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Some Blogs
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 A Strange Situation
Clarence John Laughlin
1938
© The Historic New Orleans Collection
 Clarence John Laughlin
1905- 1985 1 2 3
Laughlin at the age of 75
photo by Jonathan Williams
“I especially want it made clear that I am an extreme romanticist—and I don’t want to be presented as some kind of goddammed up-to-the-minute version of a semi-abstract photographer.”
The Shadow Of His Equipage
Jonathan Williams The Jargon Society
Writing notes for this essay, I thought: I will now command a pellucid American idiom. I will write about Clarence John Laughlin with the startling clarity of a certain ice-water spring I know on the flanks of Mt. Le Conte in the Great Smoky Mountains. But, it can’t be done. Clarence is all phantasmagoria and gumbo—Archimboldo, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Grandville, Belle Grove Plantation, the Wizard of Oz, and skillet cornbread. Bizarrerie is what you’re having for dinner. Be my guest; eat what you like and leave the rest for Genius Loci.(...)
He is the Master of Ignored Ghastliness, of the Eldritch, the Psychopompous, the Metamorphic, the Mephitic, the Fearsome, and now and then of Trumpery and the Fulsome. Purists and the mean in spirit have regarded him with disdain for almost forty years and have ignored him as being in the same league as Carmen Cavallero, “The Poet of the Piano.” Well, if you’re going to put titles like “Starlight in Steel” and “And Tell of Time... Cobwebbed Time” and “The Vials of Wrath Have Opened,” then you’re going to have trouble. No matter.... (more)
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And Still They Rise
Confronting Katrina
Dave Zirin
Katrina is something ephemeral, a sadness seeped into the humidity. It gets in your clothes, your eyes, your hair. It's everywhere, even if you aren't staring at a house with a black X, with a number underneath, denoting a death at the hands of levees. It made me feel as if the city's almost satirically gothic above-ground cemeteries were monuments to August 2005, even though the graves have stood for generations. The only thing I can compare the experience to would be visiting Kent State University, another site with spirits that can't find peace.
But as spiritual as post-Katrina New Orleans feels, the ravages of the city are something that residents know were man-made. The people of New Orleans are the last ones to need a lecture about how horribly unnatural this disaster was. It wasn't an act of God. ... (more)
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Katrina, Two Years Later
10 Important Lessons
Bill Quigley
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M/C Journal: "home"
Hearth and Hotmail
The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace
Donna Lee Brien, Leonie Rutherford and Rosemary Williamson
The Architectural Nervous System
Home, Fear, Insecurity
Gilbert Caluya
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Web 2.0 as a Social Movement
William F. Birdsall
An unanswered question currently confronting the Web research and development community is: “Does ‘Web 2.0’ mean anything?” (Graham, 2005) Web 2.0 has been described as a state of mind, an attitude, a new business model, the next generation of Web-based software and services, a set of development principles, a revolution. This paper places Web 2.0 in the broader context of a social movement. Web 2.0 represents a continuing manifestation of a social movement arising out of the interaction between technological developments in communication and the expansion of communication rights, in particular, a basic human right to communicate for everyone.... (more)via
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 The Masks Grow to Us
Clarence John Laughlin
1947
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Democracy Matters Are Frightening in Our Time
Cornel West
Logos 3.3 - Summer 2004
...a narrow rant against the new imperialism or emerging plutocracy is not enough. Instead we must dip deep into often-untapped wells of our democratic tradition to fight the imperialist strain and plutocratic impulse in American life. We must not allow our elected officials—many beholden to unaccountable corporate elites—to bastardize and pulverize the precious word democracy as they fail to respect and act on genuine democratic ideals.
The problems plaguing our democracy are not only ones of disaffection and disillusionment. The greatest threats come in the form of the rise of three dominating, antidemocratic dogmas. These three dogmas, promoted by the most powerful forces in our world, are rendering American democracy vacuous. (...)
Democracy matters are frightening in our time precisely because the three dominant dogmas of free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism are snuffing out the democratic impulses that are so vital for the deepening and spread of democracy in the world. In short, we are experiencing the sad American imperial devouring of American democracy. This historic devouring in our time constitutes an unprecedented gangsterization of America—an unbridled grasp at power, wealth, and status. And when the most powerful forces in a society—and an empire—promote a suffocation of democratic energies, the very future of genuine democracy is jeopardized.
How ironic that 9/11—a vicious attack on innocent civilians by gangsters—becomes the historic occasion for the full-scale gangsterization of America. Do we now live in a post-democratic age in which the very “democratic” rhetoric of an imperial America hides the waning of a democratic America? Are there enough democratic energies here and abroad to fight for and win back our democracy given the undeniable power of the three dominant dogmas that fuel imperial America? Or will the American empire go the way of the Leviathans of the past—the Roman, Ottoman, Soviet, and British empires? Can any empire resist the temptation to become drunk with the wine of world power or become intoxicated with the hubris and greed of imperial possibilities? Has not every major empire pursued quixotic dreams of global domination—of shaping the world in its image and for its interest—that resulted in internal decay and doom? Can we committed democrats avert this world-historical pattern and possible fate?
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Christians and Zion
Donald Wagner
part one of a five part series
John Nelson Darby (1800-81), a renegade Irish Anglican priest, added several unique features to Way’s teachings, including the doctrine of “the Rapture,” whereby “born again Christians” would be literally removed from history and transferred to heaven prior to Jesus’ return. Darby also placed a restored Israel at the center of his theology, claiming that an actual Jewish state called Israel would become the central instrument for God to fulfill His plans during the last days of history. Only true (“born again”) Christians would be removed from history prior to the final battle of Armageddon through the Rapture based on his literal interpretation of 1 Thessalonians 4:16.
Darby’s extensive writings and 60-year career as a missionary consolidated a form of fundamentalism called “premillennialism” (Jesus would return prior to the Battle of Armageddon and his millennial rule on earth). Darby made six missionary journeys to North America, where he became a popular teacher and preacher. The premillennial theology and its influence on Christian fundamentalism and the emerging evangelical movement in the United States can be directly traced to Darby’s influence.
Christian Zionism is the direct product of this unusual and recent Western form of Protestant theology. Found primarily in North America and England, it is now exported around the globe via satellite television, the internet, best-selling novels such as the Left Behind series, films and a new breed of missionaries. These unique doctrines were found among fringe movements in Christianity throughout the ages, which most Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant churches regarded as extreme and marginal, if not heretical. ... (more)
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Killing The Buddha has a new format.
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Do Not Bring a Tree into the House
Dennis DiClaudio
exquisite corpse
I know. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that Hypatia would don her philosopher's robe and walk the streets of Alexandria, interpreting the lessons of Plato and Aristotle for the citizens. And now there is a squirrel scurrying across the top of the bookshelf. We will not be able to get it down without the use of some very long stick, like, perhaps, a broom handle, like, perhaps, Hypatia beguiling Orestes, the prefect of Alexandria, through her magic and turning him against the Nitrians and against the teachings of Christ so that he would no longer take Holy Communion. How she forced him, through demonic possession, to publicly subjugate Hierax for his knowledge of the holy doctrine. How the branches of this tree stretch into the dining room and the study and scrape the newly painted pantries in the kitchen.
The house is no place for a tree. Look. I've written it down and posted it on the refrigerator where you can see it every morning, so you won't forget. And John, Bishop of Nikiu, you have written the history of this incident in ink with the seal of the church, so it is official in the eyes of God.... (more)
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The Human and his Spectacular Autumn, or, Informatics after Philosophy
Anustup Basu
pmc
We are, in a general way, already talking about fascism and the strange existential predicament of the individual grappling with it. This, despite the fact that the individual in this case may either be the Fuhrer himself, or the enlightened philosopher trying to understand this modality of power through a meaningful reading of the world. Both García Márquez's patriarch, who thinks he "holds" power and the primordial Heideggerian thinker--whose inventory of tasks include avoiding this or that ensnarement of being as subject, staying away from the herd, and thinking about Being--are seen to be already inducted into an overall mass-technological production of "they-selves." In bringing these two figures together in a constellation of thought, we are trying to understand a historical turn in Western industrial societies when the autumn of the patriarch (who may or may not have an enlightened head on his shoulders, but who always "holds" the scepter of power with a despotic sway) also proves to be the twilight of the disinterested philosopher. These figures "represent" two important aspects of the historical agency of the Western subject of enlightenment. As we know, Kantian modernity was founded on these two agents and their respective executive-juridical and moral-legislative authorities as caretakers of the political state and the ethical one] It was this secular compact between power and knowledge in the body politic that created the epistemological figure of the European human who presumed to make history exactly the way he liked it. While the Heideggerian project was to announce the end of that philosophy of progress and deconstruct the transcendental subject that it proposed as the free-willed agent of history, it also entailed an atavistic and agrarian denial of industrial modernity.(...)
