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(image found here)

Elyse Butler has a empathic eye and great visual storytelling skills.

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Chernobyl-based birds avoid radioactive nests.

Allen Ginsberg, filmed during the dialectics of liberation conference in London in 1967, mentions a mysterious TvTube in this techno-trippy beams & screens clip on YouTube, 40 years early.

From Jason Louv's introduction:

"And that’s all that Ultraculture is. You and your friends, armed with the certainty that comes from knowing that you are God. All of them, in fact, among all of them. Here to play, here to create, along with everybody else. Everybody else, who just happen to be God too, conspiring to make the best of all possible Universes. That’s my Truth. That’s what I’m offering you, along with a suitcase full of toys. And if you take it, I leave you with that question again: What are you doing? What are you gonna do next? Enjoy yourselves out there. It’s a big, wide, bizarre playground of a planet. And this party ain’t over yet. Oh no. Not by a long, long shot."

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A posthumously published essay by Susan Sontag on the need for novels, and that which seeks "...to render obsolete the novelist's prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate".

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Twittervision: Global real-time twitters make for never-ending viewing on moving mash-up Google map. Inanely fascinating.

(Thanks kahlo!)

(gracias antonio!)

(Found @ frunoflickr - does anyone know who this is by?)

Hometown Baghdad is a documentary web series following the everyday lives of three Iraqi 20-somethings.

Turn away from bomb-driven news today and watch these instead.

There are rare occasions when artisanship blows into art and the past overflows into the future like an excited Venetian tide. This is one: welcome to the glass-work of Lucio Bubacco.

(image above is a detail of devils and angels - via the encyclopedic jahsonic some time ago)

"...the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer... In cosmology, scientists have discovered that the universe has a long list of traits that make it appear as if everything it contains -- from atoms to stars -- was tailor-made for us..."

(From an interview with Robert Lanza)

By Nicola Verlato, currently on show at the Fabio Paris Art Gallery in brescia, Italy. The exhibition blurb reads:

"More is more: so, in the primordial soup the tornado – which is at once compositional stratagem, narrative element and metaphor for an art form (contemporary art), in which, like the artist says, “high and low, culture and trivia, present and distant past are thrown together by a torrent of energy which overwhelms everything in its path” – gives birth, you can encounter all the elements of the spiritual history of America. Burlesque – represented by a tribute to its queen, the artist Julie Atlas Muz (incarnation of “the darkest form of femininity, potent and destructive, but also a harbinger of new orders”), who is currently exhibiting with Jeffrey Deitch – stands alongside landscapes of the American midwest, which are in turn mediated as much by Disney as by the regional realism of the American scene; classic legends are contaminated by nineteenth century fairy tales and by new forms of narration, the hypertextual, multiple stories woven by the players of online videogames, the myth-makers of the 21st century; junk food, iPods and manga characters are crossbred with Bronzino, and the mortal remains of our consumer-driven civilization are rescued from the dump and given a place within time-honored traditions, from carnival rites to accounts of the apocalypse. Verlato’s work assimilates old and new media, near future and distant past, art and trash, and offers it all up in a new order of painting. Verlato not only appears to capture the torrent of energy that is sweeping through our culture, but also channels it towards a new outlet. A new era is coming..."

(Thanks to Francesco Monico for the pointer)

Once the mantra was make love not war, now the mood is make porn and war.