Aestheticizing Suffering

"Could it be that what were in the past necessary and substantive critiques of representation have become, in practical terms, hindrances to actually looking at images? And that this has contributed to an effective political passivity in the face of a rapidly changing communications environment? Hariman and Lucaites rightly point to “the larger problem identified by Peter Sloterdijk that modernity has entered into a terminal phase of ‘enlightened selfconsciousness’ whereby all forms of power have been unmasked with no change in behavior [my emphasis]. Irony is too widely dispersed throughout modern consciousness, subjectivity too fragmented, the administration of power too cynical, and critique too disposed to reification for unmasking to be other than a reproduction of the world it would change.”"

a couple of churches from an absolutely top-notch site devoted to one of my favorite American cities--Deep Oakland

"Affiliated with neither the tourism nor better business bureaus, Deep Oakland seeks to create a compendium of inter-linked images, text and sound that represent the complications and vitality of Oakland’s current moment..."

intelligent review of new Scott Walker film--

"Marc Almond touches upon a crucial point—namely, how much Walker shared the attitudes of Kitchen Sink Realism: the chasms and pitfalls on all sides, the sense of being deeply disturbed, thrown for a loop. It’s not that John Osborne’s plays or the social-realist black-and-white films of early and mid-’60s Britain directly inspired Walker, but that this was the world he was looking for when he arrived in London, a world he knew from television. For a while, the colorful hubbub of Swinging London obstructed his view, but Walker realized that he needed only to take a few steps away from the scene to find his beloved black-and-white world: bleakness, poetic dereliction, housing projects, bad weather. The irony of such a situation, in which a grim and depressing social reality was the almost cherished fulfillment of the promises of television, is perhaps something like the formula for Walker’s art as a whole. His music is not in fact about estrangement at all, but about all-too-familiar aspects of the world and its horrors..."

Value Village Is Booby-Trapped!!

"Waterloo Ballad, or, Why Glenn Gould Always Wore Gloves

In the land of Finger Eleven
under hand dryers
everyone will have
a lackadaisical outing today

There I experienced trout
and the beavers that try
so hard
to get a hand-out

The residential parts
have yellow-brick houses
and many incidents
of purposely-falling pianos

Though the waiters
failed to make it clear
wheat beers
have a spicier, less bitter flavour

And shock --
Smash!!
went my
glass

the pathos
only matched
by the photos..."