After the Event Horizon: Falling Through a Black Hole

The New Scientist offers a unique view into astrophysics, showing what an epic journey through a tunnel in space-time might look like, thanks to an animation by astrophysicist Andrew Hamilton from University of Colorado at Boulder.

From approaching the event horizon, falling through the black hole, to the white hole, to seeing the flash of the entire history of the universe (new and old), it envisions quite a trip.

The animation appears above. The full article appears here

CODA: Notes on Jovanotti at Music Hall of Williamsburg

Photo by Rami Moghadam  (c) 2012

Lorenzo Cherubini, better known as Italian singer-songwriter and rapper Jovanotti, performing Monday night at Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tonight at Bowery Ballroom, Manhattan.

Rami Moghadam sent these notes on the show:

 

- it was my first time at williamsburg music hall

-unlike opening act diego garcia, who declared his love for manhattan (over and over), jovanotti knew brooklyn is where it's currently at,kept firing on the crowd with shouts of "Brooklyn!"

- jovanotti was in a super stylish outfit, black hat red shirt white tie, with sparkling Michael Jackson-like shoes that lit up the crowd with every mid-air kick of his

- it was a very high-energy show, he danced almost non-stop with hardly a rest in between sets

- nice mix of a crowd, a good number of italians, both young and older

- italians responded with cheers to jovanotti's prompts (in italian), knew words, sang along, especially to old hits

- when they started playing the mid-90s hits, that's when the show really hit a higher gear

(even though it was pretty high already!)

- crowd went wild for biggest hits from that decade, such as L'Ombelico del Mondo,

Piove, and Serenata Rap. it seemed like everyone in the building, italian-speaker or not,

knew the words to the song Serenata Rap and sang at the top of their lungs

- he has a very eclectic mix of music influences, i only remember first album

from the mid nineties, nice to see his evolution as a musician.

- rapped in italian and english, sprinkled in some hip hop classics from the Beastie Boys and Sugar Hill Gang

- very fun, energetic show that brought back some nice memories and was a reminder that jovanotti is an important representative of not only Italian but World music

--Rami Moghadam

"Born in 1966, Jovanotti, made his debut at the age of twenty for Radio Deejay, under the aegis of Claudio Cecchetto. The renowned "Il Grande Boh!" was not in fact his debut as a writer as "Yo, brothers and sisters" had already launched him into the literary world. But his real passion was music, and this is where he has undergone his greatest personal and professional growth. His albums, without considering a number of singles associated with specific events (such as Cuore written to commemorate the tragic death of Giovanni Falcone), are the milestones of a complex musical journey that over the years has explored more and more genres and influences. Jovanotti has intensified his tours and collaborations and has performed with internationally renowned artists (Pino Daniele, Luca Carboni, Luciano Pavarotti)."

 

The artist's official site here

The Armory Show: The Really Big Show

The Armory Show at the piers is indeed the really big show and this weekend, truly the only show in town. Art from around the world. Art modern-20th century and earlier. Art contemporary- 21st century through today.Piers 92 and 94. In it's fourteenth year. Galleries display modern classics and works of artists who are on the verge of a breakthrough. See you there. For more information and tickets visit http://www.thearmoryshow.com

Shiznit!: "Men In Black 3" Back This Spring

Will Smith, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K, temporally shifted. Shiznit, y'all!

International Women's Day 2012: Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures

 International Women's Day (IWD), originally called International Working Women’s Day, is marked on March 8 every year. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women to a celebration for women's economic, political and social achievements. Started as a Socialist political event, the holiday blended in the culture of many countries, primarily Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet bloc. In many regions, the day lost its political flavor, and became simply an occasion for men to express their love for women in a way somewhat similar to a mixture of Mother's Day and St Valentine's Day. In other regions, for example, New York City, however, the original political and human rights theme designated by the United Nations runs strong, and political and social awareness of the struggles of women worldwide are brought out and examined in a hopeful manner.

Events for today include:

2012 Women's Herstory Induction Ceremony at Brooklyn Borough Hall
March 8, 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM
On Thursday, March 8, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Deputy Borough President Sandra Chapman will host the 2012 Women's Herstory Induction Ceremony and Reception at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The event honors women in Brooklyn who have excelled in the arts, sciences, business and public service.


This year's honorees: •The Lucy Burns Activist Award (named for the Brooklynite who helped spearhead the suffrage movement) will go to Simmi Malhotra Degnemark, director of the Carroll Park Kids' Concert Series
•Juanita N. Holmes, inspector of the 81st Precinct of the NYPD, will receive the Shirley Chisholm Leadership Award, named for the Brooklynite who was the first black woman to win a seat in Congress and run for President of the United States
•The Emily Roebling Stewardship Award, named for the woman who served as one of the chief engineers for the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, will go to Ellen F. Salpeter, director of the Heart of Brooklyn
•Carol Cymbala, director of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, is the recipient of the Betty Smith Arts Award, named for the author of the classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
•The Lady Deborah Moody Founders Award, named for the woman who founded Gravesend and became the only woman to found a permanent settlement in early colonial America, will be awarded to Marjorie Moon, executive director of the Billie Holiday Theatre
•Antonia Clemente, co-founder and executive director of The Healing Center, will be awarded the Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Humanitarian Award, named for the first black woman to be licensed as a doctor in the state of New York.

