:: BLOG NATION aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 10.09.2004 ::

:: The Deconstruction of Derrida? ::

Philosopher Derrida Dies in Paris at 74

PARIS (AP) - World renowned thinker Jacques Derrida, a founder of the school of philosophy known as deconstructionism, has died, the office of French President Jacques Chirac said Saturday. Derrida was 74.

Derrida died at a Paris hospital of pancreatic cancer, the television station LCI reported.

The snowy-haired French intellectual taught, and thought, at universities on both sides of the Atlantic, and his works were translated around the world.

Provocative and as difficult to define as his favorite subject - deconstruction - Derrida has been a leading thinker for decades with a major impact on intellectuals.

He was best known as a controversial father of deconstructionism, a kind of critical thinking developed in the late 1960s and applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture.

Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or ways of interpretation. This challenges the notion that speech is a direct form of communication or even that the author of a text is the author of its meaning.

Deconstructionists like Derrida explore ways to liberate the written word from the structures of language confining it, opening up limitless interpretations of texts.

Online resources:

Stanford lecture

Introduction to Jacques Derrida
from popcultures.com

Derrida and Deconstruction

* * *

"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend."
~Jacques Derrida

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 2:12 PM [+] ::
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:: Vote for Change update ::

Battle of the bands
Bruce Springsteen, REM, Pearl Jam and the Dixie Chicks are touring America together. It's no ordinary gig: they hope to change the course of the US election. But is anyone out there listening?
From The Guardian UK
By Adam Sweeting

Could this show, and all the coordinated Vote for Change tours running through nine swing states before concluding with a grand finale in Washington DC on October 11, actually change people's minds on polling day? "It won't make much difference with the diehard Republicans and Democrats," said Krolikowski, "but for the young people who didn't vote before, it will definitely make a difference."

The artists know that nothing turns an audience off quicker than a political lecture, so they're letting the music carry the message.

REM's hour-long set included the new anti-Iraq invasion song Final Straw and the dusted-off World Leader Pretend, as well as regular favourites such as The One I Love and Losing My Religion. Springsteen joined them for Man in the Moon, doing his best to sing while a white-suited Michael Stipe did flamboyant Elvis Presley impersonations a foot away from him.

Read more here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 12:23 PM [+] ::
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:: Search this! ::

Google adds books to its epic search story
Books go online as internet search engine scans and indexes books for web searching
Mark Chillingworth, Information World Review

Internet search engine Google has announced Google Print, a new book search service at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Google has already secured deals with major publishers, including Oxford University Press.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced the new service at the Book Fair. Reports from the Fair state that Blackwell, Oxford University Press, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Penguin are amongst the publishers to have signed up to Google Print.

"We're trying to make offline information like books searchable and available online," director of product management Susan Wojcicki told the Telegraph newspaper. Google has no intentions of becoming a book retailer, Google Print allows users to search books by key words. Each publisher that joins the scheme will choose how much of its texts are available online to searchers.

Publishers will send their texts to Google for scanning and indexing. Oxford University Press recently told IWR that it has been sending texts to Google for digitisation at no cost to the publisher. "Publishers will be able to attract new readers and increase book sales," Wojcicki told the Guardian.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 12:21 PM [+] ::
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:: another BINGO HANDJOB update ::

STIPE Q&A @ ROLLINGSTONE.COM
from remhq.com

EXCERPTS

What is the first song you remember hearing?
I was seven, living outside Frankfurt, and I remember hearing a German version of "Michelle," by the Beatles, playing on the radio. I stood there looking at the radio like it was going to do something. I was fascinated. I remember the radio was on a tall shelf, and behind it, through a glass wall, I could see a cabbage garden.

How'd you get turned on to punk rock?
When I was fifteen, I got an accidental subscription to the Village Voice. Then I started reading Cream and Rock Scene, about what was going on at CBGB with the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie. I bought Patti Smith's Horses the day it came out, stayed up all night listening to it on headphones, ate a bowl of cherries and threw up. I decided then that I was going to start a band.

What one album have you spun more than any other?
It's by a duduk player named Djivan Gasparyan: I Will Not Be Sad in This World. It was on Brian Eno's imprint, Opal Records. It calms me down, which I need from time to time.

What piece of art best represents R.E.M.'s music?
Maybe certain scenes from The Elephant Man [laughs]. There's a subtitled French film -- it's on DVD -- called Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. That film is like an R.E.M. song.

When, if ever, do you listen to R.E.M.?
Right before we make a new record I'll go back and listen to all that stuff, because I don't want to repeat myself. It offers confidence and humility in equal dollops.

ALSO

R.E.M. TO DEDICATE SONG TO HONOR DANIEL PEARL MUSIC DAY

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 1:11 PM [+] ::
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:: Bingo Handjob Nation update ::

r.e.m. today relased Around the Sun, its first studio record since May 15, 2001's Reveal. Here's a phone message from Michael Stipe.

posted by me

"let my dreams set me free./
believe. believe./
now now now now now now"


:: Mr. TRONA 11:59 PM [+] ::
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:: "'Psycho' Star Janet Leigh Dies at 77" ::

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actress Janet Leigh, whose dozens of starring roles were eclipsed by a single movie moment -- the motel shower stabbing scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," has died at the age of 77, a family spokeswoman said on Monday.

Leigh "died peacefully in her home on Sunday afternoon" in Beverly Hills with her husband, Robert Brandt, and her actress daughters, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis, at her side, the spokeswoman said.

Leigh had been battling vasculitis -- an inflammation of the blood vessels -- for a year, she said.

Leigh's film career started in 1947 after actress Norma Shearer discovered her photograph on a hotel reception desk and recommended her for an MGM studio contract.

She appeared opposite such stars as Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Frank Sinatra, Charlton Heston, James Stewart and ex-husband Tony Curtis in dozens of movies including at least two classics, "The Manchurian Candidate" in 1962 and Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" in 1958.

But lasting film fame came not from the love interest or damsel in distress roles that the blond actress specialized in more than 50 movies but from a film in which she played a thief on the run.

The camera only cares about Leigh for the first 45 minutes of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film "Psycho" as she plays office worker and embezzler Marion Crane who stops for the night at the Bates Motel where in minutes she is slashed to death in a shower by a man dressed up as his mother -- Anthony Perkins playing motel keeper Norman Bates.

Leigh spent a week filming the shower scene which is built of 70 takes lasting only seconds each in which the killer's knife is not shown cutting her. The scene, which lasts only minutes, was voted the most famous movie death scene by readers of the British magazine Total Films, outranking such tragedies as the death of Bambi's mother and King Kong's fall from the Empire State Building..

TRAUMA

Leigh was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for the role and for years maintained that the trauma of seeing it made it impossible for her to take a shower without fear.

Total Film's editor Simon Crook, told the BBC in an interview that it was "the sheer violence of the edit rather than any explicit gore" that made the shower scene so distressing. Continued here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 3:16 PM [+] ::
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:: SPAMpoetics ::

The following piece of apparent cut-up text was found in a spam that was part of the nauseating tide of such junk that clogs my inbox hourly with promsises of penile enlargement, various dangerous pharmaceuticals, not to mention actual -- no mere promises -- computer viruses:

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posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 1:51 AM [+] ::
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