David Byrne Plays the Building and So Can You

Playing the Building @ Battery Maritime Building, Friday, Saturday, Sunday through August 24. Admission is free.

I love it when you can really see how things work...it doesn't take away any of the pleasure and I think it actually adds a little bit.

Five Things: Sick Puppy Edition

• Robert Ballard: Exploring the Ocean's Hidden Worlds
• Jean Baudrillard: The Violence of the Image
  
• Laura Cull and Matthew Ghoulish: A Dialog on Becoming
  
• How to Talk to Images. Richard Wright' s randomly compiled database of over 50,000 internet images. Internetspeaks randomizes images and allows you to view them one by one without context, Mimeticon searches for images based on visual similarity. (h/t Networked Performance)
  

  No one is sure how many images there are on the internet. Google has nearly a billion. Some people say it is hundreds of times more than that. Some people say that you can find a picture of anything on the internet, as though the entire visual world is reflected there. But although we are used to hunting for images using search engines, we still have to use words to describe them. If we type in the word "square" we are likely to get pictures of shoppers in Times Square. And how can you search for an image that defies a verbal description, or one that has no counterpart in the world of symbolic language?

• This was sent to me by a friend to further my Dumb Puppy research. Thanks T.
  

Sibelius: Finale Symphony No. 5

A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one's feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of. - J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

Source Material: Dumb Puppy

This film is two years old - Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearance in the War on Terror.

Five Things: Prematurely Published Edition

• The Poetics of Grief - Jeffrey M. Jones on building routine and pattern in Jenny Schwartz's God's Ear.
• Last Theater Show - Steve Patterson writes about shutting off the lights in the theater one final time.
• Photographer Donald Weber's White Nights: Russia After the Gulag. (h/t Heading East)
• Heaven - A map by comic artist Malachi Ward.

And the one left off:

• Bembo's Zoo
  

Devise Your Own Joyce Walk

(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the the ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers from kings evil, contracts his face so as to resemble many historical personages, lord Beaconsfield, lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Rossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.) - Ulysses, Episode 15: Circe, James Joyce

I created one for the town where I live - our walk is inspired by Episode 15. We'll be doing our walk on June 16 - the official Bloomsday.

Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical tool which generates walking maps based on routes from James Joyce's Ulysses in any city in the world using Google Maps. The system prints maps to be used as the basis of walks exploring the city of your choice and generates mashups using pictures and videos documenting these walks to share with other users.