Friday Downstreams (Flying Fine in Frequency)

Something new, something borrowed and a few from the past. Welcome to the downloads and streams for the week that was. If you are a newcomer to this space every Friday I post the excesses of the week here. In my private and professional life I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet. As a result I find of lot of good things that one can listen to read or watch. Here is it for this week:

Derek Beaulieu, Flatland (2007) [PDF, 18.5 mb]
derek beaulieu's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions with an afterword by Marjorie Perloff
"As the Greenbergian modernists proclaimed the flatness of the canvas, so derek beaulieu reduces the page to a flat plane. The result is a new kind of flatness-call it non-illusionistic literature-a depthless fiction, one where image and narrative is reduced to line and shadow. In the great tradition of Picabia, Beaulieu creates a perfect work of mechanical writing with one foot in the concrete poetic past and another in the flatscreen future." – Kenneth Goldsmith

"In Flatland, Beaulieu excavates the fetile ground between form and content, gesture and geography and word and meaning. He challenges the physicality of the page as a bodily engagement in recuperating essential ideas embedded in writing as communication." – Marc Boutin, recipient of the 2006 Progressive Architecture (P/A) Award and 2002 Prix de Rome.

derek beaulieu is author of 3 books of poetry and publisher of the acclaimed small press housepress (1997-2004). A teacher in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, beaulieu's work has appeared in magazines, journals and galleries internationally. He is co-editor of the controversial, best-selling Shift & Switch: new Canadian Poetry (2005).

Marjorie Perloff is professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University and author of Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media.


Dependent Records Entire (Un)catalogue
Dependent Records, an independent record label from Germany recently decided to shut its doors and upload all its albums onto The Pirate Bay. Interestingly, a year ago the the CEO of the label mentioned piracy as one of the main reasons why they decided to quit.[Well maybe its true?].

Bruce Conner - Crossroads and Looking for Mushrooms (1956 - 1965)
Bruce Conner described Looking for Mushrooms in the 1975 Film-Makers' Cooperative Catalogue as a “[f]amous documentary containing full information. Special effects by Isauro Nava, Rancho del Cura, Huatla de Jimenez, Mexico. Sound by John Liniment and frenz”.
In 1962, Bruce Conner left San Francisco and moved to Mexico, apparently intending to “wait out the impending nuclear holocaust” (1). He spent about a year in Mexico before running out of cash and patience, and returning to the United States. During his year in Mexico, Conner hosted psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, who he had met on an earlier visit to New York. Conner and Leary occupied themselves with mushroom hunts in the Mexican countryside. It's not clear whether their hunts were successful. But Conner's staccato home-movies of their walks – combined with movies of previous mushroom hunts in San Francisco – became his film Looking for Mushrooms. The film rushes through the rustic landscape of rural Mexico, flitting past houses and through a crumbling graveyard. It's quite a contrast to Valentin de las Sierras (1967), Bruce Baillie's serene portrait of life in a Mexican village. But the quality of the image is similar, sun-blasted colours bleached to pastel.


Geir Jenssen of Biosphere, Cho Oyu 8201m: Field Recordings from Tibet
Two tracks from MiniDisc recordings taken at various stages of Jenssen's long trek up one of the world's tallest mountains.


Rainydayz Remixes
Download Amplive's Rainydayz Remixes, an 8-track collection featuring remixes of Radiohead's historic seventh album, In Rainbows. The songs are available in a zip file below and feature verses courtesy of Too $hort, MC Zumbi of Zion I, Chali2na of Jurassic 5, and Del the Funky Homosapien.
After a cease & desist put the breaks on Amplive's Radiohead In Rainbows remix project, the online music community reasonably wondered if the tracks would ever see the light of day. Well, here they are.
While the Oakland producer/DJ acknowledges that he probably should have contacted Radiohead (who were not involved in the project) to seek approval prior to making his interpretations publically available, an agreement has been reached between all involved parties and Amplive has been granted permission to release Rainydayz Remixes for free to the general public. Effective immediately, the eight-track record is available here.

Yvonne Rainer - Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980)
Rainer's fourth film, and some say her finest, an essay on radicalism and rehabilitation.
How are oppositional politics advanced by their partisans and neutralised by the State? Radicals are those who expose hidden repressive tendencies in a society. Their tactics are criminalized, politics psychologized and reforms bureacratized.
Rainer's film questions duplicitous rehabilitation (psychiatric care/control), the efficacy of radicalism, and conflicted political and personal motivations.
The collage essay technique of Journeys parallels the investigation of these conflicts on a formal level. She weaves the stories of 19th century Russian anarchists; the staging of identity as it occurs in therapeutic analysis, writing a diary or preparing a meal; and the fate of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang), which exposed the precarious and enforced nature of West German democratic freedoms in the 1970s.
Featuring Annette Michelson, Amy Taubin, Vito Acconci, Cynthia Beatt, Ilona Halberstadt, Vernon Gabor, Yvonne Rainer and many others.
Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980), her epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia. Berlin finds its unlikely star in plummy-voiced academic Annette Michelson, whose stream-of-consciousness shrink sessions unearth eggheady gems. "My cunt is not a castrated cock," Michelson protests. "If anything, it's a heartless asshole."


Tuli Kupferberg (b. 1923) No Deposit, No Return (1964)
As the inner sleeve says, this is "an album of Popular Poetry, Pop Poetry. Real Advertisements. As they appeared in newspapers, magazines, in direct mail, a company info bulletin, as a schoolroom flyer. No word has been added. Parts of some have been repeated. Parts of some omitted. But these are the very texts. These are for real!" These sound so weird and silly, particularly the ones for sexual aids, that you suspect that they were made up. However, the CD booklet does contain actual repros of vintage ads for "The Hyperemiator" and "The Sap Glove" that are recited word for word. On paper the album's concept sounds like it might not work, but Kupferberg's readings/interpretations are often sly and funny, whether he brings out the absurdity of the texts by using a poker-faced tone, or adopts mocking or ridiculous accents to draw out the ridiculous nature of the source material. It helps that there are a lot of ingenious sound effects -- by, one would guess, Gary Elton, credited with "various" -- to complement the prose (auto crashes on "Auto-Da-Fe," for instance). This, and particularly the sexually graphic material, isn't as shocking and funny as it was in 1966, but it's still amusing.


Mixhell XLR8 Remix (49.2 MB)
Fifty three minutes of mad beats from Uncle Iggor. Iggor Cavalera is recognized throughout the world as a master drummer and former member of none other than Brazilian heavy-metal band Sepultura. However, he is as much familiar with turntables and MPCs and he is with a drum kit, taking his credo of Hard Beat Beat and applying it to other projects. As Mixhell, he and his wife, Laima Leyton, combine dancefloor and hard rock sensibilities for DJ sets as unpredictable as Cavalera's musical career.

Peace and inspired dreams for the weekend!