Esoteric Agenda

Maude Barlow On CJAM: How We Poison The Earth

2009-03-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

‘Poisoning water is like poisoning your blood. It comes back to us. There is a price to be paid for thinking we’re above nature.’

A very poignant discussion on how we poison the earth, a view that I think makes the global environment problem appear more urgent than "An Inconvenient Truth".

Click Here To Listen To The Interview

The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters

2009-03-24T01:04:00.000-07:00

Adult Contemporary

2009-03-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

From The CJAM .mp3 Archives

DJ Set @ Build & Burn Closing Reception

2009-03-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

Friday March 20th, I'm going to be spinning a more danceable set, not only consisting of electronic but rock/indie, electro-clash and new wave @ The LeBel Building located on the Southwest corner of Huron Church & College. The even t will be taking place within the gallery which is currently housing a collection of several University Of Windsor Viusla Arts students.

DJ Set @ Phog, Thursday March 19th

2009-03-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

At 10:00 pm I'm going to be spinning an array of electronic music at The Phog Lounge.

Not sure what or where The Phog Lounge is, check The Phog Blog

YOU ARE AMAZING

2009-03-18T11:48:00.000-07:00

Click the Art to see pictures of the Broken City Lab crew putting up this message to the inhabitants of West Windsor.

Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!

2009-03-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

If We Could Undo Psychosis 1 by Jane Kelly

Olympia with Dog (after Manet) by Paul Harvey

EXPULSION OF ADAM AND EVE FROM PARADISE
after Masaccio by Charles Thomson

"The Queen's Speech " by Ella Guru
Here's her Artist Statement and CV

Sexton Ming, Tracey Emin, Charles Thomson, Billy Childish and Russell Wilkins at the Rochester Adult Education Centre, December 11, 1987, to record The Medway Poets LP.

2009-03-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

Guy Debord (1931-1994)
Society of the Spectacle, Part 1, 1973 & Society of the Spectacle, Part 2, 1973
From the site Ubu.com
 

A complete translation of the soundtrack by Ken Knabb
 

Kota Ezawa presented by Murray Guy

2009-03-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

KOTA EZAWA
Art Forum February 2005

by Matthew Higgs

Working through the past in order to illuminate the present, the San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa has described his practice as a form of “video archaeology.” His signature style—a digital approximation of paper-cutout animation—is evocative of the deliberately awkward graphic mannerisms of South Park and lends both a physical and psychological flatness to his works that mirrors what Ezawa has described as the “banality” or “hollowed-out” nature of his iconic yet overexposed source material (typically, archival news footage or the movies).

Raised in Mössingen, Germany, Ezawa studied for four years at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie with Nam June Paik and Nan Hoover before relocating to the Bay Area in 1994 to complete his undergraduate degree at San Francisco’s Art Institute (where he studied with Nayland Blake and maverick filmmaker George Kuchar). In addition to ongoing collaborative activities that include musical and theatrical performances with the artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, Kevin Killian and the San Francisco Poets Theater, and Karla Milosevich (who with Ezawa and Craig Goodman makes up the Helen Lundy Trio keyboard ensemble), Ezawa is gaining wider attention for his compelling animated video works, which have recently been screened in exhibition and film festivals in New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Berlin.

Ezawa’s earliest films, such as Superkraft, 1995, and Aquatorious, 1996, employed actors in scripted narratives that played off established Hollywood genres such as superhero or action movie. Having abandoned live-action filming in 1998, Ezawa began making independent animated work with Home Video, 2001. Attracted to animation for what he calls its “constructed” nature, Ezawa has, somewhat combatively, described his solitary and labor-intensive process as a struggle between himself and the computer.

Home Video is an endlessly looping three-minute digital animation that features a static shot of a suburban tract home taken from a Bay Area real-state brochure. The only “action” is the constant movement of clouds across a sky that alternates between night and day and the switching on and off of the house’s interior lights by its unseen occupant. Reminiscent of a screen saver, Home Video also owes a debt to Andy Warhol’s epic film Empire, 1964, in which a static architectural motif is also the central “character” and the primary “action: also consists of shifting meteorological patterns and the switching on and off of a building’s interior lights. Simultaneously cheerful and depressing, Home Video is a pop-situationist conundrum: a melancholic riff on social alienation and the interminable monotony of contemporary suburban experience.

Ezawa shifts his focus from anonymity to notoriety in The Simpson Verdict, 2002, a three-minute digitally animated video projection based on the (still) astonishing denouement of the 1995 trial of O.J. Simpson, during which he was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Abstracted—and graphically simplified—from courtroom footage, The Simpson Verdict’s jerky movements echo the staccato rhythms of the original fixed-position, single-camera trial recordings. (Ezawa was familiar with the filming style from his experience as an occasional courtroom cameraman in the late 90’s.) Ezawa’s decision to retain the sparse original sound track—which is largely mute aside from brief procedural comments from the judge, the jury’s verdict, and muffled sounds of astonishment and grief from those present—lends The Simpson Verdict something of the quality of a silent film: Our attention is focused largely on the character’s actions. Ezawa’s re-imaging of the events privileges (and exaggerates) the slight yet revealing gestures of Simpson and his legal team as they anticipate and learn his fate. The turn of a head, the raising of an eyebrow, the shifty movement of Simpson’s eyes serve to intensify the human drama. The Simpson Verdict condenses history to a compelling narrative from a series of nervous gestures and tics.

