A Library Sans Livres
Will the library of the future be a reliquary of precious artifacts or the information processor that obliterates them?
You Know You're the Prettiest Girl
The temptation to dismiss multimedia artist Laurel Nakadate as a wallowing narcissist, a sub-Jackass-level prankster, or an emotional terrorist is strong. She appears as all those things in the retrospective of her work at P.S. 1, inviting the audience’s contempt as well as their lascivious stares.
Gay Life Against Marriage
In this way, the gay political project wasn’t just emancipatory or messianic, nor could it be exhausted by a list of demands; from within, it undercut capitalism’s charge that there be no alternative by fucking a different world into being.
Love in the Age of Self-Consciousness
Tradition — “how things are done here” — has been fatally disrupted. We can enter an elevator in any city or an Italian restaurant in any American town and understand what to expect and what to do. And thanks to the universality of money and the pervasive norms of capitalist market exchange, we trust we
School's Out Forever
The hope is that every student has a teacher or two over a decade and a half that really makes them question and think, but either way, we silently acknowledge that they’ll spend the majority of their young vigor-filled lives quivering at the arbitrary mercy of petty kooks and jowly tyrants.
The Mirror-Slave Dialectic
When I traced my face shape onto my mirror with lipstick, I was bowing to the needs of my inner slave. I was reaching toward the looking-glass and willing the world contained therein to reveal a great insight. Tell me my face shape so I may never again have an unflattering haircut, ye mirror!
The Captive Audience
I do not mean to imply that these were the best films (if you want to call them that) of the decade. Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, the Dardenne brothers, and Bela Tarr all have claims on that title. But some kind of tipping point has been reached.
Playing Against Type
Midnight in Paris and the Many Wives of Woody Allen
Death is Not the End
The recent publication of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (in a new translation by Dustin Condren) calls for a renewed investigation of the political, intellectual and religious…
Place Matters
As more aspects of our lives are digitized, literature is an increasingly crucial means of expressing, understanding, and preserving places and their influences.
Heroine: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
A review of Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis
runs/Away from his own applause.
(via John Foster) On sense and subjectivity in the poetry of Dan Beachy-Quick We fear that we can’t communicate our thoughts or experience to others. When…
Place Matters
As more aspects of our lives are digitized, literature is an increasingly crucial means of expressing, understanding, and preserving places and their influences. At the…
Place Matters
As more aspects of our lives are digitized, literature is an increasingly crucial means of expressing, understanding, and preserving places and their influences. At the…
Seeing Through Transparency
(via tsevis) We fight for data because corporate media, blogs, and hacker pronouncements alike tell us that information is power, and that anarchic explosions of data…
It Gets Worse
The dissonance between the two poles, between puppy and wolf, altar boy and Rosemary’s baby, is the heart of Odd Future’s sound Since Roland Barthes…