Our Jesusy brother site, The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right has the story.

From Agora 1, image c/o Gothamist
Following several rainy weekends, it looks like we might actually have a clear evening tonight, so we recommend checking out Agora 2 at McCarren Park:

Inspired by the “agora,” the center of town or marketplace in ancient Greece, AGORA II investigates the role of public space in contemporary urban life. Performed beyond the theater walls, this work challenges the interactionss between public space, performance and audience. AGORA II is a continuation of the site-specific piece AGORA originally created and directed by No√©mie Lafrance in 2005 in the abandoned McCarren Park pool in Brooklyn. It further explores treatments of the pool site combined with ideas of collectivity. Expressed as one large breath, AGORA II layers strokes of audience interactions around a core group of characters and cameo appearances by guest artists, creating a grand tableau – a city slice – a social experiment… MORE INFO HERE

And on Saturday, alva noto, (also known as Carsten Nicolai and xerrox) performs at The Kitchen

In conjunction with the exhibition Invisible Geographies: New Sound Art from Germany, Berlin-based artist Carsten Nicolai, whose minimalist, post-techno music is released under the name alva noto, presents the United States premiere of his latest live solo work for laptop and video. Using a range of quotidian audio and visual sources, including Muzak, melodies from TV advertisements, and elevator bell tones, Nicolai submits this material to a series of compressions, multiplications, scale changes, and shifts in resolution that gradually progress into digital noise and visual abstraction. MORE INFO HERE

From Raw Story:

Conservative websites claim Rove has been promising GOP insiders an ‘October surprise’
According to two conservative websites, White House political strategist Karl Rove has been promising GOP insiders that there will be an “October surprise” before the midterm elections.
“In the past week, Karl Rove has been promising Republican insiders an ‘October surprise’ to help win the November congressional elections,” reports Ronald Kessler for Newsmax.
“President Bush’s political strategist is also saying that the final two weeks before the elections will see a blitz of advertising, and the Republican National Committee is deploying an army of volunteers to key locations to help the grass-roots effort and monitor the election,” the article continues. “The RNC is offering to fly in volunteers and cover their expenses.”
A few weeks ago, another conservative publication, The American Spectator, reported that White House staffers had “been talking up the possibilities of an ‘October Surprise’ or two leading into the mid-term elections.”
“They say the President feels confident he can still play a role in the election, that he intends to campaign hard for Republicans, and that on the policy front, there are a couple of issues that can be used as wedges along the way,” according to a column written by “The Prowler.”
Excerpts from Newsmax article:
Rove is not saying what the October surprise will be. Asked if he would elaborate and give his thinking about the coming elections, Rove told NewsMax that his take largely parallels what RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman said in a Sept. 5 NewsMax story.
As for the October Surprise, Rove said, “I’d rather let the balance [of plans for the elections] unroll on its own.”

This is hilarious. [Via Gawker]

Today’s NY Times has a story on Cat Power’s battle with addiction. Here’s a sample:

About two weeks before [the release of The Greatest] in January, Ms. Marshall said, she lost her mind: ‚”I was looking at death. I wanted to die.” Holed up in her Miami apartment for seven days, she turned off the phone, played Miles Davis on repeat, stopped eating and sleeping. She drank to oblivion and prayed to die.
Susanna Vapnek, a painter, came over to check on her friend. Ms. Marshall was acting bizarrely, obsessively chasing ‚”bad spirits” around her apartment with a lighter and sage. Ms. Vapnek bathed her and stayed by her side. Eight hours later she took Ms. Marshall to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, where she was admitted.
Confined for psychiatric treatment, Ms. Marshall recalled refusing to bathe, hiding from her reflection and wanting to be drunk. ‚”I asked God, I said, I’m tired, I can’t do this,” she said. ‚”I was asking him to just take me.” She was terrified by the other patients who screamed at night and were comatose during the day.
After seven days in the hospital she was allowed to leave. ‚”It was like I was in glue,” she said of the heavy doses of lithium given her.

Most bizarrely, Cat Power says she wants to “join the cast of ‘Saturday Night Live’ next summer.” We love Chan’s music, but can’t imagine that starring in wacky skits about manic depression with Horation Sanz is a good career move.

Read more about the Princeton/Diebold Vote-Reversal story here. [Thanks MQ]

The innocent man who was tortured with your tax dollars
Meanwhile, the tools on Capitol Hill want to rewrite the Geneva Conventions. From the Washington Post

Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.
The report, released in Ottawa, was the result of a 2 1/2-year inquiry that represented one of the first public investigations into mistakes made as part of the United States’ “extraordinary rendition” program, which has secretly spirited suspects to foreign countries for interrogation by often brutal methods.

(more…)

Then why not invest in a lovely house in Oregon’s newest planned community, The Shire:

All the homes in The Shire are facing the fully landscaped common areas… Walk along the curving pathways to discover scene after scene of interestingly integrated garden features within the lands of the hobbits: waterfalls tressing, streams meandering, garden statues, ponds, lush grasses, towering pines, twisted juniper. Sing in your own amphitheater, discover the homes of the orginal Shire residents embedded in the hillside. At home in The Shire……Connect with Nature……Smile at your neightbor and feel at peace in this village community, in this sanctuary, in this Place of Enchantment!

No, this isn’t a joke. We only wish it were. But if you think about it, The Shire isn’t that much stranger than Ave Maria or Park Slope. [Thanks MQ]

The always-generous RBally has two essential live shows posted for download.
Check out Spoon at Blueberry Hill’s Duck Room, 2004: here
and
Otis Redding at the Whiskey A Go-Go, 1966: here

The wonderful Jennifer Egan will be at the Brooklyn Book festival
TONIGHT
Williamsburg Celebrates: Fall Forward
FREE
when: Fri 9.15 (until 10pm)

[From Flavorpill] Williamsburg galleries stay open late tonight and get festive to usher in the fall art season. Jack the Pelican presents a night of outlandish performances including Bill Etra, co-founder of the Kitchen, reading his ferret-themed poetry; Black and White Gallery hosts a vodka tasting to promote the opening of Konstantinos Stamatiou’s multimedia installation of an all-white, mobile bunker (AIRBOX II) and Roberley Bell’s at Play, an outdoor series of blob sculptures; Momenta Art’s The Unhumane Society explores and transgresses the human/animal boundary; and feral impulses fully take over when Dallas performance artist Randall Garrett and his Uncle Remus’ La Supreme Discoteca y Youth Explosion Jamboree play the afterparty at Supreme Trading.

Myopenbar.com has a good listing of places to drink if you’re gallery hopping.
SATURDAY:
Brooklyn Book Festival
FREE
when: Sat 9.16 (10am-6pm)
where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza

[From Flavorpill] Ever wonder what Jonathan Ames’ alcoholic, self-indulgent Alan Blair and his cohort/butler Jeeves have in common with Gary Shteyngart’s Russian debutantes? It’s not vodka; it’s Brooklyn. While their characters hail from all over the globe, the authors featured in this festival have each resided in the county of Kings. So whether or not your tree grows there too, check out panel discussions with topics ranging from hip-hop as literature (with Tour√©) to Jennifer Egan and Jonathan Lethem’s muses, and performances that include a crew of promising young slam poets and Brooklyn Noir editor Tim McLoughlin. MORE INFO

SATURDAY NIGHT
If the rain ever stops, which forecasters say it may Saturday afternoon, check out Agora at McCarren Park