Yesterday, along with my friend Henry James Korn, I attended the opening of the BC Space Gallery exhibition Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance, and it was fantastic! If you’ve got time to see it sometime in the next few weeks until it closes on May 20th, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. I don’t think I’ve experienced so much shock and amazement at an exhibition in a long time.
Sadly, Henry won’t be there doing a live reading of his new novel Amerikan Krazy every day for the next month, but you’ll be continually astounded for the entire time you’re there emoting over all of the work on display in an exhibition that is not only aptly named but touches on many aspects of the cultural zeitgeist.
Jeff Gillete, Desert Debris Dismayland Castle
I walked through the gallery half a dozen times over four hours and was continually amazed by new things I’d run into that I somehow hadn’t seen on my first passes, or I’d experience new emotions in pieces I’d spent time studying after coming back to them after viewing others.
For those attending, I hope you’ll notice the experience begins almost as soon as you open the door, it continues even for those who visit the restrooms(!), and it doesn’t end until you’re dumbfounded even as you leave the gallery–in fact, I was so intrigued that I walked back up the stairs to leave a second time.
I was particularly enamored by many of the Glenn Brooks pieces, a fantastic video by Max Papeschi, and the haunting work of Tom Lamb, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the gallery.
Below is a small sampling of some snapshots I took (along with a few professional shots), but don’t let the poor quality of my photography detract from experiencing it more viscerally in person. (Click photos to enlarge and view slideshow.)
Jeff Gillete, Desert Debris Dismayland Castle
Max Papeschi, Friendly-fire
Max Papeschi, Just Married
Jorg Dubin, Corporate Clown
Glenn Brooks, Equal Justice
Lynn Kubacek, Conversations with My Mother (2004)
Glenn Brooks, Adding Human Costs (2004)
Straight jacket with hood
Henry Korn poses with a “Corporate Clown”
Sponsored Warfare
Here’s the original invitation from Mark Chamberlain and the BC Space Gallery in Laguna Beach:
Dear Friends of BC Space
…Here we go again, as go we must.
BC Space Gallery is proud to present Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance featuring the work of over twenty notable southland artists.
There will be an opening reception on Sunday, March 20, MMXVI, from 1-5 PM in celebration of the Vernal Equinox when our planet once again achieves balance between light and dark.
At the opening, from 2-4 PM, Henry James Korn will launch his new book Amerikan Krazy after which this show was named and thematically assembled. Henry’s comic masterpiece picks up where George Orwell, Jules Verne, and Edward Abbey left off, and turns political writing into art.
Henry Korn is the former director of the Art, Culture, and Heritage program at the Orange County Great Park. At the conclusion of his reading, there will be a discussion period on how the original grand dream for the transformation of the former Marine Corps air base has changed from a public serving project into a corporate theme park, sports complex, and housing development that mirrors the “Founding Father Land” depicted in Korn’s relentless satirical novel.
Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance includes work by: Jorg Dubin, Joella March, Stephen Anderson, Jeff Gillette, F. Scott Hess, Tom Lamb, Douglas McCulloh, Haley Blatte, Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Ricardo Duffy, Jared Milar, Max Papeschi, Jessica DeStephano, Lynn Kubasek, Glenn Brooks, Ron English, Dustin Shuler, Clayton Spada, Jacques Garnier, Pat Spakuhl, and Dan Van Clapp.
This exhibition will be on display until May 20, 2016. Gallery hours are by arrangement. The opening reception is free to the public, but seating for the book launch is limited so reservations are encouraged.
For additional information please contact the gallery or Mark Chamberlain.
Amerikan Krazy novelist Henry James Korn is slated to appear at the curated exhibit “Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance” featuring the work of over twenty notable Southland artists. More details at Boffo Socko Books.
One big IndieWebraison d’être is using your own web site to reply, like, repost, and RSVP to posts and events. You do this by annotating links on your site with simple microformats2 HTML.
Having said that, most people don’t want to write HTML just to like or reply to something. WordPress’s Press This bookmarklets can already start a new post with a link to the page you’re currently viewing. This code adds IndieWeb microformats2 markup to that link. Combined the wordpress-webmention plugin, you can use this to respond to the current page with just two clicks.
What’s more, if you’re currently on a Facebook post or Twitter tweet, this adds the Bridgy Publish link that will reply, like, favorite, retweet, or even RSVP inside those social networks.
I’m not sure why I didn’t upgrade this ages ago when I saw it mentioned (probably because of the manual nature of the upgrade and the fact that I don’t think it’s bundled into the IndieWeb plugin for WordPress), but here we go. And this is the first post actually using the bookmarklet.