The search for another form of politics has to begin with a critique of the aphasic, self-conscious navel-gazing of the North Atlantic intellectual, who approaches a state of stupefied entropy on looking at a monstrous military-informatic-financial assemblage which has reduced the great modernist projects of culture and ideology to incidental arrangements that can be only locally applied. To restrict an understanding of the political that is emergent to a set of cognitive phenomenological tasks of the human subject, who, as Foucault points out, is an empirico-transcendental fiction of the West very much in the twilight of his career, would be, in the last instance, subscribing to a transcendental stupidity not dissimilar from that of informatics itself. That is, the assumption that today everything and everybody is already spoken for, evaluated, and ordered by the hidden tongue of the market, instead of by the king or the philosopher of yore. This is why, when all of us are irremediably tinged with the curse of money, a caricature of liberal political action, conducted through conservative channels of human conscience and morality, becomes part of an overall shareholding of neo-imperial "guilt."... (more)
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 Besieging Wilderness
Number Two
Clarence John Laughlin
1938
© The Historic New Orleans Collection
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excerpts from Richard Hoffman's Gold Star Road (Barrow Street Press)
Vocation
Richard Hoffman
Because I was born into ongoing falsehood,
I have had to learn to think in metaphors,
to lash together what could be found on
each small island of that barren archipelago,
to learn what would float, to find what would
carry me. It is only when I am tired I pity the
various people I have been or, worse, deny them.
I have not met anyone who is entirely who
he thinks he is, nor people anywhere so strange
they did not, somehow, move me. When death comes
I have left instructions for my friends to put me
back in the thesaurus with my ancestors.
 Just a Cloud
Valle Vidal, NM
Koichiro Kurita 1 2 3
Koichiro Kurita
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from
Beyond Another Ocean
Notes By C. Pacheco
Fernando Pessoa
Translated by Chris Daniels
There are those who are affected by scratchings on the walls
And others who are not affected
But scratchings on walls are always the same
And the difference comes from the persons. But if there is a difference within this sensing
There will have to be personal difference in the sensing of other things
And when all think the same of a thing it is because it is different for each one
Memory is the faculty by which we know that we must live
And therefore amnesiacs cannot know that they live
But like me they are unhappy and I know that I am living and that I must live
An object that is attained, a fear one has
Are all manners of being alive for others
I would like to live or to be within myself as spaces are or live ... (more)
fascicle______________________________________
Incidents
Roland Barthes
translated by Richard Howard
1992
University of California Press
Someone will say: all you talk about are things like the weather, vaguely esthetic or in any case purely subjective impressions. But the people, their relations, industries, commerce, problems . . .? Even though you're just a resident, don't you see any of that?-I enter these regions of reality in my fashion, that is, with my body; and my body is my childhood, as history has made it. This history has given me a provincial, meridional, bourgeois youth. For me, these three components are indistinct; for me, the bourgeoisie is the provinces, and the provinces are Bayonne; the countryside (of my childhood) is always the Bayonnais hinterland, a network of excursions, visits, and stories. Hence, at the age when memory is formed, I acquired of those "realities" only the sensation they afforded me: odors, exhaustions, sounds of voices, errands, changing light, everything that, with regard to reality, is somehow irresponsible and having no meaning except to form, later on, the memory of lost time (entirely different from my Parisian childhood: filled with material difficulties, that childhood had, you might say, the harsh abstraction of poverty, and of the Paris of that period I have virtually no "impressions"). If I speak of this Sud-Ouest as memory refracts it within me, it is because I trust Joubert's formula: "Do not express yourself as you feel, but as you remember."
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reading caveats Roland Barthes, Georges Poulet, D.A. Miller and me
Michelle Kelly
Barthes’ Incidents – a slim, posthumously published collection of essays and diary fragments – demonstrates how to stop reading. In “Soirées de Paris” (Barthes’ account in Incidents of a series of evenings spent wandering through the French capital), his is a chronic harbouring of an internal seed of revolt, instigated by the incumbency of labour (an analogous case to evoke: the Disney cartoonists who, legend may have it, inscribed the word ‘sex’ in a cartoon cloud). (8) Barthes’ is an impromptu yet reflexive undermining – even dismantling – of one’s own work as reader and writer, which manifests itself in the deferral of flanêrie. Stefan Morawski identifies the flâneur as “a delegate, a ‘deputy’ of the artist (the intellectual)…an extraction of the artist sent into the surrounding world to get to its guts.” (9) The facility of Morawski’s definition is its (potentially metaphysical) cleft between ambler and artist. With “deputy”, Morawski enacts a petit-bourgeois professionalisation, a severance from usual bohemian adumbrations of flânerie: the association of the flâneur with exclusively aesthetic and literary climates is thus enervated, potentialising an emphatic removal from the sphere of reading. That is: the activity of flânerie enacts readerly intermittence more perilous and resolute than other reading pauses which this essay will consider, many of which will be subsumable within Barthes’ metaphoric looking up. Flânerie is moving away. The reader/writer and the flâneur’s respective occupational discontents and fatigues are dissymmetric. ... (more)
rhizomes______________________________________
 Johann Wolfgang Goethe
28 August 1749 - 22 March 1832
sculptor Klaus Glutting
Goethe at Project Gutenberg
Goethe's Delicate Empiricism
Janus Head: Summer 2005 | 8.1
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Burning the Law in a Riot of Treason
William Rivers Pitt
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
The departure of Alberto Gonzales from the Attorney General's Office brings America to a place of definitions, and hanging in the balance is the very idea of the nation itself. The basic concepts and fundamental principles of our republic now stand as the only legitimate considerations going forward, for they have been tested almost to annihilation already, and will not endure much longer if we continue on this path.
It is the mythology within the Declaration of Independence we speak of, the fiction that tells us we are endowed with rights, and that those rights are unalienable. This falsehood has been vividly exposed in the last several years, and it has been a harsh lesson indeed. All the rights we hold dear and believe to be our greatest strength are, in fact, only words on old paper with neither force nor power. The next line - "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" - is the muscle behind the myth, the core that has endured a withering assault.
Matters are so much worse than our national political dialogue lets on.... (more)
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 "we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition"
The March on Washington
Aug. 28, 1963
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from
Draft 74: Wanderer
Rachel Blau Duplessis
Book V
Here are the tracks where nomads crossed the surge,
the edge a bed of glittering light, inside this unknown land, where
former dwellers now uprooted see that they are nomads too. Shiny
tracer arcs of hypnogogic prophecies in an unknown tongue
dislodge real outcomes. All struttering ramble
these travelers and survivors, split and mangled,
scrabble looped and wayward paths, here
at the transition between dream and waking,
in the translation of dream during waking,
in the transliteration of dream's glyphs and icons
into inadequate words upon waking—
Where are we?
what dictionary? what country?
what wake? What tangled
corridors of strangeness?
Dreamed in the dream of telling him the dream.
If half the earth is blown away
will the rest wobble, witless and betrayed?
will it physically shatter or
shit on itself in orbit? ... (more)
fascicle
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 London Transport poster
William Gibson
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from
an entire department store of affirmations
kari edwards
obedience 48-50
it might be because in an instance, there might be a question, a reasonable question, questioning the questioning, that might be an eagerness to question the reasonable, that might have meaning in terms of reasonable, as a question with agreement, in terms of a definition.
it might be two thousand years of expected expecting, expecting the reasonable to be more reasonable for another two billion years of expecting the expecting, expecting the reasonable.
because the tongue is the mouth, passing from one word to the next word, as the next word to the next, passing as passing . . . as, we have a plan, it’s yours, it’s expected, it’s a definition, it’s terms of employment, sorting sounds of extermination, narrow conclusions passing expected reasonables for the next same possible endorsement of the real real, never arriving, never more, an oncoming constant, never always always expected, keeping the ambiguous antagonist at bay, keeping the grabbing experience of nothing as a word, nothing planned for everything reasonable at bay.
passing from one to the next, beyond the nocturnal vapid haze, beyond the pounding parade of heavenly disinfectant, beyond the many fictive things, to more fictive things, denying a direction of motion, denying the shock of two bodies in motion, in a degree of motion, without a language, in a series of events, without definition, without memory as an operation, an unobservable constant, decaying in a conjoined impossible possible, posing unseemable, determined by an operation of concessions, out of the necessity of bodies in motion, aiming at always, united in a something, with a slant towards once more ............... (more)
The Other Voices International Project
 Tailrace outlet
William B. Rankine Generating Station
Michael Cook Drains of Canada: An Interview with Michael Cook
Geoff Manaugh
BLDGBLOG
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"The quotation in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction."(...)
