Friday 29th of March 2024

Performing hallucinations…

dali

There is an article about an artist, Mike Parr, in a neat Sydney free magazine, where we are told Mike painted with his own blood, threw up on canvasses and spent days entombed beneath a busy city road. His most recent performance was done blind as he closed his eyes for seven and a half hours…

I am not one to denigrate other artists’ work — well I often do, possibly due to allay my own inadequacies and laziness — but try to hang this dried dog’s breakfast caper on your walls! And is there real shit on it too? You would be spewing every time you saw this stuff above your fireplace… 

So, is art to be decorative, attractive, intriguing or to be a challenge you need to skip your Sunday picnic to have a look at in a gallery where you can’t find a parking space nearby? On a glorious day, you might give it a miss and hang a reproduction print of the Great Masturbator by Dali, on your kitchen wall, instead. 

I must say I have done artworks when I was blind-drunk with a trance, I threw up on canvases in the process thereof being pissed, and I bled to death, by cutting myself on a broken bottle (or was it a cutter-knife?), on the blank page, under the front porch — I can’t remember when, but I did it and did not make a masterpiece out of this insane state of mind… I suppose this is where “art” becomes defined by choice rather than being accidental — even if failure looks the same as a masterpiece — especially in deconstructed “modern" art.

But what I remember is last night’s dream, still fresh in the spider web of my damaged neurones…

My rich wife had bought a new small abode — a 1950s house that had been vacated by an old couple because they’d died. It was on an island full of of famous artists who were far more prolific than me, considering I had not painted anything for a hundred years. They were excelling at their craft with incredible precision, choice of colours — especially discreet tonal ranges — and amazing shapes, but these painters had a paucity of idea. 
Suddenly, in front of me, there was this large painting of three figures in extraordinary headdresses from blue to purple and mauve on a magnificent decorated blue background of an intricate building. I still can see it... The only thing the painter could tell me was it’s was about blue and mauve… as if blue and mauve were an idea. It was weird.

Meanwhile I had to clean up the old new place from the old folks’ junk which eerily looked like mine, in the studio — and I used a trailer disguised as a dinghy that sunk on the launching ramp because I placed too many heavy things in it… As all dreams, this was worth a picture in itself but I could not compete against the amazing talent, with my ideas… I know people like that...

The woodworks and the sculptures were beyond this earth though I could make them up if I had another thousand years to live. And yet they still had not an ounce of philosophical hubris in them… Was this an impression of hell’s perfection?… 

Was I deluded?...


Gus Leonisky
Chief procrastinator...

in the wrong game...

The Telstra chairman, John Mullen, has taken a swipe at critics of executive pay by saying that while teenage Fortnite players can earn millions, someone who is well rewarded for devoting their life to a career in business is derided as “morally wrong”.

Speaking at the telco’s annual general meeting in Sydney on Tuesday, Mullen warned that talented executives might shy away from running Australia’s biggest companies because of criticism about pay.

An overwhelming 97.4% of shareholders voted to approve the telco’s remuneration report at the meeting, a sharp contrast to last year’s 62% vote against that sparked 12 months of consultation by Mullen.

But he said that while talented business people once aspired to run big firms, they might now think twice.

“Young kids are earning $5m playing Fortnite but when a business executive devotes a huge portion of their life ... that it’s somehow morally wrong they get rewarded for it,” he said.

Mullen’s remarks on pay kicked off an annual shareholder meeting season that nevertheless is expected to focus on corporate Australia’s response to the climate crisis. 

BHP and Origin Energy are among companies to face shareholder resolutions over global heating while other companies are set to face questions over social issues ranging from slavery to the deportation of asylum seekers.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/15/telstra-chairman-defend...

 

Meanwhile:

 

This has been, without exception, the most exciting instance of server maintenance in video gaming history.  For more than a day now, servers for the popular battle royale game Fortnite has been effectively shut down: you can load into the game but you can't do anything but watch a black hole slowly swirl on screen, or play a little Space Invaders clone if you input the Konami code. At the time of this writing, the game has been down for an impressive 29 hours, and it doesn't look like it's going to come back up tonight.

Right now it's sort of anyone's guess when the game will come back, but there's reason to believe it's going to come up soon. There appears to be an advertisement in China that says the new Season will start on October 15, which would leave some time tomorrow morning for the thing to start up: October 15 will end at 12:00 PM Eastern in the United States. The battle pass trailer has also already leaked out, something that doesn't typically happen until pretty close to release.

Again, it's all circumstantial, and Epic is expected to continue its total silence until the season starts up. There's also common sense at play here: a full day should be enough time for any server-side work Epic needs to do, even something so big as what it seems like we're working with here. Given that, the company probably doesn't want to let this drag on too much longer, risking the current wave of hype devolving further into frustration. Plenty of people are grumbling on social media already, but that would be a whole lot worse if we move on to a full 48 hours.

 

Read more:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2019/10/14/fortnite-black-hole-s...

eco-russia?...

An Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) MEP has written to the European Commission to request a probe into whether Greta Thunberg’s eco movement could represent a “hybrid threat” to Europe and be “financed and steered” by Russia.