So, I’m publishing my first book. Not a book I wrote, mind you, but a book for which I’m the actual publisher…
We’re throwing a party at Chevalier’s in Los Angeles to celebrate it. Henry James Korn, a brilliant writer—so good that I went to the trouble of publishing it myself rather than just selling it, as I’ve done so often in the past—will be doing a reading and signing on March 2nd. I hope you can all join us!
RSVP via Facebook or directly at <a href=”http://boffosockobooks.com/books/authors/henry-james-korn/amerikan-krazy/#appearances”” target=”_blank”>Boffo Socko Books.
If you have to miss the launch, you may be able to catch one of his other <a href=”http://boffosockobooks.com/books/authors/henry-james-korn/amerikan-krazy/#appearances”” target=”_blank”>upcoming book signings.
Information is a precise concept that can be defined mathematically, but its relationship to what we call "knowledge" is not always made clear. Furthermore, the concepts "entropy" and "information", while deeply related, are distinct and must be used with care, something that is not always achieved in the literature. In this elementary introduction, the concepts of entropy and information are laid out one by one, explained intuitively, but defined rigorously. I argue that a proper understanding of information in terms of prediction is key to a number of disciplines beyond engineering, such as physics and biology.
Comments: 19 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A
Subjects: Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO); Information Theory (cs.IT); Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph); Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)
Cite as:arXiv:1601.06176 [nlin.AO] (or arXiv:1601.06176v1 [nlin.AO] for this version)
Labels! Labels! It’s working with the Americans that’s given you this obsession with labels and brand names.
Msr. Charles Bonnet, painter, art forger, conman
counter-scolding his daughter who has called him a fraud
in How to Steal a Million (1966)
Then, just a bit later in the film:
We live in a crass commercial world with no faith or trust!
Msr. Charles Bonnet, painter, art forger, conman
ironically speaking to his daughter after forging and selling several major artworks
in How to Steal a Million (1966)
As it was published, I had read Kevin Hartnett’s article and interview with Christoph Adami The Information Theory of Life in Quanta Magazine. I recently revisited it and read through the commentary and stumbled upon an interesting quote relating to the history of information in biology:
Polymath Adami has ‘looked at so many fields of science’ and has correctly indicated the underlying importance of information theory, to which he has made important contributions. However, perhaps because the interview was concerned with the origin of life and was edited and condensed, many readers may get the impression that IT is only a few decades old. However, information ideas in biology can be traced back to at least 19th century sources. In the 1870s Ewald Hering in Prague and Samuel Butler in London laid the foundations. Butler’s work was later taken up by Richard Semon in Munich, whose writings inspired the young Erwin Schrodinger in the early decades of the 20th century. The emergence of his text – “What is Life” – from Dublin in the 1940s, inspired those who gave us DNA structure and the associated information concepts in “the classic period” of molecular biology. For more please see: Forsdyke, D. R. (2015) History of Psychiatry 26 (3), 270-287.
For those interested in reading more on this historical tidbit, I’ve dug up a copy of the primary Forsdyke reference which first appeared on arXiv (prior to its ultimate publication in History of Psychiatry [.pdf]):
Abstract: Today’s ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) concept is rooted in the distinction of nineteenth century philosopher William Clifford between ‘objects’ that can be directly perceived, and ‘ejects,’ such as the mind of another person, which are inferred from one’s subjective knowledge of one’s own mind. A founder, with Charles Darwin, of the discipline of comparative psychology, George Romanes considered the minds of animals as ejects, an idea that could be generalized to ‘society as eject’ and, ultimately, ‘the world as an eject’ – mind in the universe. Yet, Romanes and Clifford only vaguely connected mind with the abstraction we call ‘information,’ which needs ‘a vehicle of symbols’ – a material transporting medium. However, Samuel Butler was able to address, in informational terms depleted of theological trappings, both organic evolution and mind in the universe. This view harmonizes with insights arising from modern DNA research, the relative immortality of ‘selfish’ genes, and some startling recent developments in brain research.
Comments: Accepted for publication in History of Psychiatry. 31 pages including 3 footnotes. Based on a lecture given at Santa Clara University, February 28th 2014, at a Bannan Institute Symposium on ‘Science and Seeking: Rethinking the God Question in the Lab, Cosmos, and Classroom.’
The original arXiv article also referenced two lectures which are appended below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3yNbTUCPd4
[Original Draft of this was written on December 14, 2015.]
References
[1]
D. Forsdyke R., “‘A vehicle of symbols and nothing more’. George Romanes, theory of mind, information, and Samuel Butler,” History of Psychiatry, vol. 26, no. 3, Aug. 2015 [Online]. Available: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0957154X14562755
Dutton Books (Twitter)
Matthias Pfefferle (GitHub)
Christoph Adami (arxiv.org)
