January 2012
13 posts
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Consultancy Rock
The solace of sociological distance in the music of Rush
by Rob Horning
Certain rock groups persist as their own subgenre. The venerable Canadian band Rush is one of them, maintaining a legion of loyalists willing to stick with them as they release album after blandly titled album — Power Windows, Presto, Test for Echo — that defiantly sell in the millions despite little mainstream notice or...
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Il Salvataggio Selvaggio
A letter to Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises
By Evan Calder Williams
Dear Micky Arison, I was sorry to hear about the Costa Concordia. What a big fuck-up, a große Verhau, as Kluge would put it. A sad one to boot.
I saw that you tweeted that “our thoughts and prayers are with the passengers and crew” so I can tell that you’ve been...
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Dance With the Devil
The systematic genius of Krasznahorkai’s Satantango
by Dan Bevacqua
Twenty-seven years after it was first published in his native Hungary, László Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, Satantango, has materialized in America. Published by New Directions, it is the third of Krasznahorkai’s works to be translated into English by George Szirtes, Hungarian-born poet and winner of, among other...
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The Future Is Female
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, women are nowhere and everywhere
by Samantha Hinds
A tea-soaked palette floods recession London. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we see the khaki styles and filing boxes of an empire packing itself away. Director Tomas Alfredson, known best for his gentle adolescent vampire tale (Let the Right One In, 2008), stays orthodox to neither John le Carré’s text nor the...
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Accounting for Beauty
(Image via)
Erotic capital doesn’t set us free. It yokes women’s careers to the whims of men
by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
Before I actually read Erotic Capital, sociologist Catherine Hakim’s treatise on how women should flex their powers of sexual allure in the workplace, I wanted to like it. As Hakim presents it, erotic capital is a combination of physical assets (beauty, style)...
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Un(der)known Writers: Martin Luther King Jr.
“I’m sure that you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled Rip Van Winkle. The thing that we usually remember about this story is that Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years. But there is another point in that story that is almost always completely overlooked: it was a sign on the inn in the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the...
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Scoreboard Jesus
(image via)
Can Tim Tebow, the latest American exemplar of “muscular Christianity,” get a witness?
by Elissa Lerner
Unless you’ve avoided all sports news since Thanksgiving, you’ve probably heard the name Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos quarterback and evangelical Christian who likes to thank his lord and savior Jesus Christ for winning football games. Despite his awkward throwing motion and...
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Not Great Men
Georges Simenon’s The President shows how history swallows its agents
by Rob Horning
With its focus on a destabilized European government, currency manipulation, and the frailty of technocracy, Georges Simenon’s novella The President seems a surprisingly timely book, especially considering it was originally published more than 50 years ago. The scene in which Simenon describes various...
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Cruise Control
Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.
by Max Fox
Last Thanksgiving, more men logged on to Grindr, the largest “all-male, location-based social network in the world,” than on any other day of the year. Somehow, Grindr managed to tout this fact without mentioning...
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Do Nothing, Be Nothing
Violence, idleness, and nihilism in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
by Stephane Allard
Clocking in at just short of a thousand pages, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is the author’s ostensible pitch for the Nobel Prize and what many expect will stand as his magnum opus. Published in Japan in three installments beginning in 2009, the novel was released in North America in a single volume this past...
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Un(der)known Writers: Anna Kavan
Self-portrait by Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan was born Helen Woods in Cannes, France. She perceived herself as deeply unloved. Kavan was the main character in her novel Let Me Alone, and she adopted the name for herself after a stint in an asylum. She kept herself immaculately maintained, was severely addicted to heroin, and enjoyed the success of her own interior decorating business while she...
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No Resolution
Cruel Optimism at the beginning of the end.
By Jenna Brager
Lauren Berlant wants you to break your New Year’s resolutions. Or at least she wholly understands your impending failure to keep them. So go ahead, smoke another cigarette. Smoke whatever you can find. Down a few more 100-calorie snack packs. Eat a whole goddamn box of 100-calorie snack packs. Fuck 100-calorie snack packs, find some...
