reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified
November 30, 2012 § Leave a comment
I saw Grock, the great clown, desperately trying and always failing to construct a human bridge with the dubious help of a confederate. Their ever-repeated announcement that they were about to perform this feat – ‘Eine Brücke! Eine Brücke!’ – still sounds in my ears
November 29, 2012 § Leave a comment
I did this book on New York: black-and-white, grungy photographs. People said, “What a put-down — New York is not like that. New York is a million things, and you just see the seamy side.” So I thought I would do a film showing how seamy New York was, but intellectually, by doing a thing on electric-light signs. How beautiful they are, and what an obsessive, brainwashing message they carry. And everybody is so thankful for this super spectacle. Anyway, I think it’s the first Pop film.
Afterwards, I went from New York to Paris on a boat. We were on the pier with all our suitcases when I saw Orson Welles with a cigar and a little attaché case – that’s all he had as luggage. I went up to him and said, “Listen, I’ve just shot a film. Would you like to see it?” I showed it to him in the boat’s movie theater, and he said, “This is the first film I’ve ever seen in which the color is absolutely necessary.” read more
ART: Larry Rivers
I come from a big family. Mammals
November 28, 2012 § Leave a comment
One internet music “sharing” trend largely unnoticed by the powers that sue was the niche explosion of obscure music download blogs, lasting roughly from 2004-2008. Using free filesharing services like Rapidshare and Mediafire, and setting up sites on Blogspot and similar providers, these internet hubs stayed hidden in the open by catering to more discerning kleptomaniac audiophiles. Their specialty: parceling out ripped recordings—many of them copyrighted—from the more collectible and unknown corners of music’s oddball, anomalous past.
While the RIAA was suing dead people for downloading Michael Jackson songs (and Madonna was using Soulseek to curse at teenagers), obscure music blogs racked up millions of hits, ripping and sharing 80s Japanese noise, 70s German prog, 60s San Francisco hippie freak-outs, 50s John Cage bootlegs, 30s gramophone oddities, Norwegian death metal, cold wave cassettes made by kids in their garages, and the like. It was the mid aughts, and the advent of digitization had inadvertently put the value of the music industry’s “Top Ten” commercial product in peril. That same process transformed the value of old, collectible music as well. If one smart record collector was able to share the entire contents—music, artwork and all—of one vinyl LP on his blog, for free, and upload another item from his 1,000+ collection the next day, for weeks and years, and others like him did the same, competing with each other about who could upload the rarest and most sought-after record, and anyone who downloaded it could then share it again and again… Suddenly everyone in the world had the coolest record collection in the world; and soon, nobody in the world had the coolest record collection in the world.
Obscure music download blogs weren’t shut down like Napster or Megaupload were (though they were indirectly affected by that crackdown); they just, mysteriously, seemed to burn out on their own sometime around 2008. While some are still around, their number represents only a fraction of that mid-00s heyday. Was this because obscure music blogs had overshared the underexposed and blown the whole thing into oblivion? Is the fact that a guy in Japan will no longer pay $500 on eBay for a first pressing of the No New York compilation because he can find it for free on the internet good for the world? Was the commodity-lost but the knowledge-gained an even exchange? To explore what was going on then, I assembled this email roundtable discussion between creators of some of the most popular blogs of the time: Eric Lumbleau of Mutant Sounds, Liam Elms of 8 Days in April, Frank of Systems of Romance and Brian Turner, Music Director of WFMU. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Thorsten Brinkmann
All those attempts to bring in everything around you are part of a naïve belief that you can recreate the whole world. Well, you can’t. Where would you put it? Next to the whole world?
November 27, 2012 § Leave a comment
For the most part, when the internet acknowledges a sublime other than its own, it does so by sharing free of commentary. The expressions of Sandy’s power that most amazed me were reblogged images: the Jane’s Carousel lit up but surrounded by water, Avenue C transformed into a river, Zach van Schouwen’s version of the first partial-service subway map with affected lines erased. There was a sort of silence about the internet that night. The tweets came as fast as ever, but unembellished. Usually, the internet is a competition to see who can be the most creative with reported material, but during Sandy’s most destructive hours, the internet was content to just report.
I think of the contrast between real photos of Sandy’s destruction and photo-shopped parodies of the many fake photos that went viral. The real photos, shot at night, are dark or poorly lit and often blurry. They are striking because the reality they capture is striking. Often, they show man-made structures—cars, carrousels, subway stations—surrounded by wild water. They make you feel the natural sublime.
The parody photos, on the other hand, revel in the technological sublime. My favorite is the faked photo of the swirling cloud over the statue of liberty, faked-up even more with flying saucers, Godzilla, and the giant marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: cobalt123
‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation
November 26, 2012 § Leave a comment
So where does this obsession with returning the budget to surplus coming from? It appears to be a consequence of the puppet show that passes for political leadership not just in Canberra but globally, where mainstream parties of both progressive and conservative persuasion vie with each other over who would be best at balancing the country’s fiscal books.
