June 2009
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
…
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
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.
Stamping Loudspeaker Bells
Philadelphia, 1925. Stamping loudspeaker bells at the Atwater Kent radio factory. Found here.
Nigel Godrich Talks From the Basement
An interesting interview with the great music producer Nigel Godrich in The Quietus.
I guess the obvious place to start is the inspiration behind From the Basement…
NG: It was quite a few years ago when I was having a conversation with Beck about Rock &‘N’ Roll Circus, the film made by The Rolling Stones in the 60’s. At the time they didn’t feel it was good enough because it was basically a little bit plotless, just them hanging out with their friends playing music. But now it’s really interesting to watch all these really great people - the Stones, John Lennon, Eric Clapton - just hanging out and playing. Beck and I both felt that somehow, something had been lost in the way that people film music. It was a lot more basic in those days, and now MTV has destroyed the way that people film performing because suddenly it became about the agenda of who’s filming it, the performance of the director, the shaky cameras…
The other thing, I got this old Whistle Test DVD that blew me away. It’s such an intimate atmosphere that comes over so well, and it’s a shame to think that of the great artists that are around at the moment, no-one is recording them in that way. It will be some sort of horrible, corporate logo embezzled version, which is a shame.
What are the benefits of capturing a performance in such an intimate environment?
NG: I think it provides something very, very direct between the performer and the audience. When Talking Heads did ‘Psycho Killer’ on the Whistle Test, when David Byrne talks to the camera and goes straight into the performance…it makes the hairs on your neck stand up, because you feel it’s just for you. You can tell they were comfortable, and that’s why it worked.
Degenerate for what my tv can sell
any noise that is required c
an make but can’t see the ci
ty in here radio is not endi
ng anymore can’t hear piano
escape again don’t want to r
un don’t mind the day don’t
mind the job can see face on
tv can see a head very clear
all pixels are invisible onl
y clarity new technology set
s up this clarity on tv can
recognize family in this fac
e can recognize all sounds c
an hear any noise the bicycl
e makes an engineer the pick
of all this from a fountain
and back to an airport and b
ack to here again where the
package is tight have been p
utting thoughts into contain
ers thoughts come out of mou
th in gel bricks put one in
each ziploc container and pu
t them in the freezer until
are gone are gone again the
slurred house where baby liv
es and dollar for coke machi
ne have heard him on tv agai
n all over the street on the
wall on the grass natural ha
ir like they do under the bu
ilding any further down wher
e red is moving lights reduc
ed frame rate reduced bitra
te is a feature of…
Selection from “The Intruder”
… A nearly nude man entered among these canvases and into these stretches of ice and desert. He drew along a disorderly caravan and walked alone. A voice that came from somewhere else made our ears tingle with a new sound. But in the mixture of cloaks and daggers, of songs and cries, a carnival atmosphere reigned— grace with spirit was especially lacking.
A very old world was spinning in our heads and we were waiting for a moment when everything would fall.
— Pierre Reverdy, a selection from “The Intruder”
From a new translation of Pierre Reverdy’s first book Prose Poems by Ron Padgett. As I make my way through Reverdy, there are some translations that are absolutely thrilling and others that are flat. Padgett managed to hit every note and I suspect added a few of his own.
Too Poor to Make the News
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, looks at the plight of the “already poor” in the New York Times:
The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.
Maybe “the economy,” as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won’t pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “dramatic collapse” in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.
Fans and Trolls: A Response to Badiou-Haters
I have nothing really to say about the “I hate Badiou” meme, especially since I haven’t read Badiou. I just liked this quote from K-Punk because I think it’s absolutely true:
It’s always other people who are ‘fans’: our own attachments, we like to pretend (to ourselves; others are unlikely to be convinced) have been arrived at by a properly judicious process and are not at all excessive. There’s a peculiar shame involved in admitting that one is a fan, perhaps because it involves being caught out in a fantasy-identification. ‘Maturity’ insists that we remember with hostile distaste, gentle embarrassment or sympathetic condescenscion when we were first swept up by something - when, in the first flushes of devotion, we tried to copy the style, the tone; when, that is, we are drawn into the impossible quest of trying to become what the Other is it to us. This is the only kind of ‘love’ that has real philosophical implications, the passion capable of shaking us out of sensus communis. Smirking postmodernity images the fan as the sad geekish Trekkie, pathetically, fetishistically invested in what - all good sense knows - is embarrassing trivia. But this lofty, purportedly olympian perspective is nothing but the view of the Last Man…
It continues for a bit from there, so I recommend that you keep reading along.
Can Films Be Fascist?
From a contemplative article on Leni Riefenstahl:
As Brian Winston put it on the BBC program, “I don’t think you can make a moral judgment about Riefenstahl’s work on the basis that it embodies fascist aesthetics, because I don’t think there’s any such thing. I think she stands in the mainstream of Western aesthetics, and I think that Western aesthetics can be, on occasion, fascist. That’s the problem with the whole phenomenon of fascism — that we want somehow to treat it as a virus. It isn’t; it’s part of us. It’s the dark side of the European tradition, and she represents that dark side perfectly.”
It goes on…
The reasons for such myopia, I would argue, don’t really have much to do with Riefenstahl’s international standing as an artist. Rather, they have to do with a glaring contradiction in our notions about art and politics — a contradiction that Riefenstahl’s career throws into sharp relief. To put the matter crudely, we tend to celebrate artists who have absolute, dictatorial freedom and control over their resources, and condemn politicians who pursue or achieve the same aim.
Photography by Ellen Rogers
An interesting series of photographs from Ellen Rogers. The figures seem to exist in an over processed anachronic void.
There are some really phenomenal pictures in this series, but I hesitate to clutter this page with a long series of photographs. Instead, I suggest you view the whole set on her site. There isn’t really a designation where one set ends and the next begins, but all of her sets are interesting.
Proposal: Vanity Junk Mail
For this proposal, sign yourself up for junk mail using an incorrect name. You are now very interested in special contests and offers. Go to a website you suspect will send you junk mail and sign up under an assumed name. Once you have completed the first step, await the arrival of your vanity junk mail.
Let me know if you try this.
‘One Foot In The Grave’ Review
1993 was no year to be a teenage rebel in America. Whitney Houston spent much of the it straddling the charts with ‘I Will Always Love You’. Nirvana did too, with ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, but they’d long since inhabited a different world whence they sprang. As the New York Times noted primly that summer, “Today, the words ‘punk rock’ are used to sell Subarus on television, grungewear is available at the local mall, and any rocker with grubby hair, loud guitars and a nasty attitude could be the next Top 10 hero.” The article was entitled, “‘Indie’ Rock Settles Into the Executive Suite”. 1994 was, at first, no better. White-supremacist synth-pop jokers Ace of Base dominated the radio that spring, turning school parties, shopping centres and pretty much any other public space into no-go zones for sensitive ears. But then, as Jarvis was busy scribbling into a notebook on the other side of the Atlantic, something changed.
The article goes on to explain Beck’s arrival as a moment of relief, but I have to say that I have yet to live in a time when it seemed that commercialism didn’t have music pinned. As John Waters says, there is no American rebel.
OFITG is popularly known, if it is known at all, as a kind of proto-Mutations, although its rawness holds far more charm and inspiration than the latter’s polished production. With sluggish, nasal vocals backed up by twangy acoustic guitar, it is laid-back to the point of deadened ennui, and in that sense it feels as fresh and contemporary as anything from the Jeffrey Lewis/Adam Green stable. (Kids, anti-folk started in New York before you were even born.)
Good to know.
The Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 1825-26
To be honest, I don’t know much about the names dropped below, but the book about Caspar David Friedrich linked above is worth checking out or even buying.