December 2011
16 posts
2 tags
The Search for Posthumanism
Notes from the 2011 Singularity Summit
by Mike Thomsen
The idea that we can run out of time is peculiar. It’s a product of how we organize our memories.
Human consciousness is a kind of romance with the idea that time is finite and consumable. This assumption of finitude means that time can also become digested and metabolized urge, energizing the desire to imagine what is coming next. Being...
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Keira Knightley's Vagina
A Dangerous Method taps the allure of sexual dysfunction
by Kartina Richardson
David Cronenberg’s new film A Dangerous Method opens with the ominous notes of a cello, that, leading out of the opening credits, give way to a horn and string crescendo and the disturbing first scene: Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) arrives screaming, restrained by men, in a black carriage drawn by black...
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The Reluctant Writer
Mina Loy (1916)
Recently published work by modernist Mina Loy from Dalkey Archive
by Mary Borkowski
In a short essay on Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy writes: “You never hear anyone say: ‘I have read such and such a book by Gertrude Stein.’ People say: ‘I have read some Gertrude Stein.’ ” This some bespeaks a lack, a desire to know more, securing her on a tentative, pencilled...
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Literary Tantalus
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956 (Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press)
by Ethan Hon
It’s fitting that Samuel Beckett’s last endeavor into the literary would be from his deathbed. Two weeks before his death on December 22, 1989, Beckett dictated his English translation of Comment dire to Barbara Bray. The...
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The Revolution That Wasn't
by Matt Pearce
“I am not a hero. I was only using the keyboard, Mona, on the internet, I never put my life in danger, the real heroes are the ones on the ground. … This revolution belonged to the internet youth, then the revolution belonged to the Egyptian youth, then the revolution belonged to all of Egypt. It has no hero, no one should steal its thunder, we are all heroes.”
—Wael Ghonim,...
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I'm With Stupid
On the latest edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel, The Hour of the Star (New Directions)
by Mike Thomsen
Stupidity is always conditional. An observer discovers some ignorance in a subject, or else the subject stumbles on her own stupidity, usually engendering a torturous self-doubt about what other ignorances might be lurking within. The only antidote to stupidity is an agitated...
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Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011
by Amanda Rivkin
Where are the great men? Are we beyond the point of elevating the individual over the group, or are there simply no more individuals? Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer, has warned for more than a decade of the emergence of “leaderless jihad” as terrorist movements spawn violent individuals. But lately his idea has been turned on its head, as the movement for freedom attempts...
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The Color and the Sound
Erik den Breejen’s pop synesthesia and the Beach Boys’ SMiLE
by Mary Borkowski
“A color which would be ‘dirty’ if it were the color of a wall, needn’t be so in a painting … There is no criterion by which to recognize what a color is, except that it is one of our colors.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Color”
The first time I walked into Erik den Breejen’s studio in...
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You and Mark Aren't Friends
Facebook’s Timeline turns your old updates into an unexpurgated biography
by Giovanni Tiso
Timeline is the story of your life.
—Mark Zuckerberg
Nine beef consommés, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup
—Georges Perec, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Ninteen Hundred and Seventy-Four”
Four months...
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Manet in Tunisia
Rue Mosnier Decorated with Flags, Edouard Manet (1878)
Revolutionary art changes how one can see. So does revolution.
By James Polchin
In January, I waited outside the Grand Palais in Paris for two hours in near-freezing temperatures to see a Claude Monet show, the first in nearly two decades in France.
As it was for everyone I knew who went to the show, waiting for Monet was part of the...
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On Rage and Swagger
The following is an excerpt from Roman Letters, from Oslo Editions
By Evan Calder Williams
C,
When we spoke last, it was — and how could it not be? — of rioting and necessity, of taking and being taken by times you don’t choose. Lust for what has nothing to do with sex, or perhaps only diagonally, and carrying yourself, getting carried, what could be a battering fury and its restraints,...