Ezawa’s most recent work, Lennon Sontag Beuys, 2004, is a three-channel animated video projection based on existing footage of more measured but no less impassioned “performances” (Ezawa’s term): public speeches by John Lennon, Susan Sontag, and Joseph Beuys. Displayed side by side, the three animated characters speak simultaneously, as if competing for our attention. Lennon, seen in bed with Yoko Ono and surrounded by journalists, touts the potential of nonviolent protest; the late Sontag, seen in a recent lecture at Columbia University, discusses how images of violence might be considered instruments of protest; and Beuys, filmed in the ‘70s during a public forum at the New School in New York, expounds on his thesis of “social sculpture.” What initially appears to be a cacophony gradually becomes—as each speaker’s voice ebbs and flows and as the viewer acclimates to the individual dialects and accents—more distinct; it’s a scenario Ezawa has described as being akin to the experience of overhearing fragments of conversations as one moves through a crowd. Ezawa sees Lennon, Sontag, and Beuys not only as agents for social change but also as representatives of the historically entangled nations of England, the United States, and Germany and as ideologues for the musical, literary, and plastic arts. No single member of this triumvirate fully articulated Ezawa’s views, but collectively they synthesize his stated interests in “popular music, concerned seriousness, and German metaphysics.”

The Brawl, 2008

This juxtaposition—a kind of earnest yet skeptical relationship with popular culture combined with a wry sense of humor—reverberates throughout Ezawa’s deceptively simple works. When considered together they present a somewhat maudlin outlook: a world full of isolated marriages, and the seeming futility of protest. That is, a world not unlike the one we presently occupy.

Electronic Moon 2

2009-03-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

with Jud Yalkut.

By Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik On The Television - 1975

2009-03-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

"I make technology ridiculous." -Nam June Paik

I'm Going To Be Playing @ PHOG Lounge

2009-03-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

On Thursday March 19th I'm going to be doing a DJ Set of various Electronic music at The Phog Lounge from 10:00pm till Close.

2009-03-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

V. count MACULA - Suck Blood, Stay Young

2009-03-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

Here's an artist my friend Emily Copeland aka. EM-C told me to check out, he's from Detroit and is a Rapper and Visual Artist.

Here's his video for "Smooth Wizards"

V count MACULA from Vaughn Taormina on Vimeo.

Here's His Myspace

Kero.FM - Kero and The Neighbor on CJAM 91.5

2009-03-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Kero, local electronic artist and record label owner (DETUND - Detroit Underground), and his mysterious partner in crime The Neighbor, have a mind expanding radio show called Kero.fm Consisting of IDM, Dub-Step, Electro and Ambient tracks.

Click Here To Listen to Last Weeks Episode

2009-03-11T23:29:00.000-07:00

The Power of WORDS

Text In-Transit is a Broken City Lab project where we’re partnering with Transit Windsor to install a number of text-based creative works amongst the ads in the headspace on buses. We’re looking for submissions of short statements, poems, and stories from anyone in the city that will help to change the conversation about Windsor!!!

*** Please send your submission(s) to info@brokencitylab.org by March 20, 2009.

We’ll be curating the submissions, so feel free to send more than one. As well, this project is made possible by Transit Windsor, OPIRG, and The Arts Society at the University of Windsor.

Here's some contemporary word art.

Signs Of Progress

2009-03-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

2009-03-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

MIX 002. Classic House, House, IDM, Electro Dub-Step.

More of a club mix, something to dance to.

Track Listing:

Daft Punk - Musique

Kid606 - Raving Cain - Bruce Stallion Remix

Inagator II - Skyscratch (Mano Mano) - Tresor Mix

Otto Von Schirach - Whip Me Down - Soft Pink Truth Remix

Plastikman - Fuk

Jimmy Edgar - Wanna Do It

Kid606 - Get In The Way

DJ Funk - Bounce That Ass (Waters Of Nazareth Re-edit)

Dolby Anol - Heather, I'm Dry - Kid606 mix

Daft Punk/Para One - Prime Time Of Your Life RMX

Esoteric Agenda Mix 002 by DJFURS

This one starts and ends with Daft Punk, literally. (...and figuratively?)

2009-03-11T22:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a sweet link to a random CJAM clip in the .mp3 archives

2009-03-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

MIX 001. Mainly consisting of IDM, Electro and Dub-Step. You can download it if you want.

Track Listing:

tomandandy - Theme from Red Hot + Dance (Gothic Mix)

Jimmy Edgar - Wanna Do It

Kid606 - Die Soundboy Die

Jimmy Edgar - Slaphard Mix 1

LFO - Mummy, I've Had an Accident

Santogold - Creator

Kid606 - Circuitstep

Feadz - On All Fours

Kero - 26th Birthday

Squarepusher - U.F.O.'s Over Leytonstone

Boards Of Canada - Basefree

CacheFlowe - Flowebot Dub ft. Brer Rabbit

Kid606 - Raving Cain - Bruce Stallion Remix

CacheFlow - Oh! Dub

Jimmy Edgar - Slaphard Mix 2 (Jimmy's Revenge)

The Tuss - Synthacon 9

Dolby Anol - Heather, I'm Dry - Kid606 mix

LFO - Freak

Steve Parker - Crawling - Punisher Remix

DJ Sluggo - Wouldn't You Like To Be A Hoe

Aphex Twin - Flim

Esoteric Agenda Mix One by DJFURS

New Mixes

Coming Soon

The First Post

2009-03-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

I'm starting this blog in order to get some of my ideas and interests (which come from other peoples ideas and interests) out into the public. I'm going to be posting my Dj mixes and other music related subject matter, along with info on art, and other socially relevant themes. I'm going to try to update the blog a few times a week.