Drought refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside, photograph by Dorothea Lange by Gregory Jusdanis American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, by Michael Kazin, Knopf, 35p pp Governors curtail workers’ rights. President Obama’s second term is in question. The divide between the nation’s top 1% and the rest threatens to swallow us all. It’s…
Read MoreDesigned by a St Petersburg art collective, “Pproffessors”, the Little Red Men first appeared in Perm in 2010. The sculptures have split local opinion by Yelena Fedotova Marat Gelman is a well-known Moscow cultural figure. In 2008 he went to curate the Museum of Contemporary Art in provincial Perm, where his ideas for a cultural…
Read MoreDavid and Goliath Play Chess, Siegfried Zademack by Bill Benzon I’m heading toward language, imaginary objects, and the cognition of ontology. But I’m not ready to go there, not yet. There’s some preliminary hemming and hawing I want to do, so bracketing, as it were. What’s with Withdrawal? I’m thinking intuitions and how they inform…
Read Moreby Serkan Gorkemli In 2007, Kaos GL, a bimonthly publication of the Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association in Ankara, Turkey, devoted its November/December issue to “Turkiye’nin Gay Ikonlari” (Turkey’s Gay Icons). The magazine surveyed readers and published a list of the ten most popular gay icons in Turkey. Various well-known celebrities…
Read MoreNewton, William Blake, 1795 From How Religions Become Fundamentalist: A conclusion from what I have argued so far would seem to be that fundamentalist thinking, whether religious or otherwise, has always existed, even while it has been accompanied by ways of thinking that undermine it or criticize it from within. This conclusion, however, contradicts some…
Read MoreSirius B by Tim Morton The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are…
Read MoreFrom Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Production I.G, 2002 From SKOR: Any work, of art, of writing, in any media, if it is in the least bit interesting, becomes at some point an adventure. Usually, the adventure happens in the making, before the work is finished. “The work is the death mask of…
Read Moreby A. Staley Groves 1. St. Reagan and the Return of the Storyteller The 2004 Republican National Convention was a significant event concerning language and aesthetics in contemporary politics. The Reagan myth appeared as a stellar aura of sentimentality that churned a cultic swoon. Among the polity this spectacular mystery passed a glow upon the…
Read MoreTroy Davis by Timothy Morton To destroy an object is to reduce that object to mere appearance. Somehow a weapon of some kind is inserted into the rift between essence and appearance and translates the object so radically that the rift collapses. The reduction of an object to its appearance (“criminal,” “scapegoat,” “cop killer”) is…
Read Moreby Gregory Freidin Awarded the Jury’s Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s “Elena” is a powerful cinematic fete, as distinct and subtle as his 2003 prize-winning “The Return,” but one whose story carries a greater resonance and depth. A small masterpiece, it will be appreciated by a thinking audience, one…
Read MoreSteven Spielberg on the set of The Sugarland Express, 1974 by Steven Rybin Steven Spielberg’s America, by Frederick Wasser, Polity, 200 pp. In his book Citizen Spielberg, Lester D. Friedman notes the intellectual disrespectability sometimes attached to studying a filmmaker as commercially successful as Steven Spielberg. As Friedman reveals in an anecdote, one of his colleagues,…
Read MoreFrom At the Zoo, Ryan Anderson, 2001-2006 by Nicolas Ellwanger For many years now, I have spent hours describing to friends and family members why I study primates and why it fits within the field of anthropology. Unfortunately, primatologists have the unenviable task of more eloquently answering the same question when posed during an interview…
Read Moreby Katherine Wagner What struck me most about this clip was the incorporation of the theme park into the everyday life. While visually this makes the film fun for children, the incorporation of the theme park acts as a metaphor for the ways the American worker uses technology to get through the mundane work day…
Read MoreQuentin Blake by Lee Konstantinou In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Why We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading,” Alan Jacobs argues that “‘deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit.” The inevitable minority status of deep reading “has been obscured in the past half-century,…
Read MoreLucinda Williams by Joe Linker “I am here, and there is nothing to say,” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing” (Silence, 1961). “If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment.” So we boarded Line 15, ancient music now turned summer, for the 2011 Portland Blues…
Read MoreWilliam Santiago Translated by Meredith Ramirez Talusan Adios Amerika w/ all your star-spangled ideas Turned us into idiots Who had no resistance CRAZY MAN CRAZY CRAZY I get so furious everytimeIthink how we who’ve been educated are now the ones turned fools Because we’re out of touch (chua chua) Because we’re out of touch (chua chua)…
Read Moreby Christopher Warley There have been two songs constantly on the radio at the beach in Italy this summer. The first, Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song” (“Today I don’t feel like doing anything”), is so annoying that it makes you want to do something, anything, as long as it is violent. But the second, a…
Read MorePunishment of the Panderers and Seducers and the Flatterers, Sandro Botticelli, c.1480-c.1495 by Elif Batuman Forward-thinking readers! You don’t need me to tell you that our language is a living, growing organism. So, in an effort to stay with the times, I recently attempted to use the word “douchebags” in print. The context was an…
Read Moreby Julia Galef It’s not often that you find something that’s a fallacy both logically and creatively — that is, a fallacy to which both researchers and artists are susceptible. Perhaps you’re tempted to tell me I’m committing a category mistake, that artistic fields like fiction and architecture aren’t the sort of thing to which…
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