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The Enduring Legacy of Basquiat's Hair
The painter’s generative conflict (and coif) lives on
By Itoro Udoko
Jean-Michel Basquiat had a professional career that lasted just nine years, but in that time he managed to make himself one of the most significant painters of the 20th century and an enduring cultural icon. Basquiat was a bundle of contradictions; he made art from the streets, yet his work appeared in galleries...
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Be Aware: Nick Kristof's Anti-Politics
By Elliott Prasse-Freeman
“How can you watch people die in the streets?” “You don’t look, you close your eyes.”
Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist, is often hailed as a defender of the downtrodden, courageously reporting those man-made events that “shock the conscience.” As he traipses the globe to report on its most grisly moments, Kristof is...
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Who's That Girl?
The heroine of Fox’s New Girl has more in common with a logo design than its audience
By Sarah Handelman
Mortie is a darling girl. She never stops smiling. In her little yellow Mary Janes and her little yellow dress, Mortie is a little yellow speck of sunshine on any rainy day. She likes to go for strolls. We do not know where she comes from. We do not know where she goes. But under her...
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The Trouble with Digital Conservatism
(via)
Conserving the self in a culture of productive narcissism
by Rob Horning
The cluster of ideas, meanings, and implications associated with Web 2.0 has been amalgamating for the better part of a decade, steadily consolidating to the point where few would deny its cultural significance. The development of more sophisticated search engines and the promulgation of social media have combined...
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The Great Leap Forward
Stills from “Mao over Mao” (2011) by Sherry Mills
The Long March in a New World
by Patrick Harrison, JW McCormack and Andrew Starner on behalf of The New Inquiry
So we pick up a copy of New Directions’ new edition of Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March at the Strand and we’re floored. It’s everything we’ve been looking for, and there it was, all along....
November 2011
17 posts
2 tags
Art, Work, and Refusal
Sara Wookey performing “Trio A” (1966) by Yvonne Rainer at VIVA! Performance Festival, Montreal Photo by Guy L’Hereux
By Sara Wookey
I participated in an audition on November 7 for performance artist Marina Abramović’s production for the annual gala of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I auditioned because I wanted to participate in the project of an artist whose...
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Death Dreams
A review of Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Zero Books)
by Rob Horning
It can be hard to keep French writer-provocateur Michel Houellebecq’s novels straight in one’s head. Like Haruki Murakami — in some ways his gentler (and far more gifted) Japanese counterpart — Houellebecq writes about the sulky crises of middle-aged male protagonists confronting...
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Grudge Lust
(via)
A certain amount of hate is good for you
by Elizabeth Greenwood
I can’t remember the specifics of school years, but I can always remember my enemies. Colleen Shea, blonde, “pretty,” and popular, bore the title in elementary school. She of Worcester, Massachusetts stock — thin lips and pink skin, a nurse mother and firefighter father, CCD classes after school, and Friday night slumber...
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Don't Stop Beliebing
A dialogue on pop music’s prefiguration of the Occupy protests
By Max Fox and Malcolm Harris Selective image redaction by Will Canine
Max (X): So why is Third Eye Blind’s “Occupy Wall Street” song so obviously a failure?
Mal (L): If it were opportunistic, it would have a better beat. It’s so earnest and guileless that it’s completely unappealing. It really shows...
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The Failure Addict
John Phillips mastered the art of serial disappointment by sharing it compulsively. This makes him a harbinger of the social media age
by Rob Horning
At best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment … therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively
—Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
It takes a...
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On the Skin of the World
(image via)
On From the Observatory by Julio Cortázar (Archipelago Books)
By Mark de Silva
Julio Cortázar’s fiction is dominated by questions of knowledge: what it consists in, how we might acquire it, and what, finally, it is worth. In Hopscotch, his acknowledged masterwork, they find expression mostly at the level of form. Cortázar explains in a prefatory note that the book’s 155 chapters...
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Dispatches from The Adventures of Mao on the Long...
Self-Portrait (1972), Salvador Dalí
Conversation with Chairman Mao:
Interpreter: One of the Americans called [Dali’s “Mao-Marilyn”] vulgar. Do you agree?