Benjamin, who for his entire life pursued the idea of writing a work made up entirely of quotations, had understood that the authority involved iby the quotation is founded precisely on the destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by its situation in the history of culture.(...)
This particular way of entering into a relation with the past also constitutes the foundation of the activity of a figure with which Benjamin felt an instictive affinity: that of the collector. The collector also "quotes" the object outside its context and in this way destroys the order inside which it finds its value and meaning.(...)
The interruption of tradition, which is for us now a fait accompli, opens an era in which no link is possible between old and new, if not the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort of monstrous archive or the alientation effected by the very means that is supposed to help with the transmissin of the old. Like the castle in Kafka's novel, which burdens the village with the obscurity of its decrees and the multiplicity of its offices, the accumulated culture has lost its living meaning and hangs over man like a threat in which he can in no way recognize himself. Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into somethin alien that incessantly elludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it.
- Giorgio Agamben, The Man Wiithout Content, translated by Georgi Albert
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 Man Ray
27 August 1890 - 18 November 1976 Installation with self-portrait
peacock feather and metronome
c. 1950
Prakapas Gallery
Man Ray Trust
Man Ray at the Getty
Man Ray: 12 Rayographs
George Eastman House
Between you and me:
Man Ray's Object to Be Destroyed
Janine Mileaf
Art Journal, Spring, 2004
Becoming Man Ray
Edward Leffingwell
Art in America, March, 2004
 L'Étoile de mer
Man Ray
1928
17 min
Le Retour A La Raison
Man Ray
1923
youtube
Les Mystères du Château de Dé
Man Ray
1929
26 min
Man Ray Studio
1938
11 min
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Hegemony and Counter-hegemony:
A conversation with Noam Chomsky
Part II and Part III ______________________________________
Constellation and Critique: Adorno's Constellation, Benjamin's Dialectical Image
Steven Helmling
pmc
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People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction
George Saunders
Who are we? A word about our membership.
Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it awhile, then apologize. We stand under awnings during urban thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness by the troubled, umbrella-tinged faces rushing by. In moments of crisis, we pat one another awkwardly on the back, mumbling shy truisms. Rushing to an appointment, remembering a friend who has passed away, our eyes well with tears and we think: Well, my God, he could be a pain, but still I'm lucky to have known him.... (more)
via riley dog______________________________________
The Great Iraq Swindle
How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.... (more)via Qlipoth
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Katrina, Impeachment, War and the Black Gulag
We are witnessing the final dissolution of both the Democratic Party and established Black leadership formations as effective agents of domestic social change and world peace. Corporate power has swallowed the Party whole, and is smothering or absorbing the residue of what was once a powerful Black people’s movement. The devastation is all but complete, as is evident when one examines the response to the crises of Katrina, the Iraq War, the necessity to impeach, and the hellish and inexorable growth of a Black American Gulag through mass incarceration.... (more)
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The War On Working Americans - Part I
Stephen Lendman
As Labor Day approaches, what better time to assess the state of working America. It's under assault and weakened by decades of eroding rights in the richest country in the world once regarded as a model democratic state. It's pure nonsense in a nation always dedicated to wealth and power, but don't try finding that discussed in the mainstream. Today, it's truer than ever making the struggle for equity and justice all the harder. That's what ordinary working people now face making beating those odds formidable at the least.... (more)
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 La Ville
Man Ray
1931 ______________________________________
Who Killed Cultural Studies?
Roger Whitson
long sunday
Benjamin is the Christ-figure of cultural studies, his unique writing style and eccentric concerns only heighten the sense of his otherworldliness: a materialist who nevertheless uses kabbalism and Jewish messianic thought to break open the homogeneous temporality embedded in much of historical-materialism.(...)
It seems, though, that Mauas's film, along with Harding's article and Birman's memoir, all contribute to this odd mourning ritual for theory that show me just how unwilling many people are to give up the theoretical ghost. The conspiracy theory surrounding Walter Benjamin seems to act as an embalming fluid for theory's corpus: to keep the body intact, theoretical reflection focuses on biography and questions and requestions the events surrounding Benjamin's death. While a suicide seems Romantic enough for the godfather of 'theory,' a grand adventure yarn involving unseen Stalinist agents angry at Benjamin's critique of Soviet-style communism is even more titilating, and allows me to forget my sense of loss and my uncertainty about the future of my discipline in the compulsive repetition of the what ifs of Benjamin's final hours. ... (more)
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notes on Yeats' To the Rose Upon the Rood of time
charlotte street
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from
To the Rose Upon the Rood of time
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
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 Faust in Prague
Giornale Nuovo
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... avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy space of the other, i.e., respect as much as possible the other's "particular absolute," the way he organizes his universe of meaning in a way absolutely particular to him.. Such an ethic is neither imaginary (the point is not to love our neighbor as ourselves, insofar as he resembles ourselves, i.e., insofar as we see in him in image of ourselves) nor symbolic (the point is also not to respect the other on account of the dignity bestowed on him by his symbolic identification, by the fact that he belongs to the same symbolic community as ourselves, even if we conceive this community in the widest possible sense and maintain respect for him "as a human being"). What confers on the other the dignity of a "person" is not any universal-symbolic feature but precisely what is "absolutely particular" about him, his fantasy, that part of him that we can be sure we can never share. To use Kant's terms: we do not respect the other on account of the universal moral law inhabiting every one of us, but on account of his utmost "pathological" kernel, on account of the absolutely particular way every one of us "dreams his world," organizes his enjoyment....
Fantasy as a "make-believe masking a flaw, an inconsistency in the symbolic order, is always particular--its particularity is absolute; it resists "mediation," it cannot be made part of a larger, universal, symbolic medium. For this reason, we can acquire a sense of the dignity of another's fantasy only by assuming a kind of distance toward our own, by experiencing the ultimate contingency of fantasy as such, by apprehending it as the way everyone, in a manner proper to each, conceals the impasse of his desire. The dignity of a fantasy consists in its very "illusionary," fragile, helpless character.
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
quoted by Alphonso Lingis in Fantasy Space
Conference on After Postmodernism
November 14-16, 1997
 Valley Oak
Karen Halverson
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On the Surface Landscape. Under It the Human Element
Three Photographers: Halverson, Klett, Burtynsky
Verna Posever Curtis
archipelago
I cannot resist placing them in sequence, as if they were sentences. I begin with Karen Halverson’s slant on the Sierra Nevada foothills, follow with Mark Klett’s reading of Central Arizona, and end with Edward Burtynsky’s ode to “new” California hills. Taken in this sequence, the photographs warn and inform me of what happened in the twentieth-century American environment.
As in writing, the photographer makes choices, if not about form and words, then the type of camera, lens, and film. With these she emphasizes the truth of what her eye perceived — or produces distortion. Perspective, view, composition, detail, texture, quality of light, black and white or color, all are factors over which the photographer has control. Using intuition as well as conscious selection, he frames a location and commits to it with a click of the shutter. Through editing and after printing, we arrive then to contemplate the artful photographer’s vision.... (more)
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Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries
Barbara Kirsop, Subbiah Arunachalam and Leslie Chan
Research is an international activity where progress builds on the reported results of colleagues around the world. It follows that access to published results in a refereed journal is a critical ingredient to forging a strong research environment. But, as is now well recorded, the cost of access to published journals has become prohibitive for developing countries and has deteriorated in the past decade as journal subscription prices exceed general inflation figures three- or four-fold. A number of initiatives have been set up to try to overcome this problem.
