GIF found by j1p2m3, enlarged and severely crunched

What to do with Brion Gysin, the oddball Surrealist-cum-Beat artist who worked with every generation of creative bohemia from Breton's circle to the '80s graffiti artists? The New Museum approaches his oeuvre cautiously, allotting him only one floor after giving the whole museum to the rather-less-influential Urs Fischer. There’s no denying Gysin's considerable, subterranean influence on art, despite this tepid commitment. The excellent New Museum catalogue brings in a variety of contemporary artists to testify to Gysin’s inspiration on their practice.

The show is eclectic and episodic, reflecting the zigzags of Brion Gysin’s own life. We find traces of Gysin’s early, Surrealist-inspired works; his "writing paintings," canvases overrun with scribbly marks and repeating grid patterns; his extensive collaborations with Beat writer William S. Burroughs, scrapbook-like "board books" and spreads from their schizophrenic 1965 collage tome The Third Mind; his Dreamachine, a motorized spinning cylindrical device intended to induce waking dream states behind the viewer's closed eyes; his experiments in photo collage; a room-filling slideshow recreating the experience of a live Gysin reading of his combinatory poems; recordings of his collaborations with jazz musicians and poets; and much related ephemera.

The exhibition space is divided chronologically into four parts: calligraphic paintings and drawings, the “Cut-Up Method,” The Third Mind, and the Dreamachine. Ultimately Gysin's cut-ups, methodically irrational rearrangements of words and phrases known mostly in the literary sphere because of William Burroughs use of them in novels such as Naked Lunch, come to dominate every chapter of this chronology. The disassociation of language from meaning in these quasi-geometric word experiments also informs Gysin's paintings, collages, sound works, slide projections and especially two collaborative films on view that combine all these media. The grid as a kind of occult code-maker becomes an obsessive motif that unifies the show.

In Gysin’s sound cut-ups, the artist’s enigmatic voice imbues emotion and urgency into superficially nonsensical babble. A museum recreation of the artist's scratched and painted slide projections features audio of him reciting permutations of several poems while calligraphic scribbles and images of his face and figure fade in and out. (The curators are playing artist but this "piece" isn't bad.) In this work we get a sense of Gysin’s obsession with magic, sparked by the years he spent in Morocco listening to the hypnotic music of the Joujouka brotherhood. His chanting arrangements reverberate throughout the gallery, as though he were placing a spell over the viewer.

To experience the Dreamachine, placed in a darkened room in the middle of the gallery, viewers sit with closed eyes around this rotating cylinder with cutout shapes and light bulb suspended in the center. Some adopted meditative poses, others looked confused—one man stood in the corner as if afraid to even get near. I chose not to listen to the Throbbing Gristle soundtrack on a proffered iPod but tuned in to the abundant sounds already in the room, as I watched the pulsing lights on my inner eyelids. Such enlightenment as was achieved will remain undescribed.

In one corner of the galleries, on yet another iPod, you can listen to a recording of Gysin reciting poet John Giorno’s fragmentary ode to New York chaos, "Subway Sound." As the sounds of the New York subway breathe eerily in the background, Gysin performs the hell out of the poem, slowly building, his voice rich and casually expressive, pausing at exactly the right moments, wringing deadpan comedy and then a certain grandeur out of Giorno’s stitched-together mindscape, composed of geographic information and free-floating slogans. "Be a Hair Stylist in 6 ½ months. . .," Gysin rumbles. "Preparation H!" he trumpets. "Does She or Doesn’t She?"

Gysin's liabilities in life--failure to become known in any of the individual media he excelled in--become posthumous credits. Seeing the retrospective reveals a consistency of personality, method, and an odd kind of rhythm, with origins in the grid inscribed on the paint roller that he used in almost every 2-dimensional work, or perhaps just the grid inscribed in his head, which unifies several diverse arts where others have tried and failed to do so.

(nothing else was said on this topic)

Triffids vs Lipids (hat tip yert? for lipids)

Disco Beagle in Wormhole (hat tips sam and mmmmallory)

Learn something new every day dept.: the Dugtrio pokemon is a favorite for homoerotic fantasies.

Spacetime Tension Headache (Noisia's post; hat tip to mirrrroring and j1p2m3)

an older MSPaint drawing cropped
an MSPaint animation by stage is layered on top
the result is screen captured to make a new GIF

illalli posted a GIF of a pulsing planetoid
i cropped, enlarged, converted to black and white & inverted so it became a quasi-stellar pixel field
mirrrroring added the gymnast
i did a screen capture

dump.fm user AGT528 had the idea of hand-rendering images she found on dump.
I tried it out using a couple of GIFs from her log as subject matter: the flamingo and the "presenting man" (these weren't her drawings but rather things that she found or reblogged). I drew mine in MSPaint. A couple more are coming where I put this sketch against different backgrounds.
Subjective art is not dead, just more dorky and robotic.

posted by poopdeck on dump.fm

From a press release from Congressman Jerrold Nadler, via Atrios:

[T]he Social Security Trust Fund has a $2.5 trillion dollar surplus, and it will be able to pay 100 percent of benefits through 2037, according to the Social Security Board of Trustees. What’s more, Social Security has not contributed at all to the federal deficit.

The statement you receive in the mail from Social Security corroborates this, but makes it sound more dire:

In 2016 we will begin paying in more benefits than we collect in taxes. Without changes, by 2037 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted [based on intermediate assumptions from the Trustees] and there will be enough money to pay only about 76 cents for each dollar or scheduled benefits.

Pres. Obama's "Fiscal Commission," also known as the Catfood Commission because it is stacked with people who think you will do fine if you live on Science Diet after age 70, is talking about raising the retirement age or cutting benefits in the next five years to fix this. But there is no present "crisis" in Social Security. Lots of time to think about how to fund it at 100% after the year 2037. One idea might be closing the 700 military bases the US maintains around the world for no reason after the end of the cold war.