Less than Nothing (audio)

Dead Donkey on a Piano

Mount Fuji does not exist

e-flux

FRAC Île-de-France – Le Plateau

Mount Fuji does not exist
7 June–29 July 2012

FRAC Île-de-France – Le Plateau
Place Hannah Arendt
Rue des Alouettes / Rue Carducci
75019 Paris, France
Hours: Wed–Fri, 2–7pm
Sat & Sun, 12–8pm
Entrance free

T +33 1 76 21 13 41
info@fracidf-leplateau.com

www.fracidf-leplateau.com

James Lee Byars, Lenka Clayton & Michael Crowe, Hamish Fulton, Julien Gasc & Bruno Persat,Mark Geffriaud, Chitti Kasemkitvatana, Yuki Kimura, Benoît Maire, Pratchaya Phinthong, The Play, Chloé Quenum, Shimabuku

Curated by Elodie Royer & Yoann Gourmel

Legend has it that Mount Fuji can be seen from anywhere in Japan. On several occasions we tried to check this hypothesis. People had told us you could glimpse it from the train window going to Tokyo. That in clear weather it revealed itself from the upper floors of certain buildings in the city. That in the Five Lakes region, you could not miss it. That if you took such and such a train, boat, or cable car you were sure to discover it in all its serene and conical majesty. Yet we saw nothing of Mount Fuji. The experience of contemplating it vanished every time behind thick layers of mist, replaced by the even thicker layers of its representation, drawn, photographed, sculpted, reproduced on prints, posters, and post cards, in Zen gardens, on restaurant menus, and bank notes. By standing in for the experience of it, its permanent and symbolic presence underpins the legend: Mount Fuji can be seen from anywhere in Japan. Everywhere and nowhere, at once. Tantamount to saying it does not exist.

Mount Fuji Does Not Exist. What we tell, we take it from experience, our own or that reported by others. Together they marry some of the contours of this exhibition, bringing together artists with a preference for a relation to the work as process, experience lived and shared, making way for a host of appropriations and interpretations. The artistic gestures that it encompasses are situated as much in their formalization as in the stages, which take part in their execution, and in the situation, which they may give rise to. This relation to art in constant motion, beyond fashions and the need to produce an object that is "art," lies at the heart of this exhibition. A discreet art, sidestepping all ostentation and spectacularization, in favour of actions undertaken in the daily round over and above their representation. With no end purpose, the work of art here is thus at once everywhere and nowhere—in its object, its experience, and its memory.

The works on view therefore waver between a collective dynamic based on gestures dodging all need for productivity, a descent into the everyday probing the nature of existence and the substance of things, a mysterious handwritten letter that is addressed to you, a longing for perfection, everlasting and furtive, a reflection in a window pane, a walk embarked upon 43 years ago, a quest for the void, a few grams of gold mined from tons of electronic waste, a ground in bits whose fragments are so many draughts. Appearing in different modes and timeframes, they try to describe this permanent displacement between here and there: from the evocation of a one-day exhibition in 1967 to a collection of books, from a small ad published in a daily newspaper to a set of photographic documents recording ephemeral actions, from a musical composition in the making to a drift on the Seine.

Sometimes, a work of art has that astonishing character which time has no hold over, imposing itself all the more lastingly on the memory, by the way it leaves its recipient, the concern for shedding light on it, creating more depth for it in the light of its own experience. So everyone has the potential to become the trustee of a precipitate of experience, which we can thus take away, conserve, and bring forth when we feel the need.

–Elodie Royer and Yoann Gourmel

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Sanders Releases Explosive Bailout List

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/11895-sanders-releases-explosive-bailout-list

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

13 June 12

ore than $4 trillion in near zero-interest Federal Reserve loans and other financial assistance went to the banks and businesses of at least 18 current and former Federal Reserve regional bank directors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, according to Government Accountability Office records made public for the first time today by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

On the eve of Senate testimony by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Sanders (I-Vt.) released the detailed findings on Dimon and other Fed board members whose banks and businesses benefited from Fed actions.

A Sanders provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act required the Government Accountability Office to investigate potential conflicts of interest. The Oct. 19, 2011 report by the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress laid out the findings, but did not name names. Sanders today released the names.