This article compares two broad approaches - donations and free open access - in terms of their sustainability and ability to build scientific research capacity.... (more)
Ariadne: 52 Web magazine for information professionals in archives, libraries and museums in all sectors via The Ten Thousand Year Blog
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Public Library of Science and PLoS Blog
via Tom Matrullo
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Dreaming Between FramesWim Wenders Naked Punch
My “method”, whatever it may be, may have a transformative effect on the viewer indeed. But that doesn’t make me a wizard or a guru. It strictly reflects my opinion about the true existence of films. They don’t exist because there are prints on the shelves, or because there are box office results, or reviews, or whatever. They exist because they are SEEN, and the place where they are stored is only and exclusively in the eyes and the minds of the spectator. Now you might say that goes for all films. I tend to disagree. There are films MADE to exist as box office results first, or as reviews first, or as expression of the author first. My films are meant to come to life in people’s heads. They are incomplete before, actually they are meant to be incomplete. I see them like open systems that need to be pulled together by somebody. That somebody is each and every spectator. In a way I think of films the same way I looked at stories in books, when I was little. I realized very early on that the story was not in the written words, but in the space between the lines. That’s where the real reading took place: In my imagination, and that happened in all the white between the letters and the lines. And when I started to see films, I approached them the same way. In fact those films ALLOWED me to perceive them like that, they were asking me to dream myself into them. The classic American cinema has that same specific quality, and this is also the great tradition of European Cinema. I did not invent that “method”. It is an endangered process, though, these days. More and more films come as “wall to wall” entertainment. What you see (and hear!) is what you get. No more space between the frames, so to speak. No chance to sneak in with your imagination, to dream on and to project your innermost hopes or fears or desires into what you see and thereby pushing it further. You come out of the theatre and feel strangely empty. For two hours you were prevented from participating. You were obliged to “witness” instead. And that is the opposite to what you called my “method” which is in the true sense of the word “interactive”.
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Autumn
Grace Paley
December 11, 1922 - August 22, 2007
1
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story
by Chekhov or my father
2
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story by
Chekhov or my father on
his own lawn standing
beside his own wood in
the United States of
America saying (in Russian)
this birch is a lovely
tree but among the others
somehow superficial
from Long Walks and Intimate Talks by Grace Paley and Vera B. Williams
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Restlessness and the Achievement of Peace: Writing and Method in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Timothy Gould
a hefty excerpt at the Valve
... Wittgenstein’s aphorisms gesture beyond themselves to other less spectacular forms of writing. (...)
To recapitulate the story: We begin with a sense of disquiet, an unrest which takes the form of an oscillation. Unable to get away from this oscillation, we repeat the sentence that we feel we need to insist on, as if repetition will fix our gaze, make our focus sharper. And what happens is: after sufficient repetition, language repeats the sentence back to us. It is as if the likeness - which began as a form of words about words had now become transformed into a picture. This picture, which now seems inescapably part of the language we are examining, repeats back to us the very words we had been repeating, the very words (which constituted a proposition about how propositions had to be) that we had been fascinated by. The outline of the proposition that we had tried to find immovably fixed in the scheme of things has now fixated us ...... (more)
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 No Place to Move/Shadow Walls
David-Baptiste Chirot
flickr
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Dovetailing Details Fly Apart—all Over, Again
In Code, In Poetry, In Chreods
Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Poetry and code—and mathematics—make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations, both those written by available pathways and patterns and entropy budgets, and those we conjure out of 'nothing'.
- Gregory Bateson
...this paper can be read as the latest in a series of eight essays by Strickland, available exclusively in ebr.
A coder of language-based work has additional constraints. Assumptions about language presentation, from typography to context, determine coding decisions. For instance, timing to present text is very different from that used for video or image. If we want a viewer to read text, we must consider layered temporalities in which the detail of the detail can begin to resonate. While it is the human reader who brings reading tempo to both printed and onscreen reading, it is the machine that sets the tempo in code. Machine-based pauses or delays will function differently on computers with different processing speeds or slower internet connections.Code is meant to control time.... (more)
Slipping GlimpseStephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
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 Crush Collision
Chris Larson
via BLDGBLOG
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Legend
In the blind root of this wonder
there is a crystal: whomsoever stares upon it
ah, whomesoever stares upon it
eyes in blood
hands in blood
living blood
whomsoever stares upon it will not sleep
but will be a crystal of wonder
-- will remain lucid forever.
— Orides Fontela, translated by Chris Daniels
LUCIPO Anthologyvia mosses from an old manse
"Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue"
 Jorge Luis Borges
August 24, 1899 -June 14, 1986 photo by Pedro Meyers at ZoneZero
The Library of Babel
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by J. E. I.
The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
I have just written the word ``infinite.'' I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.... (more)
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 Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man
Directed by Philippe Molins
Runtime: 47mins
Ubuweb
Although honors came late in life to Jorge Luis Borges, his unique worldview had begun to emerge even as a child. This program examines the life and literary career of the charismatic Argentine writer, as well as the thematic, symbolic, and mythological underpinnings of his works. Archival interviews with Borges; his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges; his second wife, Maria Kodama; and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares provide insights into the private Borges, while readings from “The Mirrors,” “Dreamtigers,” “The Plot,” “The South,” “The Aleph,” and other landmarks of Latin American fiction demonstrate his virtuosity as a transformer of experiences.
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Funes, the Memorious
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Poems by Jorge Luis Borges
The Borgesian Cyclopaedia
"The Parallels!"
Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
John Barth
center for book culture
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 Secret Shrine
Joe Milutis
If you go to Paterson, you may now happen upon a secret shrine to William Carlos Williams' poem. Although, it might not be there anymore. Composed of trash the Education Department leaves in the abandoned Hinchliffe Stadium (e.g. busted file cabinets, waterlogged textbooks, wobbly bookcarts), the shrine is itself subject to the vagaries of what constitutes trash and what art . . . and what, for that matter, desirable furniture.(...)
The orange design is a shadow of the jacquard--the punch card that interfaced the vast worlds of labor, nature, and machine in the old silk mills.
Joe Milutis blogs at New Jersey as an Impossible Object
via Al Filreis
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The Warfare State is Part of Us
How to Survive at the Pentagon on $2 Billion a Day
Norman Solomon
The warfare state doesn't come and go. It can't be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it's at the core of the United States -- and it has infiltrated our very being.
What we've tolerated has become part of us. What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward. In the long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, "It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared."
The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.... (more)
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Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy
Volker Heins
German Law Journal Vol. 6 No. 5 - 1 May 2005
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Beginning of the English Peasant Revolt
Jean Froissart
A crazy priest in the county of Kent, called John Ball, who for his absurd preaching, had been thrice confined in the prison of the archbishop of Canterbury, was greatly instrumental in inflaming them with those ideas. He was accustomed, every Sunday after mass, as the people were coming out of the church, to preach to them in the market places and assemble a crowd around him; to whom he would say, --
"My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until every thing shall be in common; when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill have they used us! and for what reason do they hold us in bondage? Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? and what can they show, or what reasons give, why they should be more the masters than ourselves? except, perhaps, in making us labour and work, for them to spend.
"They are clothed in velvets and rich stuffs, ornamented with ermine and other furs, while we are forced to wear poor cloth. They have wines, spices, and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of the straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field; but it is from our labour they have wherewith to support their pomp.
"We are called slaves; and if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice. Let us go to the king, who is young, and remonstrate with him on our servitude, telling him we must have it otherwise, or that we shall find a remedy for it ourselves. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the appellation of slaves, or are held in bondage, will follow us, in the hopes of being free. When the king shall see us, we shall obtain a favourable answer, or we must then seek ourselves to amend our condition."
With such words as these did John Ball harangue the people, at his village, every Sunday after mass, for which he was much beloved by them. Some who wished no good declared it was very true, and murmuring to each other, as they were going to the fields, on the road from one village to another, or at their different houses, said, "John Ball preaches such and such things, and he speaks truth." (...)
The moment John Ball was out of prison, he returned to his former errors.... (more)
Tales from Froissart
(circa 1337-circa 1404) edited by Steve Muhlberger, Nipissing University
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The InoperativeCommunity
Jean-Luc Nancy
edited by Peter Connor
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 World's Wildest Roller Coasters
Avi Abrams
Dark Roasted Blend
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Bacon notes, with respect to artistic 'knowledge' that it isn't cumulative, as it is in science. What matters is style; great painters are not better than one another. The questioner reminds him of what Braque used to say, 'Echo replies to echo, everything reverberates'. This meets with Bacon's approval.
What the great writers have produced is a sort of stimulation in itself. Reading them can make me want to produce something myself; it's a sort of excitement, perhaps even like sexual excitement, like something very strong anyway, a sort of very powerful urge, but with me that doesn't take the form of attempting to illustrate texts in some way.
