Berfrois

2011

Every Time We Ride

Every Time We Ride

From Poetry: Lupe Fiasco, who Bradley praises in Book of Rhymes, is represented in the Anthology by “Dumb It Down,” in which his bravura performance— I’m earless and I’m peer-less, that means I’m eyeless Which means I’m tearless, which means my iris Resides where my ears is —is met...

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Tuning in to Cricket Radio

Tuning in to Cricket Radio

Corps of Discovery member Andy Brand pushing for crickets by John Himmelman A few years ago I gathered some friends to hunt for the smallest cricket in North America, the Sphagnum Ground Cricket (Allonemobius palustris).   The friends are part of a group we call “Corps of Discovery”, after the...

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How the Celtic Tiger Lost Its Stripes

How the Celtic Tiger Lost Its Stripes

Ireland on the turn? | by Daniel Finn

New Left Review

For much of the past two decades, the Republic of Ireland found itself hailed as a crowning glory of neo-liberalism. Between 1993 and 2000, Irish gnp grew by an average of...

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Amelia Atlas on Mr. Talk

Amelia Atlas on Mr. Talk

Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Possessed), Fritz Eichenberg, 1959 by Amelia Atlas It is often said that one is either a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person, in the same way that one is either a cat person or a dog person.  I used to want to be a Dostoevsky person,...

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‘Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era…’

‘Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era…’

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, 20th Century Fox, 2010 From Rolling Stone: Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s...

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Our Damned Faces!

Our Damned Faces!

by Walter Kirn During a runaway Facebook session recently — on one of those threads that grows its own weird brain and sits up Frankenstein-style from the table and bursts its restraints and goes smashing out of the lab — it occurred to a few of us at once...

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“All of those painters were horny”

“All of those painters were horny”

Horny Season, Armen Eloyan From Bidoun: Would you say your paintings are dark at all? “I don’t think so.” Talking to Armen Eloyan, in spite of his gorgeous voice, can be taxing. He is exceedingly terse, mostly answering questions in combinations of one, two, three, or four words. Five...

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Gaga’s Way

Gaga’s Way

by Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks When Lady Gaga hit the pop culture-scape with “Just Dance” in 2008, her performance was accompanied by the slogan “Pop Music Will Never Be Low Brow,” which was appropriately projected in her video-screen glasses, the first of many props that would celebrate the...

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The Primitive, Technology and Horror

The Primitive, Technology and Horror

Alien, 20th Century Fox, 1979 by Norah Campbell and Mike Saren Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe,...

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