neverhappened

Nam June Paik is Dead 백남준 은 죽는다

The founding father of video art, Korean Nam June Paik, died on the 29th January at his home in Florida of natural causes.

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The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick wrote When Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was made into the movie Bladerunner.  This is a comic by Robert Crumb telling the story of what sounds like a schizophrenic episode near the end of Philip K. Dick's life. 

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URGENT APPEAL TO SAVE IRAQ'S ACADEMICS.

http://www.petitiononline.com/Iraqacad/

To: special rapporteur on summary executions at UNHCHR in Geneva and international Human Rights & Law organisations
URGENT APPEAL TO SAVE IRAQ'S ACADEMICS.
Call for action to save Iraq's Academics

[ English ] - [ Arabic ] - [ Nederlands ] - [ Portuguese ] - [ Japanese ]

URGENT APPEAL TO SAVE IRAQ'S ACADEMICS.
A little known aspect of the tragedy engulfing Iraq is the systematic liquidation of the country's academics. Even according to conservative estimates, over 250 educators have been assassinated, and many hundreds more have disappeared. With thousands fleeing the country in fear for their lives, not only is Iraq undergoing a major brain drain, the secular middle class - which has refused to be co-opted by the US occupation - is being decimated, with far-reaching consequences for the future of Iraq.

The wave of assassinations appears non-partisan and non-sectarian, targeting women as well as men, and is countrywide. It is indiscriminate of expertise: professors of geography, history and Arabic literature as well as science are among the dead. Not one individual has been apprehended in connection with these assassinations.

According to the United Nations University, some 84 per cent of Iraq's institutions of higher education have already been burnt, looted or destroyed.

1. We appeal to organisations which work to enforce or defend international humanitarian law to put these crimes on the agenda.

2. We request that an independent international investigation be launched immediately to probe these extrajudicial killings. This investigation should also examine the issue of responsibility to clearly identify who is accountable for this state of affairs. We appeal to the special rapporteur on summary executions at UNHCHR in Geneva.

This petition was launched by the BRussells Tribunal and is already endorsed by CEOSI (Spain), the Portuguese hearing of the WTI, Iraktribunal.de (Germany), the Swedish Antiwar committee, the IAC (USA), the International Association of Middle East Studies (IAMES), the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO) and the European Association for Middle Eastern Studies (EURAMES), and several personalities, like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Tony Benn, Eduardo Galeano, John Pilger and Michael Parenti. See the list of endorsers.

See also the call for action underneath and more information on www.brusselstribunal.org/Academics.htm
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Call for action to save Iraq's Academics

1. We call upon all people, especially academics and students, to help end the silence that surrounds the ongoing crime of the assassination of Iraqi academics and the destruction of Iraqi's educational infrastructure, and support Iraqi academics' right and hope to live in an independent, democratic Iraq, free of foreign occupation and hegemony.

2. We urge that academic institutions and organisations declare solidarity with their Iraqi colleagues.

3. We urge that academics forge links between Iraqi educators, both in exile and in Iraq, and universities worldwide.

4. We urge that student organisations link with Iraqi student organisations.

5. We urge that educators mobilise colleagues and concerned citizens to take up the cause of the salvation of Iraq's intellectual wealth, by organising seminars, teach-ins and forums on the plight of Iraq's academics.

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Academics.htm

Jean Michel Folon

Jean-Michel Folon was an illustrator, painter and sculptor.  He died last month.

Folon's pictures owed something to the techniques of pointillisme, though he often worked in watercolour wash. There was an airy, and in some cases surreal, aspect to his apparently simple studies of stylised figures and animals.
 

ジャン・ミシェル・フォロンが1966年オリベッティの為にデザインした。

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Singapore executioner revealed

By Alan Shadrake
From News.com.au

October 28, 2005

       

   

Smiling executioner...Singapore's chief hangman Darshan Singh

The hangman who will execute Australian drug trafficker Van Tuong Nguyen in Singapore has been revealed as a semi-retired 73-year-old grandfather.

