'In the late 1970s members of the US press metonymized Iran's hardliners as turbans and its moderates as neckties.' —Necktie  Western fashion is rarely subject to the same scrutiny as non-Western fashion garb. Rare, too, is the invitation to closely inspect men's fashion as an exhibitor of cultural values, masculine authority, and significantly, capitalism. (If you are a non-American/non-European woman, the chances that your habit will be cause for public and also political consternation is the equivalent of three cherries clocking in unison at a slot machine.) That's why the correspondences pictured above are a delightfully surprising find. In 1978 American artist Jeffrey Vallance sent one of his ties to dozens of government leaders with the request that they send back one of their own, as 'a token of friendship and as a symbol of the cultural ties between our nations.' By 1979, at least 47… Read More...

After several days of enduring a solid, nagging throat ache, I took a one-day vow of bed rest. Though I found myself going in an out of lucidity, with shivering, body aches, and all the other concomittant symptoms of acute coryza (a.k.a. the common cold) I availed myself of no drug harsher than a 200-milligram ibuprofen every few hours. And I found that I couldn't speak: every careful attempt at forming a sentence ended in vacuum-filled gasp and a look from interlocutors that mixed pity, concern, and amusement. Why the illness had lodged itself so resolutely in my pharynx was not immediately clear; the medical doctor I consulted after not being able to swallow anything but liquids for those two days took a strep throat test (negative) and handed me a 'Cold/Viral Illness' FAQ that a friend pointed out was… Read More...

The following is a guest post by Jack Hamilton. Earlier this week the prolific Miami-based rapper Rick Ross released his latest mixtape, pictured above. From a purely musical standpoint it’s pretty good in the way that a lot of Rick Ross’ stuff is good: lively, consistent, generally bereft of risk. But evaluating anything Rick Ross does from “a purely musical standpoint” is a little like evaluating Star Wars based on Chewbacca’s acting technique: Rick Ross isn’t so much a musician as a constellation of interconnected ideas, an concept album in human form. And when that concept album suddenly boasts the title The Black Bar Mitzvah and a cover that scans like Choose Your Own Adventure: Overdetermined Signifier, well, it’s best to begin from the beginning. Rick Ross (pronounced RICK RO$$) was born William Leonard Roberts, taking his professional handle from… Read More...

Boston is a city perennially self-conscious about public art. A recent Boston Phoenix cover story examined why so many young artists leave a city ranked in the Top 10 for national arts funding. When it comes to large-scale works in the public domain the city tends to favor exogenous creations rather than home-grown communities that shape or foster artistic breakthroughs. The accusation that the city is risk-averse and WASP-y descends from an 'age-old attitude central to the very culture of Boston itself: a city where philanthropy as historically been dedicated to institutions and fine art, rather than to visual art and artists that push boundaries.'¹  The most publicly discussed art work to happen to the city this year, or at least as long as anyone can remember, is 'The Giant of Boston' by Os Gêmeos. Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo are Brazilian brothers… Read More...

Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet CAConrad. If you are dejected or confused or depressed about the place of art in the age of mass technological fuckitallwithery you might consider reading Conrad, who bursts in on that debate from the bitterly frigid outdoors with a warm gust of joyousness, righteous anger, and hard-won self-possession. His poetry is an outstretched hand with a note scribbled inside that says, Art makes the world go 'round. For Conrad, an active questioning of where art comes from and the interpellation of the writer/reader/listener within that enterprise is at the center of things. He shows you the physio-psychological labor behind that work by exposing carefully prepared 'somatic exercises' of which he is a creator and participant—as far as 'teaching' writing goes, it's an egalitarian performance. In… Read More...

Every few years we get to play a part in choosing the national Daddy. I see your Tiger mom and raise you an Eagle dad. _____ I've held several jobs considered menial or 'jobby-jobs' but one I have never chosen and would never be able to choose is sewing flags. To thread non-wearable fabric in primary colors would give me nightmares of being BLED THROUGH with them. _____ They hate us because we use money from China to pay for a children's program featuring a giant bird. We have failed in being nuanced and cautious about how we pay for the televisual sighting of our national birds. _____ It is dishonest to call U.S. elections U.S. elections. They are by default world elections. They collapse the concept of 'at home' and 'abroad' in ways that have not even begun to… Read More...

Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet, essayist, editor, professor, and political activist Juliana Spahr. Have you read her essay 'Metromania: Poetry, Academy, Anarchy'? (I searched high and low for it—at least two library archives carrying the journal in which it appeared skipped that publication year, and I surreptitiously started to give this omission greater meaning—so she has generously allowed me to set it free.) Published twelve years ago, 'Metromania' reflected on the institutionalized American literary establishment, the nature of creation and the larger social fabric, and financial subsidization (or lack thereof). It is as relevant as ever. To see just how relevant, I refer the reader to two places: (1) Spahr and Joshua Clover's jointly-written 'A Job Letter to the Poetry Foundation' (May 2012) nominating themselves for the organization's presidency on the grounds… Read More...