"This report reveals the inherent conflicts of interest that exist at the Federal Reserve. At a time when small businesses could not get affordable loans to create jobs, the Fed was providing trillions in secret loans to some of the largest banks and corporations in America that were well represented on the boards of the Federal Reserve Banks. These conflicts must end," Sanders said.

The GAO study found that allowing members of the banking industry to both elect and serve on the Federal Reserve's board of directors creates "an appearance of a conflict of interest" and poses "reputational risks" to the Federal Reserve System.

In Dimon's case, JPMorgan received some $391 billion of the $4 trillion in emergency Fed funds at the same time his bank was used by the Fed as a clearinghouse for emergency lending programs. In March of 2008, the Fed provided JPMorgan with $29 billion in financing to acquire Bear Stearns. Dimon also got the Fed to provide JPMorgan Chase with an 18-month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital requirements. And he convinced the Fed to take risky mortgage-related assets off of Bear Stearns balance sheet before JP Morgan Chase acquired the troubled investment bank.

Another high-profile conflict involved Stephen Friedman, the former chairman of the New York Fed's board of directors. Late in 2008, the New York Fed approved an application from Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company giving it access to cheap loans from the Federal Reserve. During that period, Friedman sat on the Goldman Sachs board. He also owned Goldman stock, something that was prohibited by Federal Reserve conflict of interest regulations. Although it was not publicly disclosed at the time, Friedman received a waiver from the Fed's conflict of interest rules in late 2008. Unbeknownst to the Fed, Friedman continued to purchase shares in Goldman from November 2008 through January of 2009, according to the GAO.

In another case, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt was a New York Fed board member at the same time GE helped create a Commercial Paper Funding Facility during the financial crisis. The Fed later provided $16 billion in financing to GE under this emergency lending program.

Sanders on May 22 introduced legislation to prohibit banking industry and business executives from serving as directors of the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks.

To read a report summarizing the new GAO information, click here.

Reports of Occupy’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Posted 2 days ago on June 10, 2012, 8:41 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

via Ben Vitelli, Occupy Baton Rouge:

http://occupywallst.org/article/reports-occupys-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerate/

[…]

Shrugging off Occupy as a momentary fad or a leftist pipedream is to do a disservice to both Occupy and our collective yearning for a more legitimate community. When Occupy began, there was a feeling in the air that another world was not only possible, but that it was possibly inevitable. Our isolation and alienation no longer seemed like an unbridgeable gap:

“Separations are broken down. Personal problems are transformed into public issues; public issues that seemed distant and abstract become immediate practical matters. The old order is analyzed, criticized, satirized. People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” Long repressed experiences are revived. Everything seems possible — and much more is possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in “the old days.” (Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution)

Since those days, over 7,200 Occupy protestors have been arrested in the United States. Many have been beaten and tortured. The media has been strong-armed into not reporting on Occupy except in an unfavorable light, and non-participants (but potential sympathizers) are encouraged to sarcastically roll their eyes at those silly protestors who just don’t seem to get it. In light of all this demoralization, Occupy protestors are left wondering what it was all about, grasping at easy explanations for their continued movement such as “shifting the national dialogue” or hoping that this next week’s protest might suddenly convince the powers that be to change their corrupt ways.

While I’m certainly happy that the “national dialogue” has “shifted” (I no longer feel like a crazy person babbling away about economic injustice) [editors note: we support "crazy people" speaking out about economic injustice] celebrating the fact that Obama now has to pretend to give a shit and Romney must now pretend to be human is an incredibly hopeless prospect. This “national dialogue” we speak about is not something that happens when we reach critical mass and the media and the politicians can no longer afford to ignore us. It’s a continued conversation that reverberates among the masses. It’s a process of teaching one another, of questioning the status quo and debating the proper course of action—it’s the sound of agreements and disagreements among individuals who view each other as human beings. It’s the sound of people sharing their visions of a better society and realizing their common goals.

It needs to be remembered that the word “occupy” is a verb. It’s a call to action, not the action itself. The word “occupy” was useful for getting individuals and organizations previously isolated or focused on one-issue grievances out into the streets. Whether the individuals involved wanted to merely overturn Citizens United or overthrow the entire capitalist system itself, Occupy was the first all-encompassing protest movement to occur within many of our lifetimes. Whether or not the word “Occupy” continues to be the word to describe this movement is not important. What is important is that there’s wide community of opposition being formed across many social barriers, and those who hold power are very afraid.