Mao: No. Dali understood the relation between sexual power, or sexual magnetism, and sexual myth, for the myth of Mao is sexual, political, et cetera. Marilyn is the feminine Mao; she is, dialectically speaking, the victim,...
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Between the Bars
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s On Booze, from the New Directions Pearl series
by Jessica Ferri
Unless one has the time and money to turn writing into a glamorous and leisurely profession, being a writer can be a thankless pursuit. The profession can drive one to drink copious amounts of alcohol, regardless of his or her talents. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then...
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Empire Goes to College
On Gigi Roggero’s The Production of Living Knowledge (Temple University Press)
Recent college graduates seem to have more debt than marketable skills. Could this actually be a good thing?
By Chris Maisano
In a speech at the 2011 Left Forum in New York, British journalist Paul Mason described the bleak prospect confronting many graduating students in the rich countries of the...
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What Is an Artist?
Andy Warhol Atomic Bomb, 1965 (via)
A Glossary
By Patrick Harrison
Classical musicians: Uptight, ambitious squares. Doctors.
New Music musicians: Having implicitly resigned from the institutional rat race, they are the cool, if slightly embarrassing, high-school teachers of the art world.
Rock musicians: Losers. Of all artists, they are the most likely to squander their entire life’s...
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The Resentment Machine
(Geoff McFetridge, via)
The immiseration of the digital creative class by Freddie deBoer The popular adoption of the internet has brought with it great changes. One of the peculiar aspects of this particular revolution is that it has been historicized in real time—reported accurately, greatly exaggerated, or outright invented, often by those who have embraced the technology most fully. As...
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Consider the Humblebrag
Roy Lichtenstein Girl in Mirror (1964)
What false modesty gains from a new medium
By Matt Pearce
On Twitter, he calls himself Totes McGotes. He’s got a job in San Diego that probably involves real estate. I’m not entirely sure.
Mr. McGotes’s (or is it Totes’s?) avatar is a obscured cell-phone photo—presumably of himself ]—shirtless in the mirror. Obviously, he’s in good shape. He...
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Redefining the Right Wing
Richard Aldrich, Syd Stripe Split (2005)
An exchange between Daniel Larison and Corey Robin about conservatism and reaction.
In The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, political theorist Corey Robin frames right-wing ideologies as impulses “to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.” These fighting words were taken...
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Scenes From Occupied Oakland
via Reuters | Stephen Lam
A street-eye view of the clashes between protesters and police
by Christopher Chitty
Keith Shannon was the picture of American pride and courage in his sailor’s whites. As plumes of tear gas and police projectiles streamed around him, he alone held the line, standing almost at attention, gripping a “Veterans for Peace” flag with his left hand while extending a copy...
October 2011
13 posts
2 tags
Savage Messiah
The following is an excerpt of Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, her long-running fanzine now available in book-form from Verso.
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Not Your Friend: Dissensus and the Police
(“Circle of Truth Hovering over The USA” by The London Police)
On police cooperation with the status quo and occupiers’ cooperation with the police
By Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
One of the most heated aspects of the Occupy mobilizations—from the Occupy Wall Street mothership to Occupy Boston (the base of my own direct observation) to Occupy Oakland (site of arguably the worst...
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The Geography of Failed Revolt
(Image by Rafal Karcz, via The Tourist)
On the strange case of #OccupyPhoenix and the search for civic life in the exurbs
By Alex Aums and James Broulard
In America (1986), Jean Baudrillard identifies two facets of the country that is his book’s subject: “the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways” and “the deep America of mores and mentalities.”...
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Money, Sex and Tweens: A Dialogue
Two YA novelists discuss the gender politics of literature’s biggest growth industry
John M. Cusick (JC) is an editor at Armchair/Shotgun and literary agent specializing in YA books. His first novel, Girl Parts is available from Candlewick Press.
Laura Goode (LG) is an essayist, poet and author. Her first novel, Sister Mischief, was released by Candlewick Press on July 12.
JC: So why did...