Join Women on the Bridge!
Thursday, March 8, 2012 11:00am
Brooklyn Bridge, NYC
Make your voice count! Join us on the Brooklyn Bridge on the 101st Anniversary of International Woman’s Day as people come together on bridges around the globe as part of Women for Women International’s campaign to unite for peace and women’s equality worldwide.This special event is hosted by What BETTER Looks Like’s “100,000 VOICES” project to bring awareness to the sexual violence inflicted upon women, children and men in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 11:00 A.M. - MEET AT CADMAN PLAZA PARK, BROOKLYN MARCH ACROSS THE BRIDGE TO CITY HALL PARK, MANHATTAN. Guest speakers include Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International. Music by the Manhattan Girls Chorus

BRING YOUR BANNERS IN SUPPORT OF PEACE!
TO REGISTER: http://joinmeonthebridge.org/events/brooklynbridge
More info: Liz Gannon-Graydon liz@whatbetterlookslike.com
516-528-9939


More on Women's Art here

More on International Women's Day here

NOW NYC (for which I proudly served as a political reporter back in the 1980s) here

A Moment's Bliss: Stevie Wonder

Don't you worry 'bout a thing....

The "Great" Recession? Gimme a Break

As Occupy Wall Street appears to slip below the cultural horizon, is it a sign that Americans are more accepting of the "New Normal" ?

Poorer Americans as the "middle class" shrinks further here

Robert Reich on the forgotten American worker - the economy is expanding incrementally, but paychecks aren't. Link here

The President depends on High Tech Industry supporters, but is this causing him to overlook potential abuses of the H1-B foreign worker visa for the purpose of replacing American high tech workers with lower paid staff recruited from oversees? Link here

Beyond the free market: Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana in Salon write:"Despite the ambiguity of their goals, the Occupy protests have made one point abundantly clear: The mainstream Democratic alternative is paltry stuff. For the most part, Democrats disagree that tax cuts and deregulation are the solution, and instead argue that the state should be used to guarantee equal opportunity. For instance, cheap, publicly available education, job training and affirmative action are all justified on the grounds that each American should have the skills to compete and the labor market should treat everyone equally.


"Yet, the two parties differ only on means, not ends. While Republicans profess a more abiding faith in a self-regulating economy, Democrats believe carefully tailored state interventions are needed to ensure equal opportunity.

"The question becomes: Equal opportunity for what? For both parties, opportunity basically means a market-oriented ideal where individuals are given the chance to fight over a limited supply of high-status jobs. As it turns out, the end that each party agrees on is largely same: the equal opportunity to become unequal." Article here

Synthapop for a Late Winter Monday: A-ha's "Take On Me"

Pure 80s Synthapop for a late winter Monday morning, A-ha's classic "Take On Me" went through numerous iterations using a progressively more synthesizer-based sound, approaching liftoff on UK charts, but even then it didn't breakthrough to real commercial success until Warner Brothers produced a cutting edge music video that helped propel the tune to #1 in the US. Two videos were made for the song. The first release of "Take on Me" in 1984 includes a completely different recording, and was featured in the first video, which shows the band singing with a blue background.The second video was directed by Steve Barron, and filmed at Kim's Café and on a sound stage in London, in 1985.The video used a pencil-sketch animation / live-action combination called rotoscoping, in which the live-action footage is traced-over frame by frame to give the characters realistic movements. Approximately 3,000 frames were rotoscoped, which took 16 weeks to complete.


More on the production of the tune here

On the Norwegian pop band A-ha here

And on singer Morten Harket with his amazing vocal range here

Digerati: The Late Andrew Breitbart

Uber-effusive, fulmanating, Whig-like, and now, one for the Digital Ages. Andrew Breitbart, who provided start up support to the Drudge Report and Huffington Post, before creating his own media empire, died in Los Angeles yesterday, cause still under investigation although continuing serious health problems believed to be the cause. Having announced that he had something big for March 1, This of course has prompted further conspiracy theories, as well as even more far out reports that Breitbart was exploring development of a CNN talk show with former Congressman Anthony Weiner -- who Andrew had effectively played a large role in his removal from office.

The Atlantic offered one view here

The New Yorker here as well as the New Yorker 2010 profile by Rebecca Mead here

His larger than life persona -- becoming as Big in conservative circles, or at least on the Internet, as the instittutions and individuals he pilloried, suggest that the final chapter may yet to be revealed.

Digital Futures: The Untested "Third Way"

This interview with Jaron Lanier, author of "You Are Not a Gadget" asks deep and controversial questions about the accepted "nature" of the Internet and how decisions made at its inception have become ingrained and continue to shape its function and potential. That is, decisions made that essentially reward the gate keepers and facilitators of the system but don't materially reward users who add "their hearts and minds" to the Internet, and how this has limited the growth of the middle class. Therefore, the job losses resulting from automation and globalism are not being sufficiently replaced by the enormous amount of work done each day on the Internet, which offers more psychological (status, creative satisfaction) than financial rewards.

