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When the U.S. President talks about American soldiers dying for "freedom," this is what he's referring to:
Iraq in Talks With Chevron, Exxon
Houston Chronicle
LONDON — Iraq is in negotiations with Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. to build a new $3 billion petrochemical facility, and is in talks with several other Western companies over industrial projects.
In an interview Thursday, Iraq's minister for industry and minerals Fowzi Hariri said the discussions with Chevron and Exxon began this week in Washington and are at an early stage.
"It will be one or the other company for this new facility, not both," he said. "We're hoping to have a (Memorandum of Understanding) in place by about July."
Hariri took his first trip to Washington early this week and met with several companies about industrial projects. The other leg of his trip took him to London, where he also met with a number of firms.
The minister, who has been in his post since last June, said the issue of security was a prominent feature of the discussions, given the sectarian conflict that has come to characterize Iraq over the past year. He said he emphasized to the companies that much of the violence has been in Baghdad. "What you see on the television is real ... but it's concentrated in the capital," said Hariri.
The discussions with the companies have been greatly aided by an Iraq foreign investment law that won final approval last October, he said.
Hariri said he hoped discussions with ABB Lummus, a unit of Swiss-Swedish electrical engineering company ABB Ltd., Dow Chemical Corp. and KBR Inc. over rehabilitating existing facilities would lead to tentative agreements by around March. "This is what we're hoping for but we will see," he said.
The contract with ABB Lummus could be worth $100 million, while Dow Chemical's contract could be $40 million to $50 million, the minister added. The contract forms for all the deals under discussion would include joint ventures.
While in the United States, the minister also held talks with the U.S. Geological Survey about performing a nationwide survey of Iraq's potential mineral base. He said he "had a good discussion" with the Export-Import Bank about possibly providing some of the financing for a nationwide survey to gauge Iraq's resources.
"We know we have iron ore and we think we have copper and probably gold," he said, adding that those opinions were based on old data.
Hariri plans to have discussions with General Electric Corp. over possible power turbine contracts and with General Motors Corp. over contracts for service vehicles, such as fire trucks and ambulances. The latter contract would be worth $80 million or less.
Over the next several years, the minister said Iraq would look to privatize all of state-owned industry, which number around 60 companies. He also said Asian companies were keen to enter discussions with the Iraqi government over industrial contracts.
Hariri said Iraq was also in discussions with San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. over engineering contracts, but did not elaborate. The company recently said it was leaving Iraq after suffering through a spree of violence that killed 52 workers. The departure of the company served as another sobering reminder of how the carnage in Iraq has scrambled the United States' ambitions to rebuild the country.
Untitled (Lower My Bills), 2007, animated GIF. The actual, moving version is over on Nasty Nets, where I've been posting photos of Dr. Zizmor ads and other things of note. NN was recently included in "Professional Surfer,"* an online exhibit curated by Lauren Cornell for Rhizome.org.
Related: The Art of LowerMyBills.
Update, 2011: Rhizome changed the "Professional Surfer" link to http://archive.rhizome.org/exhibition/timeshares/professionalsurfer.php
"Song 14 (Dirty LFO)" [mp3 removed]
Update: A more stripped -down version of this: "Dirty LFO (Solo)" [2.6 MB .mp3]
Commentaries, commodities, copies,
appropriation, authorship, death-talk,
originality, ... these are for "heroes,"
hot dog boys and bubble gum chewers.
Elaine Sturtevant, 1987
artist unknown--see comments to previous post on perpetual motion and such. perpetual internet motion?
update: i got tired of looking at the GIF that was here and moved it below the fold.
Images found here while searching for perpetum (sic) on Google Images.
When Curators Spew Ad Copy
An excerpt from a UK Times article today about the release of Destino, the aborted Dali/Disney film collaboration "reconstructed from more than 100 storyboards, drawings and paintings...created over nine months in 1945 and 1946" (thx bill):
Matthew Gale, the Tate's curator of the exhibition, said that [Dali and Disney] understood each other, partly because Disney’s own work was surreal. He added: "If you look at the things that happen in Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, there are surreal instances."Somehow I don't think Andre Breton had Snow White in mind when speaking of the mind-shattering, politically transgressive power of the unbridled sexual unconscious. Dali and Disney understood each other because they spoke the common language of $$$$$$. I'm sure the film's eminently watchable, but (a) it is a pure simulacrum since the creators are long dead (akin to posthumously-reconstituted Jimi Hendrix/John McLaughlin jams) and (b) it's kitsch--the "sampled" authors had their early moments but they were fundamentally schlockmeisters as they got older.
R. Murray Schafer's 1977 book The Soundscape is highly recommended; as Bernard Krause said on amazon.com: "the narrative still reads like a contemporary novel." Just as Patrick Suskind in Perfume sensitizes us to the world of smells we never knew existed, Schafer engulfs the reader with a wealth of sonic details (without filtering them through the mind of a maniac). Here are some political conclusions he reaches based on the book's careful study of aural history and geography:
The acoustic community eventually found itself in collision with the spatial community, as evidenced by numerous noise abatement by-laws. This conflict is also recorded in the decline of Christianity when the parish shrank under the bombardment of traffic noise, just as Islam waned when it became necessary to hang loudspeakers on the minarets, and the age of Goethe's humanism passed when the watchman's voice no longer reached all the inhabitants of the city-state of Weimar. [...]He is proposing to stand society on its ear (so to speak).
Modern man continues this retreat indoors to avoid the canceled environments of outdoor life. In the lo-fi soundscape of the contemporary megalopolis, acoustic definitions are harder to perceive. The sound output of the police siren (100+ dBA) may have surpassed the faltering voice of the church bell (80+ dBA), but such an attempt to produce a new order by sheer might is today proving anachronistic, as increased anomie and social disintregration prove. Today, when the slop and spawn of the megalopolis invite a multiplication of sonic jabberware, the task of the acoustic designer in sorting out the mess and placing society again in a humanistic framework is no less difficult than that of the urbanologist and planner, but it is equally necessary. The problem of redefining the acoustic community may involve the establishment of zoning regulations; but to limit it to this, as is common today, is to mistake the trajectories of the soundscape for the sight lines of the landscape. Only when the outsweep and interpenetration of sonic profiles is known and accepted as the operative reality will acoustic zoning rise to the level of an intelligent undertaking.
It seems appropriate to mention here a passage from Daniel Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts, which also gets at the antagonism of the visual and aural worlds, less on the political side than the poetic:
In his remarkable centennial essay on Beethoven (1870), Wagner (partly following Schopenhauer) divided human experience into a light world--a domain defined by the eye, vigilant, alert, prosaic--and a sound world--a domain defined by the ear, inward-turned, unconscious, so far outside the boundaries of time and space as to permit telepathy and prophecy. [Lengthy Wagner quote omitted] Music then, is a sort of dreaming of the ear; an endless, subtly readjusting refinement of a shriek.