Orville Peck to Make Broadway Debut in Cabaret
46 minutes ago
Monday, 10 May 2010
Sunday, 9 May 2010
The Dream Machine by Charles Gatewood
william s. burroughs, brion gysin and dream machine
photo © charles gatewood, london 1972
the 'dream machine' is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli.
it was an invention by cult figure brion gysin, writer w. s. burroughs and scientist
ian sommerville in early 1960. rotating at 78 rpm on a phonographic turntable,
the 'dreamachine' emits flashes of light reputedly synchronized with alpha rhythms
of the brain which allows one to enter a hypagogic state.
a tribute for william s. burroughs
in 1972 during an assignment for rolling stone magazine, charles gatewood flew to
london to meet william s. burroughs and brion gysin. over the next couple of days,
gatewood photographed the two iconic figures, capturing what are widely acknowledged
as the finest images in existence today of the 'dreamachine' and its creators.
dream machine night at whitechapel gallery on 29 June, 2007
new york based mcgovern design house is an exclusive agent of rare vintage and new
prints of this esteemed photographic series. published many times and recently exhibited
at the irish museum of modern art, the 'dreamachine' prints will be presented in an
upcoming new york city exhibition (to be announced soon).
mcgovern design house is a new york based full service art consulting firm, providing
art advisory services to individuals and companies too busy to navigate the art market
of today. building collections for nascent and established collectors, they facilitate
connections to international artists and art communities. with their knowledge of furnishings
and interiors, they also advise on collectible furniture and emerging design talent on
the international scene.
£10,000 claim makes Tory the first MP in an expenses row
Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP, faces the first expenses complaint of the new parliament after a row about a £10,000 claim she paid to a friend’s company.
Her former Commons researcher, Peter Hand, is writing to John Lyon, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, questioning whether the claim can be justified.
The complaint will undermine hopes that the expenses controversy can be consigned to the last parliament.
Dorries, who last week retained her mid-Bedfordshire seat, claimed the money for an annual report in 2007 on her performance as an MP, and consultancy services, but Hand said he never saw the report or worked on it. Dorries claimed a total of more than £40,000 in expenses for services provided by Marketing Management (Midlands), owned by her friend Lynn Elson. They live near each other in the Cotswolds.
Hand, who worked full-time for Dorries in the Commons from 2005 until November 2008, said: “I gave her the benefit of the doubt and waited and waited. But the report never appeared.”
Dorries claimed £9,987.50 for Marketing Management in June 2007 for the design, layout and production of an annual report and for consultancy. She says she spent the money, and posted a copy of the report on her website. However, it does not appear to be professionally produced. The previous year, by contrast, she issued a glossy four-page professionally produced report with more than 25 pictures, news articles, an interview and a breakdown of her typical working day as an MP.
Hand, who now works for the charity Mencap, said: “The 2006 report was posted on her website and I was closely involved in its production.
“I was never aware a report was produced in 2007 and never saw one. Even if there was this leaflet, I don’t understand how the costs could be so high.”
Dorries said: “I’ve done an annual report every year since I’ve been an MP. We did keep a lot of stuff from Peter.”
She would not provide details of the printing firm which had been used for the work or a breakdown of what Elson’s firm charged for.
Dorries claims her modest cottage in the Cotswolds, 55 miles from her constituency, is her main home. This means she can claim a second-home allowance for her constituency home.
'The Beat Goes On' by Kathy Acker (21C 1997)
Tonight I saw a king. A few of his attendants were mulling about when I entered: a man in white T-shirt, black pants and an Alice-in-Wonderland black and white hat; another man in a sharply designed black suit, black and white shirt, shaved head (except for a fringe of punk-style ebony hair) and sunglasses; a third wearing diapers; a few guys in basic black cut-off T-shirts. The auditorium becomes silent when a man whose gray-white dreds are flowing out from under his African hat-headdress in a robe of pale blue and red squares walks out on stage. Mr George Clinton lifts his right hand in benediction: Reality breaks out into funk. Funk-e-delic. Now women appear: a major thigh babe in black tux and not much underneath, head hidden under a Mad Hatter top and wearing Vivienne Westwood rip-off shoes. Thighs for which to die, oh Ms Tina Turner. Another woman, spectral, in a golden and orange sari, her voice challenges Aretha Franklin’s. Then there’s a gigantic baseball jacket and equally skunky pants over which lies a baseball cap, and out of this strolling assemblage soars the sexiest little-girl voice I think I’ve ever heard. Rapping about an angel. I want to die. More men appear: a tiny guy who teaches us how to sing scat; a horn player in black and white bicycling shorts and nothing else.... Mr George Clinton directs everyone and everything, the gospel and jazz riffs, soul, horn solos à la Motown, rap, poetry, all mixed up, funked up, and when he gets tired, if he ever gets tired, he turns to us and directs us, and we follow him, until soon half the audience is on that stage, dancing as only humans can when space is equivalent to human flesh....
