February 2012
91 posts
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No Kings of New York
By Malcolm Harris
An Interview with Doomtree Collective
One place where you do get prescriptive, both in your individual and group music, is calling other folks out for lacking originality. With more and more outlandish hip-hop getting mainstream attention, do you think that’s changing?
P.O.S.: We have a situation where people are making more interesting music and release it free on the...
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“But Santorum’s hypocrisy is boring. What’s interesting to me is the fundamental...”
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Body Image Tips from Plato
By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
I didn’t set out to become a body image blogger. I just wanted to write about clothes.
Well, that’s not really sufficiently precise. Lots of people write about clothes. I wanted to write about my own clothes. Of course, lots of people do that too. What I really wanted to do was to write about my relationship with my clothes. Back when I started my blog, Decoding...
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Beside the Point: Appearance Anxiety in Eating...
By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
In preparation for National Eating Disorders Awareness Week—which starts today—the Renfrew Center sent out an interesting press release, one you’d think would be right up my alley. “Barefaced and Beautiful,” a campaign from the Renfrew Center, one of the best-known eating disorder treatment facilities in the United States, is encouraging women to post photos of...
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The Slow Politics of Occupied Filmmaking
By Adam Rothstein
I thought of Bela Tarr’s film, Werckmeister Harmonies, several times as I sat in the Occupied Media Van. I too, was awaiting the approach of what might have been a gigantic whale. I peered through the Livestream window, that conjured square of futuristic omnipresent light and darkness, and I switched tabs to monitor Twitter, its textual equivalent. The “whale” was a line of...
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All I needed was a sandwich to make me believe in...
“You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country? They stuff an old wallet with putrid chicken innards. Well, take it from me, a man is just like that, except that he’s fatter and hungrier and can move around, and inside there’s a dream.”
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Compared to the extravagance of the betrothal... →
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“Male tenure-track professors may be abusing...
“Although it is targeted at men, paternity leave is also thought to improve the lot of women. The rationale is that if both men and women take time away from work to care for their children, it will no longer be mothers who suffer a disproportionate effect in their careers. Paternity leave is also believed to encourage a more balanced distribution of child-raising responsibilities....
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The Fame Game
Image by imp kerr
Frank Warren of PostSecret and Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen discuss the instability of sudden Internet celebrity
Hannah Hart: I’m petrified of the future. What happened to me happened so suddenly. I wasn’t aiming for it. So, I’m scared it’s gonna disappear, I’m scared I’m gonna make the wrong choices. I’m playing in an arena I have no experience in whatsoever. I’m wary of...
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Northanger Abbey and antisocial pleasure
By Rob Horning
Though published last, Northanger Abbey was probably among the first novels Jane Austen wrote, sometime around 1799. While it’s not regarded as straight-up juvenilia, it’s sometimes dismissed as a slight and occasionally awkward mix of parody with the ”free indirect speech” approach she later perfected, a satire of Gothic novels that can seem obvious and unnecessary. Austen has...
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A reign of terror that not even the police or the...
[hell, if the hose fits… consequences of mass-production, the gas-fueled fallout of the Système Gribeauval spreading outward to the interchangeability of all parts, across sectors, and, therefore, to the irregular weaponization‡ of what is supposed to push pistons, not burn schools, and be handled by Mobil men, not arsonists in straw hats; all of which poses the yawning question: shit,...
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Thoughts on a Word: Nappy
By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
Nappy is, at the very least, to be handled with caution. It may mean diaper in some parts of the world, but that’s not the case at all, in these our United States of America. Here, nappy is combustible. Not everyone can say it and come away unscathed. Say it to, or even just near, the wrong person and it might just blow up in your face.
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Night Moves
By Christine Baumgarthuber
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Das Schlaraffenland, 1567
Enviable is the sleeper who sleeps, who sinks into nothingness and remains there for a good seven to ten hours, rising again only with the sun.
Enviable and perhaps contemptible. “I hate a man who goes to sleep at once,” complains Mark Twain. Provoking his hatred is nothing specific, rather only “a sort of...
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Portrait of the Artist as a Rookie Cop
By If You Can Read This You’re Lying
The photographs of Antonio Bolfo, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate and former NYPD patrolman who took artistic photographs while on the job, humanize both officers and civilians. So says the The New York Times. But is this true? And if it is, does it matter? As to the civilians: when a cop says ‘cheese,’ do you have any choice but to smile? And...
