The Speculative Frontier

Tonight is a wonderful night for film, music and food under the stars:

THE SPECULATIVE FRONTIER
Friday, July 31, 2009
8:00pm - 11:00pm
Greymalken Center for Experimental Living, in Portland, Oregon.
229 N Shaver, Portland, OR

Experimental film + video inspired by Stan Brakhage’s film 'The Stars Are Beautiful'.
Curated by Brel Froebe and Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa (In Attendance)

with live music by new music project Chariotomic Found Sountain, featuring members of Powernap + Brainstorm.

8ish potluck / bbq
dusk: music
dark: screening

"Inspired by Stan Brakhage’s The Stars Are Beautiful (1974), a sound film that cycles through mythological explanations for the cosmos in dozens of permutations, the curators of tonight's event devised an exploratory text that drew from science fiction, structural anthropology, and deep-space physics. They then approached artists from a wide range of disciplines to create new work in response to this cue, resulting in a series of projects--performances, music, lectures, films, and videos--that navigate across the Speculative Frontier, the boundary between the known and the unknown. Expect to see and hear: transmissions from Apollo 8, unidentified objects,black metal, alchemy, ghosts, gods, cartoons."

FILM PROGRAM:

"Ghost Forest" Mark Essen
"Apollo 8 Radio Address" Frank Borman
"Chiller and B-Flat’s" Jesse Malmed
"Aurora Borealis" Bradley Eros
"Circa" Katherine Bauer
"They Knew About Star Wars Mixtape" Chemtrailz
"The Portable Hole" Salter, Snowden, & Post
"Object 2" Andres Laracuente
"Keratin Reserve" Josh Gen Solondz
"Compendium_PP_321" Zak Kitnick
"Scaffolding for a Social Transformation Process" Brel Froebe
"Intimaci" Micaela Durand & Maximiliano Ferro
"I Just Called..." Chris Jolly
"Where Few Men Have Gone Before" Harry Crofton
"(Dis)continuity" Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa
"Tranquility New York" Ted King & Jordan Stone
"In Operation" Pete Deevakul

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=105921388923&ref=mf

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GIANT SQUID HAIKU

In italics: haiku by interviewer Tiffany Lee Brown
Not in italics: haiku by interviewee Aaron Gregory of GIANT SQUID...

...a fine musical combo, appearing in Portland on August 1 and around the country throughout the summer. Details on touring and new album (source of graphic above, The Ichthylogist re-released): giantsquidlives.com.

TLB:
to start i would ask
what is the meaning of life
in this universe?

AG:
The answer you seek
requires one to sit still
deep at the bottom

TLB:
my bottom is deep
and it is also quite wide
what jeans should i wear?

AG:
Bypass denim jeans
Try a suit of neoprene
Return to the sea

TLB:
The sea found me love
in meritridium fields
twenty minutes long

AG:

(Shit!! I didn't even see this.)

Old memories grow
in those fields on the bottom
a life time ago


TLB:
Do memories seep
into the stuff of your songs?
haiku interview...

AG:
Absolutely true
Things of the past dominate
Lyrical content

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A Deadbeat Summer

Swimming pools, beaches, thunderstorms, sunglasses, falling asleep in the park, and couch surfing across the states and back in a friend's sister's 1998 Honda with shoddy air conditioning. That's what this mix is about. There's still some good sunshine to be soaked up before the rains begin again. Maybe this one will last until then. Who knows. It's only 27 minutes long.

Enjoy.



DEADBEAT SUMMER
1. Neon Indian - Deadbeat Summer
2. Fleetwood Mac - Everywhere
3. Kurt Vile - Freeway
4. Memory Cassette - Last One Awake (Friend Version)
5. Animal Collective (remixed by PhaseOne) - Daily Routine
6. Nite Jewel - What Did He Say
7. Coco Rosie - Happy Eyez
8. Empire of the Sun - Walking On a Dream

DOWNLOAD

Also special thanks to Baker for the album art photo

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Meeting Modernity Exhibition Tokyo!

Unearthed outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, this portrait photography series documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods.

This post marks the Tokyo opening of the Meeting Modernity Exhibition.
Details:

MEETING MODERNITY
OPENING: A Night of Néojaponisme
A night of presentations, discourse, music, and booze.
DATE: 31st of July 2009
OPEN: 1800 START: 1900
FEE: open charge (Nagesen)
PLACE: hybrid so+ba gallery
5-29-20 KYODO SETAGAYA-KU
TOKYO 156-0052
WWW.SO-BA.CC

Come on down to the infamous Hybrid SO+BA Gallery in Kyodo (Odakyu Line) for a night of revelry with the staff of Néojaponisme. A smattering of presentations by the editors of and contributors to the site will be accompanied by Funkmaster DJ Jean Snow on the wheels of steel.