You are bombarded by images all the time. There are only a few, though, which stick in your mind and have some influence, but some do have a considerable effect. It's difficult to say anything about this effect because it isn't so much the image which matters, but what you do with it, and what effect some images have on other images. It's possible, for example, that the fact of having seen the image of the Sphinx could change your way of seeing a man who passes you in the street. I think that every image, everything we see, changes our way of seeing everything else. My perception is completely altered. Certain images, perhaps even everything that I see, might imperceptibly modify all the rest. There's a sort of influence of image upon image; it's a great mystery, but I'm sure that's what happens. Spurious provides this (and more) from Michel Archimbaud's Francis Bacon: The Final Vision
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Policing the Academy for Pirates
Crispin Sartwell
One would think that higher education administrators would prefer information be more liquid than coagulated and monopolized. Even films and music contain important information subject to pedagogy and academic research. The fact that copyrighted textbooks can cost $100 a pop represents is not just the unfortunate result of a property claim to information, for example, but is a concrete barrier to the actual flow of information. Google's idea of putting massive academic libraries online for free—a project from which they've retreated bit by bit because of pressure from publishers and other copyright-holders—would in theory be a huge boon to the business of education, the dream of a John Milton or a Samuel Johnson.
Rather than enforcing anti-sharing rules, colleges ought to be fighting the expansion of copyright law, and investing in and exploring filesharing software and sites. Much of the content that an institution of higher education provides is also already available on the Internet, and colleges would be better off getting into the business of sorting it, evaluating it, disseminating it, and re-presenting it—the sort of thing their expertise is good for.
That Harry Reid is doing the bidding of the entertainment industry isn't surprising. But the very essence of a university ought to place it in fierce opposition to demands that it police its students for the excessive sharing of information. On the contrary, colleges and universities ought to be working toward an environment in which information can be shared with more freedom. ... (more)
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The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0
William Davies
The Register
responses from Nicholas Carr and Ian Douglas via Dave Rogers
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Artist in the forest
Morris Graves
Imogen Cunningham
1950 1 2 3 4 6
 The Floating Exhibition
Serpentine Pond
Selina Swayne
Unusual Books & Book Sculptures
Dark Roasted Blend via languagehat
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Season of art and poetry
Andrei Codrescu
The Villager
Quietly, quietly, the artworks and the poems and the stories keep being made in small towns and big towns and middle-sized ones, storms of beauty like butterflies migrating past one’s hoary head. You’d think that by now every wall in every house in the world would be covered by works of art and that there would be a stack of poems by every chair, being read dawn to dusk, loudly or to oneself, by lovers of words. But no, most walls are bare, sporting at best religious icons, and at worst mass-produced pictures from yard sales and Walmarts, and the people read the crawlers at the bottom of TV news and the thin newspapers with even thinner words and zero matter for reflection. People complain of excessive mediatization, of too much TV, too-loud advertising, too many sensationalistic news stories, but I don’t believe it. I think that a great big silence surrounds and suffuses us and that all the noise the world makes barely penetrates it, and that most people’s inner lives are muted craters gurgling forth only the loopy monotony of one’s own voice discussing misconnections and mortality in nonstop prose. And yet, over there, by the trees in the Vermont hills, lovely magical theater is being made for decades by the Bread & Puppet Theatre, and there by the Russian River, living for years in a house beneath the redwoods, poet Pan Nolan projects in lovely lines the issues of a consciousness intensely immersed in nature and irony, and a little up the ocean, in Prague, Vincent Farnsworth makes the cacophony of the band rehearsal next door into a manual for gracefully ageing, and just around the corner in Baton Rouge, Colleen Fava, burning sacrificially for art is reading Robert Musil in his wooly and unfinished entirety for the purpose of feeding her mind and pleasing her capricious teacher. So why is it, that all most people hear is their own lonely sorrow drowned in TV noise, and all they see is their insignificance barely kept at bay by shopping? The answer is that there are two devils: the Devil of Conformity who keeps us from seeing and hearing what artists make and thus condemns us to sterile solitude, and the Devil of Art and Joy who is fighting the Devil of Conformity as we speak. Today, in the deep laziness and profound tedium of summer, go out and buy an artwork and a book of poetry and keep it talismanically around, or take it with you into the waves. You must quit boring yourself.
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 "Seu Raimundo" sits in a busy intersection in the city of São Paulo. He creates his own clothes from trash bags and plastic. He spends most of his days writing. Often people pass him on the street and greet him as "the poet" or "the prophet". He calls himself "the conditioned one".
Lost Art: Brazilian Dreams
photo by Ignacio Aronovich
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The cinematic condition of the politico-philosophical future
Daniel Ross
If we understand by the word “cinema” not just what is projected onto the screen in the interior of a movie theatre, but rather as including television and all the manufactured forms of image sequences made possible by digital technology—that is, if we understand by the word “cinema” every kind of audiovisual industrial temporal object, where “temporal object” is meant in Husserl’s sense as something that exists as the flux of its passing into inexistence (such as a melody, which is Husserl’s paradigm case)—then, grasped in this most ample sense, cinema cannot be divorced from what future possibilities there are for philosophy, and we can even say that this twinned future for philosophy and cinema, a future in which both of these terms must necessarily remain open, contains the question of the future of politics, that is, of the future as such.... (more)
Scanjournal of media arts culture
via Continental Philosophy
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We must select the illusion
which appeals to our temperament,
and embrace it with passion.
- Cyril Connolly (1903-1974)
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 Henri Cartier-Bresson
August 22, 1908 - August 3, 2004 1 2 3
The Decisive Moment
Henri Cartier-Bresson
full text
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Notes on Coffee
Craig on Jakob Norberg's No coffee
Long Sunday
Carl Schmitt and Jurgen Habermas are, without a doubt, the most (in)famous political theorists to come from Germany since since Marx.(...)
Their respective assessments of coffee present interesting grounds upon which to judge and compare the anti-liberalism of Schmitt with the pro-liberalism of Habermas. ... (more)
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 In Kindergarden
1949
Dmitri Baltermants
1 2 3
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Spare Struggling Nations from Executives Without Borders
Dave Pollard
An article [pdf] in this month's S+B by Economist writer Jon Ledgard suggests that business executives in the affluent nations should be spreading the gospel of globalization, 'free' trade and the 'market' economy in Africa to save it "from total collapse".
I hope struggling nations will have the good sense to say "no thanks, you've 'helped' us enough already". It's bad enough that so many in affluent nations have been caught up in the cult of leadership and the wildly inflated sense of executives' and consultants' value and infallibility. We don't want to export our myths to countries where it can do real damage. The missionaries we've sent in past have wrecked enough lives. ... (more)
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The Conversation of the Hours
Alexander Vvedensky
Translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky
The first hour says to the second,
I am a hermit.
The second hour says to the third,
I am an abyss.
The third hour says to the fourth,
put on the morning.
The fourth hour says to the fifth,
stars rush down.
... (more)
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 Grief
Dmitri Baltermants
via Spitting Image
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from
Woods
Jorie Graham
There is no home. One can stand out here
and gesture wildly, yes. One can say "finished"
and look at the woods. One can even, say,
look into the woods, as I do now, here,
but also casting my eye out
to see (although that was yesterday) (seeing in through the alleyways
of trees, the slantings of morninglight)
(speckling) (golden) laying in
these foliate patternings, this goldfinch, this
suddenly dipping through and rising to sit very still
on top of the nearest pine, big coin, puffed-out,
turning in little hops and hopes when he turns, sometimes
entering full into
a beam of sun—becoming yellowest then—these line
endings
branching out too only so far
hoping for the light of an other's gaze to pan them,
as the gaze pans for gold in day ... (more)
Poetry by Jorie Graham
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The question of where to stand is interesting. What we’re really talking about is a vantage point. If you look at amateurs or people taking pictures, they do funny things. Most people obviously don’t know where to stand. They’re standing too close, they’re contorted. They’re humorous to watch, people who photograph, especially people who aren’t in tune with their equipment, because they don’t know when they pick it up what it will do. If you work with the same equipment for a long time, you get more in tune to what is possible. But within that there are still surprises. But using a camera day after day, within a framework, I’ll do the same thing; I’ll back up and I’ll go forward with my body.
You don’t have to be a fancy photographer to learn where to stand. Basically you’re stuck within the frame and just like the person taking the picture of his family who needs to go half a foot back - well, he doesn’t step half a foot back - but on the other hand, he knows where to be if he hits it right. Now when you watch tennis you not only have the commentators, you also have the best of the old pros. You know how they repeatedly say, “Look at the way his back was formed when he took that shot.” It is really important to them. They see that as a possibility of where the thing went. Probably the same thing is true of all of us. Lee Friedlander, from a longer quote provided by Jeff Ward
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 Ottawa River, Arnprior
photo - mw
 Edith
Danville, Virginia
1971
Emmet Gowin 1 2 3
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Fencing Off Ideas:
Enclosure and the disappearance of the public domain
James Boyle
cento
The enclosure movement continues to draw our attention. It offers irresistible ironies about the two-edged sword of "respect for property" and lessons about the role of the state in making controversial, policy-laden decisions to define property rights in ways that subsequently come to seem both natural and neutral.(...)