"But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. It's possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible..."

The full text of this important and controversial interview here

Enough Fundamentalist Hooey -- America is a Land of Freedom -- and Joy

Rosario Dawson leading the dancers in Kevin Smith's Clerks 2 (2006): Yep,that's joyful.


"Satan has his sights" on the USA..and off goes GOP Candidate Rick Santorum providing the framework for a frightening new form of American theocracy -- now good Americans, products of the Enlightenment, after having weathered the demise of the totalitarian Soviet Union, need to not only worry about an international front of renegade Islamic religious extremists seeking to destroy secular and Enlightenment freedoms and restore some totalitarian international caliphate, but also a home front of home-grown Christian religious extremists seeking to destroy secular and Enlightenment freedoms and create some frightening vision of a totalitarian  theocratic government. The GOP casually throws around accusations of "socialist" Democratic government,so  let's label what many GOP candidates seem to be striving for -- un-American religious dictatorship right out of Margaret Atwood's A Handmade's Tale.

The NY Times' Maureen Dowd took issue with some of the latest Santorum fear-mongering:  "Why is it that Republicans don’t want government involved when it comes to the economy (opposing the auto bailouts) but do want government involved when it comes to telling people how to live their lives? In a party always misty for bygone times bristling with ugly inequities, Santorum is successful because he’s not ashamed to admit that he wants to take the country backward." More from Ms. Dowd here

Don't give up the struggle for freedom, creativity, science and enlightenment -- and never stop singing and dancing.

No Middle Ground: China's Way---or the Highway?

Author David Sirota asseses the conundrum faced by the US: "President Barack Obama admitted it when in his State of the Union address he said jobs are returning because “it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China.” Economists at the Boston Consulting Group underscored it when in August they said employment growth is happening because rising Chinese wages are “eroding China’s cost advantages” while the United States “is becoming a lower-cost country” as American wages decline. And GE Consumer & Industrial CEO James Campbell reiterated it when he recently told the New York Times that “making things in America is as viable as making things any place” because domestic labor costs are now “significantly less with the competitive wages” — read: far lower wages — now accepted by American workers...Now that this consensus is finally out in the open, the real question for America is simple: Do we accept an economic competition that asks us to emulate China?"

Six-day work weeks, no environmental or workplace regulations, extremely low wages... or if, "alternately, we reject this dystopian future, then it requires us to more seriously consider things like tariffs, industrial policy, tax incentives for domestic investment and Buy America laws for government procurement. In other words, it requires us to declare that access to the American marketplace is no longer free — that corporations who want to sell things to Americans must play by our wage, environmental and human rights rules no matter where they make their products."


As Mr. Sirota explains, at this point, there ain't no other way. Read the full Salon article "Is China Our Future?"  here

New Jean-Michel Basquiat "Ultraviolet" Work Uncovered

LONDON — Graffiti pioneer Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Orange Sports Figure", which was recently found to be signed in invisible ink, sold for over £4 million at a London auction on Wednesday.
The 1982 work, which depicts a figure emblazoned with Basquiat's iconic crown motif, eventually went under the hammer for £4,073,250 ($6.2 million, 4.8 million euros) at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction.
Experts at the auction house on Tuesday revealed they had discovered Basquiat's signature in invisible ink after viewing the painting under ultraviolet light.
Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1960 and began as a graffiti artist in the late 1970s before evolving into a Neo-expressionist during the next decade.Full article here http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iFodo8Xu-M2Gvn7Dqshj2Vafdgzw?docId=CNG.e6ef2ff4a08e66d1e154b9918edd385b.8a1

Fagen on Friday: Counter Moon & Teahouse on the Tracks

Donald Fagen performs "Counter Moon" and "Teahouse on the Tracks" from his solo album Kamakyriad, 1993 Steely Dan Tour, Nashville, TN

On The Road Again

Ofer is a traveling man. He describes himself as “a Nomadic Entrepreneur who was born and raised in Germany, lived in the US for over a decade, moved to Israel four years ago, and who succumbed yet again to his overriding urge to experience new places, people and adventures.” Currently in Penang, an island in Malaysia, he was in George Town, the capital the other day, when he was walking down the street and he happened to see a fellow traveler, from New York as it so happens, who was cruising along in a local form of transport, a rickshaw. 
Although his camera battery was nearly empty, “running on fumes” as we say, and his subject was in motion, Ofer managed to snap this great photo of his fellow traveler doing what he does best, being Anthony Bourdain. Although DITHOB's efforts to photoshop it into greater clarity were not successful, you can see Mr. Bourdain doing his thing, like Ofer, on the road again.

Photo by Ofer Mog (c) 2012

Thanks for sharing the photo, Ofer.

You can visit Ofer’s site, “Marco Polo East My Dust” here

 --Anthony Napoli for Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn