Stay tuned—our new reBloggers will begin next week!

And our Reblog today. For all you that aren't New York here are some pictures of the exhibition Other Options organized by inCUBATE and Eyebeam kindly hosted. Reblog has been fun.Thanks for inviting us. Have a nice day.

*This saturday we are having an auction by (RE) project for the closing: Bring your red items for the action! All proceedings are donated towards HIV/AIDS organizations. Installation by Project (RE): Phil Orr/Ryan Thompson

Mike Merril: Kmikeym.com

Josh Greene: Service Works

Joanna Spitzner Foundation

Material Exchange Multiplayer Pinball

Retool by Robin Hewlett & Carolyn Lambert

Gentrify! by Forays

Tanda Foundation by Geraldine Juárez

Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion

Introduction

The introductory pages contain a brief general description of the characteristics of money and how the U.S. money system works. The illustrations in the following two sections describe two processes: first, how bank deposits expand or contract in response to changes in the amount of reserves supplied by the central bank; and second, how those reserves are affected by both Federal Reserve actions and other factors. A final section deals with some of the elements that modify, at least in the short run, the simple mechanical relationship between bank reserves and deposit money.

Download pdf

Brush knuckles designed by Ken Goldman - for the toughest cleanings via BoJ.

Wooden knuckles.

Cupcake Knuckles.

Brass knuckle cup & purse.

Very cool looking homemade / modded hand grenade mouse from a Russia modding forums. Looks pretty easy to remake...

This month is the 79th anniversary of the great stock market crash that sparked the Depression.  To honor this anniversary contempo Wall Street wunderkinds have decided to offer us what appears to be a failed pilot for a reality TV show that suggests banks are not nearly as prepared for disaster as your local cub scout troop. Douglas Rushkoff expertly explains their descent into poorly orchestrated greed in a great article he wrote for Arthur Magazine, and Ron Chernow offers up notable history in last Sunday's Times.

In commiseration I say: who needs money?  If it is in fact a mere apparition of its former green self, then let's put it to rest and make our own economy.  Raw trade was o' so popular before banks stepped in to mess things up, so let's take a walk on the non monetary side and find our inner art student self (i.e poor).

Instead of shopping at your local designer boutique throw a naked lady party!  Commonly called a clothing swap this works best with a lot of variety in the people you invite and the sizes of clothes involved.  For me, one kind of success is bringing three bags of unwanted clothing and leaving with much, much less; it's easier to store.  Another victory might be channeling your inner Chanel when your best friend is getting rid of a scarf her boss gave her for Christmas. It's always a new experience, every one I've been to is always magically different.  Unlike the marketplace, you set the rules.  And it doesn't even have to be clothes.  Art supplies, yarn, car parts, CD's; you pick the currency then send out the invites.  Any extras at the end of the night can be saved for the next swap or passed on to your local charity thrift.

Start up a local food or drink club and take turns meeting at friends homes for an evening of fine eats and/or libations.  The host offers up her house as part of the circle and everyone else brings a dish or bottle.  Figure it out ahead of time for a thematic twist or let the randomness carry you away in DADA-ist revelry.  For party favors that double as wall art play Exquisite Corpse and build an art collection as you tour this monthly soiree around the nabe.

Do you have a burning desire to tour the south of France but no Euros to spend on hotels?  Do a housing swap and stay in a house or apartment with all mod cons and pay not one shilling.  There are several associations that hook you up with other like minded individuals, some doing a literal trade or others that allow you to 'bank' visits so you can go one place and offer your pad to a visitor from another.  You might like your vacation destination so much that you want to swap homes for good: and yes, there is a business that will facilitate that for you.

Why go out to a club when you know so many musicians? Start a local Hootenanny.  Provided you live in a space that can handle the extra noise, do a regular jam session.  Invite musicians of varying taste and ability and tackle songs by pulling titles from a jar; the novelty of the surprise works for Yo La Tengo when they play Gaylord's show for the WFMU fund raising marathon!

I am sure there are 700 billion more ways we can subvert the dollar crisis and trade our sweat and passions for fun.  Walk away from the ugly G-man and follow a path previously carved out by earlier societies, to experience a greener, more social, and less GNP trackable lifestyle.

The FTSE100 may have hit a four-year low but fine wine, art and stamps are holding their value – at least for now.

From the Telegraph

Three weeks after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy triggered panic across the world of finance most investment asset classes have taken a hit. But anyone who has recently put their cash into some bottles of vintage Bordeaux, a Penny Black or perhaps a series of Andy Warhol prints will still be able to get virtually all their money back. Whether they will a year from now, however, remains to be seen.

So far experts and valuers across most of the types of collectibles that have become investments for the adventurous report that September's doom and gloom is yet to fully hit their markets

Fine art experts report some softening of prices, but wine buffs say so far markets are holding steady. Stamp dealers on the other hand are positively bullish about the prospects for their sector.

In June I'll be releasing a new book and short film, Life Incorporated: How we traded meaning for markets, society for self-interest, and citizenship for customer service. They both look at the way human beings and corporations traded places, and how we came to accept corporatism as our dominant value system.

What I conclude is that our society didn't just end up this way. This landscape was cultivated over time. We are living on a playing field sloped towards corporate interests. Every day, we negotiate the slope to the best of our ability. Still, many of us fail to measure up to the people we'd like to be, and succumb to the tilt of the landscape.

By Howard Slater

Marx's concept of 'species being' is for some a way of re-connecting with fertile currents in the communist left. Howard Slater explores Frére Dupont's recent book Species Being and Other Stories as a vehicle of exodus from left orthodoxies

Over the past few years several publications have surfaced from what can loosely be called the non-Bolshevik revolutionary milieus. Ordinarily publications from such milieus can hardly be noted for their personal openness, play with form and stalwart exasperation with the seeming shrinkage of their circles. Such books as Call, Zones Of Proletarian Development (ZPD) and this one by Frére Dupont are noteworthy in that they seek, non-prescriptively, to provide grounds for optimism and fresh angles of approach for those milieus that will not rush to embrace them. A provocative theme in their approaches is the way that each reflects upon the modes of organisation of those milieus. Each has experimented with ‘phantom organisations'; imaginary groupings of one or several that offer some means of conceptual secession; some means of supported self-exile from those hermetic orthodoxies for whom counter-cultural activists are, as ‘culturalists', not to be taken seriously. From Call's elaboration of a party of secession through to Mastaneh Shah-Shuja's investigation of ‘reflexive joint activity' in a ZPD, could it be that these books appeal to those distanced from the vestigially workerist revolutionary milieus, or to those convinced that capital's efficacy is, to some degree, related to its instauration as a social relation? Are such approaches, with their accent upon relational congruence rather than ideological purity, more attractive and less threatening for those put off by the over erudite, the emotionally inarticulate and the suicidal militancy that non-revolutionary ‘others' complain of? Frére Dupont frankly asks the question: ‘why is it that others feel no interest for us?' (p.39).

Read full article at Mute Magazine.

Crisis in the Credit System is a four-part drama dealing with the credit crisis, scripted and directed by artist Melanie Gilligan. A major investment bank runs a brainstorming and role-playing session for its employees, asking them to come up with strategies for coping with today’s dangerous financial climate. Role-playing their way into increasingly bizarre scenarios, they find themselves drawing disturbing conclusions about the deeper significance of the crisis and its effects beyond the world of finance.

Using fiction to communicate what is left out of documentary accounts of the crisis, the short, TV-style episodes reflect the strangeness of life today in which the financial abstractions that govern our lives appear to be collapsing.

Crisis in the Credit System, commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction, is the result of extensive research and conversation with major hedge fund managers, key financial journalists, economists, bankers and debt activists.

The machine began to feed the things that has made and the people who has made it. So the world is divided between people between feeding the machine and people fed.

You can download the episodes here:

Jed Perl at the Atlantic names director Philippe de Montebello’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  as the museum’s “Golden Age” hanging much of this argument on the director’s philosophy that “the public is a lot smarter than anybody gives it credit for.” 

Also, it should not go without note that the Met’s one time ticket price is a pay what you can price.  This can sharply be contrasted with MoMA’s $20 dollar mandatory admission price, which as many have argued encourages one time visits, and acts as a deterrent to those in lower income classes as well as younger demographics from attending the shows.  On the subject of blockbuster shows Perl goes on to observe,

[de Montebello] wants to move museums beyond the boom-or-bust mentality that blockbuster events tend to create. The Metropolitan declines to keep separate profit-and-loss statements for each show; that way, the financial people can’t cherry-pick potential moneymakers or dismiss unprofitable exhibitions. “The budget,” he says, “is there to support the program”—not the other way around. By offering a truly heterogeneous experience, de Montebello has taken the Metropolitan out of the game of “guess which shows will fill the till,” an approach that in museums across the country results in a glut of predictable Impressionist and Picasso splashes. What de Montebello understands is that the public is actually hungering for something else.

And of course, this very philosophy is what gave the incoming director Thomas Campbell a start, as he was given the support to launch the truly ambitious,  Tapestry in the Renaissance, an exhibition no one had anticipated would be a hit. Good PR management helped.

Surely Campbell and others at the museum were thrilled with the response.   Perl discusses Campbell’s other achievements, and takes a few less interesting swipes at MoMA before concluding the piece.   Criticisms that the MoMA has become too influenced by business models, focusing on crowd pleasing exhibitions at the expense of innovative programming may not be without merit, but its hardly as bleak a picture as Perl paints.

Link tip Via: Angels and Stardust

From the Guardian

All argue that the new organisation, to be launched tomorrow at the In the City conference in Manchester, is vital to represent their interests as the music industry is turned on its head by digital distribution. Damon Gough, of Badly Drawn Boy, said: "I think with the digital age and record companies dispersing and disbanding, young bands need a governing voice that will support them and help protect their work."

The organisation will "speak with one voice to help artists strike a new bargain with record companies, digital distributors and others ... by engaging with government, music and technology companies, and collection societies, arguing for fair play and, where necessary, exposing unfair practices".

The industry has been revolutionised since Napster sparked panic by bringing illegal file sharing to a mass audience 10 years ago; CD sales have collapsed and digital downloads have soared, but they have failed to make up the gap.

But while the digital revolution was traumatic for big labels, it has opened up new possibilities for artists, especially those with established fanbases.

The coalition will campaign for a fairer deal on copyright, cited by Radiohead as one of their reasons for leaving EMI last year and releasing In Rainbows as an attention grabbing "pay what you can" download. Guitarist Ed O'Brien said: "For us, this is a no-brainer and we believe all artists and musicians should be signing up." The band's co-manager, Brian Message, said it would allow new artists to benefit from the experiences and clout of more established ones.

Message said up and coming artists no longer saw signing with a major record label as the only way forward. New artists tended to be much more savvy about business because they had built up a fanbase online, promoted their own gigs and released their own demos.

Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths
Nytimes unfortunately reports:

More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close.

Associated Press
Mr. Ayers was wanted by the F.B.I. in 1970. Charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct.

From Washing Post:

Katy Clark knows that this is a deeply awkward moment to ask Lehman Brothers for $50,000 -- a bit like showing up in the smoldering aftermath of a Road Runner explosion and asking for a match.

But two years ago, the then-flush investment bank gave Manhattan's Orchestra of St. Luke's 50 grand for a music education program, and as the organization's vice president of operations, Clark is hoping that in its death throes, the company just might cut one last check. She has traded a few e-mails with her Lehman contacts in recent days, but she hasn't raised the subject.

"Timing is everything," she said. "They need time to figure what's coming next."

With Wall Street in a shame spiral, "What's coming next?" is a question that has everyone in the arts community taking big, anxious gulps. Lehman may never hand out another charitable dime; the immediate future of the firm's philanthropic foundation, like everything else about it, is now a matter of bankruptcy law. But the fear isn't limited to those groups that were getting money from corporate America's recently deceased and badly wounded. There's agita all around.

For now, it's agita about the future. You don't hear panic from the directors of museums and theaters, nor has anyone started to cut back the number of productions or exhibitions they're planning. Economic jolts take a few months, or longer, to reach budgets and schedules in Planet Arts, and gifts from corporations make up one of the smaller slabs in the pie chart of annual giving in this realm. The National Endowment for the Arts reported that corporations accounted for only 3 percent of contributed income for nonprofit arts organizations in 2005.