I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me
January 11, 2013 § Leave a comment
The war in Iraq was not fought principally for economic reasons, but it raised the growth rate by a point or so in 2003. And then in 2004, they actually quite deliberately increased public spending as much as possible—they understood that they didn’t have enough public spending to keep the economy going. And basically the President said to the Congress, “I’ll sign any appropriations bill you send me. Spend away.” And they did. And they squeaked through that election. Behind all of this was the deregulation of the real estate sector, de-supervision, which was designed to put money through the economy on whatever terms possible. That is a real wrecking of the future. It gives you growth in the short term, but everything is set to melt down in a few years. They tried, of course, to push the meltdown past the passage of power to the next administration, and they almost succeeded.
With the Obama administration there was a vast failure to look at the crisis in a realistic way—to assess what it actually was. When you look at the period of, and immediately following, the crisis, the new administration bought into the view that this was a temporary event, and that there would be—at some point—a return to the normal growth path. They didn’t assess the possibility that this wasn’t true—that we’d reached a turning point and we were not going back to that path. And therefore, they created expectations that they could not meet. What they did was vastly too small, and they treated the financial sector as though it were going to behave in the future the way it had behaved in the past—namely, making loans that support economic expansion. But in the environment that we were in—which was basically a debt-deflationary environment—the financial sector makes money not by promoting growth, but by promoting contraction: by shorting things, driving down prices, selling off assets, liquidating, and foreclosing.
So by keeping the financial sector alive, the administration basically kept alive a panoply of institutions which had at one point been constructive but were now purely destructive. And as a result, the notion that the government was going to be the saving force lost steam. It lost credibility because they didn’t take the full spectrum of measures that were required. And because they hadn’t made clear to people from the beginning what they were actually facing, they opened up the window to every quack in the business who had a magical solution—and that includes the Grover Norquists and it includes the Paul Ryans. Plus, you’re faced with large budget deficits—which people attribute more importance to than they actually have—that can easily be turned into an argument supporting cutting government.
The reality is that most operating businesses, if they could rely more on Social Security and less on their own contributions to retirement, more on public health insurance and less on employer contributions, they’d be much better off. For most of basic American business, the more you have insurance schemes handled by the public sector, the better off you are. But there are parts of the plutocracy that have always regarded this as a threat in principle to private insurance companies. It’s the threat of a good example. The government runs an insurance company—it’s basically an office building full of bureaucrats and computers. They don’t have fancy salaries or fancy perks. They’re doing this pretty well on a civil servant’s income, and without lots and lots of people to try and separate the healthy from the sick. They just enroll everybody. And guess what? It’s a very functional system. But there are some parts of the plutocracy that just don’t care what happens to the broader population, and for whom, as I say, the fact that the government runs very efficient, comprehensive insurance programs is politically offensive. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Yato Tamotsu
I must off to studio and work with a dwarf (very sweet – and he has to wash in a bidet) and your fellow countrymen Mark Hamill and Tennyson (that can’t be right) Ford
January 10, 2013 § Leave a comment
The @dronestream project, conceived as part of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, is a follow-up to Begley’s Drone+, an iPhone app mapping every drone strike in real-time that was banned by Apple, and draws constant, methodical attention to a hush-hush reality. Wondering just what Begley was hoping to accomplish with what’s now become an extended part-time job, we e-mailed him a few questions.
Why tweet all the reported drone strikes if they’ve already been reported? Where did this idea originate?
The idea came from a conversation with [NYU professor and media theorist] Douglas Rushkoff. In his class, Narrative Lab, we talk a lot about narrativity and the way stories are told on the web. It also came from a love of how Teju Cole uses Twitter; his “small fates” project is so beautiful and devastating at the same time.
When I started reading all the reports of drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, one thing stood out: the flatness of language. There are words like “militant” and “compound” and “hideout,” which come to mean very little when you read them in such volume. I sincerely didn’t know what the contours of our drone war looked like. So I wanted to dig into the data set about every reported U.S. drone attack and try to surface that information in a new way. (Dronestagram has been a big inspiration in this regard.)
