post.thing.net

headlines | about |

the thing new york vs. the american embassy (thursday, june 14, ziegelstrasse 20, 10117 berlin)

categories:

From: amerikanische botschaft

The following takes place between 11pm and 2am on the day of Wolfgang Staehle's visit to the American Embassy

For some reason I remember standing in a phone booth at a 76 Station in Palm Desert at nine-thirty on a Sunday night, late last August, waiting for a phone call from Blair, who was leaving for New York the next morning for three weeks to join her father on location. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and an old baggy argyle sweater and tennis shoes with no socks and my hair was unbrushed and I was smoking a cigarette. And from where I was standing, I could see a bus stop with four or five people sitting or standing under the fluorescent streetlights, waiting. There was a teenage boy, maybe fifteen, sixteen, who I thought was hitchhiking and I was feeling on edge and I wanted to tell the boy something, but the bus came and the boy got on. I was waiting in a phone booth with no door and the Day-Glo light was insistent and giving me a headache. A parade of ants marched across an empty yogurt cup that I put my cigarette out into. It was strange that night. There were three phone booths at this particular gas station on that Sunday night last August and each booth was being used. There was a young surfer in the booth next to mine in OP shorts and a yellow T-shirt with "MAUI" etched across it and I was pretty sure that he was waiting for the bus. I didn't think the surfer was talking to anyone; that he was pretending to be talking and that there was no one listening on the other end and all I could keep thinking about was is it better to pretend to talk than not talk at all and I kept remembering this night at Disneyland with Blair. The surfer kept looking over at me and I kept turning away, waiting for the phone to ring. A car pulled up with a license plate that read "GABSTOY" and a girl with a black Joan Jett haircut, probably Gabs, and her boyfriend, who was wearing a black Clash T-shirt, got out of the car, motor still running, and I could hear the strains of an old Squeeze song. I finished another cigarette and lit one more. Some of the ants were drowning in the yogurt. The bus came by. People got on. Nobody got off. And I kept thinking about that night at Disneyland and thinking about New Hampshire and about Blair and me breaking up.


The Fat Man and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

categories:

In Slate Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger tour the most beautiful nuclear test craters in Nevada:

NEVADA TEST SITE, Nev.—Rumor had it she was a whore from Pahrump. But it didn't matter to those who knew her: Everyone agreed Priscilla was the most beautiful.

On June 24, 1957, the U.S. military touched off a 37-kiloton nuclear device over Frenchman Flat, a dry lake bed about 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The atmospheric test, code-named Priscilla, was one in a series called Operation Plumbbob. The provenance of the code name remains obscure; the earliest tests were ordered on the old military alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie), but several tests in the 1950s were named after women. Test site lore persists that some were named for local prostitutes.


Interview with Florian Schneider about Fadaiat

categories:

florian
Raw, unedited interview with Florian Schneider. Schneider was one of the 40 guests interviewed at Incommunicado (15-17 June 2005, Amsterdam) for an upcoming DVD. He talks about Incommunicado and the Fadaiat / Borderline Academy taking place in Tarifa (18-26 June 2005).

Bittorent download

See video for bittorent instructions and other bittorent files about Borderline Academy.


Is al-Qaeda Really an Organized Network?

categories:

Download the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares "questioning whether the threat of terrorism to the West is a politically driven fantasy and if al-Qaeda really is an organized network".

There is also a transcript of the final episode on the site for the bandwidth impared.

Thanks to Liza Sabater for posting the site on Thingist.


Mediated Bodies: Locating Corporeality in a Pixelated World

categories:

The Online Journal of Embodied Technology at UCLA has launched it's new issue: Mediated Bodies: Locating Corporeality in a Pixelated World. Some of the articles are: Streaming the Performer’s Body: An Interview with Downstream, The Touching of the Touch—Performance as Itching and Scratching a Quasi-Incestuous Object, and my project Viral Portraits.

give it a look, Viral Portraits:
http://www.wac.ucla.edu/extensionsjournal/v2/index4.htm
entire issue:
http://www.wac.ucla.edu/extensionsjournal/


Why G-8 summit is a haven for anarchist golfers

categories:

Ahead of G-8 summit, protests in high gear

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS – Gleneagles, a luxury hotel set amid fabled golf links deep in the Scottish countryside, is a good place to get away from it all.

The Group of Eight (G-8) leaders of the world's most industrialized countries, however, will not find the resort its normal secluded self when they meet there for their annual summit Wednesday.


Wi-Fi cloaks a new breed of intruder

categories:

Wouldn't you know this comes out of Florida, paranoia capital of the US:

Wi-Fi cloaks a new breed of intruder

Though wireless mooching is preventable, it often goes undetected.
By ALEX LEARY, Times Staff Writer
Published July 4, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - Richard Dinon saw the laptop's muted glow through the rear window of the SUV parked outside his home. He walked closer and noticed a man inside.


Mukul Patel: Speak Slowly after the Tone

categories:

On the telephone, artist Wolfgang Staehle stated that I should get out of the house, that we all should get out of the house. ‘It is a kind of exercise.’ He suggested a small gathering at 149 Ludlow. The ground floor was being prepped for a sound installation by THE THING residency artist Mukul Patel, and a table could be set centre to host 8 to 10 people, sipping on bouillabaisse.

It is a very grand idea, indeed, to have a dinner party and an installation simultaneously. I was there.


New iTunes 4.9 Does Podcasts

categories:

The new version of Apple's iTunes makes it easy to publish and subscribe to podcasts that download directly into the player.

Download iTunes 4.9

ArtCast by Barbara Strebel and Patrik Tschudin in Basel is number 69 in the top 100!


Pictures of mukul performance June 21, 2005

categories:
mukulface

Pictures from the dinner for Jakob Boeskov (Danes for Bush) and mukul (ambientTV) during his residency at The Thing in June plus shots by Jee Won Kim of the performance of mukul's phoneme (speak slowly after the tone) at 149 Ludlow Street in NYC, June 21, 2005.

slideshow