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Two New Plazm Thread Artists Announced - Al Jaffee + E*Rock

We are happy to announce two new artists for upcoming Plazm Thread shirts.

#1: E*Rock (November 09)
#2: Mad Magazine's Mr. Al Jaffee (for realz - January 10)

Subscribe now and receive both these shirts and four others including the current gem by Ed Fella. Peruse and purchase here: www.plazmthread.com

**

About the artists:
E*Rock has teamed with Plazm on many projects in the past and we are honored to have his contribution to Thread slated for November. E*Rock is a multi-disciplinary artist and electronic musician based in Portland, Oregon who runs the record labels Audio Dregs and Fryk Beat and produces animated music videos with the Wyld File crew. Most often though his work finds itself home on various forms of music driven media such on the covers of numerous CDs, LPs, DVDs, concert posters, magazine covers and also his contributions to music videos and animation have appeared on MTV2 and The Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He has also toured the USA, Japan and Europe with a combination of his video art and electronic music.

His artwork has appeared in exhibits across the world from Hanna in Tokyo, LIttle Cakes in NYC, Impakt in Utrecht/Netherlands, Nu in Athens, CCA in Glasgow, Trudi in Los Angeles, Paris, Oaxaca, Chicago, Seattle, and Portland. His drawings and designs have appeared in books such as Radical Album Cover Art, This is a Magazine compendium and Dot Dot Dash; and featured in magazines like Res, Plazm, The Fader, Afterhours.

**

Al Jaffee is a true legend! He is one of Mad Magazine's cartoonists and has been drawing comics professionally dating back to the 1940s including titles for Timely and Atlas Comics. Jaffee is best known for his work on Mad Magazine's "Fold-Ins," which he came up with as a one-off idea. It is an amazing page that has an entirely different meaning once folded across itself. In addition to producing over 400 of those for Mad, Jaffee has worked as writer/artist on many other features including "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." Al still creates all the fold-ins by hand. A great profile appeared in the New York Times a short while back and is totally worth checking out.

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Cooper Black Swash Italic

Cooper Black Swash Italic, now available on MyFonts.

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Sucks.

Pedestal time... .

Sometimes we need to call out the folks practicing around us that do lame shit.

Problem #1:

Punctuation and grammar. Why doesn't "the establishment" take graphic design seriously? Because graphic designers have no sense of the mechanics of language. One cannot poke fun at another if one cannot use punctuation properly. 

*Note: there is an extra apostrophe in the graphic above.

Problem 2:

Homophobia sucks.

It isn't edgy. It isn't ironic. It isn't anything except fucking lame, Bunch Design.

Take potshots elsewhere. 

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Plazm Thread Presents Mr. Ed Fella's Latest

Each month Plazm presents a new limited edition T-shirt design, once it's gone, it's gone. We call it "Plazm Thread." This month's shirt features a six color Ed Fella design that seemingly brings clarity to the economic collapse. The print will feature three colors pulled in split fountain, so each shirt will be a little different. Subscribe to get Ed's T-shirt plus 6 more original, exclusive designs for 99 little bucks (that's about 16/ shirt shipped to your door).

view / info / purchase: www.plazmthread.com

All subscriptions through November automatically enter you for a raffle with Plazm's collector's box set as a prize.

Concocted by Plazm with BuyOlympia.com

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Envisioning Information: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Lust put this together for De Volkskrant newspaper. It's quite an amazing semiotic analysis and re-categorization of the sea of information we swim in.

The Oogle search engine queries Google search and determines the semantic orientation of each word in the returned results. To determine semantic orientation the program searches every word in the title and description of each result. By comparing the number of returned Google search results for each word to the ratio of returned results for a set of positive and negative words to the number of returned results for the positive/negative words paired with each word, the program can determine the degree of positivity or negativity. Essentially word score is determined by how often it is found paired with other words known to be positive or negative. Each word in the returned results is then colored by score, and the scores visualized per result title, result description, and then for the whole page, showing the overall semantic orientation as determined by Google. Oogle is a tool for digital anthropology in that it gives insight into the relationship between language and (primarily western) culture and shows how, at a certain moment in time, words are being read and valued.

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Blur - Rick Valicenti Mash-up of Farrah and Michael

Following up from my post a week ago in tribute to Rick Valicenti's 1996 cover for Plazm #14, now you can download Rick's mash-up book "Blur." Made a week or so ago in response to Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett's passing and impact on our collective consciousness.

Download the pdf here.
Blur-RV.pdf

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