"The military-police mindset has been embodied in the creation of Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, bringing local cops together with Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal agencies. At the same time, billions of dollars worth of military hardware, from assault rifles to armored vehicles, are being funneled annually from the Pentagon to local police departments, creating a militarized force suitable for deployment in a domestic war. The real significance of these developments was demonstrated first in the martial law lockdown of the Boston metropolitan area following the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013. An entire population was turned into prisoners in their own … [Read more...]
Archives for December 2014
The Unserious
"Deep contempt and indifference to the spirit is a trait of the ideal type of the modern bourgeois..." Max Horkheimer "Nowadays, the moral efforts of the intellectuals are no longer directed at the owners of the means of production, but at the members of the lower classes, who are being bound against their interest to the whole. This change has meant that influential members of society now treat intellectuals with disdain, regarding them as servants and entertainers whose activity is of no relevance to the lives of the powerful." Heinz Steinert "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Guy Debord "Great shame and … [Read more...]
Something Else We Want
"The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at most can defend themselves if they are attacked. They are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus." Sigmund … [Read more...]
I Am Not I
"Every photograph which exists to perpetuate something becomes its grave and tombstone." Richard Hennessy "Integrity is not only a moral condition, but a pictorial task." Michael Fried "Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried." Walter Benjamin A discussion of abstraction in art is usually something one has with in-laws, or weird Uncles during the Holidays. It is usually a simple argument about how abstract art isn't really art, and how anyone could do it, and how modern art in general is junk. Rarely are there serious discussions about abstraction … [Read more...]
Monochrome
"When a couple of local people asked us where we were staying that evening we replied that we would just pull our car next to a park and catch some sleep. Horrified, our new friends told us bluntly that “The Los Angeles Police (LAPD) will pull you out of your car, kick the shit out of you and then arrest you.” This grim assessment of the LAPD was corroborated in the wake of the 1992 LA riots by a local fifth-grade teacher who told historian Mike Davis that: “In the area where I work, the LAPD is a sadistic occupying army.” Paul Ortiz, The Anatomy of a Rebellion (Solidarity) "...the social contract establishes corporate virtue as an asylum for individual sin, making a moral society out … [Read more...]