Jouet en plastique jaune pour de vrai (Post is in French)

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Samuel Bester’s 4:40 video clip, 140 Pop Method, produced in 2004, uses found footage to explore the intrusion of the unknown in our media. Here, is his description of this piece in French:


Cette vidéo est un exemple de contre-culture: elle représente le goà»t pour l’insolite et la spontanéité. Elle veut échapper au poids de l’histoire et du conditionnement socio-économique. Elle existe grâce à notre société industrielle qui engendre une forme irrésistible de pollution médiatique qui a donné naissance à une génération d’image-junkies qui mixent, copient et détournent les médias tout en en créant des nouveaux. Il s’agit dans cette vidéo de montrer avec insistance ce que l’habitude nous fait oublier: la banalité, la nullité, la stupidité en la forme d’un jouet en plastique. C’est l’irruption inopinée de l’étrange dans un flot d’image identifiées. Car comme le disait si bien Aragon: “il y a plus de prodiges dans un moulin à café que dans tous les séraphins du ciel” Cette incursion dans les médias n’évoque rien, ne parle de rien ne symbolise rien car comment se faire comprendre d’une biche quand on n’est pas sà»r d’àªtre un cheval!

Community Service (2002)

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Graffiti, in case anyone missed the point, is a marking on a surface. Graffiti eradication is typically the application of paint over the marking of the surface. In terms of “damage,” there is no evidence that one layer of paint is less destructive than the one beneath it. In the course of painting over graffiti, the eradicators create a unique marking of their own that writers call “buffmarks.” Roll along the highways of LA and see thousands of buffmarks, each as visually compelling as the next and the last, each with a story to tell. Continue reading “Community Service (2002)”

Matt Besser: Not to be messed with

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Crossballs: The Debate Show

In 2005 Matt Besser produced this show on Comedy Central where unsuspecting debate show pundits made fools of themselves debating absurd characters.

http://www.mattbesser.com/crossballs.php

Continue reading “Matt Besser: Not to be messed with”

God’s dupes by Sam Harris

This article from the LA Times, March 15, 2007 is so incisive and deserving of attention, I hope everyone reads it! Sam Harris is the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” -JS


Moderate believers give cover to religious fanatics — and are every bit as delusional.

Pete Stark, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn’t believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or “inspired” word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.

Of course, one can imagine that Cicero’s handlers in the 1st century BC lost some sleep when he likened the traditional accounts of the Greco-Roman gods to the “dreams of madmen” and to the “insane mythology of Egypt.”

Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham “” the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Continue reading “God’s dupes by Sam Harris”