Pablo Picasso, Bulls Head, 1942

“Jeff is like the man who fell to earth, who, in this grotesque time of art flippage and speculative mania, is either the icing on the cake or some kind of Piketty-esque harbinger of the return of Brecht’s ‘making strange.’ Or a glitteringly bent version of that alienated vision. He brings the cake and lets them eat it.” ~ Barbara Kruger in Jeff Koons Is Back!

Jeff Koons, Popeye, 2009-2011 (sold for $28.2 million)

“Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.” ~ Bukowski

"Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy" ~ David Korten

"Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world."

"Some people fear genetic modification, which is not very sound, because we’ve been genetically modifying plants and animals for a long time. Long before we called it science, people were selecting the best breeds." ~ source

Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug

Endeavour docked to the International Space Station. Picture taken by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft on the 23rd May 2011.

Pre-Winter Storm, Southwestern Australia. Taken from the International Space Station on 29th March 2014.

Dariusz Zawadzki, I’ll Give You My Angel

Zdzisław Beksiński, Untitled, 1984

Egon Schiele, Male Nude with Red Cloth, 1914

NASA physicist Harold White and artist Mark Rademaker design a FTL spaceship.

IBM Data Centre from the 1960's

Photo by George Dunbar

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793

"Our subjectivities are all cyborgian collages of flesh with signs and images, and with past and present tech." ~ McKenzie Wark

fightpunch, Cyborg 3, 2013

Popular crimes in Mega-City One:

• Blitzers: hitmen with self-destruct bombs implanted inside them which detonate if they surrender when apprehended.
• Body-sharking: loaning money to people willing to put a loved one into cryonic storage for collateral.
• Chump-dumping: conning aliens into believing Earth is a paradise, taking their money, and then dumping them into space.
• Face changing crimes: the illicit use of face changing machines to commit crimes and fraud.
• Futsies: People who can no longer handle the fast pace of life begin to suffer from "Future Shock," become psychotic and begin to commit crimes.
• Numbers racket: buying computer passcodes for industrial theft.
• Organ leggers: those who cut up citizens and sell their organs on the black market.
• Perp running: transporting felons off-world.
• Psycos: telepathic protection rackets.
• Stookie glanding: butchering Stookies, an intelligent alien race, for the anti-aging drug they produce.
• Umpty-baggers: pushers of umpty, a candy that tastes so good it forms an instant psychological addiction.

The Conceptual Advertising of J.G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard's 'Advertiser's Announcements'

25th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests

Born this day

In Back of the Real

I have recently updated the technology behind this site to replace Django with AngularJS as the primary front-end web framework. The site is now a single-page application that efficiently loads the data asynchronously via JSON feeds. It still uses Python as the backend programming language and remains hosted on Google App Engine where it stores all its data in Google's schemaless NoSQL datastore.

RIP

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill 
for the caged bird
sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom. 

Honoré Daumier, The Chess Players, 1863