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Look What You Did, You Little Jerk
By Mary Borkowski
Imagine you are driving home from a long day one Friday and little ghoul-faced vampires, witches, and sheet-masked bodies start to dart around your car. They slow the traffic and swallow up your vehicle in a wave. They wade into the street and whack your sedan with buckets full of candy. A few of the gutsier ones press their faces up against the car windows and cackle at you,...
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Best in Show
By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
I don’t particularly like dogs, at least not as a species. Some of them are perfectly lovely creatures I’m happy to share space with on an as-needed basis; others are sources of anything ranging from annoyance to terror.
So it wasn’t the dogs that got me into the Westminster Dog Show the other day, not exactly. I was on the treadmill at the gym, which is where I...
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X Marks the Spot: Occupy’s Architecture
By James Graham
Before it was Zuccotti Park, it was Liberty Plaza Park. The old name reflected the realities of Manhattan real estate, binding the park by association to the building that stands just north of it: One Liberty Plaza, a 54-story tower that necessitated the park’s very existence. The Park formerly known as Liberty Plaza, surfaced in granite and shaded by honey locusts, was a result...
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The Earnestness of Being Grantham
That’s what real class antagonism is, the relatonship between the powerful who use their power to benefit themselves and the weak whose subjection to it makes them objects of exploitation. In industrial capitalism, this antagonism is the exploitation of labor; in agricultural economies, it’s based around rents and debt peonage. But the principle is similar enough, and in both cases, the...
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As if she lived a mad, gay life …
By Christine Baumgarthuber
Edward Hopper, Morning in a City (1944)
“What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl’s apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a scrap of cheese and some canned orange juice in the icebox, perhaps a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying...
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Sunday Reading
By Aaron Bady
Political Movements in Bahrain, Past, Present, and Future
What We Owe to Each Other: An Interview with David Graeber, Part 1 and Part 2.
The Moscow Protests, part one, two, three, and four
When Oakland Is Under Attack, What Do We Do?
Barack Obama Can’t Stop Making Stupid Sexist Jokes About His Daughters’ Dating Lives
I’m Every Woman: Whitney Houston, the Voice of the Post-Civil...
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Predictive analytics and information camouflage
By Rob Horning
Charles Duhigg’s article in the New York Times Magazine and this excerpt from Joseph Turow’s book at the Atlantic make for good companion reading. Both are about the rise of data mining for marketing purposes — the efforts to assign consumers a profile that will then determine their status in various retail spheres and what sort of deals they will be offered and ads they will...
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Hate on Me
By Kate Redburn
Matthew Wettlaufer, The Murder of Allen Schindler, 2007
Captive Genders Eric Stanley and Nat Smith, eds AK Press 365 pages
Queer (In)Justice Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Witlock Beacon Press 216 pages
In March 2002, 17-year-old April Mora was brutally attacked near her Denver home. As the authors of Queer (In)Justice explain, two white men jumped the queer...
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Boor and Peace: The Russian Occupation of Paris...
By Christine Baumgarthuber
Snugs nooks outfitted with wall-length mirrors and chairs upholstered in red velvet shelter men and women, who chat as they sip from demitasses. A waitress in a white apron wipes her knife before slicing a cake into squares. Patrons pass in and out, quickly and lightly as moths. Business is in full swing at a café in the City of Lights.
The cosmopolitan leisure...
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Precarity and “affective resistance”
The word precarity is becoming increasingly fashionable as a way of describing the effects of neoliberal policy. The concept expresses the sense that the state has broken its ideological promise (what Polanyi posited in The Great Transformation) to ameliorate the misery capitalism necessarily generates. The state tries to offload as much of the responsibility for maintaining a minimum standard...
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███████ (zero-length files; thread-topic: SHEx)
By
FILES B1 & B2. “Come to Mommy.”
A polaroid showing the tilted tiled room at S-19, located inside S-75, and vice versa (mutatis mutandis).
A floor plan showing S-19 and S-75, both located internally within S-19 and S-75.
-=-
FILE C. Recovered from Jerry Syrup’s computer:
From: ShUwH Subject: SHEx Initiation Ritual Date: August 16, 2010 4:58:37 PM EDT -000000 To:...
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Every tile was identical and black, except █
“Today is a day of hate,” said Ritz.
Mid-December, two guards took Rubi Possolipo to S-19. S-19 was a small facility operated by T-Symmetric from New York. “One confirmed,” said one guard. Rubi was in the tiled tilted room, tied up. Every tile was identical and black, except █ which was black and engraved with a black Spanish diacritical mark. The floor was tilted on purpose, the light was...