[Caspar David] Friedrich’s own destiny is part of the psychological landscape of his age. In almost every one of the poems by Wihelm Müller that Schubert set in his Winterreise, there are lines that seem to mirror the painter’s distraction and dread of human contact:
Durch des Bergstroms trock’ne Rinnen
Wind’ ich ruhig mich hinab–
Jeder Strom wird’s Meer gewinnen
Jedes Leiden auch sein Grab. (Irrlicht)(Down the mountain stream’s dry gullies
I calmly pick my way
Every stream will reach the sea,
Every sorrow finds its grave.)
Waffle Shop/Talk Show
If you find yourself in Pittsburgh between 11PM and 3AM Friday and Saturday nights, there’s only one place to get great waffles with your talk show and that’s Waffle Shop. They also have a brunch on Sundays if your sleeping patterns are a bit more conservative.
If you happen to be interesting, hop up on stage for Talk Show:
Lamp, Ice, Ink, Dimensions Variable
Kitty Kraus, Untitled, 2006, lamp, ice, ink, dimensions variable.
A lightbulb is placed in a block of ice and ink. As it melts, the ink spreads about on its own accord. More views at various stages here.
Via VVork.
Michael J. Hartwell’s Word Machines
A friend of mine from Carnegie Mellon has started to publish some of his work online and it’s surely worth your time. Michael consistently wrote evocative and thoughtful work when I was in workshops with him. Judging from what he’s put up so far he’s doing some interesting work at Indiana University’s MFA program. In particular, Atlas is a forceful poem.
Judging by the title of the blog, we have a similar interest in automation.
Optigan
Optigans were essentially early electronic keyboards made by Mattel that relied on optical discs to reproduce sounds. The have earned quite a pedigree in the last 30 or so years as musicians Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Kraftwerk, PJ Harvey and Mark Mothersbaugh have all added Optigans to their recorded material.
They’re known for their lo-fi sound and the peculiarly specific technology they used to produce that sound. That being said, the impressive limitations of the Optigan format leave me envious.
Learning to create music with something like Ableton Live can be completely overwhelming and even guitar amp software can take a nonprofessional a year or so to master and understand. From the samples I’ve heard on Youtube, it seems like this instrument has some life to it and anyway it certainly sounds better than our musical Model-T, Apple’s Garageband.
The Unmarked Font of Metaphysics and Truth: Helvetica
K-vond has an interesting analysis of the font Helvetica, following his viewing of the eponymously titled film, arguing that the metaphysics of the “Marked” and “Un-marked” (Helvetica belonging to the latter) operates at the basis of today’s contemporary ideologico-political fantasy of neutrality.
While I agree that to some extent with this view, especially as it’s found in the film Helvetica, I don’t think we should be so quick to throw (modernist) minimalism away. I think that it has a certain power to strip away baroque, Imaginary “meaning” and to reveal beneath it the pure mathematical formalism underlying design: to this extent, I think there is a certain radical aspect of minimalism, what we might call “militant minimalism” (as opposed to today’s self-contradictory ideology of what I would call “romantic minimalism,” as exemplified by the trite works of Malcolm Gladwell).
As a broader point, I think typography is just as worthy a domain of ideology critique as art and architecture, perhaps much closer to the latter insofar as we spontaneously interact with it, yet nevertheless operates at various levels: political, aesthetic, social, economic, etc. In so far as it materializes at the aesthetic level our unconscious, ideologico-political fantasies, typographic critique can function as an important element in the overall critique of ideology.
And as a side note, I just wanted to compliment the Lenin’s Tomb’s header image.
Understanding “Critique” in Marx’s “Capital”
Criticism is something I’m very interested in. It was essentially what my undergrad thesis was on. That’s why I’m linking to this terrific talk, given to the Marx & Philosophy Society, by N. Pepperell of Rough Theory. Here’s an excerpt:
Capital’s reflection on critical standpoint, I suggest, takes the form of a sustained analysis of all the conditions that we have not chosen, of materials – in the form of practices, institutions, beliefs, affects, forms of perception and embodiment, habits of thought, technologies, forms of interaction, and other subjective and objective moments that feed into the reproduction of capital – that have been thrown up from the detritus of history and are currently suspended into a determinate form that reproduces the capital relation. Marx’s analysis examines these materials as they currently are – looking at the properties these materials exhibit while suspended within this distinctive relation. It also, however, examines what other properties these materials might exhibit, if they were to be suspended within new relations. It is through this contrast – examining what we currently create with the historical materials that lie ready to hand, and contrasting this to what we potentially could create with these materials – that Marx establishes his standpoint of critique.
Deutschest of Lands: Ein Reisebericht
Greetings, Howlers!
Over the course of the next day or so I will venturing from Virginia/Washington, D.C. area to Schlactensee, Berlin (with a brief pit-stop in London Heathrow’s visionary quasi-aquatic “Terminal 5,” presumably greeted by dolphins and sea turtles when I arrive). Not that any of you give a damn, and I’ve already mentioned it before, but I will be taking a six-week intensive German language course at the Freie Universität Berlin while I’m there.
This is simply a reminder that during this period I will be pretty busy and my Internet access will be very limited! It is therefore very likely that I will not be posting much on either here or Twitter. Yes, yes, I know you’re all very disappointed, but life is full of hardships. You’ll just have to keep going on, like what that Celine Dion song says.
Anyhow, Mark will probably still be posting things, so fear not.
Mit herzlichen Grüßen,
Bryan
Competing Against Free
Matthew Yglesias has it right on Internet profitability:
But in the world of websites, it’s not clear that the ability to raise large sums of capital really is a huge advantage. The startup costs of a decent website are pretty small in the scheme of things. And there are lots of people and institutions—academics looking to bring their research to a wider public, think tanks and advocacy organizations looking to influence the public debate, corporations like Google looking to express their views on policy debates, students trying to get an edge in the job market, authors hoping to promote a book—with perfectly good incentives to run websites that don’t aspire to maximize profits.
The Parking Lot
A few months ago I attempted to write a long form narrative poem about a security guard at a massive parking lot faced with difficult and consuming events. My attention span is unusually short, so I struggle with narrative, but I thought it was time to give it a try. While I don’t consider this poem completely successful, I do believe it has some very decent moments. I’ve included it here for your viewing pleasure, since I have no plans to publish it elsewhere.
In Florida, large parking lots are abundant. The more elaborate parking lots that surround malls and theme parks are usually accompanied by very organized French-inspired gardens and rows and rows of lights that never go out. Occasionally, I would spend time in these parking lots at night and so this poem was particularly inspired by those visits. Pinpointing my inspiration is usually a fool’s errand, so, in accompaniment with its narrative form, this piece is unique.
Poetic Glitch: “I Am Sitting in a Room”
In 1970, experimental composer Alvin Lucier recorded a short speech, played it back and re-recorded it several times. The intention of the work was to bring out the resonate frequencies of the room using the speech as a point of debarkation.
As the work goes on, the explanatory text becomes indecipherable as the sound of the room’s resonance creates a lurid cacophony increasing in complexity with each iteration of the process.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
While Lucier justified this experiment (likely with tongue-in-cheek) as a way to “smooth out” his stutter, the distortions of his speech and each repetition create unexpected and moving complexities. An empty room and a disembodied voice turn into an erratic symphony.
Since poetry presents another space and another disembodied voice, I suggest that Lucier’s technique can quite easily be adapted for our purposes.
For this model, I will use…
Bing’s Commercial Blames Google for Financial Crisis
In review:
- People watched too many stupid videos on youtube.
- This allowed the forces of evil to destroy our economy.
- When we tried to stop them using our google cannons, we got LOST IN LINKS and it got worse and everything turned into suck.
- If you use Bing, you can completely ignore this reality and enter a new one, one where people sit in front of giant white boards and wear knee braces and children are kinda cute and Hey Look, a muscle car!
Also, there’s the obvious Hitler analogy.