The question of whether and when the books should be balanced doesn’t get a look in when this contest is afoot. Both mainstream contenders — Liberal or Labor in Australia, Democrat or Republican in the US — concur that the best budget is a balanced one (and the best of all is one in surplus). This shows that there is no real contest of ideas in modern politics: parties instead compete over who would do a better job of managing the economy according to the neoliberal rulebook.
That rulebook has two overriding principles: that government should be as small as possible, and that asset price bubbles are a good thing — though heaven forbid actually calling them that. The first principle is why a surplus is seen as being better than a balanced budget, since then government can be downsized. The second, which is described as increasing private sector wealth, makes it easier to justify downsized governments since a wealthier private sector has less need of public largesse.
That rulebook appeared to work right from the early 1980s until the crisis of 2007, and when something appears to work, few politicians question why. Instead they strive to take the credit for it. This made governments of notionally Left and Right persuasion complicit in the debt bubbles that actually finance asset bubbles.
This is why there is no Left/Right pattern to political economics in the last three decades: a notional progressive in Bill Clinton signed in the abolition of Glass Steagall; a notional progressive in Tony Blair extended the City-favouring policies of his notionally conservative predecessors Thatcher and Major; and a card-carrying conservative in John Howard simply built on the finance-friendly policies of his notionally progressive predecessor Paul Keating.
In fact, the neoliberal rulebook worked because both rules encouraged the growth of the FIRE economy (FInance and REalestate), where the engine of growth was exploding private sector debt. When that engine burst past maximum revs and seized up in 2007, the crisis we are now in erupted.
An optimist might hope that politicians would learn from their mistakes, and abandon the rulebook that caused the crisis. But that would involve admitting that mistakes were made in the past, and it seems that politicians — and the public too — would rather return to the past than to examine it more closely. read more
ART: Jeroen Allart
When I get you on your own you show vestiges of common sense and tell me you know you’ve got to behave or else it’ll be dangerous; but two days of experiments and you’re just as bad as before
November 23, 2012 § Leave a comment
If the presentation of Rafa Benítez to the media at Stamford Bridge on Thursday afternoon perhaps lacked the event-glamour of André Villas-Boas’s debut in the same room last summer – an occasion reminiscent in its swooning near-hysteria of an early Cliff Richard concert – it was still a peculiarly gripping, peculiarly fraught, even thrillingly incoherent occasion…
The high point of the afternoon was perhaps that first glimpse of Benítez, emerging smiling and blushing in a shiny, grey blazer and black shirt, chunkily matadorial, and holding up a Chelsea shirt rather gingerly like a white flag. Flanked by Chelsea’s chief press man, Benítez winced his way beneath the Tambling Suite’s low ceiling and settled down at the gallows-like plinth at the far end with its familiar dual unveiling chairs, the two of them looking less like a managerial dream date and more like a pair of policemen announcing a fresh investigation into some unsolved atrocity. “This is a massive club, a club that will allow me to fight for trophies every year,” Benítez set off cautiously, coming on like some Sunday night Scando-sleuth.
It was of course an inauspicious background for any managerial new dawn, coming just a couple of hours after the FA’s announcement that Mark Clattenburg had no case to answer over Chelsea’s accusations of racial abuse against Mikel John Obi. And naturally there are plenty even among Chelsea’s supporters already suffering from unveiling-fatigue, the temptation to equate these occasions with the wheeling out of the latest puppet prime minster by some banana republic despot. Yes. We have absolute faith in Governor Benítez. No. Governor Benítez can’t talk right now. Governor Benítez is asleep in his wooden crate.
Except, this is still Rafa. That same fidgety, quietly egomaniac managerial prodigy, with his facts, his sense of personal mission. How, you wonder, is it really going to play out for him here in this feudal sporting dictatorship, when even his unveiling is in truth a semi-unveiling, launched in a fluster of equivocation…
You wonder, really, how this can possibly play itself out. Another notable feature of the Villas-Boas unveiling was the presence in the front row of Roberto Di Matteo, nodding politely as his new boss addressed the room, sounding as ever like a very intelligent robot reading segments from a personal improvement manual. Here it was tempting to glance around in search of similarly fateful apparitions. The large portrait of John Terry hanging oppressively close, perhaps. Or more obviously the most potent absence in the room, the man who owns all this read more
PHOTOGRAPH: betbele
I have a life without latent content
November 22, 2012 § Leave a comment
The nature and management of assholes — or as I generally prefer to say, jerks — deserves far more attention than it has received thus far in moral psychology. Thus, I commend to your attention Aaron James’s recent book Assholes: A Theory.
James defines an asshole as follows. The asshole
(1.) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically;
(2.) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and
(3.) is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people (p. 5).
Nuances of ordinary usage aside, it does seem to me that this captures an important type of person, and one deserving of the epithet.
Two of James’s insights about the asshole particularly strike me. First, why is the asshole so infuriating, even when the harm he does is slight? James’s answer is that the asshole’s entrenched sense of entitlement — the asshole’s refusal to treat others as equals — adds particular sting to the injuries he forces upon us. It’s not just that he cuts in line or takes the last two cookies for himself. It’s that, even when confronted, he refuses to recognize us as deserving equal consideration for line position and cookie consumption. A mere jerk (in James’s terminology) might be moved upon reflection to confess the wrongness of his actions (even if still refusing to yield the second cookie) but all such appeals slide off the asshole. In fact, the more you protest, the more the asshole glazes over and rises, in his own mind, above you. (Here I go somewhat beyond James’s own remarks, but I hope I remain within his general spirit.)