In a matter of weeks, Darshan Singh will place a rope around the 25-year-old's neck and say the words he has spoken to more than 850 condemned prisoners during his 46 years as Singapore's chief executioner.

"I am going to send you to a better place than this. God bless you."

Nguyen's hopes of escaping the gallows receded further yesterday when the Singaporean Government confirmed that it would not make an exception for the Australian.

Mr Singh has officially retired from the prison service but is called upon to carry out executions, for which he receives a fee of $S400 ($312).

Until now, his indentity has been a closely guarded secret in Singapore.

Officials rarely comment on capital punishment, which is carried out without publicity behind the walls of Changi prison.

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Visiting Stefan Sagmeister

from PingMag

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Wiremu

Vote Kinky

But Kinky was not to be cheered up. He was worried that he wouldn't be able to deal with people at the bar in Dallas. It was a bigger place, and some of the crowd were there just to drink. But here, too, the line went out the door for hours. These voters had had more alcohol than the afternoon crowd; a woman asked Kinky to sign her breast. (“Rick Perry would never do this,” she said, inspecting the autograph afterward. “Who'd want him to?” her friend said.) One slightly drunk voter asked Jewford why he wanted to be governor. “I don't,” Jewford said. Several more asked him the same thing. “I don't want to be fucking governor,” he said. “What's your stance on the environment?” a man asked, unfazed. “I don't have a fucking stance,” Jewford said. Kinky, signing a poster with his face on it, heard the exchange and cracked up. But afterward he collapsed into the car.  Away from the cameras, he said to me, “Eternal life! Christ. Did I tell you what Bob Dylan said to me about dying? He said, 'When you die they let you off the hook.' ”

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Marla Ruzicka

Marla Ruzicka, who has been killed by a car bomber near Baghdad airport, was an extraordinary, one-person American aid agency, who worked tirelessly to get compensation for victims of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Though only 28 when she died, she was an unusual mixture of charm, ebullience, adventure-seeking and tireless dedication to helping ordinary people whose lives had been shattered.

Link to Rolling Stone article

Link to Marla's Journal

Unmerry Prankster

By Steven Kurutz      

EVEN now, four years later, people who know Simon Curtis still can't believe the odd series of events that led him to spend the last year in jail. And although Mr. Curtis readily admits that he was living recklessly, drinking too much, taking drugs and spraying graffiti on the Lower East Side, he didn't exactly see a state prison in his future when he went to an art opening on the night of July 14, 2001. 

The show, titled "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," after a Flannery O'Connor story, was held at 31 Grand, a small, well-maintained gallery along a strip of paint-chipped warehouses in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a group show, and a young friend of Mr. Curtis's, a darkly beautiful photographer named Michelle Cortez, was among the artists whose work was on exhibit.

A good-size crowd had turned out, and a loose, partylike atmosphere prevailed. As the evening wound down, Mr. Curtis, then 31, found himself nearly alone inside the gallery and eyeing his favorite photo, a self-portrait of Ms. Cortez that showed her topless and wearing ripped stockings. He was feeling contented and mischievous and also a little drunk. It suddenly occurred to him that it would be funny to show up with the photo at Max Fish, a Lower East Side bar where Ms. Cortez had gone with friends. As a group of people stood outside smoking cigarettes in the sticky air, he reached up, plucked the photo from the wall and shuffled out.

It was a spur-of-the-moment act, a juvenile prank, but one that had far-reaching consequences. From the theft would spring a high-speed getaway, an alleged kidnapping and an assault on a gallery owner. Later, there would follow criminal charges and a grand jury proceeding, a blunt intrusion of law and order into a carefree world.

"I've run that night over in my head so many times," said Mr. Curtis, who is to be paroled this month. "I think about it way too much."

via Wooster Collective, article by Steven Kurutz @ New York Times

Link to pictures by Michelle Cortez