It all goes on for hours....
Lawrence is a small mid-western university town in Kansas. At the 1996 US elections, voters in Kansas returned all the Right-wingers to their governmental seats, then added a few; Lawrence, a Left-wing – or, at least, a liberal – oasis in a desert of conservatism and worse, according to some of its residents, might well be taken over by its increasing numbers of Aryan Nation immigrants.
There’s another king in Lawrence. I just had the pleasure of visiting with him. He’s a thin man who now walks with a stoop, sprightly and surely. According to some, including myself, Mr William Burroughs is the most important living fiction writer in the USA. Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Legs McNeill and I were in town to celebrate with speeches about William’s opus at the opening of a show of Mr Burroughs’ art work that started at the LA County Museum and moved on from there. In just over a week, Phil Glass, Laurie Anderson, John Giorno and Patti Smith will also pay public homage to William in his home-town. It all ends in Lawrence.
I can barely speak to William when I see him: A mixture of awe, respect and fear holds my tongue captive and I suspect that it’s that very mixture that’s making it difficult for me to talk about William here. He’s a good man. Politeness, with him, is not just a matter of surface. When I visited him a few days after the Lawrence Museum’s opening of his show, he was speaking about human integrity, for him deeply tied to politeness. He was sitting in a wheelchair whose back was covered with a green towel and gazing at an over-fat black cat he had just taken to the vet for skin trouble. In true Burroughs-speak, he said that he had to ask himself if for $100,000 he would kill one of his own cats. “Of course not. Not even conceivable.” “Every man,” commented William, “has to ask himself this. What would make him do what he couldn’t possibly do? What would make me kill a cat?” He thought about what might matter enough to him to act in such a manner. “A chance to escape death?”
Death is well-known to be a place on which there’s a lot of Burroughsian pondering. The old man said that he was discussing morality, because if a man is to have any moral standards, he must ask himself if there is anything that would make him turn away from these standards. “I would never kill a cat,” William thought out loud, then turned to considering moral dictates that come from the outside, from the government. As he spoke about the US government’s determined attempts to control the drug trade, he became more and more agitated.... When William hugged me good-bye, to my surprise, I felt not my usual awe as my fear had almost gone away. Rather, I felt something that I want to call ‘sadness’ but is more likely to be tenderness for this human who is happy and seems at peace with himself.
Though Mr Burroughs is not young, he’s showing no evidence that he is in danger of dying. The old man might live forever. Might have discovered space – to use Burroughs-speak. At his Lawrence Museum art opening, after all our presentations, he seemed joyous. Having signed books, he walked through the room and shook hands and talked to whomever was there. Ginsberg was slightly more reserved. He seemed occupied with health (he told me that due to heart trouble he had to cut down his touring) and with meditation practice. For me it was pure pleasure: He talked precisely about William’s use of cut-up. The whys and wherefores, dates and events. As if seeing can be remembering, I saw how intelligent Ginsberg is; while he was speaking, I could watch his mind move from point to point. Could this precision of mental movement, which I call ‘intelligence,’ be related to meditation, to the clearing of the mind of obfuscation?
The Lawrence Museum art opening is happening as I am writing about it now, so I shall say this in the present tense: It is a wonder for me to see these two men together, William and Allen, who make literature more than the fashioning of clever stories, other than the manipulation of language according to other peoples’ rules. These two men have not simply put writing and ‘life’ together, say, Fluxus-style; these men, I’d like to say ‘literally,’ write the imagination into actuality, write reality because they write themselves, because they write by listening, because reality writes them as they write reality. The practice of cosmogony is that of writing. And so all of our worlds, certainly mine, has changed.
