I’m happy to tell you that my review of No Order: Art in a Post-Fordist Society has just been published in the latest issue of Metropolis M, a great art magazine here in the Netherlands. Unfortunately for those who cannot read Dutch – which include myself – the article has been translated to Nederlandse. No worries, though, I’m posting the English version below. Check it out and, in case you do read Dutch, go buy the magazine.
The new issue of Off Beat Cinema is out and it looks pretty good. Among the many interesting articles you can find one of mine, namely a review of Attack the Block. It’s the first episode of a film/architecture column I’m gonna share with John Bezold, so stay tuned for the next chapters. Go read the magazine here and, if you live in Amsterdam, find it in your favorite movie theater.
It’s been a while it’s come out, but those of you with access – or willing to pay the fee – can read my review of Bill Moggridge‘s Designing Media on the Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing at Oxford Journals. Go take a peek.
May is almost here and – before the paper edition gets distributed in all the most underground-friendly movie venues in Amsterdam – the monthly issue of Off Beat precedes it. For the next month I have contributed with a rather inspired review of The Myth of the American Sleepover, first movie by David Robert Mitchell. You can go read it on the magazine’s Issuu account, pages 9 to 11.
I just posted an article on ymag.it (former yskira.com) about District 9. You should go read it.
It all started by doing what every active internet user does once in a while: egosurfing (or something like that, I wasn’t looking for my own blog – this one here – but for the one I work for).
I googled “yskira.com” and found, at the 8th position on the first result page, a link claiming to be a blog review. The url name read no less than “topblogreview”, so I was intrigued and clicked in hope of a nice comment. It turned out the comment was far more than nice, and even enthusiastic would be a euphemism:
Every post available in the blog is neat, no dirt in terms of inappropriate photos or anything. The articles titles makes you want to read more. I enjoy the widespread reach this site has in terms of its readers from over the world. It’s like the writer has eyes of a hawk not at all missing any point. As soon you read a post you can’t wait to read another one for the tips given. Once you start reading you could not give over.
First of all, such grand terms are so fired up they sound ironic, and second there is no reference whatsoever to what the blog is about. (more…)
In one of the last scenes of Werner Herzog‘s Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) an Aborigine stands up in a court room to speak up against some mineral excavations happening in a sacred tribal ground. The judge asks for a translation, but nobody can provide it. The man is called “the Mute”, being the last living member of his village and the only one in the world left speaking his native language.
This saddening scenario may not just be a relevant piece of cinema, but a likely future for many of today’s less technology-savvy linguistic minorities.
Although there are diverging opinions about it, there are from 4,000 to 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, but on the internet English reigns as an unquestioned king (enlightened, yet patronizing), since the first bit was transmitted back in the ’60s. Nevertheless, despite it being the globalization’s lingua franca, more languages and some interesting linguistic phenomena have been emerging on the net in the past years, drawing the attention of linguists and media scholars.
The Multilingual Internet, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring, is a very interesting and significative attempt at making sense of such phenomena, in both their novelty and urgency. (more…)