Author: Trent
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Drain Guy
Little People: ps. Got a couple of exhibitions coming up this month. The first is in a completely unofficial capacity… I will be placing some little people around The Leonard Street Gallery for the opening night of their new show Eleven on Thursday 8th March. Eleven features, unsurprisingly, eleven artists who “…question the nature of…
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Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries
Wired: A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images, Wired News has learned. Adobe plans to start rolling out the technology in a number of photo-authentication plug-ins for its Photoshop…
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Historians Fight Bush on Access to Papers
NYT: In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.” The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993.…
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For an Opaque White House, A Reflection of New Scrutiny
Washington Post: Shortly before he was inaugurated for his second term, President Bush was asked why no one was held responsible for the mistakes of the first. “We had an accountability moment,” he replied, “and that’s called the 2004 elections.” Two years and a stinging midterm election later, Bush is having another accountability moment, but…
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Downloading Is a Packrat's Dream
Wired: Like everyone else, compulsive hoarders have gone digital. Infohoarding may be the first psychiatric dysfunction born of digital age. “Jim” is an infohoarder like few others. In the last four years, this 37-year-old Brooklyn native has downloaded and burned every piece of broadcast and print media that’s been digitized. Or so it seems. His…
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France bans citizen journalists from reporting violence
MacWorld: The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on…
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A different kind of "Inconvenient Truth"
Jonestown Apologists Alert: Director Stanley Nelson’s editing tricks in his “Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple” easily sent nearly every movie critic swooning, yet another reminder about film’s power over those ignorant of history. … In Nelson’s 90-minute window dressing, this group of brainwashed people that burned little children with cattle prods –…
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A Terrible Thing to Waste
LA Weekly: On the night of August 22, 2003, Billy Cottrell would later testify, he had only intended to tour around Southern California with his friends Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe, plastering SUVs with bumper stickers. Going in, the plan was so innocuous, rising only to the level of a graffiti prank, that even Cottrell’s…
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Russians wonder: Bomb plot or drill?
LA Times: Arriving home, Kartofelnikov noticed a car parked near the entryway. Someone had written “62,” the auto license code for Ryazan, and taped it over part of the license plate. Underneath, he saw “77,” the Moscow code. Suspicious, he called police. The car was gone by the time police arrived. But in the basement,…
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Town Shows Its Face, if Not Its Reputation
NYT: Dave Anderson says the photographs in the book, published in October by Dewi Lewis, came out of the affection he developed for the small town; he considers them largely sympathetic portrayals of the beauty he sees in life “close to the bone,” as he put it. But many residents have responded with rancor, to…
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Russian Police Beat Democracy Activists
Washington Post: Several thousand people chanted “Shame!” as they marched down St. Petersburg’s main avenue to protest what they said was Russia’s rollback from democracy. The demonstration, called the “march of those who disagree,” was a rare gathering of the country’s often fractious opposition. … Mayor Valentina Matviyenko, a close ally of Putin’s, called the…
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King Kung Fu (1976)
Netflix: In this comedic action movie, a martial arts master teaches his secrets to a gorilla, who is then dispatched to America to show off the best Chinese fighting techniques. The ape, known as King Kung Fu, escapes from his handlers and eventually seeks refuge atop the tallest building in Wichita, Kan., a Holiday Inn.…
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Artist's war depiction has many faces, rough edges
LA Times: In every war that Britain fights, the Imperial War Museum selects an artist to render that one image. Steve McQueen was chosen for the task at the start of the Iraq war, and he struggled for months to come up with it. Then he realized that it didn’t have to be just one…
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Losing Their Buzz
NYT: But people from all demographic groups across the country are facing a much more frightening real-life situation: the disappearance of millions of bees. This winter, in more than 20 states, beekeepers have noticed that their honeybees have mysteriously vanished, leaving behind no clues as to their whereabouts. There are no tell-tale dead bodies either…
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Printable Cold Sores
via Wooster Collective: Why don’t we just see them for what they are? They are regular people just like us, they just have a team of retouchers waiting at the ready. Printable cold sores allow us to take action! Bring these people back down to our level, and tell advertisers that you don’t agree with…
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The Stuff Sam Nunn’s Nightmares Are Made Of
NYT Magazine: By now we can too readily imagine the horror of terrorists exploding a nuclear weapon in a major American city: the gutted skyscrapers, the melted cars, the charred bodies. For Sam Nunn, however, a new terror begins the day after. That’s when the world asks whether another bomb is out there. “If a…
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Ja-Ja should know how street gangs operate: he runs one
The Observer: Last week, in a remarkable insight into the world of gangs and how teenagers get dragged in, The Observer spent two days with Kerr and other members of the PDC, a group of young men who, throughout the Nineties, formed the most feared gang in south London. Lee Jaspar, the Mayor of London’s…
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
NYT Magazine: A studio visit to an artist in Beijing is often like 10 studio visits in Brooklyn. In China, you don’t find a painter, and a sculptor, and a video artist, but rather one artist who is working on painting, sculpture, photography, video and (why not?) performance all at the same time. When I…