Monday, May 28, 2007

http://www.surrealcoconut.com/surrealist_documents/jacobs.htm

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Monday, May 21, 2007



Sunday, May 20, 2007

STYX FÖRLAG ger ut fyra (4!) böcker av MATTIAS FORSHAGE
som SLÄPPS med en FEST på galleri ak28,
Krukmakargatan 28, onsdagen den 23 Maj 19-22,
med uppträdanden och utställning därtill
- med verk av John Andersson, Niklas Nenzén samt författaren -
som finns kvar att beskåda fram till 27/5 på samma plats (13-18 dagligen).
STYX FÖRLAG är en heterogen mötespunkt för allehanda strömningar och lager i samhällets silt där bildkonst, poesi, musik, filosofi, scenkonst etc ofta blandas utan att någon kommer ihåg vilket som var vad. Eller bara avlagringarna längs floden som omflyter dödsriket. Kompasserna fungerar inte där. Det finns bara de här envisa mårddjuren och gnagarna med sina tvångsmässiga anhopningar av artefakter...
MATTIAS FORSHAGE är poet och biolog (systematisk entomolog), bosatt i Stockholm, ej längre ung men bekant bara för dem som delar hans ganska udda eller subversiva intressen.
FRÅNVARANDE UR SAMMA STIM AV BLÄCKFISKAR är titeln på den diktsamling av MF som härmed offras åt världen; där drömföremål och uppviglingar blandas med epistemologiska delirier och bäddas in med stilla blodfläckar och årstidsväxlingar. Jämte denna volym lossas även några äldre skrifter: det mytologiska äventyret Häxprocessens åskbetingelser, den geografiska romanen Drömgeografi Naturgeografi och dramsamlingen Sex förslag till skrapsanning som rymmer misantropiska Moment 23-pjäser och absurda Tintinpjäser som illustrerats av John Andersson och Niklas Nenzén.
PÅ GALLERI ak28 visas bilder av John Andersson och Niklas Nenzén (varav åtskilliga föreställande Tintin), jämte kuriösa lådor av författaren.
JOHN ANDERSSON och NIKLAS NENZÈN ställer ibland ut som del av gruppen 4X och ger ut den surrealistiska serietidningen DIABOLIK. Den förre publicerar sig dessutom regelbundet i tidningar som Galago och Kapten Stofil.
PÅ ÖPPNINGSFESTEN äger framföranden rum av författaren samt EMMA LUNDENMARK, MICHAEL LUNDBERG och CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON, och det hela inleds 19.00 med ett trevande samtal om vissa teman kring geografi och valda mytologier i allmänhet och i ljuset av föreliggande böcker.
Bar, samt bokbord med blandat utbud från Styx förlag och Surrealistförlaget finns också på platsen.läs mer på
ak28, Krukmakargatan 28, (i källaren - ring på porttelefonen för att bli insläppt) T-Mariatorget.

Thursday, May 17, 2007



Un des aspects les plus étonnants de la Révolution haïtienne, dite des « Cinq Glorieuses de 1946 », a été le rôle joué par des étincelles poétiques dans le déclenchement de l'explosion. (...) Ces étincelles sont tombées sur une poudre sèche et inflammable : la rage du peuple haïtien et son désir de liberté. Cette fusion explosive entre poésie et insurrection, surréalisme et révolte sociale, est peut-être un cas unique dans l'histoire des révolutions modernes.


Le Groupe de Paris du mouvement surréaliste


vous invite à une rencontre



avec Gérald Bloncourt et Michaël Löwy



le mardi 4 juin à 18 heures 30




au café de la Tour Saint-Jacques

96, rue de Rivoli

Paris (métro Châtelet)



http://surrealisme.ouvaton.org
Book Excerpt:
The Assault on Reason

By Al Gore
Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Why was the Senate silent?
In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.
A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.
To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.
American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.
While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.
Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd's incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money—much of it from special interests—to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore—not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.
Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.
Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.
In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.
In practice, what television's dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics—and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role. That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources.
When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls."
I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the "consent of the governed" was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.
As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.
The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to "psychographic" categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.
As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.
And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush's economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president's controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.
To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the "vividness" experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan's description of television as a "cool" medium—as opposed to the "hot" medium of print—was hard for me to understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of "heat" in his metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.
As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that "the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people." Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America's self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they're interested in receiving from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.
Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.
Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.
So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.
Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.
The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.
The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy.