Realism and Correlationism: Truth
I haven’t had a chance to read Quentin Meillassoux’s much-discussed After Finitude yet, but this post over at Grundlegung, which, among other things, defends the complexity of the Kantian “thing in itself” against speculative realist reduction, is a pretty marvelous read. It’s also probably one of the few, if only, somewhat inspiring posts I’ve read throughout the rather asinine Realism Wars™. The real bite of the post comes here:
Even with these revisions in place, it seems to me that Meillassoux mischaracterises the thrust of the Kantian strategy. Kant is not trying to redefine truth or objectivity in intersubjective terms, under the pressure of epistemological constraints introduced by transcendental idealism. Instead, he attempts to vindicate certain a priori concepts — such as the categories of the understanding — as being objectively valid. For example, these concepts include like causality, as a necessary connection between two events. These concepts figure in Kant’s attempt to provide a reformed and legitimate metaphysics, able to justify the concepts to which it appeals. In contrast with empirical concepts, such as bear or atom, we supposedly cannot give a full defence of them by simply looking to the world and seeing whether there is anything which corresponds to them (recall Hume’s scepticism about justifying causality). For Kant, these concepts have a special status: “since they speak of objects through predicates not of intuition and sensibility but of pure a priori thought, they relate to objects universally, that is, apart from all conditions of sensibility.” (B120) Not being based upon experience, they “arouse suspicion.”
If Kant had argued that truth is reducible to universalizable intersubjectivity, then the first Critique would’ve been far less devastating for both traditional metaphysics, as well as skepticism. What Kant is really after with his transcendental philosophy is a critique of introspection by way of introspection.
Twitter Profitability
First off, I want to preface this post by saying that, in the long-term, I don’t think the Internet can be made “profitable.” This is because the medium itself is inherently opposed to profit-making: it can be done, but only at the cost of either a quick death (for example, Napster) or a slow death (MySpace) of whatever kind of service is being offered. I firmly hold to the idea that the Internet is a new, intellectual form of the “commons” and while the commons can be deterritorialized and reterritorialized by capital, that model can’t be sustained for what is essentially free (in that all information ought to be free).
That being said, I like Twitter. Although I had an account for about a year before I really “got” it, I now use it more than once every day and have found it mostly useful for interacting with people I know and don’t know. That’s also why I’d like to see Twitter remain independent: thus far, the Twitter team has provided a great service and it would be upsetting if even a fairly humane company like Google were to buy it and turn it into a Google Ads farm. That’s also why Twitter should probably figure out a way to at least nominally turn a profit.
There are a few ways to do this. One is to take Facebook’s “flat tax” approach: instead of charging anyone, Facebook just inundates you with ads (in your profile, in your sidebar, as…
Bridge Lovers
Edit: Maybe this is a little exploitative… Perhaps you would enjoy it in context.
Love The Factory, Hate The Job
A meditation on affect.
Business As Usual
Bloomberg explains the significance of the recent Air France plane crash:
Air France-KLM Group (AF FP): An Airbus A330-200 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard went missing after reporting an electrical-circuit breakdown and encountering turbulence, the company said. The shares gained 3.5 cents, or 0.3 percent, to 11.26 euros.
Via A Tiny Revolution.
Transparency: The Global Financial Crisis
I’ve had this GOOD Magazine diagram sitting on my desktop for about a month and now I can’t find the link to where it’s from, but it’s really cool and fairly intuitive.
Interview Project
Interview Project. Is a roadtrip where. People have been found and. Interviewed.
Another tale of an unfortunate circumstance.
Hello! Another story has been posted at my blogy blog. I tried to write a story about a tedious experience. It was tedious to write, and tedious to read. So yeah, I got tedious down. Here’s a preview!
“Damn,” he said. He picked up a Phillips head screwdriver from a small TV tray to his left. He moved further up his arm, above the elbow. He nudged aside a flap of rubbery flesh and inserted the tool into a small hole. He twisted for a good twenty seconds, eventually producing a screw that was half an inch long. He moved around his arm, repeating the process three more times. He was about to place the fourth screw on the table, when it slid out of his fingers and fell to the floor, rolling under the chair. He decided to get it later.
