The Flaming Lips get Embryonic

Mark Gluth

10.13.09

The Flaming Lips have a new album out today, with a title that harkens either a new beginning or return to roots. You can guess which, but the main figuring problem (if we haven’t already) is do we opt for the $40 furry super rad version, the $13 Itunes or local indie store deluxe cd version, the $8 Best Buy basic version, rip it from a friend, or like one would as a deadhead, just get a tape of one of the live shows. Mark Gluth ponders here in fact why more don’t follow this band in a caravan like those Phishheads do (the Lips have got their own carnivalesque show on, but way, way better). So read up, then listen, it’s a doozy. Here’s Embryonic.

The Informant! Denunciation vs. Deflation as Rhetorical Strategies

Daniel Hamilton

10.12.09

Hollywood has responded to the economic crash with the lightning quick reflexes of a short-selling day trader: swapping glitz and glamour for a hint of class consciousness with recent films like Public Enemies, The International and Sam Raimi’s Drag me to Hell. Stephen Soderbergh, on the other hand, is at least four movies deep in his own immersive and idiosyncratic investigation of the ways economic systems damage both the winners and the losers. Soderbergh refuses to demonize his corporate lackeys and instead de-glamorizes the system in which they participate through his depiction of gold tinted frames, fluorescent lighting and Marvin Hamlisch’s brilliantly kitschy soundtrack.

In the In Between: a Conversation with Galit Eilat and Chen Tamir about the Mobile Archive

Thom Donovan

10.10.09

The Mobile Archive holds roughly 1,000 videos by Middle-Eastern and Eastern European artists. It has travelled throughout Europe for the past three years and is now being exhibited at Art in General in NYC (September 24th through October 17th). Thom Donovan interviews two key curators for the Archive: Galit Eilat, who founded the M.A. through her work at the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon, Israel, and Chen Tamir, who has selected videos from the archive for the current Art in General show. The interview also discusses Eilat’s Liminal Spaces – a collaborative project which researches spaces in between bureaucracies, mental and physical geographies, legal systems and what remains beyond the law in the more fluid realm of culture. Other topics discussed are the politics of curation, Israeli military strategy, and questions about the submergence of the "liminal" within popular American culture and intellectual discourse.