Second — and equally infuriating — the asshole, unlike the psychopath, is morally motivated. It’s not just “morality be damned, I’m getting mine!” Rather, the asshole feels morally entitled to special advantages. An injustice is done, he feels, if he has to wait in the post office line equally with everyone else. After all, he’s not a mere schmoe like you! Sanctimonious selfishness is the mark of the asshole. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: David Crawford
Winter always comes too soon. This year was the worst I can remember, except when I was five years old. Pushed open the front door, got lost in the snow
November 21, 2012 § Leave a comment
Gay marriage, as framed in the United States, is the ultimate neoliberal fantasy, in that it allows for a politics of the personal to masquerade as a necessity for policy change. In the process, it serves to distract us from the very real issues facing millions of U.S. citizens and residents. For instance, a primary argument for gay marriage has been that it would allow gays and lesbians to acquire health care and other benefits via their spouses. But this claim ignores the fact that the United States is the only Western nation that does not provide health care to its citizens, and that approximately 50 million Americans are without health care. The ability to marry would not help the millions of gays and lesbians without health care in the first place.
As law professor Nancy Polikoff points out in her comprehensive book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law, the United States is unique in the way that it draws such sharp distinctions between the married and the unmarried. Countries like the Netherlands and Canada do treat gay and straight relationships equally in that they permit marriage, but what’s often ignored by U.S. gay marriage activists is the fact that these countries also treat married and unmarried people in equal ways. In other words, in Canada, you can be unmarried and still have health care and, in various instances, you can name a person who is not your romantic partner as the beneficiary of your estate. In the United States, however, your marital status is, increasingly, what determines your legal status as well as your legitimacy as a subject of the state.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment accorded to single mothers on welfare. Following the egregiously named “Welfare Reform” package of 1996, poor women in particular have been subject to the kind of state intervention in their lives that would be held as unconstitutional if exerted on any other segment of society. With the collusion of the Religious Right, single mothers are required to undergo marriage counselling in an effort to get them to marry the fathers of their children. The stigma against unmarried people swirls around in U.S. culture at large, with an overwhelming array of messages in the media about single people as desperate, lonely souls who need to find their lifemates if they are ever to be considered as human beings. It is no coincidence that such a widespread delegitimisation of single people comes at a time when fewer people in the United States are getting married—currently, less than 50% of U.S. citizens are married. Divorce rates are higher than ever among those who do get married, sparking great anxiety on the part of the Right.
While the gay and lesbian community is widely seen as a liberal/progressive one, its rhetoric around marriage often mirrors the discourse of the Right on the need for marriage as a stabilising force. Gay marriage activists have taken to deploying the strategies of the Right in asserting that marriage is necessary to cure a host of ills, for instance even going so far as to claim that not having marriage increases the social stigma faced by the children of gay couples. But surely we live in an age where the children of unmarried straight people are not considered “bastards,” and are not disallowed from inheriting property or from receiving parental and state support because their parents were not married. In such claims to moral standards, gay marriage advocacy hearkens back to the conservatism of the 1950s and earlier eras. It’s this conservatism that allows for a blinkered distraction from the other, and more pressing, issues that face queers who are not, after all, immune from the ravages of the world. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Anni Leppälä
One of the universal laws of semantic change is that all basic verbs easily end up with the meaning ‘fuck’
November 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
My British forebears did know how and where to build prisons, you have to give them that. The island is isolated in the middle of Sydney harbor, with the prison itself located on top of a steep cliff. Recent excavations have uncovered minute solitary confinement cells, which have a distinctly contemporary look in this Abu Ghraib era. The officials built themselves sandstone residences with a Georgian feel but placed at the highest point to give them a panoptic viewpoint. Grain silos dug into the rock still have chain rings, to which the excavating prisoners were linked while working. The prison was created right at the end of the transportation era in 1849–convicts were not sent to New South Wales after 1850, although they went to Western Australia as late as 1868.
As has often been pointed out, these colonial punishments add a totally different complexion to the idea that European jurisprudence had moved from physical punishment to mental discipline by the early nineteenth century. My view has been that revolutionary action in Europe won workers there a certain (if limited) reprieve from punishment; but colonial punishment intensified in the later nineteenth century as imperialism abandoned all pretension of colonial self-government in favor of direct rule from the metropole. That did not preclude the disciplinary formation of colonized subjects, as the reformatories attest.
In 2000, a group of Aboriginal people occupied the island and claimed it as sovereign territory. You can still see their murals, using the Aboriginal flag as a motif. Using the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, Isabell Coe and others asserted that Britain had never formally claimed the island, a claim rejected by the courts as “inconceivable.” Really? A deserted island on the edge of the harbor? Regardless, Coe created a tent embassy on the island and asserted sovereignty. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Anton Corbijn
my nerves are bad to-night 