Žižek on the film Melancholia

http://bigthink.com/postcards-from-zizek/the-most-anticipated-movie-of-the-summer-according-to-slavoj-zizek

Despite the fact that it depicts the last 24 hours on Earth and is directed by Lars von Trier, Melancholia is not as pessimistic as you'd think, he says. "I find something beautifully poetical in the attitude of the main person, Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, this inner peace, how she accepts this."

You could even read it as a kind of optimism, he argues. "If you really want to do something good for society, if you want to avoid all totalitarian threats and so on, you basically should go . . . we should all go to this, let me call it--although I’m a total materialist--fundamentally spiritual experience of accepting that at some day everything will finish, that at any point the end may be near. I think that, quite on the contrary of what may appear, this can be a deep experience which pushes you to strengthen ethical activity." The result is not fatalistic hedonism, but a kind of profound engagement with the meaning and significance of life.

Bruce Springsteen: last of the protest singers

On his European tour, the Boss assails the banks and inveighs against the 'robber barons'. Yet among stadium rockers, he is a lone voice

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jun/10/bruce-springsteen-last-protest-singer

Under a full moon rising above the old Olympic stadium in Rome during the summer of 1993, Bruce Springsteen paused to catch breath between gale-force blasts of music – it was another of those thermo-charged, three-hour concerts – to cue his next number, Darkness on the Edge of Town. I was taking time out from frontlines in Bosnia, back across the Adriatic where no one gave a damn, for a bit of dolce vita.

"I wanna dedicate this song," gasped Springsteen, "to the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina!" The crowd, if it heard, was puzzled, and I was dumbstruck with gratitude – Springsteen? Here in Italy, ranting on about Bosnia? How good can this guy get?!

Last week in Berlin, he did it again – only this time his message, like his new album, Wrecking Ball, concerned a matter of more universal and mainstream concern: the looting of our economies and lives by banks brazenly gorging on our money. He railed against "greedy thieves" and "robber barons", saying from the stage that "in America a lot of people lost their jobs and I know that in Europe and Berlin also times are tough". He sang: "The banker man grows fatter, the working man grows thin …/ … Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood / Here we stood the drought, now we'll stand the flood … / ...If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight / I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be all right". Cop an earful of that!

Next month, after playing Sunderland, Manchester and the Isle of Wight, the Boss heads for London, where the darkness from the edge of town infests the steel and glass of the City and thereby all our lives. His concert falls on Bastille Day, only a week before the most aggressively corporate Olympics Games ever staged. The day also marks the centenary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, the father of American folk protest, of whom Springsteen is regarded as some kind of electric superstar incarnation. (Or at least that is how he seems to see himself.)

Why would we who love Springsteen's music and share his rage not await this night with bated breath? On the other hand, why does it matter so much? Why is it always Springsteen, and at this level of stadium rock and record sales, only Springsteen?

There are very few rock superstars from the Anglo-American axis who have played at this level over time – and a quick survey shows how far they have bloated away from serious commitment. Perky Sir Paul McCartney rounds off the jubilee for Her Majesty's whooping, servile subjects. Sir Mick Jagger showed a sign of rigor mortis by refusing to serenade the burghers of Davos, but struts and frets his years upon the world's stages to little cogent effect. Of the young ones, Coldplay filled the Emirates stadium with even less political content than Arsenal.

Across the Irish Sea, U2 traded Sunday Bloody Sunday for one of the great tax avoidance scandals in showbiz, and when a group of protesters raised a defiant balloon at Glastonbury, they were roughly handled – leading many to wonder that if you cannot peacefully and safely protest at Glastonbury, where can you?

The American greats are more complex. Bob Dylan cannot be said to count – he inspired a generation but now orbits another planet, despite playing Ballad of a Thin Man to very great effect during the 2003 Iraq war. Neil Young, author of Ohio back in the day that four protesting students were murdered by state troopers, veered into a Reaganite moment during the 1980s, but re-emerged to record the only album by a big star to overtly challenge war in Iraq. He was cheered by half his audiences, booed and middle-fingered by the other half. But last week, he did something weird, releasing God Save the Queen, perhaps ironic in the mode of Springsteen's Born In the USA, or – as Young has explained – integral to Canadiana, but the video taken from his new album is as bulimic as any other TV content of late. Aerosmith, Bon Jovi et al are simply excruciating.

