November 20, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Superávit (surplus energy) is an exhibit to be organized and hosted in Barcelona, in 2009-2010 to feature painting, photography, books, short film, discussions, regarding ways in which the pace of prevailing lifestyles causes breakdown in our sense of cohesion, morally, economically, and in the visionary sense of one’s own purpose. We are at the focal point of a vast combining and stitching-together of resources and approaches, and the nature of life in the human world is, as a result, now constantly redefined.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Poetry is the frontier where language in use comes in contact with future meaning, and in the process, when best executed, brings a wealth of transcendent truths into the present. Poetry is relevant to all uses of language, though there may be trends that suggest popular culture is looking to new forms of poetic activity to replace specific old models: many musical artists now play the role of mythic historian or wandering troubadour, but poetry is not confined to these purposes.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Just a couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom dictated that financial minds must view “green technology” as pie in the sky, an unaffordable idealistic quest for something beyond the “easy” solution of endless oil. Then, almost overnight, the financial markets discovered that oil was not infinite, that the entire US economy was beholden to the pricing whims of an international cartel —this was long known, but tolerated—, and failure to go green could cripple the world’s most powerful democracy.
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November 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.
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November 13, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of troubled souls and pretentious intellects; it is the basic state of nature as we know it. The more we discover, the more certain we can be of this: even elemental particles are less solid than they seem, behaving like tightly bound arrangements of spherical bodies —irreducible monads—, they apparently achieve this physics by behaving like something they are not (now widely accepted in particle physics, “string theory” proposes that elemental particles are actually 2-dimensional vibrating “strings” whose vibration causes them to interact as if they were not strings at all).
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.
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November 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.
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October 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
According to a new report from Reporters sans Frontiers, the United States is tied for 36th in the world for press freedom, with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde, South Africa, Spain and Taiwan. Of the nations that rank above the US, the report lists Mali, Ghana, Namibia, Jamaica, Surinam, as well as states formerly controlled by the Soviet Union such as the three Baltic states —Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—, and Slovakia. France ranked 35th, just ahead of the US.
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October 12, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
American schools have been many things over the centuries: the world’s first true universal public education system, a decentralized municipal forum for sincere ambition and hopeful good efforts, indoctrination channels, oases of political correctness, the envy of the world in science and math, edge-leaders in social progress, the root-structure of the most vibrant university culture in the world, and now, largely insufficient, as competing with the world’s best.
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October 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
A revolutionary skyscraper design by Herzog and de Meuron, commonly known as ‘the Triangle’, aims to break the long-standing Parisian height barrier of 37 meters, while respecting the right of neighbors to the same quantity of sunlight they would have without the new structure. The Guardian has called it a ’shade-less ziggurat’, reference both to its irregular stepped-pyramid shape and to its playing a central role in the evolution of the spirit of the times, in design terms, in a city whose emblematic architecture is, somehow, also a sacred essence.
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September 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
I want to write about hope, about the nature of optimism and how closely linked the quality of imagination is to our ability to conceive of, work for and see through meaningful improvements to the human condition. I want to write about it because it is such a vital commodity in our times, such a spiritual enigma and a challenge to our political systems, but then one glaring fact becomes clear that seems to limit what can be said about hope: that vital spiritual resource does not stand alone, but is linked in every case to human specifics, inseparable from what we seek to apply to it, and so hope is different to all people, even in its most essential manifestations.
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August 29, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
China is choking under a thick covering of contaminants produced from burning carbon-based fuels for industrial production, power-generation, and transport. Environmental degradation is so rampant that much of the northwest of the country is being lost to rapidly expanding deserts. And desertification threatens the already shaky balance between China’s available arable land and its skyrocketing demand for cheap food. Policy makers and market theorists in China and abroad should be thinking about whether that desert can produce something to help China escape the mounting environmental and public health cataclysm.
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August 26, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a man but nature’s finer success in self-explication? What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon figures, — nature’s eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of nature, but a still finer success? all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the pencil?
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August 17, 2008 :: AlexS :: One Comment
THE LAST YAK, PANGOLIN’S TEATIME, PLEASANCE DOME
****
Pangolin’s Teatime are a young Edinburgh-based puppet theatre company, who in 2007 picked up a clutch of awards at the National Student Drama Festival for their previous work Haozkla. This year they return to the Fringe with a new original production, and have created a thoughtful, mature fairy tale about power, reality and the magic of belief. With lovingly handcrafted masks and puppets, some rod, some glove, and a flair for storytelling, this is a beautifully thought-through work that should appeal to adult and child alike.
