Tourism is sin.
Mama Said Knock You Out
K-punk on the demise of hip-hop:
The stage was set for hip-hop’s embracing of the gangster. Its adherents were fixated on films such as the Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas and (a particular favourite) Scarface, because they presented a kind of anti-mythical myth. The world they projected – of generalised betrayal, distrust and exploitation – was in tune with the capitalist realism of neoliberalism, except that hip-hop’s celebration of the crime lord, its sense that there was ultimately no difference between the tycoon and the criminal, acted as an unintentional parody of neoliberal rapacity. Even so, the left was faced with the melancholy prospect that the dominant form of black popular music was now a celebration of conspicuous consumption and will to power. In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.
And They Say Romance Is Dead
This has something to do with the Dead Weather, but who knows.
Commonwealth
The long-awaited conclusion to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s anti-globalization trilogy (which includes Empire and Multitude). Here is how Harvard University Press describes Commonwealth:
Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.”
Slavoj Zizek Audio Lectures at Birkbeck
Zizek is teaching several master classes this month (or summer?) at Birkbeck University in London and the lectures are publicly available on the Internet. So far there have been five lectures which I will link to individually below:
- Monday, 15 June 2009: Utopias
- Tuesday, 16 June 2009: Architecture
- Wednesday, 17 June 2009: Wagner
- Thursday, 18 June 2009: Populism and Democracy
- Friday, 19 June 2009: Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism
Simon Critchley on Heidegger
Simon Critchley has a new blog at The Guardian where he reads and comments on Heidegger’s Being and Time. I haven’t had a chance to read this yet but it looks interesting.
On the Situation in Iran
Since I’ve been busy and haven’t had any time to post links about this as they came in, here are some that I’ve culled together over the past few days:
- Lenin’s Tomb poses the question of whether or not the Left should support the demonstrations in Iran. One of the more spurious claims made by certain so-called Leftists is that showing support for the protestors is in essence support for Mousavi’s neoliberal policy proposals, so it’s good to see Seymour properly frame this issue.
- An open letter of support to the demonstrators in Iran, signed by a number of leading left-wing academic theorists (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, and Jacques Ranciere).
- Another interesting post from Lenin’s Tomb: “Iran: This is Not a Revolution.”
- “Will the Cat Above the Precipice Fall?” An open letter by Slavoj Zizek on the situation in Iran. His conclusion:
The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.
- And finally here’s new blog following the events, so that I don’t have to post any more links: Support for the Iranian People 2009
Vehmgericht on the Nihilism of the Day
Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper” (1856):
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.
At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.
This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.
(Via No Useless Leniency.)
Please Say Something
Please Say Something is a short animated feature from David O’Reilly. It’s about cats and mice, spousal abuse, the horror of writer’s block, and other stuff. It won the Golden Bear for best short film at the 2009 Berlinale.
Night Writing 12
A fresh collection of poetry for the first time this June. Although it has not yet been published, I think my last manuscript is complete. Now I can work on my next set unhinged.
What a relief
here is your doe eyed conflict
away from here in broken buildings
and what do you cover
yourself, animals, grinning awareness
they do not do it primitive
they do it under neath your head
here is your polite keyhole
plugged with grass because you believe
in nature and leniency
there is a gas leak
and when they said to count
you climbed into the drain
and instantly aged
you sell fruit
oranges, lemon
Desperate and in a frame
I wore a white t-shirt
and questioned my essential homeliness
I made the telephone wood
a road of pantone stones
and I spoke to so many new peoples
who respected my lack of dignity
mainly I retold books I hadn’t read
something about a bread line and
ASIA minor
stopped the tea
with two large cubes
and reasserted my
essential assertiveness
the sky moved here as a projection
I held a ring of thick keys
and thought about girlfriends
he would have thought
this mattered
each line undone by kettle steam
in glasgow’s roads a tosser limped
little burns aside my eyes
hungry swans and chicken’s breath
Going back with a head
on top of
the bar
I raised a liter up of gas
tolerance was breed into this
red boy with open jaw how
to stay alive how to stay alive
truly concentrating— oh a metal saw
this cut across a wrapping putrid
in liberty or dreaming of a fascist france
with peasants on the firing squad and
peasants on the blindfold walk a
thought of fascist artist then
three bricks of paints from little
king a roll of bread sees this woman
face my tumbling off and rolling
spoke this broken fist a shovel pulled
an installation oil reserve my
money’s gone I’m of no class
my money left my sister left
All fields here become quite blue
the thirty guns with polished ears
carry me on my face goes
flat this woman’s face I held
her head up and drank coffee
until I couldn’t hold a plate
let alone a sliding draft
became unstuck I left alone
her pleasant mouth we had
a thought we could not save I
could not save you all I’m sorry
we still will have our gallic lies
we still will have you please come back
0 —-
our pointisthat
withnothing done
allsignals off
the light shut low
my operator
I am lonely
The 80/20 McCartney Split
The records Paul McCartney made in the first ten years after leaving The Beatles are eight parts ego-tripping superstar schlock to two parts outsider art. They have all the slickness of Seventies AOR, but at second glance they’re as disassociated as Wesley Willis. No other major rock star would make an album quite like Ram, so cosy and so conflicted. No other major rock star would think to write a song about his Land Rover, or Fungus The Bogeyman. While his peers were mining Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, McCartney was covering the theme from Crossroads. The man was in a world of his own.
Dream Big, Obama
David Sirota in Salon:
All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.
Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for “a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business,” as Paul Krugman said we once had — they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.
Via @HicSaltus.
Vonnegut on Writing Programs
When I taught at Iowa, then Harvard, then City College, here is what I tried to get away with, only in effect, not actually: I asked each student to open his or her mouth as wide as possible. I reached in with a thumb and forefinger to a point directly beneath his or her epiglottis. There is the free end of a spool of tape there.
I pinched it, then pulled it out gradually, gently, so as not to make the student gag. When I got several feet of it out where we could see it, the student and I read what was written there.
All together a good essay if you’re looking for an excuse to go to grad school.
flickr stream
