daily reference

http://www.wizards-of-os.org/archiv/wos_3/sprecher/l_p/armin_medosch.html

from: National Geographic, December 2009. “South Georgia rises sheer and stark from the sea”, by Kenneth Brower

South Georgia sometimes seems like a time-lapse film of weather – one of those frantic abridgments in which clouds boil across the sky while a stroboscobic flickering of light and shadow passes over the land. You sail into a bay in bright sunshine and air scrubbed clean by the ceaseless circumpolar wind. You really can see forever. The steep headlands are in intense, improbable green. Depth of field is infinite, from the kelp beds in the foreground to the snows of the peaks beyond. A glacier, cradled in its high cirque, sends a skein of streams down the rock wall, icy rivulets glittering so bright they hurt the eyes. Then, moments later, like Dorothy whirled back to Kansas, you look out on that same emerald Oz rendered suddenly in gray halftones. A new front has blown in. The sun is just a dimly glowing patch of cloud across which flurries of snowflakes swirl and eddy, dark patterns against the glow. South Georgia suffers from a meteorological version of bipolar disorder.

9 weeks on the list: THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young. (Marvel Entertainment, $29.99.) Dorothy travels to the land of OZ, graphic novel style.

clicks – a lot.

“Click my heels togehter 3 times and I’m back in Kansas – could it be that simple?”

from http://www.psychedelicchick.com/

This image shows a page from Lynne Heller’s comic book “The Adventures of Nar Duell in Second Life.”
This is Lynne’s website: http://www.lynneheller.com/

“Pandas, Lions, and Dragons, oh my!”: How White Adoptive Parents Construct Chineseness
Andrea Louie
Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, October 2009, pp. 285-320

Jeffrey Baer, chanel 11 pledge drive: the Harlem Globe Trotters are not from Harlem, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is not from the North Pole, and the Wizard of Oz is not from Kansas – they are all from Chicago.

By Edward L. Glaeser, NYT, September 1, 2009

Perhaps the most famous example of economics-in-the-enchantment is “The Wizard of Oz,” which has been interpreted by Henry Littlefield and Hugh Rockoff as an allegory about the monetary policy debates of the populist era. According to this view, the Scarecrow represents the farmer, the Tin Woodsman is the working man, the Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan, the Wicked Witches of the East and West are Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, and the Wizard, associated with green money and ounces of gold (Oz), is Marcus Alonzo Hanna himself.
read the article

from a Facebook invitation sent by Area Chicago:
Bars, Businesses, Benefits, Oh MY!
To all guests of Bars, (da) Business & Benefits

This evening, as part of AREA Chicago’s ongoing More Money Issues event series, we will continue our conversation with leaders from Mucca Pazza, The Hideout, Backstory Cafe, Epiphany Church, Kuma’s Corner, Quennect 4, and Danny’s Tavern, among others, about the important role that independent business can play in raising consistent resources for activist and non-profit communities.

http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/episodes/2006/12/29

pay no attention to the glacier behind the curtain

Nova – Car of the Future – Click and Clack go to a geothermal field in Iceland: “where are we? I don’t know, we are not in Kansas anymore.”

” I just came back from a trip to Oz”, Meshach Taylor as Hollywood Montrose in “Mannequin: On the Move”, after wearing the mannequin’s necklace for a few moments.

Myth in Material

An image

from today’s NYT

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102438008

Kelsey Grammer in the episode ‘Fortysomething’: “I’m sort of like the Wizard of Oz.” (1994)

wizard of oz quiz

Obama’s Gift to Brown Irks Media
... go to timecode 1:53 …

from e-flux:
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Thomas Bayrle.
I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
6 February – 19 April 2009

Under the title I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona not only presents, for the first time, a large array of Thomas Bayrle’s works, but also highlights the artist’s ability to take us to a different place in his work, a place far from what has become familiar, where we can consider how humans and the technology they invent can create or destroy the meaning of things.

This exhibition offers an overall vision of the praxis of German artist Thomas Bayrle (Berlin, 1937) from the end of the 1960s until now. The beginnings of his work were conceived in a key historical, political and social moment in the recent history of Europe, at the end of the ‘60s. This was a moment defined by the need to create a new conception of the cultural identity and aesthetic sensibility of a country in a state of upheaval, Germany. Frankfurt, the city Thomas Bayrle was living and working in, became one of the most important centres of protest. The economic miracle following the Second World War had reached its end, and the need to completely revise the ideological bases and structure of existing hierarchies had become urgent for a generation that felt the need to write history in other terms, and to create cultural alliances different from those of preceding generations. The atmosphere generated by the American presence in Germany, the crisis in the Middle East an d the war in Vietnam undoubtedly marked the starting point of an œuvre that has remained attentive to the possibility that change can be produced in the world we know, and that from this, another new and different world might emerge.

This exhibition provides a thematic and chronological tour through his work as a whole, from the photographic collages of the 1950s; the ‘machines’, as the artist calls them (oil paintings that turn out to be mechanical toys in which the figures can be activated by the spectator); to his 16 mm film collages and the digital animation work created in the nineties. A vision of the whole leads to another reading of the relationship between popular and high culture in a moment and a context – Europe – in which modernity sees the possibility of reaching the general public via the culture industry.

...
Bayrle’s work grows out of that we might call ‘conceptual enthusiasm’: the belief that the real is just as susceptible to being mythified as the mythical is capable of engendering strong effects of reality.

I’m very excited to have been alerted by Jennifer Geigel Mikulay about this Super Bowl ad

by Niall Ferguson
Home-owning Democracy
“An Englishman’s home is his castle, or so the saying goes. Americans, too, know that (as Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz) there’s no place like home – even if the homes do all look rather similar. But the origins of the Anglo-American model of the highly geared home-owning family lie as much in the realm of government policy as in the realm of culture.” page 241

No Time for Poetry

By FRANK RICH
NYT, January 24, 2009

PRESIDENT Obama did not offer his patented poetry in his Inaugural Address. He did not add to his cache of quotations in Bartlett’s. He did not recreate J.F.K.’s inaugural, or Lincoln’s second, or F.D.R.’s first. The great orator was mainly at his best when taking shots at Bush and Cheney, who, in black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Wicked Witch of the West. more