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August 17, 2008 :: AlexS :: No Comment Yet
TALKING HEADS PLUS, GEMS OF MAZAL, THE MEADOWS
***
Alan Bennett is much admired and much performed, but his characters are currently being given voice in a more unusual setting than he is probably used to. Stop by the Sainsbury’s Local on the Meadows this Fringe at around 6pm, and you’re likely to be greeted by a group of twentysomethings milling about, a skateboard doing the rounds, chirpily singing songs, before one of them begins narrating an excerpt of what sounds like Roald Dahl in a heightened voice. As he starts his speech, the company sets off down Middle Meadow Walk into the greenery, trailing an audience behind them. This is Talking Heads Plus, combining Bennett’s much-loved pieces with works by other authors, and claiming to bring the monologue form to life as you’ve never seen before.
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August 14, 2008 :: AlexS :: No Comment Yet
SCARAMOUCHE JONES, GUY MASTERSON TTI, ASSEMBLY SUPPER ROOM
*****
Justin Butcher is a man of many talents. Not content with penning a sumptuous script, full of wonder, lyricism, evocative imagery and beautifully crafted turns of phrase, as a performer he also keeps the audience wrapped in his spell for an hour and a half, never slackening or flagging. It’s an extraordinary achievement, and Scaramouche Jones is as delightful, funny, moving and thoughtful a Fringe show as could be hoped for.
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August 14, 2008 :: AlexS :: No Comment Yet
TITUS ANDRONICUS, ACTION TO THE WORD, C VENUE
***
Fringe productions of Shakespeare are usually best approached with caution. Everyone wants to have a go and show their mettle, and the temptation to add their own mark to the works by offering a “reinterpretation” often begs for disaster – Hamlet in space, perhaps, or The Tempest re-enacted as a Marxist parable of the evils of modern society. Occasionally it’s a spectacular success, as with the Midsummer-Night’s-Dream-in-a-roller-disco of The Donkey Show, a recent Edinburgh Fringe smash hit that went on to a run in London’s West End and from there to New York. The list of equally spectacular failures stretches on into the middle distance. Cambridge University-born company Action to the Word’s version of Titus Andronicus falls squarely between these two stools, passing the test with, if not a distinction, then enough merit to be shared round the sizeable cast, without ever really breaking any new ground.
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August 14, 2008 :: lucyribchester :: No Comment Yet
‘Clown is failure,’ says Chris Mitchem, co-founder of Barcelona-based theatre company Clownfish. ‘What makes a good clown is the ability to accept failure.’ I hope he’s right. My attempt to attend the first day of Clown Theory, a five-day course run by US-born clown Jango Edwards, is a bit of a disaster. The workshop, Jango says, will make you ‘remember everything you forgot’, and is based on re-learning the innocence we are all born with. Jango, whose past audiences include the Rolling Stones and Salvador Dalí, is convinced anyone can become a clown. He’s had all sorts from taxi drivers to journalists take the course, and even persuaded an Italian policewoman to give it a go while she was giving him a speeding fine. She now directs a show with him called 00Clown, ‘where she plays a cop.’
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August 13, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
Separatist rebels on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao are engaged in intensifying clashes with government forces, and reports suggest as many as 130,000 civilians have fled their homes to escape the violence. Now, observers have expressed concern of a mounting humanitarian disaster, with refugees in danger and supplies running short or unable to reach some remote areas. The violence has intensified after a Supreme Court ruling blocked the implementation of an expanded ethnic Muslim territory.
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August 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
New York is a place where everything is just a little off kilter, pushed and angled by unwavering momentum, but there is flow and the hope of flow working in the depths of personal metaphysical craft, there is the dewy first light of possibility and the wisdom of the tempest-tossed, if —as Kipling says it— “you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”.
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August 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Everyone is alone in the world, separate from all else, at all times, and never truly capable of saying with certainty that things could be otherwise. This is both a fundamental existential problem and a flawed way of looking at human relationships. It is true: each individual is separated from the world by his or her perceptions, but: there is a reason why human beings cooperate, why we integrate ourselves into larger social fabrics, why we maintain relationships from birth to death, or for as long as possible.
