Descriptions of an imaginary univercity 23 a 3/15/95 ****************************************************** DIU subscribers who wish to partake in _Passages_, the technopoetics magazine named by a Robert Duncan poem, should reply to this message saying so. Passages invites writings on mergings between poetry and technology, and promises to use "real" names, with a "named" editor. don't miss it! "something more" "dig" cf2785@cnsvax.albany.edu ****************************************************** KZSC, Santa Cruz "Outside, My Strange Attractor" ( the n point plan to save the radio omniverse ) Featured expose: Contractions of America: Whiteness on the Installment Plan The Hall of Precedence may have begun with Disney, but the Newt Covenant demonstrates that the animatronix of govt. representation extends to all orders of business. Language is easily economized to singularly ventriloquize the plural American voice. Elections show that the speaker system can be standardized to accomodate all contestants. All bets on radio as the great equalizer: the congressional basement fills with stations ready to meet the challenge of chromatic harmonization. In this medium, whiteness figures prominently, it naturally reflecting all colors in the spectrum. It is, as most authorities would have it, efficient and ultimately past tokenism. Above and beyond the floors of Congress, the great white hope is regaining a new coinage and an inflatable currency. On the other coast, however, IMP inc. asks the question: who would figure? The color of saying has variable generations, its intrigue of surfaces enough to say that the photic zone is liquid and mined at that. The Manichean vision that would have white as light is not properly illuminated. While Frankensteins of all races crawl out of the unlit halls of the academy to try their old hands at charging up the body-politic of "blackness", few switch-operators will play the doctor on Snow White. The language already betrays the risk. Bodies are perfectly encased, their faces fresh and unmarked, racial make-up need not apply (please!). Meanwhile, the white dwarfs scratch their great white beards, belching after having swallowed the systems they authored. After all, everyone always excuses the violence in cartoons, it being at once innocent and universal. IMP inc., then, suggests a description of an imaginary unveiling. If, under the new system, even color conspires, then none of us is properly insured. The media is multiply screened and the snow ubiquitous, but gradually connections have been made and most original copies now pirated. We were amazed at the extent of the involvement. With glaring ommisions, the recent broadcasts: 1) George Hamilton or Apocrypha: Who is the most beige? (runners-up- Mary Baker Eddy, Alan Alda, the Unarians...) 2) Siegfried & Roy: Live Interview from Las Vegas (the `I' of the Tiger: survivalism and the exotic) 3) Snow: Cold or Conquest? (s/now= conspiracies of immanence; first-world thermocentricism and Project Angelic Inscription, subsequent cover-up...) 4) Martha Ray: Mouth or Measure? (dream interpretation's trial by teeth: death metapors and one woman's cultural ascension from "off-color" comedian to cosmetic normalizer via the fantasy anti-body of Sid & Marty Krofft's White Witch) 5) I Love Australopithecus (Lucy as Director of Destiny screens the long white trailer and, hence, rents history for awhile... cf. St. Lucy, Wordsworth, Ricky `Tropicana' Ricardo nee Recorded; many thanks to the Museum of Nat. History for generously donating the human fossil record) 6) Shmoo who? Ghost as Form (the guest in the White House, gestural copy: white as sheet) 7) The White-out of Sight (Outside, My Media Terminal) (the double-envisioning of African-American experimentalists as seer and spectacle, jazz palimpsets, whose writing?) 