The following is a guest post by Elliott Prasse-Freeman. The meteoric rise of comedian Louis CK’s show Louie reached its zenith during the infamous Dane Cook episode, in which the ostensibly-fictional narrative addresses a real feud: Cook’s alleged theft of CK’s jokes. The viewer can only suspect what kind of wrangling went on in the writing of the scene in which they confront each other, but it produces a remarkable economy of fame: in exchange for accepting that Cook did not intentionally steal CK’s jokes, CK gets to effectively destroy Cook as a comic: You’re like a machine of success, you’re like a rocket, you’re rocketing to the stars, and things are getting sucked up in your engines, like birds, and bugs, and some of my jokes. I think you saw me do them, I know you saw me do them, and I… Read More...

The following is a guest post by Matthew Battles. The invitation to post at South/South came to mind the other day as I was driving fast down a country road in Illinois: a gravel-dusted, two-lane blacktop, of all places, a blistered seam between corn and beans. A quarter mile or so down the lane, a flock of birds wheeled against the molten sky—a token of disaster, a sign of impending crisis brought by drought and industrial agriculture. Or so it seemed; as I drew closer, the birds lost focus, grew tattered and uncanny, until passing beneath I managed to reread the apparition as mere shreds of dried cornstalk twirling in a stately vortex of slow-turning air. Now, arguably, the image was a more-fitting symbol of agricultural apocalypse: these were after all actual crops, withered and torn from the ground, turning… Read More...

The following is a guest post by Christina Kral and Adriana Valdez Young.  SETTING The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has a desk space for 1,000 staff and 619 blast-proof apartments, the sealed compound includes a cinema and retail complex, a food court, schools, and medical facilities as well as its own power generation and water purification systems. A perfect American container city within a war-torn Baghdad. The first shopping mall was born in post-World War II America. Émigré architect Victor Gruen was nostalgic for his home city of Vienna, which he had fled in 1938 after it was annexed by Germany. In 1956, he created the Southdale Center in Edina Minnesota, the world’s first enclosed shopping mall. Gruen had a dream of the mall as a harmonious city. He planned for schools, apartments, cultural institutes, hospitals, parks and more to be attached to… Read More...

Transcribed data on the fate of some paintball gunshots, flames, hammers, pig’s legs, and bottles of acid in the first half of August 2012 in the United States of America.   ONTARIO, California. Worshippers said two women threw the three legs onto the driveway of the proposed Al-Nur Islamic Center in Ontario shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday and sped away in a white pickup.     NORTH SMITHFIELD, Rhode Island. Muslims from a North Smithfield mosque are asking for extra protection after a sign outside their place of worship was vandalized over the weekend. North Smithfield police confirmed they are studying surveillance video recorded around 3:30 a.m. Sunday. That's when a person was seen driving into the mosque's parking lot and smashing the sign with a hammer.     MORTON GROVE, Illinois. The shots were heard by worshipers who were outside the… Read More...

The following is a guest post by Elliott Prasse-Freeman. I visit Uganda’s capital Kampala regularly, and so the city’s recent Ebola outbreak might have seemed relevant to me. And yet, oddly, I didn’t really think much of it. Indeed, despite the generally horrific deaths that befell those folks in that 1990s-era mass-contagion movie, and the fact that the film was inspired by real events in east Africa, my first reaction upon hearing the Ebola news was casual curiosity. It was only upon a doctor friend impressing Ebola’s “it will kill you” nature upon me did I even consider canceling my upcoming trip: Are you in Kampala? Just don't go to Mulago hospital, which you shouldn't be going to anyway. And don't go to Kitaale. Otherwise you're probably fine. If it gets to more than a few hundred cases, I would… Read More...

The following is a guest post by Linnéa Hussein. It's called Slumdog Industrial Millionaire and the Ecstasy of Victoria. Not even the Nazis could top this shit. —Danny Boyle on the Opening Ceremony, "Fuck the Olympics" in If You Can Read This You're Lying During the Olympic opening ceremony I sat outside in a beer garden in Germany trying to have a conversation with an old friend, when my visiting friend from Luxembourg kept pointing at the television screen behind the windows mumbling about Britain’s idiotic ways of spending money and distorting their history. That was my first glimpse at the Olympic Summer Games 2012: a muted screen full of bizarrely arranged Mary Poppins, Shakespeares, steelworkers, and 007. I didn’t think much of it until I came home and saw the flood of enthusiasm and national pride on Facebook coming from… Read More...