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July 18, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
The former vice president of the United States, Al Gore, yesterday announced an ambitious goal, which he says the nation can meet, of transitioning its entire domestic energy production to clean resources by 2018. The speech marks a major moment in the process of transition to the green technology boom, which will be the next step in the ongoing economic development of the United States and the world. Gore, however, warned that failing to meet the challenge to date means “the United States of America as we know it is at risk”.
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July 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The New Yorker magazine has chosen for its cover cartoon for the 21 July 2008 edition a caricature showing Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) dressed in traditional Muslim garb, his wife with a large afro and an AK-47, bumping fists, with an American flag burning in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama Bin Laden on the wall. The cartoon has caused widespread offense, and both candidates’ campaigns have said the cartoon is tasteless and offensive. Subscribers have reportedly begun canceling their subscriptions.
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July 1, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The historic and landscape canvases of J.M.W. Turner have invaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a bath of vibrant color and the artist’s characteristic ability to paint the energy of forces converging in space and time. The exhibit is more than a mere retrospective; it will deliver to many visitors their first real taste of the pioneering British painter’s ambitious experiments with light, scale and texture, and it illustrates how his work informs many of the innovations that would later come in imrpessionist and avant-garde movements.
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June 29, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Zimbabwe’s 5-term president Robert Mugabe, the only one since liberation from the British nearly 3 decades ago, looks poised to serve a 6th term after holding a “presidential runoff election”, in which his opponent was forced to withdraw due to allegations of constant violence and intimidation from ruling-party supporters and paramilitaries. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai had asked his supporters to vote for Mugabe if they felt their safety would otherwise be in jeopardy.
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June 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The ‘hard truths’ are those that make us cringe, that give us pause and drive us to worry that we must ignore the truth or conceal it or find the most adequate disguise, even before our most intimate relations. They are a powerful driver of human behavior, and they often come into everyday conversations about the need to deal with problems or to assimilate a difficult emotional burden. The problem is: they don’t exist.
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June 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign began telling the press that she intended to officially concede defeat, withdraw from the campaign and endorse Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, as the Democratic party’s nominee, as early as the morning after the final primary votes. She scheduled a farewell gathering for campaign staffers and supporters on Friday, the date pushed back to allow more people to attend. And on Saturday, she followed through and gave a rousing speech to supporters, officially endorsing Obama and calling on her supporters to follow suit.
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June 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There is a more than notable tendency among human beings to adopt profound attachments to other human faces, even if those faces are known not as flesh but only as patterns of light. In the much-seen, or much-envisaged, visage, there comes an air of the familiar, almost the attachment of identity. The face celebrated either by adoration or by derision can have the effect of assisting in a psychology whereby the individual sees him or herself in the face of another.
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June 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Recién inaugurada en el Palais de Tokyo, en París, Francia, ‘Superdome’ explora el sufrimiento humano vinculado con situaciones donde el desastre se sigue con transformaciones socio-económicas de escala casi incomprensible. La exposición concentra su atención temática en la situación que encontraron los habitantes de Nueva Orleans, cuando el huracán “Katrina” y su consecuente desintegración cívica los desplazaron hacia un caos tormentoso, su entorno físico devastado, forzados a llevar el peso extraño de ver cómo se borró la geografía económica de su ciudad para ser reemplazada por algo desconocido.
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May 31, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
A new exhibit at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, France, examines the human suffering inherent in situations where disaster is followed by economic transformation of nearly incomprehensible proportions. ‘Superdome’ focuses its thematic attention on the situation encountered by citizens of New Orleans, displaced into chaos by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the devastation of their physical environment followed by the strange burden of seeing the economic geography of their city wiped away and replaced by something unknown to them.
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May 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.
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May 20, 2008 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
La desconfianza no es un estado de ánimo, no es una reacción a la desdicha; es una doctrina, y existe una secta dispersa que la difunde. Esta secta consta de una gente que apuesta abiertamente por la desconfianza, como cosmología o plan de vida, una lógica venenosa contra la que poco se puede hacer, porque su fuerza radica en la decisión total de sus congregantes de vivir en la desconfianza, confiados hasta la última en que no puede haber otra forma de vida más inteligente.