8) "The Authority Exhibit" : from the Museum of Othered Uncles (currently showing- the hydraulic family featuring the animatronic miracle of cryogenic Walt's production of Uncle Sam Sham and the Pharoahs) 9) Dirty Laundry/White-Wash : Laundromat as Confession 10) Memories of Milk : This Land is Your Land, This Land is Mylanta (simulac or simulacra, milkshakespeare and the canon of digestion) The series recycles, is ongoing. Stay tuned. --Interstatial Municipalities of Postnormalism, Incorporated subdiv. Radio Esoterica * "Go out to a standard suburban shopping mall, and it takes your breath away," says Marion Nestle, Ph.D., chair of the department of nutrition at New York University. "I mean, the size of these people. It's just amazing!" --quoted in _Self Magazine_, Jan. '95 Alas, our collective Self has grown large, and our rituals of metabolism All-consuming: Body and the Denial of Body, the paradoxical construction of our peculiar form of subjectivity. The Sex Goddesses of Industrial Hollywood--and their somehow less convincing male counterparts--project gossamer fleshtone images across the sky: all the world is a drive-in movie. Look up! Desire floats among the clouds...."There was an evening I remember well, in early spring, when the contrails of jetliners and the smokestack plumes merged with the smog-red sunset, and Venus hovered above the horizon. Since I was a child, I had always wondered how the Greeks had formed the constellations they saw in the confusing spectacle of the heavens. Now, as the drifting patterns of smoke and light arranged a likeness of Madonna in the western sky, I experienced something like an epiphany, coupled with an infinite yearning...." --pop-apocalyptic productions * Playlist, Conference of the Birds, KZSC, Santa Cruz, 3-9-95 Mansour Seck/ Quinze Ans/ N'der Fouta Tooro Vol. 1 Sona Diabate/ Kinikiniko/ Sons de la Savane Yusef Lateef/ Love Theme From Spartacus/ Eastern Sounds ... Prince Lasha and Sonny Simmons/ The Loved Ones/ Firebirds Ivo Perelman/ Mina do Sante/ Children of Ibeji Ogwang lelo Okoth & Pady J Onon/ Jacob Omolo/ Luo Roots Nahawa Doumbia/ Mogoya/ Didadi Hamiet Bluiett/ Snake Back Solos/ Nali Kola David S. Ware/ Cryptology/ Three Stream/ Cryptology Igor Stravinsky/ Double Canon Fro String Quartet, Epitaphium/ Recent Stravinsky Henry Threadgill/ hyla crucider... silence of/ Carry The Day ... Orchestra Baobab/ Mahmadou Bamba/ Bamba India/ Mi Prim,era Rumba/ Los Batazos del Ano Chrissy and Tony Vega/ Solo Seremos Amigos/ Los Batazos del Ano Charles Mingus/ Take the A Train/ Live in Oslo 1964 * URLs from far The First Church Of Cyberspace = http://www.freenet.ufl.edu/cgi-bin/gotomenu?fcoc The Codpiece resurrection society = http://www.teleport.com/~codpiece/cpresurrect/society.html * _Cultural Baggage_ (To the tune of "Robin Hood") Dead white guys, Dead white guys, Writing all that crap* - Dead white guys, Dead white guys - Time to take a nap! You're really boring ME From my own centurEE Dead white guys - Bland white lies - A-ttracting flies. * the culturally fastidious may substitute "pap" Sorry, boys and girls. It's very early. I love DWGs, but regard them with intense suspicion. They rise from the grave at the oddest times, carrying their portmanteaux, move out of the canon and into my seminars, and refuse to decamp. Sometimes if I shake garlic and a book of alternative voices at them, they shuffle over to the blackboard and write sonnets, Miltonics and mnemonics -- but they never really leave. --JAS * The Last Daze of the Whyte Race Radio Free Northamerika, 15 March 1995 _Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise_ (1922) compiled by Thomas W. Talley of Fisk University "I Would Rather Be a Negro than a Poor White Man" "From Slavery" "Teaching Table Manners" "Learn to Count" "Self-Control" *** "I'd druther be a Nigger, an' plow ole Beck Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck" "CHILE: I come from out'n slavery, Whar de Bull-whup bust de hide; Back dar, whar dis gineration Natchully widdered up an' died!" "'Won't you pass de biscuit, please, Mam?' I said wid a liddle fear. Dere wus not by one mo' lef', Sir. Mammy riz up out'n her chear." "NAUGHT'S a naught, Five's a figger. All fer de white man, None fer de Nigger." "Don't have a tongue tied in de middle, An' loose frum en' to en'. You mus' think twice, den speak once; Dat donkey cain't count ten." diu c/o thelogicofsnowflakes cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet