NPR Monthly Broadcast RC06: DECEIT

Neighborhood Public Radio

NPR Monthly Broadcast RC06: DECEIT

Deceit, upon first glance, is generally felt to be a bad thing. Big, greedy corporations spend billions to persuade the public that they're our best friend, often hiding behind smiling faces and happy little cartoon characters, all to more effectively get away with murder. Political officials lie through their teeth, and their powerfulness seems, at times, inversely related to their honesty. At the same time, we universally celebrate tricksters, beloved pranksters able to use deception for heroic and hilarious ends (think Bugs Bunny or the Yes Men). We're eternally in search of good stories, ones successfully able to suspend our disbelief and excite our imagination. Paradoxically, sometimes the use of deception or untruth is the best way to point to a deeper truth, expose horrendous lies, or provoke inquiry. Occasionally in human dealings, honesty isn't always the best policy; in certain situations, it's quite possibly the worst. This program will explore the pros and cons of deceit. Curated by Ben Furstenberg.

Schedule

12:00 PM: Deceit, an introduction
Other heralds, uncontrolled noises, and bon mots. Experimental music ensemble, Respectable Citizen (aka Despicable Alien), will be perform a set at some point and play interstitial music/noise as "house band" over the course of the program. http://www.myspace.com/respectablecitizen
12:30 PM: Ink of the Cuttlefish
Shiftingly, we sway our proximity, perspectives unraveling within depths of unconscious intent...a slow unveiling of deceptive realizations...somewhere beneath the surface of assumption float inky clouds of self deceit...
1:00 PM: Liz Hille, Alysoun Quinby and more
Author Liz Hille will read a micro-narrative or two dealing with deceit in inter-personal dealings. Her work has also appeared in Quick Fiction, Glimmer Train and on Nerve.com and Salon.com. Linguist Alysoun Quinby will discuss the language of deceit, and other sexy topics.
2:00 PM: Zefrey Throwell
Zefrey will be interviewing Per Schumann and Malte Zacharias of German collective, Entwurf-Direkt (http://www.entwurf-direkt.de/ed/home.html). They're visiting from Hamburg and will be speaking about their project that explores the secret relationship between plants and humans, and whether there is a level of deceit that exists there.
2:30 PM: Jeff Ray, and more
We'll get a visit from Jeff Ray sometime around then, who brings an exclusive scoop: the first public announcement of the Mission Creek Music Festival's line-up! This has until now been cloaked in a cloak of secrecy, lies, and deceit. You heard it here first, folks.
3:00 PM: Amanda Eicher, Tony Discenza, and more
Conversation with artist and writer Amanda Eicher, who will likely discuss her recent collaboration with the Anti-Advertising Agency, part of the Corporate Art Expo '07 at The Lab.
We'll also hear a short sound-piece by media artist Tony Discenza, whose work has been shown at The Whitney Biennial, The New York Video Festival, the Pandemonium Festival, The Pacific Film Archive, The Impakt Festival, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and other national and international venues.
3:30 PM: Erik Davis
Writer Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and the recent The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape will talk with us about uses of deception from the annals of arcane spirituality. www.techgnosis.com
4:00 PM: SL Morse: "Miriam Abacha's Greatest Hits"
The sounds of spam - Godard-core recitations of Nigerian 419 emails intermittently audible then drowned out by arhythmic percussion performing Morse code translation. There may be Nigerian 419 mad libs handed out for those who come down to see it live.
"SL Morse began as a conceptual art project for the radio, translating context-specific texts into Morse code and the Morse code into music, performed on drum set. Upon further consideration, we determined that this idea was worth exploring as music, with the Morse code falling somewhere between chance composition and a simple graphic score guiding improvisation. Our "repertoire" includes "Sentences About Conceptual Art" (Lewitt), "Dante's Inferno Canto 6" (Dante), as well as texts by Hermann Nitsch, Samuel Beckett, Frank Norris and Kimberly Chun."
4:30 PM: DD Russell: "The deceit of beauty"
The demystification of the beauty industry. A sincere expose of the beauty industry from a former makeup artist and model. Topics include dangerous diets awful plastic surgery, neurotic clothes and more revealing issues intent on revealing the filthy business of 'nature beauty.'