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May 15, 2008 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
THE ‘TEXT’ OF LIVED EXPERIENCE PAINTED IN VIVID COLOR WITH A NARRAIVE EDGE
Marco is a painter and graphic artist from Mexico, with a talent for rich, vivid color and evocative texturing. His works have been featured in shows on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as on the covers of and the interior of […]
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April 15, 2008 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
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April 11, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The Zimbabwe opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai, has been meeting with African leaders in an effort to shore up support against the regime of Robert Mugabe, which preliminary vote counts suggest may have lost the recent election, both for parliament and the presidency. Mugabe’s suppoerters have been fighting to keep down opposition support, while Mugabe has refused to allow vote counts to be made public.
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April 9, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
9 April :: Reuters reporting: “The self-described mastermind of the September 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] has been assigned a U.S. military lawyer to defend him in the Guantanamo war court, where he could face execution if convicted, The Miami Herald reported”… Famed Harry’s Bar, owned by Cipriani […]
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March 28, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
EXCERPT FROM PLAN B 3.0, CH. 9: “FEEDING 8 BILLION WELL”
Lester Brown, EPI :: One of the questions I am most often asked is, “How many peo-ple can the earth support?” I answer with another question: “Atwhat level of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at theU.S. level of 800 kilograms of grain per person annually […]
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March 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.
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March 10, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
A new study has found that selective seratonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRI, or anti-depressants), sex-hormones, painkillers and anti-biotics in significant quantities in the drinking water of 24 out of 28 major metropolitan areas in the United States. Though the term “trace amounts” appears multiple times in today’s reporting of the findings, that term does not necessarily […]
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March 4, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
At its current growth rate, global installed wind power capacity will top 100,000 megawatts in March 2008. In 2007, wind power capacity increased by a record-breaking 20,000 megawatts, bringing the world total to 94,100 megawatts—enough to satisfy the residential electricity needs of 150 million people. Driven by concerns regarding climate change and energy security, one in every three countries now generates a portion of its electricity from wind, with 13 countries each exceeding 1,000 megawatts of installed wind electricity-generating capacity.
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February 18, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The Democratic party is again facing questions about its handling of the primary process in some precincts in New York City, where initial “unofficial” tallies reported zero votes for Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, rival of local junior senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination. The undercounts occurred in precincts bordering on precincts […]
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February 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
At a meeting of European scientists, in Stockholm, Sweden, the man who coined the term ‘anthropocene’ to describe the new geological epoch in which human influence dominates natural processes, announced that the term has gained acceptance in a growing number of fields. The real import of the term, and of its increasing relevance to what science is showing about the effects of human civilization on the environment, globally, is that ecological information is increasingly vital to implementing human ambitions in a responsible and sustainable way.
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February 6, 2008 :: admin :: 2 Comments
The figures from the biggest day of primary voting in US history are coming in, and reveal a lot of interesting detail about the make-up of the campaigns. Sen. John McCain was the day’s big winner, though he did not win enough delegates to seal the nomination. McCain, still struggling to convince many conservative Republicans, […]
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February 5, 2008 :: admin :: 4 Comments
The biggest prize in the Super Tuesday 24-state primary vote today will be California, with more than 36 million inhabitants, the most populous state in the nation. Observers expect Clinton and Obama to nearly split the delegates available, which amount to more than 50% of the total. The Republican contest could be close to being […]
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February 4, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
4 February :: US pres. George W. Bush has presented the nation’s first federal budget exceeding $3 billion in spending; while giving generous expansions to defense spending, the budget seeks to cut $196 billion from healthcare spending, and projects near record budget deficits for at least two years; Bush claims that part of the 6% […]
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January 24, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The potential for broad-scope “electronic agents” —preprogrammed service aggregators and self-organizing databases with proactive marketing capability—, aiding in everyday information-related activities, will require a new security standard to prevent identity theft, which could become one of the gravest threats to economic performance and individual liberty.
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January 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
A low mumbling of congestion, cars, buses, bikes and jeepneys harmonize with pedestrians in urban chorus. Negotiating its way through a mixture of cooking smoke and tropical urban air, the salt of the seas soak clothes and voices alike. Sounds hover through the air und