From the inception of intellectual property law in the eighteenth century until quite recently, protection of the public domain - the intangible commons - was one fundamental goal of the law in most nations. In the new vision of intellectual property, however, property rights should be established everywhere: more is better. Expanding patentable and copyrightable subject matter, lengthening the copyright term, giving legal protection to "digital barbed wire," even if it is used in part to prevent fair use: each of these can be understood as a vote of no confidence in the productive powers of the commons. We seem to be shifting from Brandeis's assumption that the "noblest of human productions are free as the air to common use" to the assumption that any human production left open to free use is inefficient, if not tragic.... (more)
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 Scriabin Again and Again
Faubion Bowers
Aspen
For so long now — in fact until very recently — Alexander Scriabin has lived under the haze of public amnesia. Cloudily, he has existed in the memory as a series of half-remembered questions. Didn't he write a color symphony? Wasn't he Koussevitsky's friend? Didn't he invent the piano "poem," as Chopin the piano "nocturne" and Liszt the orchestral "poem"? Didn't he plan to destroy the world with his final piece of music, and didn't he believe World War I was a prelude to this magnum opus? Didn't he strain his right hand and write for the left hand alone, long before it became the fashion? Wasn't he the one who first wrote musical directions, such as "poisonously," "satanically," or "with a chaste ardor"? What happened to his symphony of glances, perfumes, and caresses? Wasn't he the one who put "sex," as opposed to "ardor," "passion," or "love" in music? Didn't Strauss copy his "sex-in-sound" when he wrote that opening bedroom event in "Rosenkavalier"? Or was all this experimentation merely in the 19th century or fin de siècle air?
Yes, all this was so. But lately, the world hears anew from Scriabin. His interpreters have sprouted like crocuses on a snowy spring morning.... (more)
Scriabin performed by Daniel Kunin.....................................................................
Aspen1965 to 1971
The multimedia magazine in a box preserved by ubuweb
This is a web version of Aspen, a multimedia magazine of the arts published by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Each issue came in a customized box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards — one issue even included a spool of Super-8 movie film. It's all here.
The combined issue 5 &6 is a favourite containing essays by Roland Barthes, George Kubler and Susan Sontag's The Aesthetics of Silence as well as sound files of William Burroughs and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Beckett's Text for Nothing #8 (read by Jack MacGowan) - and more.... sound files by Marcel Duchamp and Richard Huelsenbeck Four Films by Four Artists: Hans Richter, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Morris & Stan VanDerBeek and Robert Rauschenberg
transcribed from the original super 8
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Homeland Security: what we need to know that politicians and pundits will never say (VIII)
Stan Goff
Insurgent American
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 Weapons Disposal Trenches
Tooele Army Depot, Utah, 1991
Emmet Gowin Emmet Gowin talks about CHANGING THE EARTH
NOW with Bill Moyers Imaging a Shattering Earth
Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate
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Balkan-Wards:
Falling Dollar, Faulty Infrastructure, and the Lessons of the Bulgarian Lev
Stephen Lewis
Hak Pak Sak
The country appears to have gone out of its way to sabotage its own economy and debase its currency in the process. From the social ethos of the New Deal and the Great Society, and even the business ethos of the Eisenhower years, the US slipped into a culture of short-term gain and long-term disinvestment. Corporate looting ala Enron and Worldcom, skyrocketing “CEO” compensation, the near-incomprehensible waste and corruption of the four-year-long debt-financed war in Iraq, and the public and private sector’s cavalier attitudes towards investment in the human and physical infrastructure requisite to productivity and social stability (cf. the pathetic state of US health care and the headline-grabbing failures of levies in Louisiana and bridges in Minnesota) undermine confidence in the country and its currency and prompt international investors to shift capital elsewhere.
When the dollar first dipped below the Euro, I smiled at the irony. The very same US that now shuns investing in its own physical and human infrastructure by passing the buck to the whims of the so-called “market” had, long ago, under the Marshall Plan (see this current New Yorker article), provided the long-term loans and investment capital that rebuilt Western Europe’s war-shattered physical plant and kick-started its post-war economic recovery. In the fifty years that followed, Europe built slowly and steadily on this foundation and today surpasses the US in measures of productivity and quality of life. But I can barely raise a smile as I watch the dollar continue to fall, heading high speed towards parity with … the Bulgarian Lev!... (more)
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 The Art of Kareem Risan and the Uranium Civilization
Maymanah Farhat
Electronic Iraq
In Uranium Civilization, the artist employs text and painted imagery to create powerful expressions reflecting the lingering turmoil plaguing his homeland, while simultaneously calling attention to the fact that the destruction of Iraq began long before the recent invasion.
via David-Baptiste Chirot
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Blind Oracles
Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger
Bruce Kuklick
FiniteThinking
Jean-Luc Nancy
Potentialities
Collected Essays in Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben
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 half awake and half asleep in the water
Asako Narahashi The photographs in half awake and half asleep in the water are images that peek from this shore through to the other shore. They look candid and relax, but are the labour of courage and love from an artist who is not a great swimmer.
via Heading East
 carved books
Brian Dettmer 1 2 3 photo found here More Odds and Ends
Giornale Nuovo
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Physiology of the Oppressed
David Murphy
Paulo Friere, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, writes, "The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it... They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized." (Friere P.48) Friere could have just as easily been talking about psychological trauma. If the tools to freedom from psychological illness are connecting to our animal instinct toward self-regulation, then Friere's internal oppressor is the desire to safely avoid fear of attack and shame.
This begs the question of whether we can solve the ills of our society disconnected from any real sense of our bodies, our emotions, and each other. It may be that we have to start judging what is healthy for our society by what connects us to ourselves and the planet rather than what gets us what we want, or wins the battles we are fighting. To create political change that fits the vision of a world embracing community, equality, and freedom from oppression, we must learn how to liberate ourselves, not just from the material circumstances of our lives, but also from the disregulation in our physiology that mediates our experience..... (more)
Journal of Aesthetics & Protest______________________________________
 photo - mw ______________________________________
Stone me: the pebble collectors
Christopher Stocks
things magazine
Like the leaves on the trees they’re ubiquitous yet rare. Every one is different, different in shape or marked in a different way. But unlike leaves they have weight and heft in the hand. They’re solid and heavy and (though this, of course, is an illusion) reassuringly permanent. They’re cool to the touch but comforting to hold. They’re free but precious, too: a favourite pebble can become a talisman, a minor household god, a Becketian worry-bead, even a smug little social mark. They’re as refined as the most delicate sculpture, yet they’re also tough as nails....... (more)
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A parallel tradition
Ian McEwan
Guardian
...above all, a literary tradition implies an active historical sense of the past, living in and shaping the present. And reciprocally, a work of literature produced now infinitesimally shifts our understanding of what has gone before.
Can science and science writing, a vast and half forgotten accumulation over the centuries, offer us a parallel living tradition? If it can, how do we begin to describe it? The problems of choice are equalled only by those of criteria. Literature does not improve; it simply changes. Science, on the other hand, as an intricate, self-correcting thought system, advances and refines its understanding of the thousands of objects of its study. This is how it derives it power and status. Science prefers to forget much of its past - it is constitutionally bound to a form of selective amnesia.(...)
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. There has never been a science book quite like it. Drawing on the work of a handful of scientists, it bound together genetics and Darwinian natural selection in a creative synthesis that amazed even those few who were already familiar with the concepts. It hastened a sea change in evolutionary theory, it affected profoundly the teaching of biology, it enticed an enthusiastic younger generation into the subject, and spawned a huge literature, and eventually a new discipline - memetics. At the same time, and this is the measure of its achievement, it addressed itself without condescension to the layman. It did so provocatively, and with style.(...)
