Hise, Ricardo Dominguez, Bernardo Attias, Mark Hosler

To Be
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Unknown
Unseen
Unmade
Undone

There was a soft rapping on my door and when I opened it there was a lovely young woman who, I thought, was my upstairs neighbor and asked to look out my window. I invited her in then found she'd actually said "was you lookin' at me." I work at my laptop on the window sill across from the building I thought might be a brothel, and I guess it is.

Tonight at the liquor store on Franklin Ave. and Eastern Parkway (it was a bad day at work and I needed some fortification) the man in front of me, after buying a bottle of white rum (he said he wasn't prejudice) started going off about Obama and why he wasn't supporting him.

upcoming reenactments
Part of Creative Time's 2008 public art initiative
Democracy in America: The National Campaign

http://www.nothing.org/porthuronproject/index.html

Cesar Chavez
WE ARE ALSO RESPONSIBLE
Based on a 1971 speech by César Chávez
(Performance by Ricardo Dominguez)

6:00 PM, Saturday, July 19, 2008
South Lawn, Exposition Park, Los Angeles

Bedford-Atlantic Shelter

A blog from last year by someone living in the Bedford-Atlantic men's shelter named Nathan:

http://bedford-atlantic.blogspot.com/

It's a pretty accurate, day-to-day description of what it's like in the shelters though I was never in this one. I do, however, now live up the street from it in what I've finally decided is Crown Heights and I can tell you the outside of the building is pretty ominous. My own journals from Bellevue, Camp Laguardia and Wards Island will be posted here eventually.

Once you find yourself in any system you adapt to it or you are ejected whether it's shelter or a job or a relationship or a computer network like the Internet. You find your own equalibrium and work with it. I hope Nathan found his.

"Cardiologists hired by the companies offered short briefings on ways to reduce radiation doses, while sales representatives in business suits quietly talked up the benefits of the scans and the clarity of the images. The sales atmosphere was low key, more art gallery than "Glengarry Glen Ross.""

Before there was a Starbucks on every corner of New York City there were laundromats and hardware stores and Greek diners and liquor stores and Irish bars. My new neighborhood doesn't have a Starbucks (yet) but it doesn't seem to have many of the other necessities either. There are, instead, several places to have my hair braided if I ever get that drunk and lots of West Indian takeouts.

Presidential hopeful John McCain is hiding a skeleton in his closet. Not your typical political scandal, Senator McCain’s dirty little secret is his longtime involvement with the International Republican Institute (IRI), an organization that operates in 60 countries and is budgeted by millions of US taxpayer dollars each year.

As with most of Žižek work - I agree with some of some parts and disagree with the other parts. For instance the frame he uses to displace the "left" from the Zapatistas to the Democrats - is that they are bound by a tactical frivolity that is more about humor than one of direct class warfare - well one could say that of all of Žižek work (it is funny, critical, full of love for globalization's pop-culture and he also lacks any push to direct action at the scale of class war that Chávez has done). He also falls into the greater paradigm of immaterial globalization that resists looking at the the situated conditions within each states and to what degree they function as they either function as mediators for neoliberal(isms) or as resistance(s) sites - one can sense the nature of the situated frame of this struggle with the the battle for how Mexican oil and how it will continue to function - as state-owned or as privately owned or how the Zapatistas still view the state as an important component for resistance to globalization/while accepting the process of new networks that flow beyond the state to question the state from within/without - without erasing Mexico as a state - so the long of and short of it is that Žižek is a "subcomediante" himself - which is fine with me, since words and ideas are just as important to me - but, if I ever see him take the reins of the State power like Chávez - it will the funniest revolution ever too happen! and I will certainly be happy to join in!

ciao,
r