Members of Mexico's losing leftist party are invoking America's recent electoral scandals to convince the world that last Sunday's presidential election was fixed.

By Eliza Barclay

July 8, 2006 | MEXICO CITY -- "Ciberfraude," or cyberfraud, is not a word in the average Mexican's vocabulary. But most Mexicans have heard of the extraordinary electoral debacle that befell their neighbors to the north in 2000, and Martí Batres, the head of the Democratic Revolutionary Party's Mexico City chapter, was going to capitalize on that knowledge. At a press conference Friday afternoon at PRD headquarters, the close advisor to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist politician who lost an exceedingly close election here this week, nodded to an aide to turn on his laptop. "And now I'm going to show you a video," he told the roomful of reporters.

Probably the best museum show I have ever seen and heard is the DaDa exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I liked it so much I was inspired and did two Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt Mash-ups. The first one uses the curators audio tour guide and the audio I recorded while Rob Murphy & I walked around the exhibit. I used a cut-up technique and shuffled the “found sound” of the curators comments.

Charles Atlas, You Are My Sister

Electric Arts Intermix showed free music videos under the stars last night on Pier 63 on the Hudson River in New York.

William Wegman's 1988 video for New Order, Blue Monday reminded me once again that a little Wegman goes a long way and the same can be said for the Tony Ousler/Sonic Youth collaboration, Tunic from 1990. Is it just me or have SY been playing the same song with varying degrees of volumn and speed for the past twenty years?

Joseph Nechvatal invites you to regard his new series of works entitled mOnstrOus hOax here:
http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/hoax/monstrous_hoax.htm

At left, a satellite image showing Florida at present; at right, a projection of what Florida will look like if the sea level increases by 18-20 feet

The Threat to the Planet
By Jim Hansen
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19131

Animals are on the run. Plants are migrating too. The Earth's creatures, save for one species, do not have thermostats in their living rooms that they can adjust for an optimum environment. Animals and plants are adapted to specific climate zones, and they can survive only when they are in those zones. Indeed, scientists often define climate zones by the vegetation and animal life that they support. Gardeners and bird watchers are well aware of this, and their handbooks contain maps of the zones in which a tree or flower can survive and the range of each bird species. Those maps will have to be redrawn. Most people, mainly aware of larger day-to-day fluctuations in the weather, barely notice that climate, the average weather, is changing.

Thursday June 22 2006

Objectives and Objectivity

Hi Friends,

I’m happy to be back in NYC. And to be posting on the Thing. I was teaching in Georgia this year, outside Atlanta. It has taken me a while to get back into the spin here…

On my way back home in mid-May I visited first Earthaven, an eco-village outside Asheville, N.C., for an overnight stay. The place is off the grid except for telephone. I checked my email using homemade hydroelectric power from a stream. Crapped in a composting toilet. In Baltimore I ate crabcakes at the food court. It’s true, New York doesn’t know what a crab cake is. Then I stopped in to chat with Cira Pasqual Marquina, curator at the Contemporary Museum. She had just opened her new show, “Headquarters: Investigating the Creation of the Ghetto and the Prison Industrial Complex” (through August 27, 2006). We went to Red Emma’s infoshop and had lunch. Cira’s partner Chris Gilbert had left for Berkeley to serve as Matrix curator at the University of California museum there…