Dronestream turned into more of a journalistic feed, of course — and you’re right to say that the strikes have already been reported. I’m just pulling them from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and inserting them into a different medium. read more
ART: EVOL
a helpful writing tip is to go back through your first draft and remove all the nouns
January 9, 2013 § Leave a comment
In September 1940 the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin walked into the French Pyrenees towards the Spanish border and never came back. It seems that when the Spaniards barred his passage, he swallowed morphine tablets to elude the Nazis. He received a Catholic funeral, as “Dr Benjamin Walter”, in the Spanish border town of Portbou.
Today the Franco-Spanish border, like most in Europe, barely exists. It’s just a half-forgotten line of stones on a field, photographed by Valerio Vincenzo in one of three magnificent photo-essays on borders showcased here. Nowadays you often only know you have crossed a European border when the telecoms provider on your cellphone changes. Yet as our pictures from Israel, Korea and the Mexico-US frontier show, elsewhere borders still very much exist. The militarised fence photographed by Gary Knight in Arizona’s Sonora desert looks as if it could stand for ever.
But it won’t. Closed borders are by their nature unstable. Too many forces – similarity on both sides of the fence, trade, desire for happiness – gnaw away at them. Already the southeast Asian states united in Asean are pursuing European-style porous borders by 2015. The South American countries in Mercosur have stumbled along a similar path. There’s reason to hope more regions will follow Europe’s example. In most places, history seems to be working against borders.
In the decades before the first world war, you could generally cross a European border without a passport. The movement of people and ideas helped make neighbouring countries more similar. From 1914, European borders began to tighten. The process reached its nadir in 1961, when Berliners woke one summer Sunday morning to find that the East German regime was building a wall through town. At least the wartime restrictions that killed Benjamin had been exceptional. With the Berlin Wall, closed borders became the everyday European reality.
There is a poignant piece of footage from that day: Berliners are standing around beside the rising fence, when suddenly a man and a small dog come running into the picture from the east. The man hurdles the waist-height wire and lands in west Berlin. But his dog, leaping after him, hits the wire. A border guard grabs the animal. The man and bystanders implore him to give it back. He refuses. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Laura Kok
you cannot kill an English institution with ridicule, for ridicule presupposes a sense of proportion in the thing ridiculed
January 8, 2013 § Leave a comment
Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Olya Ivanova
The majestic figure says not a word, but simply looks down at me; and, under the compulsion of its gaze, I begin to write my Report. It is not what I want to say. It was only what I have to say. But the shape is inexorable
January 7, 2013 § Leave a comment
I printed these records on a UV-cured resin printer called the Objet Connex500. Like most 3D printers, the Objet creates an object by depositing material layer by layer until the final form is achieved. This printer has incredibly high resolution: 600dpi in the x and y axes and 16 microns in the z axis, some of the highest resolution possible with 3D printing at the moment. Despite all its precision, the Objet is still at least an order of magnitude or two away from the resolution of a real vinyl record. When I first started this project, I wasn’t sure that the resolution of the Objet would be enough to reproduce audio, but I hoped that I might produce something recognizable by approximating the groove shape as accurately as possible with the tools I had.
In this Instructable, I’ll demonstrate how I developed a workflow that can convert any audio file, of virtually any format, into a 3D model of a record, and how I optimized these records for playback on a real turntable. The 3D modeling in this project was far too complex for traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to a 3D printable file format. read more
ART: Michelle Jane Lee
Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction
January 4, 2013 § Leave a comment
Extraordinary images have been discovered hidden beneath two 500-year-old paintings at the National Portrait Gallery.
A version of The Flagellation of Christ has been found on the canvas underneath a portrait of Thomas Sackville, the Tudor statesman and poet.
A portrait of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster and secretary, is thought to have been painted on wooden blocks previously used for a depiction of the Virgin and Child. The images were revealed with infra-red reflectography and X-radiography during a five-year study at the gallery into the working practices of Tudor artists.
This has allowed the images to be seen underneath layers of paint without disturbing the main works. Experts are hopeful of making further discoveries when other Tudor paintings are X-rayed as part of their conservation.
Dr Tarnya Cooper, chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery, said: “It has been really exciting to discover these images beneath portraits. The re-use of wooden panels is an example of Tudor recycling, which was an essential part of life in the past. And yet, the people in the portraits painted over the top were perhaps unlikely to have known the panels were second-hand.
“In the case of Sir Francis Walsingham, the Protestant spymaster with the Roman Catholic image of the virgin and child beneath, you do wonder if the artist might be enjoying a private joke at the expense of the sitter.” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Ellen Rogers
The space hairdresser and the cowboy. The guy, he’s got a tin foil pal and a pedal bin. His father’s a robot and he’s fucking fucked his sister. Lego! They’re all made of fucking lego
January 3, 2013 § Leave a comment
It’s August, 1928. A Ford Model T sputters past the newsstand where your ten-year-old self stands motionless, gawping at the cover of Amazing Stories. A man confidently hovers above a field in a fitted helmet and skin-tight red jumpsuit. He waves at a woman — smitten with his prowess — as two lesser men sulk into the periphery, envious of the magical harness strapped to our hero’s back.
The Frank R. Paul illustration on the cover is the first mainstream depiction of a personalized jetpack some thirty years before a team of crafty Nazis would reportedly build the first working prototype. Incredibly, Amazing Stories, Volume 3 Number 5, also contained the inaugural Buck Rogers story, Armageddon–2419 A.D. That’s two stories of rocket-propelled humans for just twenty-five cents… not bad.
Now, fast forward to 2011. You’re 93 years old, Germany is a democracy and electric cars are all the rage. And even though televisions now babysit your grandchildren you still don’t own a jetpack. Of course, even Buck Rogers had to wait until the 25th century for his, so quit your moaning and reminisce with us as we look back at the age of jetpacks that never was. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Brett Weston
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside
January 2, 2013 § Leave a comment
The first durable gay organization, the Mattachine Society, arose in 1951. It was the brainchild of Harry Hay, a cross-dressing Southern Californian who went to high school with John Cage and taught music classes at the People’s Educational Center, in Los Angeles. Hirshman, in “Victory,” delights in the fact that Hay took inspiration from the writings of the virulently homophobic Stalin, and in particular from Stalin’s definition of nationhood as a “community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.” Hay decided on these grounds that there should also be a gay nation; he took the name Mattachine from Renaissance bands of dancers dressed as fools. Hay’s radicalism soon caused internal discord, and the Mattachines moved in a less confrontational direction. In public appearances, they made a point of looking respectable, wearing coats and ties. Members of the Daughters of Bilitis, a like-minded lesbian organization, were urged to abandon mannish clothes.
The way the gay-rights story is usually told, things got moving only in 1969, when a fed-up phalanx of bull dykes, drag queens, and street youths rioted at the Stonewall Inn, in the West Village. One advantage of Hirshman’s book—breezily written, but kinetic in its storytelling—is that it honors the activism of the pre-Stonewall era, when any public exposure required considerable courage. Political and legal advances, such as a 1958 Supreme Court decision ruling that the gay magazine ONE was not obscene material, were modest but hard won. Hirshman also highlights the work of Glide Memorial Church, a liberal Methodist congregation in San Francisco. When police intimidated attendees at a gay ball on New Year’s Eve, in 1964, ministers denounced the incident as “the most lavish display of police harassment known in recent times.”
