Splitting Tips, or Not
On 29 June 2009 in a Chinatown restaurant a young man confessed to his date that he kept to himself a twenty-dollar tip that he was required to split 50-50 with his coworker. “I felt bad,” he said. “But it’s not like I’ll ever see or work with this person ever again.”
Friday Night at Father Demo Square
Friday night at 9:25 p.m. a woman talked with her friend—while sitting in Father Demo Square—about love and work: expectations, let-downs, corporate versus non-corporate men (“Ooooh, they are so smart and so ambitious!”), Christian faith, hook-ups, being single, Pepsi finance, best/worst, the fifty-year-old flirt with a great car, and so on. “Tell me one friend,” the woman said, “who has not had an epic romance.”
Odradek
Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters, you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him – he is so diminutive that you cannot help it – rather like a child. ‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek’, he says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode’, he says, and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. —Franz Kafka, From Troubles of a Householder
Searching Your …
19 June 2009—NEW YORK
At 2:32 p.m. in the 28th Street subway station of the 6 train a couple played Pat-a-cake through a glass-block wall. The man slapped the outside of the glass wall, while the woman played on the inside. They both sang and the clapping noise was loud.
The World Is Flat
If you’re in NYC this week, check out No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents, a project at X Initiative. Private Circulation will be at Rhizome‘s booth.
No Soul For Sale
June 24 – June 28
Reception: June 23, 6–9 pm
X Initiative
548 W 22nd St
Rhizome is pleased to present “The World Is Flat,” an exhibition to be included in X Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents. Featured artists and collectives include B’L'ing (Chris Moukarbel, Anne Eastman, Amy Yao), Anna Lundh, Oliver Laric, Lizzie Fitch, Alexandre Singh and David Horvitz. Two artist-centered publications, Private Circulation and Free Internet by AIDS-3D, will also be displayed. Read more
The Noise
The weird humming noise began Saturday 20 June 2010 and was all-pervasive. It seemed to surround the whole city like a dome. Its borders, which had not yet been mapped, but merely reported by rumor, did not fade; they just abruptly quit. The noise (whose tone was blue, not like the Blues, but like the color blue, a dim, solid electric blue) spread itself evenly throughout every elevator, room, avenue, tunnel, and park. It started like a hallucination and spread one-by-one like a virus. Some people even claimed, after they were driven out of the city by the madness of it, that the noise followed them, although further cases outside the city were unconfirmed.
Imagine Your Own Self-Contained Knowledge Manipulator in a Portable Package
“Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference material, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.” From John Lees, “The World in Your Own Notebook,” The Best of Creative Computing, vol. 3, 1980
New Issue: Untitled (Pages 116–122)
Pictorial cuisine
Between dog and wolf
Ocular maladies
A gentleman of the state
Loaner cars
House on the crossroads
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