Some do pronounce: Sting added rainforests to Tantric sex and Jarvis Cocker cares about melting ice caps, but so what? It's the banks, stupid – the looters, foreclosers, launderers of drug profits, arms deals and tax evasion, the new zillionaire global dictatorship that brings Death to My Hometown, as a new Springsteen song goes. Who is going to sing about them?

There is a roll of honour. In the UK, the estimable folk bards and balladeers: Dick Gaughan, Chris Wood, Martin Simpson, Martin Carthy and their small, devoted following. Billy Bragg lays claim to Orwell. In Ireland, rebel folk endures and develops, uniquely – just listen to Lizzie Nunnery's England Loves a Poor Boy.

In America, Jefferson Starship remains an unreconstructed project to plant a tree of liberty both from somewhere out there and within. Patti Smith strikes up People Have the Power on the stroke of midnight every New Year's Eve, even though they don't. Steve Earle clenches his fist and urges "Come back Woody Guthrie". But these are venerable – dare one say it, elderly – people, apart from the Dixie Chicks: blacklisted across American radio and their CDs ploughed into the ground at what amounted to musical book-burnings in George W Bush's America, after mildly criticising the then president.

Ah, then there's Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, now The Night Watchman, singing for striking teachers and assailed unions – playing both his own subversions and acquainting young America with the great radical folk canon. Morello became the watchman after an attempt to have his band crushed by the patriotic tsunami that followed 9/11, during which their music was blanket-blacklisted. Morello's response was to team up for a series of live performances with no equal in modern America: a blood-vessel-bursting account of The Ghost of Tom Joad – invoking Steinbeck's hero – with the man who wrote the song: Springsteen. Now, Morello features on the new album.

Even on this list, Springsteen stands alone for sheer stature, durability and profile. None of these others have been singing for 40 years to stadiums worldwide. His adrenalin-pumping shows are woven into American life, yet subvert its capitalist fundamentals, that innate American principle of screw-thy-neighbour, in favour of what he insists to be "real" America – working class, militant, street-savvy, tough but romantic, nomadic but with roots – compiled into what feels like a single epic but vernacular rock-opera lasting four decades.

Springsteen does this because he believes in what he says, and because it is easier to be an American leftwing patriot than a British one. We do not have that "redneck left", of blue-collar scaffolders who smoke weed and listen to Springsteen and even the Grateful Dead. And he gets away with it. As Glenn Stuart, front man for the tribute B Street Band, observes: "He's never been Dixie-Chicked".

Springsteen made his name in part by challenging and rejecting Reagan's attempted appropriation of Born in the USA, the irony of which the then president was too dim to grasp. But it wasn't only Reagan: Springsteen is so popular astride political fissures that Chris Christie, the recently elected Republican governor of his home state, New Jersey, wanted Springsteen to play at his inaugural bash. Springsteen refused, but the episode demonstrated Stuart's point that "either they don't hear what he is saying, or they just overlook it".

This leads to charges of ineffectuality. And to pointing out that Springsteen is himself a millionaire with a 378-acre horse ranch. It is further argued that the blue-collar working class for which Springsteen stands is largely Republican, though this was not true of the industrial and post-industrial swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan in which Springsteen performed for Barack Obama last time round.

Certainly, though, they do not account for feudal America's desperate poor – at food collection points and homeless shelters, working in fruit fields or online shopping warehouses, living in trailer parks across the edge of town – let alone the ghetto. But there it is: a song called American Skin (41 Shots), about those fired by New York cops, killing a young black man called Amadou Diallo in 1999 – and that is real American roots folk at its best.

Springsteen throws down a challenge no other superstar – or craven politician for that matter – has the vim, guts or gusto to even consider. That's why it matters. And he does so with an album at No 1 in the Billboard charts, with five stars from Rolling Stone and lyrics like this: "Yeah, sing it hard and sing it well / Send the robber barons straight to hell / The greedy thieves that came around and ate the flesh of everything they've found / Whose crimes have gone unpunished now / Walk the streets as free men now."

Bring on Bastille Day, bring on the Boss!