Postscript 2010:
By a truly cruel twist of fate, given the musings on mortality above, the author of this piece, the beautiful Kathy Acker, along with her subjects here, Mr Burroughs and Mr Ginsberg, all died the same year this piece was written, 1997.
From the onlive archive of one of the greatest magazines ever - 21C
Chimps mentally map fruit trees
Where next?
Chimpanzees remember the exact location of all their favourite fruit trees.
Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found.
More than that, the chimps also recall how productive each tree is, and decide to travel further to eat from those they know will yield the most fruit.
Acquiring such an ability may have helped drive the evolution of sophisticated primate brains.
Emmanuelle Normand and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany teamed up with Simone Ban of the University of Cocody in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire to investigate the spatial memory of chimpanzees in the wild.
“We were amazed by the apparent easiness by which chimpanzees discover highly productive fruit trees. Or how after being separated from other group members for hours or days, they could join each other silently at a large fruit tree, like if they would have had an appointment at this place,” says Normand.
 |  We think it’s fair to assume that chimpanzees can remember the exact location of probably thousands of trees  Primatologist Emmanuelle Normand |
The team also identified 17 species of fruit tree that the chimps regularly fed from, and worked out how often each individual tree belonging to these 17 species would be in fruit each month. From that, the researchers could determine how likely it would be that a chimp randomly walking around the forest might bump into a fruit tree that it could feed from.
The team found that the chimps didn’t visit the most abundant fruit species most frequently, as would be expected if they were navigating without using spatial memory. They also excluded the possibility that the chimpanzees navigated toward the trees by smell.
 It’s off to eat we go |
The chimps also travelled much shorter distances to each fruit tree than would be expected by chance, confirming that they travel directly to the trees.
“We think it is fair to assume that chimpanzees can remember the exact location of probably thousands of trees ,” says Normand.
Of two females closely tracked, one ate from 391 separate trees, averaging 14 trees per day, while the other ate from 506 trees, averaging 18 trees per day. On average, each chimp revisited each tree once every five and a half days.
Remarkably, as well as remembering the location of their favourite trees, the chimps also recalled when each tree would be in season, producing the most fruit. They would then often walk further to reach these more bountiful trees rather than make a shorter journey to a less productive one.
“Across all seasons, it seems that they have preferred tree species,” says Normand.
 A male chimp has to make do with eating leaves not fruit |
Intriguingly, female chimpanzees travelled shorter distances to eat than males. The researchers don’t know why, but speculate that it is either because females better remember the locations of trees, or because males simply compete with one another by ranging more widely through their territory.
In one respect, it is not surprising that chimpanzees have developed an outstanding ability to navigate their home range, says Normand.
One idea, known as the ‘ecological hypothesis’ proposes that the need to remember and find food resources, such as fruit trees, could have driven the evolution of primate brains. In particular, it says that a preference for fruit eating, or frugivory, would select for intelligence compared to leaf-eating, or foliovory.
“That’s because the distribution of fruits is more scattered, less predictable and fruits can be more difficult to manipulate than leaves, the nut cracking by Ta chimpanzees being an extreme example,” says Normand.
Compared to monkeys, chimpanzees live in larger territories and are highly frugivorous, suggesting that developing an outstanding ability to navigate to fruit trees could have a key driver in the evolution of ape intelligence.
Team Berated for Hooters Sponsorship Deal
The Broadbeach Cats team in Australia's Gold Coast were cheered on by two skimpily-dressed staff from the Mermaid Beach franchise of the American restaurant chain during their home game against local side Labrador on the weekend.
"The message these boys are getting -- and bear in mind we're talking 15 and 16-year-old boys -- is that ... as a young footballer you have an entitlement to large-breasted women in skimpy outfits bouncing around at your games," women's advocate Melinda Tankard Reist said on an Australian morning television show.
Restaurant owner Morney Schledusch described the criticism as "ridiculous."
"Our waitresses represent the all-American cheerleader," he told local media. "And no, they don't all have big boobs. "We are all about sport. We had a great opportunity here to show Australia what we are really about."
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