let the seperatist cult run with the ball!

Nam June Paik, "The Medium is the Medium"

Big Love series finale
The Fall, Room to Live: Undilteable Sang Truth!
The Durutti Column, Treatise on the Steppenwolf
Frog Eyes, Ego Scriptor
The Weekend*, House of Balloons (free mixtape)

God only knows when Natalie Maines' version of "God Only Knows" from the closing credits of Big Love's bow-out will leave my head. I'm trying to view this endgame through some irony Moebius where the greed and the bourgeoisie hypocrasies of the leads (Barb and Bill) become manifest with teh cute one getting her inevitable freedom and poor old Nicki remaining in the pawn role into which she was born. Bill's "I started this church for you when you got ex-communicated" thing and then Barb's refusal to join and then swoopingin at the end and getting everything she wanted is ice cold wrapped in HBO TV warmth. I just can't quite tell if that was the intention given how ham-fisted the final season has been. If you are going to turn a decent show into a batshit soap opera, let the seperatist cult run with the ball! I mean, Alby neatly couldn't escape from jail or at least make bail? C'mon! Ugh. Albyites everywhere are displeased with these events, and no amount of moral toil will set this right. Stupid TV.


Nam June Paik, from "Global Groove"

I went searching last night for a particular Nam June Paik video where he talks about penetrating the vagina of a whale (I don't think he does it; the text is accompanied by his run-magnets-over-the-screen shtick), and I'm in the awkward position of possibly accepting that I made up such a thing. I could swear I saw it late in my adolescence on Night Flight, circa 1983.

A friend of mine used to live in an artist warehouse place in Cincinnati that was above the loft where Nam June Paik's giant TV robots were built. There were a million busted TV sets everywhere and one druken night, we stopped the scary freight elevator on that floor and peered into a disued room with a dirt floor, with TV's half-buried everywhere, and the flouresecnt light overhead desperately flickered, like it was a distress signal blipped out over those broken dead TV's and it was so powerful. My friend said it was hell but I think it was a creepier living purgatory thing going on. Now I'm wondering if I made that up too.

Anyway, what I was really getting to is the Moebius strip thing with its infinity/ouroboros/predictability/video loop/culture loop/everything loop thing and here is this cheery Robert Whitman video.


Robert Whitman, "Moebius Strip"


And hey, groove on John Whitney's "Catalog" from 1961 with me. I've never heard of him either!


Love me some Robert Whitman. He was also an early pioneer in video art who rose to fame when he projected a film of a girl taking a shower into an actual running shower, which I still think is one of the best ideas ever.

* The band is called the Weeknd, without the third e. I'm already annoyed before even listening to it.