In the written question to the Commission, Jörg Meuthen notes that he has been "following with interest" the measures being taken by Europe to "avert hybrid threats." He describes hybrid threats as being designed to “influence decision-making, to weaken societies and undermine unity.”

But could we really be looking at yet another of the Kremlin’s many feared discord-sowing tentacles wearing the doomsaying teen activist as a sock puppet?

Given that Meuthen’s AfD party colleagues have themselves been questionably accused of being beholden to and financed by Russia, there is a strong scent of trolling from the German MEP’s request. Indeed, almost any political party or figure who is not hostile to Moscow has been pegged as a Russian stooge at some point in time.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/471000-greta-thunberg-russia-influence-afd/

 

 

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Yes the world is the grip of Russia's benevolence...

art rationale...

In June 2018, Australian artist Mike Parr sealed himself beneath a road in Hobart's CBD for 72 hours without food, to draw attention to Australia's buried history of colonial violence.

In 2002 he sewed his lips shut in solidarity with asylum seekers, in an endurance performance called Close the Concentration Camps.

Last week, at Sydney's Carriageworks, the artist closed his eyes for seven hours straight and painted black squares on the walls of the gallery.

The performance, Towards an Amazonian Black Square, was an angry lament for the Amazon, where wildfires burn out of control and deforestation threatens to plunge the world further into global warming.

It's also an indictment of Western enlightenment values such as "progress" and "rationality", Parr tells the ABC.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-30/australian-artist-mike-parr-prote...

 

 

Read from top...

 

I have news for you: painting black squares is still an aesthetic comment... 

no genetic relation...

It must be a blow to learn that you’re not the daughter of a famous artist and that your mother was a bit of fibber in the same moment—especially if you’re a psychic and didn’t foresee either. Pilar Abel, a Spanish tarot card reader from Girona, won the right to exhume Salvador Dalí’s body in 2017 to run a DNA test to prove that she was his daughter. Her mother had told her that the artist was her father. Alas, the test showed there was no relation. “After the Madrid court ruled that Dalí was not related to her, Abel filed an appeal calling into question how his remains were handled. On Monday May 18, the Regional Court of Madrid dismissed this appeal, and ruled that Abel was liable for the costs for the exhumation. While no amount was cited, the bill had been previously been estimated to be around €7,000 ($7,678).”

In other news: Woman wins €1m Picasso in raffle. “‘I have never won anything before,’ said the 58-year-old told from Ventimiglia, in north-western Italy.”

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/prufrock/exhuming-dali/

 

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off the planet…….

When a pink glow lit up the evening sky above an Australian town on Wednesday, local woman Tammy Szumowski wondered if the apocalypse had arrived.

"I was just being a cool, calm mum, telling the kids: 'There's nothing to worry about,'" she told the BBC.

"But in my head I'm like, what the hell is that?"

It turned out to be light emanating from a cannabis farm just outside the town of Mildura, in northern Victoria. 

But like other stunned locals, Ms Szumowski's mind initially went elsewhere - was it an alien invasion? An asteroid?

"Mum's on the phone and Dad's in the background going: 'I better hurry up and eat my tea because the world's ending.'"

 

"And Mum's like: 'What's the point of eating your tea if the world's ending?'"

Another local, Nikea Champion, first thought it was a really bright red Moon - before realising the light was originating from the ground.

"All these end of the world scenarios were going through my head," she told the BBC.

"I was having a big Stranger Things moment - I'm like, Vecna? Is that you?" she said, referencing a villain from the TV series. 

Both women - to their amusement - were wildly off base.

Secret farm exposed

Medicinal cannabis was legalised in Australia in 2016, but recreational use of the drug is banned.

 

Since then, some 260,000 prescriptions have been approved by Australian regulators for a variety of illnesses. 

The most common reason for the prescriptions was chronic pain, followed by anxiety and sleep disorders, according to data from the Australian Department of Health. 

The number of prescriptions approved has doubled since 2019, with the majority of applications coming from the state of Queensland. But charges for possession remain high, with 71,151 people prosecuted for marijuana related crimes in 2018-19. 

Few growing facilities exist and their locations are top secret for security reasons - but the cat's out of the bag for this farm.

Reddish-tinged lights are used to help the crop grow. Usually, blackout blinds come down at dusk.

On Wednesday they didn't work, a spokesman for manufacturer Cann Group revealed.

 

And because it was a cloudy night, the lights created a "sunset on steroids" that could be spotted almost an hour from the facility.

"I cracked up laughing... it could have been something so much cooler, but was just medical marijuana grow lights basically," Ms Champion said.

Ms Szumowski said they had also "had a good laugh". 

Despite the initial panic, she was struck by the beauty of the light show: "I reckon it was great - they should do it more often."

There has been a steady growth in the number of countries legalising the use of marijuana in some form since the turn of the millennium. 

In the US, some 38 states have legalised the use of medical marijuana and around 48 million people used the drug in the US in 2019, according to Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The drug is also available for those with certain medical conditions in a number of EU countries, including France, Belgium and Ireland, as well as in New Zealand. 

In some countries such as Canada possession and use of recreational cannabis is also legal.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-62261094

 

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