Saturday, July 28, 2012
Junk for Code : London: paying the price
July 18, 2012The Olympics have changed. They've become a global extravaganza. A sporting event ---a festival of bodies--- has become overlaid with commercialism, heavy-handed security, ostentatious plutocracy and phoney patriotism. The people of London have been sacrificed for the London Olympics that will cost the host city close to $20 billion.
This overlay when coupled with the International Olympic Committee( I.O.C.) history of corruption tarnishes the Olympic brand. The image that surfaces from the media hype is not a city city clogging up and grinding to a halt. It is the armed drones being deployed in the skies above his city and the blue fence around Olympic Park. It is the image of surveillance ---cameras, the blue fence surrounding the stadium, armed soldiers on rooftop buildings, brand protection teams” roaming the city.
The London Olympics is an example of civic enhancement that acclaim themselves as "regenerative" and find their expression most charismatically in architectural "grand projects": domes, stadiums, mega-sculptures and super-cities. It is a grand project as a firm of corporate futurism premised on the privatisation of public space whose stadiums may well become modern ruins in a global city
It is an example of what Ian Sinclair calls Grand Projects that are abandoned and useless and suck up lots of money. The Olympics, for Sinclair, London's heart of darkness.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Bob Marley exhibition opens - Telegraph
via telegraph.co.uk
Bob Marley cooks, Westmoreland, Jamaica, 1974.
Bob Marley in his late-20s cooking Ital food, a vegetarian diet followed by most Rastafarians, designed to promote a healthy mind, body and spirit. Marley was raised as a Catholic, but converted by Rastafari in the 1960s, and began to wear his trademark dreadlocks thereafter.
Messenger - The Bob Marley Exhibition is part of Jamaica 50, a celebration of the 50 years of Jamaican independence at the O2 in London. See respectjamaica50.co.uk for more details.
Picture: Photo by Lee Jaffe; Courtesy of Lee Jaffe.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
No Wonder US Elections are Expensive. Romney Playing Catch Up to Obama.
via slate.com
Once a week, members of Mitt Romney’s political department gather in the campaign’s Boston headquarters and pretend that they are in Barack Obama’s war room. Such play-acting has been crucial to Romney’s tactics since he secured the Republican nomination this spring. Shortly after preparing their own vote goals—the state- and county-level accounting of registration, persuasion, and turnout targets that offer the basic strategic foundation of every campaign—Romney’s team drew up a set imagining what Obama’s internal projections would be. In their weekly meetings, they review Obama’s travels to identify the areas they think their rivals in Chicago are making a priority.
At the same time, a new data-science team within Romney’s strategy department sifts through reports on Obama’s broadcast buys as assembled by the Campaign Media Advertising Group. Romney staff code each of Obama’s ads according to their distinctive characteristics: content, style, the candidate attributes and characteristics they’re trying to drive—even the gender of the narrator and at what point the legally mandated “I approve this message” tag is inserted—along with the perceived demographic audience and the markets in which it appeared.
“We watch where the president goes,” says Dan Centinello, a Romney deputy political director who oversees the weekly meetings. “We’re trying to piece together what we think are his top ranks.”
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)