Few of us, I think, in the mid-1970s, when The Selfish Gene was published, would have thought we would be dedicating so much mental space to discussing religious faith in this new century. We thought that since it has nothing useful at all to say about cosmology, the age of the earth, the origin of species, the curing of disease or any other aspect of the physical world, it had retreated finally to where it belongs, to the privacy of individual conscience. We were wrong. A variety of sky-god worshippers with their numerous, mutually exclusive certainties (all of which we must "respect") appears to be occupying more and more of the space of public discourse. Increasingly, they seem to want to tell us how to live and think, or inflict upon us the strictures they choose to impose upon themselves.... (more)via This Space
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 Library - Babylon
Desert Archeologies
Thierry Urbain
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The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason
Pierre Bourdieu
translated by Channa Newman
Abstract
Science is a social field of forces, struggles, and relationships that is defined at every moment by the relations of power among the protagonists. Scientific choices are guided by taken-for-granted assumptions, interactive with practices, as to what constitutes real and important problems, valid methods, and authentic knowledge. Such choices also are shaped by the social capital controlled by various positions and stances within the field. This complex and dynamic representation thus simultaneously rejects both the absolutist-idealist conception of the immanent development of science and the historicist relativism of those who consider science as purely a conventional social construct. The strategies used in science are at once social and intellectual; for example, strategies that are founded on implicit agreement with the established scientific order are thereby in affinity with the positions of power within the field itself. In established scientific fields of high autonomy, “revolutions” no longer are necessarily at the same time political ruptures but rather are generated within the field themselves: the field becomes the site of a permanent revolution. Under certain conditions, then, strategies used in struggles for symbolic power transcend themselves as they are subjected to the crisscrossing censorship that represents the constitutive reason of the field. The necessary and sufficient condition for this critical correction is a social organization such that each par-[ticipant can realize specific interest only by mobilizing all the scientific resources available for overcoming the obstacles shared by all his or her competitors. Thus, the type of analysis here illustrated does not lead to reductive bias or sociologism that would undermine its own foundations. Rather it points to a comprehensive and reflexive objectivism that opens up a liberating collective self-analysis.... (more)
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 Massey College
U of T
1963
Views Of 20th Century Canada
The Canadian Architectural Photography Digitization Project
via The Ten Thousand Year Blog
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The Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener
Electronic Text Center - full text
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The Politics of God
Marx Lilla
via larval subjects
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 Derinkuyu
Cappadocia undeground city begun 8th-7th centuries B.C
once home to 20,000 via BLDGBLOG
 Clippers
Julie Blackmon
Catherine Edelman Gallery Julie Blackmon Photographs ______________________________________
The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair
Chris Hedges,
The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.
They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives.
The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.
Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.... (more)
The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy
Chris Hedges
The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.... (more)
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Despair was there long before Mr. Bush, aka the USian Scion of Nihilism, arrived. He simply punched it up. Softened up the targets, readied them.
The only answerable mode for Bush and the fascist pearl forming in his pud is a language that does not feed upon despair, anxiety, terror. That means an end to media as usual.
- Tom Matrullo
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Politics of Christian Domination
Carl Pwccaman
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Policing the Convergence of Virtual and Material Worlds
"The True Object of Police is Man."
Dion Dennis
 Taken as a whole, these "surveillant assemblages" of governance are a constituent element of an "economic pastorate of men and things," where the objects of policing have again become fixated on "the cheapness of commodities, public security and cleanliness," as they were for Polizeiwissenschaft practitioners (the Cameralists) and Adam Smith. At the end of the modern and its trailing iterations, this Polizeiwissenschaft trinity of desired effects uncannily embodies key tenets of contemporary security and economic practices, as well as political philosophy. (...)
The question remains as to what bureaucratic and political assemblage might plausibly govern national and global systems, so informed by this "New Protestant Ethic." In this transitional period between the postmodern and the technologically networked un-modern, the de facto emergence of a neo-Polizeiwissenschaft points, ultimately, to notions of policing and social order that can be plausibly called Neo-Cameralist. The current Neo-Cameralism/Neo-Polizeiwissenscchaft formation fuses a late 18th Century, authority-driven administrative proto-rationalism with social, economic, religious and political values uncannily resonant with early 21st Century Empire. While the prerogatives of the CEO replace that of the Divine Right of Kings, as the reigning governance ideology, in practice, however, the distance between the archetypal "benevolent despot" and the contemporary "unitary executive" is startlingly short. Neo-Cameralism and its neo-Polizeiwissenschaft techné is a repetition with a difference, a reverse temporal and ideological folding, a networked iteration. In the midst of this transition, the virtual is fusing with the material, as the scope and goals of policing are broadly redefined, easily outstripping the mid-and-late 20th Century notion of policing, in the process. ... (more)image by Mieczyslaw Gorowski
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Anthropophagous [Anthropophagic] Manifesto
Oswald De Andrade.
SIbilA
The spirit refuses to conceive spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. The necessity of an anthropophagic vaccine. For balance against meridian religions. And external inquisitions.
The paterfamilias and the creation of the Stork Fable: Actual ignorance of things + lack of imagination + authoritative attitude before the curious progeny.
Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. ______________________________________
 photo - mw
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In the Middle of the Way
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Translation: Charles Bernstein
In the middle of the way was a stone
was a stone in the middle of the way
was a stone
in the middle of the way was a stone.
Never, me I'll never forget that that happened
in the life of my oh so wearied retinas.
Never, me, I'll never forget that in the middle of the way
was a stone
was a stone in the middle of the way
in the middle of the way was a stone.
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 Mieczyslaw Gorowski 1 2 3 Freedom on the Fence: The Polish Poster
A Digital Documentary Project ______________________________________
The Renaissance Of 1910
Reflections on Guy Davenport’s Poetics
Marjorie Perloff
Again and again, in the essays collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981), Guy Davenport refers to a “renaissance” taking place “around 1910". The clearest statement comes in the essay called "Narrative Tone and Form", reprinted from the Guy Davenport-Ronald Johnson issue (1976) of Vort, that remarkable journal founded and edited by Barry Alpert. Davenport writes:
Our age is unlike any other in that its greatest works of art were constructed in one spirit and received in another.
There was a Renaissance around 1910 in which the nature of all the arts changed. By 1916 this springtime was blighted by the World War, the tragic effects of which cannot be overestimated. Nor can any understanding be achieved of twentieth-century art if the work under consideration is not kept against the background of the war which extinguished European culture. . . . Accuracy in such matters being impossible, we can say nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916. Charles Ives had written his best music by then; Picasso had become Picasso; Pound, Pound; Joyce, Joyce. Except for individual talents, already in development before 1916, moving on to full maturity, the century was over in its sixteenth year. Because of this collapse (which may yet prove to be a long interruption), the architectonic masters of our time have suffered critical neglect or abuse, and if admired are admired for anything but the structural innovations of their work.
This is vintage Davenport: the mix of remarkable precision — names and dates—with large-scale generalization, of historic pinpointing with evaluative conclusion. ... (more)
SIbilA An International Journal Of Poetry ______________________________________
 
Eyeballing the stock exchange security zone
Photos by Cryptome 17 August 2007
Seven security barriers create a security zone for the New York Stock Exchange. In addition to the barriers and full-time police there are dozens of surveillance cameras. As with most security around the globe, these measures appear to be as much for show as for protection. Greeders with their global telecom network who exploit the Stock Exchange's prowess at fleecing gullible investors are hidden in palatial penthouse and country estate bunkers far away from the touristically inviting bulleye. Telling the truth: except for the 20 feet gated on the tourist sides of the Exchange, the security zone is a squalid and filthy dump.
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Poetry and Contingency:
Within a Timeless Moment of Barbaric Thought
Michael Palmer
... this talk will reflect that flux: an assemblage of fragments, shored perhaps against the ruins. With no theory, no argument to speak of, and only that tentative knowing, that knowing of nothing, that the uncertain yet actual experiencing of poetry offers. Poetry, which includes the unspoken. Within a timeless moment of barbaric thought. Of what is and what returns; of memory and forgetting. Since I think we can agree that we find ourselves in a very strange time, yet also, remembering, a sadly all-too-familiar one. As it happens, poetry has something to say about all of these things, the “strange,” the “familiar,” and of course “time.”(...)
We know that it is something happening in language and in silence. We know that in its silences a certain excess gathers, an excess, or surplus, of meaning that can cause meaning to tremble. Yet, “No more than a breath between / there and not there,” as Celan writes. We know that the breath-turn itself is silence, the moment in which the poem gathers itself, the site where the conversation is to begin, and where another is to be found. Whereas, it would seem that the voice of God in the bottom of the glass brooks no other, except perhaps a beseeching. We know that poetry is a form of listening. Both the making and the receiving are forms of listening. To an unknown language found everywhere among our daily words, in the currents of our common speech, where Jack Spicer’s low-ghosts lurk . In the winding streets. We knew as we marched through the winding streets that the powers-that-be were not listening, had not the capacity. Just as the discourse of control annuls conversation and represses all questioning, as it erases the other, thereby ultimately erasing itself. Whereas poetry is nothing if not a question, and then a book of questions. To which the answer is, perhaps, no more than another question. Poetry in that sense remains open, and without authority. Its authors, is there anything to say of them?... (more)
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The Great American Media Mind Warp
A Feast of Bullshit and Spectacle
Joe Bageant
Through advertising and marketing, the hologram combs the fields of instinct and human desire, arranging our wants and fears in the direction of commodities or institutions. No longer are advertising and marketing merely propaganda, which is all but dead. Digitally mediated brain experience now works far below the crude propaganda zone of influence, deep in the swamps of the limbic brain, reengineering and reshaping the realms of subjective human experience.
In the time it took you to read this paragraph, and while millions watch the cathartic media projection of their deepest nightmares, several dozen children died of famine or disease outside the hologram.
Together, we live within a media-generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. It shows us how successful people supposedly behave, invest, and relate to each other. Through crime shows, it demonstrates what happens to us if we don't behave. It shows us who we should hate (Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, for starters). Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall.
Well, we can't have that happen, can we? So let us all close our eyes and let the one voice speak to the many. Take a deep breath, and exhale very slowly. ... Let the soft electrical buzz engulf your mind, let that auroral drapery of flickering light play across the inside of your eyelids.
"This is the hologram speaking ..."... (more)
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 Long Room
Trinity College Library
Dublin, Ireland
Silentium
Thorsten Schimmel
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Not in MY name!
A collection of quotes on the past, present, and future of the practice of torture
Selected and arranged by Ella Mazel
via Death and the Maiden
 Man bending in front of hill
Tina Modotti
c. 1926-1929
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Age Moves
by Liam Rector
Age moves in the hound
As it was in me moving
Through forest I found
As to dog I went
That year scrounging
Through Manhattan....
The wood opened out,
Unlikely in the city,
As to boy slandering
To leave his fitful home,
Bright he might survive
With his pen-knife only.
 Liam Rector
1949 - 2007
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“As I’m using the term, it’s a sense of other people and ourselves as being ‘we’ - we feel that what affects them affects us because we, to some extent, identify with them. I ... describe social progress ... [as] the expansion of ... the ability to take in more and more people of the sort fashionably described as ‘marginal’ and think ofthem as one of us, included in us. The argument I make is that this is mainly done by going into concrete details about marginal lives rather than by having theories about what all human beings have in common.”
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Richard Rorty, quoted by Jim Johnson
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 Tina Modotti
August 16 (or 17) 1896 – January 5, 1942
Tina reciting poetry
Edward Weston
1924
1 2 3
Mexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston
Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance
A tempestuous life of art, passion, love and death: Tina Modotti
Max Perchick
PSA Journal, March, 1996
Tina Modotti: Life, Art, And Revolution
Gillian McIver
Tina Modotti's radical beauty
Patricia C. Johnson
 Bandolier, corn, guitar
Tina Modotti
1927
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The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and Terrorism
Tarik Kochi
Law and Critique, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2006
Abstract. The words terror and terrorism are used widely today and are used to denote an illegitimate act of violence. War, on the other hand is used as a more open concept, the legitimacy of every particular act is at least placed under limited debate. The issue of how our thoughts upon the legitimacy of violence are ordered by the framing of the legal concepts of terror and war is an important contemporary question. One way into this question is by giving an account of Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘partisan war.’ Introducing Schmitt’s concept of the ‘partisan’ into Anglophone legal theory is the main aim of this paper. PDF download available here______________________________________
Our police order: What can be said, seen, and done
Jacques Rancière interviewed by Truls Lie
eurozine
I studied the workers' emancipation in the nineteenth century in order to rethink a certain tradition, namely the Marxist tradition. But now I am sorry to say that there is not much interest in those topics. It is taken for granted that all this is over, no more workers' movement, no more workers' emancipation. There is a trend in France to consider any kind of workers' protest as a sign of disease. Workers are seen as an outmoded part of the population who cannot grapple with modernity.(...)
We shouldn't think of the police order only as some institution. I don't think that the police order is the same as the police with their batons. I think it's too easy to say that the media is the police, that it is a big machine. The police order is not only a Big Brother, it is a kind of distribution of what is given to our experience, of what we can do. We don't need a Big Brother like Fox News. I think the same kind of partition between what is possible and impossible for us can be made by more sophisticated channels. It is wrong to focus on a horrible example like Fox News. The sophisticated media are also part of the police order, as a kind of distribution of what you are and are not able to do. In France, we have some sophisticated newspapers, but they are members of the police order in the same way as Fox News.... (more)
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Thinking Between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge [PDF]
Jacques Rancière translated by Jon Roffe Parrhesia______________________________________
 La poétesse
Angel Zárraga
16 August 1886 - 23 September 1946
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From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks
"The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"
Naomi Klein
What is at the root of our crisis of confidence? What drains us of our conviction at crucial moments when we are tested? At the root, I think it’s the notion that we have accepted, which is that our ideas have already been tried and found wanting. Part of what keeps us from building the alternatives that we deserve and long for and that the world needs so desperately, like a healthcare system that doesn't sicken us when we see it portrayed on film, like the ability to rebuild New Orleans without treating a massive human tragedy like an opportunity for rapid profit-making for politically connected contractors, the right to have bridges that don't collapse and subways that don't flood when it rains. I think that what lies at the root of that lack of confidence is that we’re told over and over again that progressive ideas have already been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we accepted it. So our alternatives are posed tentatively, almost apologetically. “Is another world possible?” we ask.
This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time.... (more)
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 The South Texas Border
1900-1920
Photographs from the Robert Runyon Collection
via ______________________________________
Translating Translating Apollinaire:
A Preliminary Report
bpNichol
The pieces included here begin with the three memory translations written over the atlantic ocean on May 27th. TTA 4 is the original poem as published in 1964 & all the pieces that follow are based on TTA 4.
TTA 5: re-arranging words in poem in alphabetical order
a a a,
an and aware Aztecs back backs beating becoming bodies,
brown built by by cars
centuries cold cou coupé
dozen dozen drivers' everyone, films flat flat flickering
floor for for, for from glares
glasses,
grass great, hearts hiding high Icharrus in in
in in instant
it Judea Macchu, Magician
mountains my my, new of
of off offer, on
on on on
out pages passing Piccu reaching rolls Simon
slowly soleil stone sun sun sun
sun tearing the the the, "the
the the", the their their them
thru to towers tree trees turning unfound
up wave wet whizzing
wind window winging
... (more)
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Given the appalling gravity of what has been done in their name, Americans have been remarkably obliging to the Bush Administration. What, one wonders, would it take to get Americans to riot?
- Richard Marsden
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A Plea for Media Literacy
White Courtesy Telephone
I don’t think it’s an accident that in our hemisphere only Canada has mandated media literacy in its school curricula.
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Media Literacy Clearinghouse______________________________________
 reading El Machete
Tina Modotti
1928
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Alan Chin on photographing New Orleans
BAGnewsNotes
...this was my ninth trip in 2 years. I have tried to make a "big picture" documentation of New Orleans in this time. First was the storm and its horrible aftermath. Then i followed several families to Arkansas and Ohio. Next, the physical devastation. After that, Mardi Gras, and the beginnings of rebirth. Finally, stagnation. Last year, there was a six-month period when things did improve. But that leveled off, and it seems that what was going to get better did, but that the rest remains frozen and paralyzed. Only half of the 500,000 pre-Katrina population has returned, and many people say that they will leave again.
My work, at its best, has shown this process. However, one of the limitations of photography, as I've pointed out in the discussion here, is that often you need words to fully explain a situation. Context has to be provided. Photos can be misleading, or very narrow. Also, there is the seduction to make beautiful images in the midst of despair. Sometimes this beauty, though haunting or ironic, can also provide too much aesthetic pleasure, and therefore create too much distance from the reality, be that as it may.
If i go back, it will be to take a look at the elite and wealthy culture, which was barely affected by Katrina and now either likes to pretend that the disaster didn't happen, or finds it a blessing in disguise.... (more) ______________________________________
 Composition with parrots
Angel Zárraga
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Empty Rooms
Paul Ford
I have been dreaming up these rooms for years. A few square feet that remain constant: a walled-in basement corner in a museum where there sits a filing cabinet filled with old maps; a Model A rusting in a carriage house; a copy of The Tales of Guy de Maupassant and a catalog of electric goods left on a mattress in an attic. In defiance of progress and real-estate values these fake places are perfectly dusty and still.... (more)
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