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Seeing these men live it up makes my mouth water….
“Gipfel der Höflichkeit” (1894)
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A.C.A.K.K.: All Cops Are Keystone Kops
As always, the best research into the police will be lived, especially through struggles in which people engage, the conversations they have and actions they take, and the internal discussions, splits, and and tensions that threaten to “ruin a movement.”‡ But the divide of practical and theoretical should never map simply onto things bodies do and things heads do, nor should it imagine that a...
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The Fire Next Time
‘This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.’ —James Baldwin, ‘My Dungeon Shook—Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation’
‘A favela um inferno, Oh Jerusalém.’ —Asian Dub Foundation, ’19 Rebellions,’ a track about the Carandiru massacre
In 2009 Honduras was the site of the first military coup in Latin America...
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I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream
By Ben Gabriel
Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth? Is its absence more than an expedient, minimalist design choice? And does her lack of a mouth necessarily translate into the absence of a voice, as the arguments tend to go? The first Hello Kitty product, after all, was a coin purse with HELLO printed in block capitals over an image of Kitty; her name is her form, and it is speech.
Most...
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Against Ted
By Nathan Jurgenson
When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart?
Started as a one-off conference nearly 30 years ago, the TED (“Technology, Entertainment and Design”) phenomenon has grown to two large annual events and many smaller regional TEDx events, focusing mostly but not exclusively on technology. TED has...
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Rootless & Ruthless
By Laurie Penny,
It’s two in the morning and I’m bent over a laptop watching fifty homeless protesters chant “occupy!” as police drive them out of the old bank building where they were living. This is happening live: One of the occupiers has managed to get a wobbly video link up and running, and the officers guarding the doors are surrounded by a thicket of jeering cameras. Meanwhile,...
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We’ll make them uninhabitable, or even pull them...
Forget Saint Valentine’s Day and the exaltation of the private. It is Alexander Kluge‘s birthday today. (Although granted, the image of his birth does not go as sexily with Jodeci and almond oil bubble baths as the thought of a beheaded priest outside the Flaminian Gate in Rome.)
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Reading Like a Loser
Sometimes it’s said that we’re all Nietzscheans now. From cultural studies to continental philosophy, Nietzsche’s ideas aren’t so much studied as presupposed; they’re part of the deep grammar of those disciplines, part of the furniture. These days, disquieting Nietzschean insights like, say, perspectivism (the idea that there are no facts, only interpretations) have come to seem commonplace. At...
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Breaking Down Beauty: Physiognomy Revisited
Just when you thought you’d read enough from me about physiognomy—the discredited pseudoscience of face-reading to determine character—for one month, here I come, wagging my charts with dimensions of bulbous foreheads and “lipless mouths” that “denote housewifery.” It’s just that in thinking more about the notion of “It” girls as a modern-day version of the science of face-reading, I realized...
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Superman/Everyman
Review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas
America was once seduced by a violent, charming, but ultimately insane egotist with a distinctive mustache, a superiority complex, and a penchant for unabashed cruelty. Captivated by his mercurial flashes of comedy and brutal passion, and by the verve with which he quoted Italian, Americans were of two...
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Nietzsche Is Our Valentine
This February 14, The New Inquiry is sending our love to a certain mustachioed Teutonic superman. Whether he’s writing his own mythology, tracing conceptual genealogies, or picking fights with deities, our love is eternally recurrent. In his honor, we have two reviews of books about his work:
“Superman/Everyman” – Roger Bellin on Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietszche
and
“Reading...
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Some Assembly Required: Parlor Games and Their...
It often happens that, by accident of consanguinity or some other connection, people who don’t get along must spend a few after-dinner hours together. This happens mostly at holidays. Once the jellied cranberry and candied yams have been dispatched, these ill-sorted fellows, having swallowed their antipathies like so many antacids, sit in uneasy silence. Feeling it at once too early and too late...
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“where MPs no longer feel safe walking in the...
“Our politicians lied to us. They never told us the truth, and now they want to pass policies that they have no mandate to do. As that sign says over there,” she said, pointing to a friend holding a placard, “We choose to be free. Keep your money.” But that was one of the milder slogans.
Read More | Helena Smith, I fear for a social explosion: Greeks can’t take any more punishment | The...
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What I would really love to see eradicated — and will do my part in helping eradicate — is the notion that because women’s beauty is this innate, primal thing (supposedly), that means it has a power over men, and that if women just learned how to tap into that power more we’d have arrived at a place of “separate but equal.” I think that’s bullshit. There are undeniable benefits that come with...