The leader of the Mattachines in Washington, D.C., was Frank Kameny, an astronomer and an Army veteran who had lost his government job during the gay purges of the fifties. In the early sixties, he began sending the Mattachine newsletter to the office of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As F.B.I. files reveal, an agent informed Kameny that Hoover wished to be removed from the mailing list. Kameny replied that he would put the matter to his board, and his associate added that the director was welcome to attend the next Mattachine convention. The mailings continued, and the Mattachines’ veiled taunt of the most feared man in Washington went unanswered. read more
Paddington is hot. A West Berlin of spiv glamour, in-transit morals and a getaway airport connection flashing its lacquer at the east’s plaints and art-sharp PR
January 1, 2013 § Leave a comment
The infamous city section cuts past the Reichstag with its colourful history and the dome climbed in victory by the Red Army, hugging the Brandenburg Gate, through the middle of Potsdamer Platz and then out to Friedrichshain along the Spree. But this is barely 15 kilometres of the ride.
With some relief from the Christmas crowds, I find myself in quieter spaces. Along busy roads and populous quarters it passes, but also through areas of ‘no-man’s land’, spaces that some have appropriated for themselves for those characteristic gardens and their huts, or for letting a dog run free for a while. Much of the no-man’s land remains vacant. More than two decades after the ‘fall’, people seem reluctant to build and buy in that space. Thus, even on prime real estate around the city core, weed-infested blocks sit empty beside apartments for the fashionable inner-city types.
But the path also runs along railway lines and canals, around villages on the Brandenburg border, through fields and vast forests. Far from the grim black-and-white pictures purveyed by the ‘official’ history of the wall, towards the south-west it skirts the holiday playground of the Wannsee. Here inland beaches where nudists still frolic in summer – for nudism was fostered in the DDR – sit cheek by jowl with extensive forests and their tracks. I imagine the pleasure of the builders as they cut through the areas where mansions of the rich and famous are found, turning them into places for all to visit, subsidised by the government (although too often government leaders reserved some for themselves). And to add to the thrill, the path becomes a ferry for crossing the Wannsee itself.
Germans have rather liberal understandings of what constitutes a fahrradweg. It may be a wide, smooth path, clearly signposted. It may be a peaceful forest path that you have entirely to yourself, with perhaps a deer or a hare around the next bend. It may be a road with no shoulder, which one shares with trucks and buses and cars. It may be a cobbled street, or perhaps a rough farm track that rattles the teeth out of your jaw. It may be a dog-run, bespattered with turds that the locals obviously believe assist with fertilisation and preserve tyre rubber. And it may be narrow, muddy wheel furrow that had been made by riders themselves desperate to find a way through. Add to that the frozen puddles upon which I constantly skid, the snow that threatens to drift over the path, and the wind that bears the promise of more bitter temperatures, all beneath the lowering December clouds. At least they cannot be accused of lack of variety or challenge. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: [unattributed]
I made it like 90 minutes in, and I was all proud of myself for concentrating on nutritious, prestigious Cinema, then the third-act twist was so bonkers and implausible that I shut down my Macbook and set it on fire
December 31, 2012 § Leave a comment
Ahmed brings up Shulamith Firestone writing about refusing to smile as a form of politics. Oh, can I quote some?
The word feminism is thus saturated with unhappiness. Feminists by declaring themselves as feminists are already read as destroying something that is thought of by others not only as being good but as the cause of happiness. The feminist killjoy “spoils” the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convent, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness.
In the thick sociality of everyday spaces, feminists are thus attributed as the origin of bad feeling, as the ones who ruin the atmosphere, which is how the atmosphere might be imagined (retrospectively) as shared…
Say we are seated at the dinner table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things are brought up. Someone says something that you consider problematic. You respond, carefully, perhaps. You might be speaking quietly; or you might be getting ‘wound up,’ recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. The violence of what was said or the violence of provocation goes unnoticed. However, she speaks, the feminist is usually the one who is viewed as ‘causing the argument,’ who is disturbing the fragility of peace.
Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Crystal Lee
my nerves are bad to-night 