Sunday, May 13, 2007


KOMMUNICERANDE KARL ...
http://kommunicerandekarl.blogspot.com/
we love you!

Friday, May 11, 2007

Wednesday, May 9, 2007


Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Fakta: Färgämnen

Azofärgämnena är syntetiska och framställs på rent kemisk väg.
I livsmedelsförpackningarnas innehållsförteckning har de följande nummer:
E102, tartrazin (gult)
E110, paraorange (orange-gult)
E122, azorubin (rött)
E123, amarant (rött)
E124, nykockin (rött)
E129, allurarött AC (rött)
E151, briljantsvart BN (svart)
E155, brun HT (brunt)
E180, litolrubin (rött)
Färgen E123 får bara användas till fiskrom och till spritdrycker och färgen E180 bara till ätbar ostskorpa.

Källa: Livsmedelsverket

http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789,1064241,00.html
LONDON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF SURREALISM 2007

Monday 16th - Sunday 29th July in the following venues:
cemeteries, wasteground & abandoned sites
pubs & cafes empty buildings,
silenced offices & haunted houses
factories & slums streets,
forests & deserts
London & its doppelgängers
atopoi, dystopoi & utopoi
your own head, heart & lap
online & offline
everywhere & nowhere
wherever you least expect it ...

*** Dear Surrealist friends & fellow travellers Last summer, SLAG's London International Festival of Surrealism consumed the world like a ravenous kiss.
More than 40 contributors from at least seven countries joined forces to create an international festival of dreams, poetry and play.

This summer we are inviting our friends and fellow travellers worldwide, both old and new, to join us again for another fortnight of festive fun, whether with us in London or wherever you happen to find yourselves during the last two weeks of July.

Participation in the Festival is simple. Towards the end of June, SLAG will distribute on its mailing list a pdf booklet of games and other activities. Participation in the Festival means, quite simply, conducting as many of the activities as you like, either on your own or with others. In some cases there may be specific dates or times at which collaborators around the world will all be conducting the same activity at the same time. In other cases we will simply do so at any time we choose during the two weeks of the Festival.

When the Festival is over, you will be invited to send any results, findings or other contributions to SLAG by email. We will then compile an album of photos, reports, texts and images from the festival for distribution to all the contributors.

As with last year's Festival, we are inviting you not just to play alongside us but also to suggest your own games, events or other ideas. If you email your proposals for games, enquiries, events etc. to us by Friday 15th June, we will include them in the pdf booklet and distribute them on our mailing list. If you don’t like any of our suggestions, don’t just sit there wishing we had come up with better ones, invent your own and make them happen yourself. Adapt our games for your own purposes, or prepare to be struck by the Marvellous in a thousand unanticipated ways during those two weeks in July.

In the words of Lautréamont, “Poetry must be made by all.”

The London International Festival of Surrealism is not designed for passive consumption. This is a DIY festival: it is up to you to make it happen.

Surrealist greetings from SLAG -- the Surrealist London Action Group http://robberbridegroom.blogspot.com

Thursday, May 3, 2007


Where is my mind?
THE POLLS: U.S. Presidential Race 2008 Standings As Of May 3 2007:

THE NUMBERS: DEMOCRATS

Hillary Rodham Clinton, 32 percent
Barack Obama, 18 percent
Al Gore, 14 percent
John Edwards, 12 percent
___

THE NUMBERS: REPUBLICANS

Rudy Giuliani, 27 percent
John McCain, 19 percent
Fred Thompson, 14 percent
Mitt Romney, 8 percent


___

THE NUMBERS: HYMENOPTERON

Ori Sapel, 99 percent

Are you afraid of what you will see?

recording instruments transcribing the surreal elements embedded in reality