And as a meta joke and a personal failing, I have forgotten how to properly format this post, so now Bryan will have the tedious experience of editing all the formatting errors. SO TEDIOUS!
Bryan’s note: It was the first thing I did before reading this tedious post.
Live Your Best Life Ever!
Newsweek:
In January, Oprah Winfrey invited Suzanne Somers on her show to share her unusual secrets to staying young. Each morning, the 62-year-old actress and self-help author rubs a potent estrogen cream into the skin on her arm. She smears progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month. And once a day, she uses a syringe to inject estrogen directly into her vagina. The idea is to use these unregulated “bio-identical” hormones to restore her levels back to what they were when she was in her 30s, thus fooling her body into thinking she’s a younger woman. According to Somers, the hormones, which are synthesized from plants instead of the usual mare’s urine (disgusting but true), are all natural and, unlike conventional hormones, virtually risk-free (not even close to true, but we’ll get to that in a minute).
Continue reading the article for more horrifying details.
Goodbye, GM
A decent article by Michael Moore (whom I haven’t read anything from since probably the 2004 election) on the GM bankruptcy. The state of the Michigan economy is a disaster, and the bankruptcy—at least in the short-term—is only going to make things worse (but then you might ask, how much worse could they get?).
On the other hand, the left and left-of-center eulogizing of high-speed rail strikes me as suspect. I’m all for eliminating our addiction to fossil fuels to fight global warming, as well as eliminating the in itself psychotic nature of driving an automobile, but with foreclosures rising and more and more people unemployed, who’s supposed to ride these trains and what will be their purpose? Without a bailout for those who’ve lost their home and their jobs, perhaps it’s only natural that these trains will be the homes for our new “surplus population” made redundant by Capital: mobile public housing.
(Via @mikesoron.)
The Internet
Benjamin Kunkel has a great article in n+1’s Book Review (N1BR: Issue 3) on the viability of the Internet as a platform for writing. I liked this short passage on the Diet Coke/Mentos meme that spread across YouTube for a couple of weeks last year:
As for the internet as a broadcast rather than point-to-point technology, everyone knows that it supplies a lot of information. Culturally, it has the charms and limitations of a variety show. For example, during the short-lived Diet-Coke-and-Mentos craze of a few years ago (it seems the substances combine like nitrogen and glycerin), I was cheered by going on YouTube to see Americans harmlessly blowing things up in disused weekend parking lots: it is not often that the American fantasies of pure destructiveness and pure innocence are so beguilingly combined.
Kunkel then goes on to describe the basic deadlock of “Internet prose” and the equally vacuous attempts at re-branding Web 2.0 as a “popular seizure of the means of production” through ironic cutting and pasting and remixing—une révolution sans révolution.
In election years, I like a pointed YouTube parody of a political ad as much as the next man, but parody and what the Situationists called détournement are fundamentally parasitic forms. If you want to make a culture your own, you have to make your own culture, and not just repurpose the productions of people with more capital (or contribute marginalia to news stories).
Du mußt dein Leben ändern! Kunkel concludes on an equally salient note:
The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible. And if is worth noticing your boredom—not for the sake of your prose style or your attention span, but simply for the sake of your enjoyment of life—it is for the same reason worth recognizing the general sensuous poverty of online experience.
But since the Internet, like the state, seems here to stay—and it’s certainly not the worst of forms—the real question is whether or not we should be willing to resist the collapse of space by time into McSpace-Time and attempt to cultivate interstitial points of resistance or whether we should be suspicious of our very suspicions. My advice is to read the piece, if you can focus for long enough.
Death Drive in a Cadillac
While I was browsing old car manuals searching for Studebakers, I came across a series of Cadillac brochures which advance the Cadillac lifestyle. As far as I can tell, the Cadillac line moved from sophisticated continental gentlemen to predatory equastrian-based molestation to murderous anti-human technical landscapes.
1959:
1971:
1987:
