I’ll Have a Scotch, Rocks.

Here is a story that is not uncommon these days. http://www.adistinctiveworld.net/health-department-raids-community-picnic-and-destroys-all-food-with-bleach/ And this curious bit of legislation: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-09/kansas-s-self-destruct-button-a-bill-to-outlaw-sustainability.html And this.....http://jonathanturley.org/2013/09/19/95-year-old-man-in-nursing-home-resists-going-to-hospital-police-arrive-and-shoot-and-kill-him-stun-gun-and-bean-bag-rounds/ These are examples of an ascension of irrationality in state agencies, and a new level of aggression. That is the key, the aggression is coming out of a culture now inundated with representations of violence. … [Read more...]

Breaking White

Nothing arouses the almost religious indignation of the U.S. populace (the educated liberal class anyway, and that means mostly white) than to criticize their favorite TV shows. Vince Gilligan's AMC series Breaking Bad has, as we close in on the final two episodes, reached clear cult status now. I've seen it compared to Dostoyevsky and Kafka. What accounts for the show's over-valuation? I think the clearest answer, the most simple, is that it flatters the intended audience. Network Demographics has it this way: AMC targets viewers 18-49, viewers 25-54, males 18-49 and males 25-54, according to its 2007 Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau profile. For full-year 2007 the network … [Read more...]

Whoosh

"...the certain realization that Kafka's entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning..." Walter Benjamin, On The 10th Anniversary of Kafka's Death I want to continue on fromn that last post, and also to incorporate some of the long comments thread, and also try to more specifically look at this idea of violence in the West, and its cultural expressions. The link below is almost a daily occurance now. http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/09/12-1 The new theatre of violence is this temporary stage on the side of the highway. This mini drama encapsulates the thrust of the white male system of domination. The beating of a woman, … [Read more...]

It Cant Be Known

"There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmaksed, it can’t do otherwise, in raptures it will writhe before you." Franz Kafka "...we must acknowledge at the outset that our concept of 'social identity' is a product of that culture (American political culture) and that only within that culture can an author's racial, ethnic, or gender identity found a politics of cultural curricular revision." John Guillary Media today is the single most powerful force in shaping our sense of identity, and of socio-political reality. Mass … [Read more...]

Quien es?

"We are witnessing transitions from social-welfare states to social-control states around the world. We are facing a global crisis that is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the sheer scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity; we have entered a period of great upheavals, of momentous changes and uncertainties. " William Robinson The painting above is by Italian fascist painter Mario Sironi. It is a magnificent and haunting work. Sironi was a strange isolated figure even when rabidly supporting Mussolini. He was an architect of sorts, but his plain brutal buildings were not met … [Read more...]

The Triumph of the Kill

There is an increasingly bizarre sense of body, sexuality, and health image reflected back at people in the West from their cultural products. The evolution about ideas of "health" are, of course, ideological, but coupled to this is an increasingly dysmorphic sense of body and how this manufactures desire and props up the White male world in a delusionary state of percieved superiority. Let me backtrack just a bit. There is a shift that has occured over the last forty years, and probably it began more like fifty or even sixty years ago, but more acutely since the 70s and that is the emergence of a militarized aesthetic for beauty. At least for male beauty. The corresponding shift for … [Read more...]

A Puppet Life

"For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were equal to regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind, that single endeavour they knew would be but a fond labour: to shut and fortify one gate against corruption, and be necessitated to leave others round about wide open. If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing of dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth, but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was … [Read more...]

Varieties of White

There are several thoughts that are really just addendums to my last post, and then a brief discussion of a couple popular new TV shows that seem worth looking at in terms of their popularity. But first: One of my very favorite artists, among the very best I know, is photographer Frederike Von Rauch, who lives and works out of Berlin. Rauch works with only an analog camera, and changes nothing in her enviornment. She simply waits. She waits for the right conditions, and her own inner clock. In this sense she is another version of Trevor Paglin. Rauch keeps the camera at eye level, and never shoots if the sun is shining. It is a kind of study of space, and of architectural space, even … [Read more...]