literally blogging from a house party I’M OUT IN THE FIELD GUYS
everyone is too fucked to stop me putting the east 17 stay another day mariachi doritos thing on really loud
it’s so beautiful
sigh
just from the description you should be able to see how this is exactly the kind of thing stuart hall is talking about in that quote
i tried watching the video but within 5 seconds i already wanted to punch him so
also whoever that is he opens the video with says the internet is “free” and promotion doesn’t cost anything etc.
and i don’t understand how
people still need reminding that
it’s not free
in any sense of that word
This is an extremely tricky phenomenon [of the internalisation of the circuits and circulations of cultural and artistic production], because it’s now ideologically represented to us as if there is a frictionless cultural universe in which anybody can get on the tramline anywhere, any work of art will be seen anywhere. This reductive model presents globalisation as a circuit without power, which is very mysterious. In reality, the moment you look closely at those circuits, you see massive disparities of access, of visibility, huge yawning gaps between who can and can’t be represented in any effective way… But globalisation is not internationalist at all. It doesn’t have anything to do with inter-nations.
—Stuart Hall in conversation with Michael Hardt
(thanks reem)
it really irks me when tao lin posts quotes from the book of disquiet about the futility of politics and revolution etc.
because you really get the sense that he’s identifying himself uncritically with soares
and probably not giving any thought to the fact that pessoa himself was actually fairly active politically as an anti-fascist etc.
it’s like unreflexively ventriloquising this other writer just to support his own brand of listless apolitical pseudo-zen renunciation
which the more i think about it comes to seem kinda like ayn rand on acid, but more on that some other time
“I make and sell custom jerseys for a local sports team, which is not the cheapest merchandise, and one night a few weeks ago a customer was talking to me about this and that and thinking about making a purchase. He was asking me all kinds of strange questions about whether I believe in god, whether I believe in marriage, if I have a husband, if I’m an honest Christian, et cetera, generally making me a little uncomfortable. As well he kept pulling out this huge wad of hundreds and leaving it on the counter in front of me to show that he could obviously afford whatever he wanted. A second customer approached, a shaky old man who was obviously not very well off but I had seen him before and knew he had saved up some money to buy a couple jerseys. I’m not sure how exactly it got to this point as they had exchanged words and began posturing and whatever, but the rich man being kind of an asshole made a comment to the second man that he probably has more money in his one pocket than the other man has total. He bet $10, and the second man was feeling pretty confident as he had saved up a lot for this day and so he took it. He counted his money out on the counter in front of me, close to about $1200 total. The rich guy, smug dick he was, calmly began counting his cash, getting to $3000 and then pulling out more money that he had in his other pockets and wallet. He doesn’t stop until he’s reached $5000 and then tells the poorer man to pay up the ten he owes.
The other man is upset and his daughter comes up and tells him to keep his cool and asks why he would even agree to that stupid bet and has to pull him away from my stand. The rich guy then says to me, “Some people, huh?” He didn’t end up buying anything and as he left he told me to be keep being a good Christian.
The whole experience left a very sour taste in my mouth and left me feeling upset the rest of the night.”
“I was bumped up to first class on my way home from a trip. I’ve never been in first class and assumed it was just better seats and food options but no… I was suddenly treated differently as if I had suddenly become more important than everyone else on the plane. I especially remember at the end of the flight when first class was unloading. My bags were still in the back of the plane so I didn’t get up right away and was planning on waiting for everyone to get off before me. The flight attendants offered to make everyone make way for me to get to the back of the plane, get my bags, and get off. I told her that I didn’t want to inconvenience everyone and she responded, “Maybe they are the ones inconveniencing you.” This statement took me by suprise… is this really the way rich people think?”
Manchester fell through so my future once again appears as a wrap-around matrix of deepening banality, variegated only by temporary spikes of horror.
You mean the generation that paid three times as much for college to enter a job market with triple the unemployment isn’t interested in purchasing the assets of the generation who just blew an enormous housing bubble and kept it from popping through quantitative easing and out-and-out federal support? Curious.
“
| — | When comments are better than the article, Atlantic edition (“The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials arent’ buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy”) |
The male type is characterised by a detached, if not outright dysfunctional, sensibility: retreat from a perplexing and frustrating emotional world into an intellectual domain in which their precocious facility with words and images affords them a degree of mastery and skewed self-understanding. “Girls” are then somewhat unfortunately positioned as gateways into the abandoned realm of sensual and emotional connection, and alternately idealised as muses/sex-goddesses and denigrated as (variously) narcissists, seducers, trivial beings, neurotic leeches, etc. (Dworkin’s inventory of misogynist stereotypes remains one of the most comprehensive and deeply-felt). Duncan Thaw’s alternating attraction towards and contempt for Kate Caldwell is exemplary here, as is his delirious observation that “men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the recipe is hate”.
Young female intellectuals (again, I’m talking about the characters one encounters in books, such as the memoirs mentioned above) seem to have problems not so much with “boys” as with themselves: boys are a nuisance insofar as they behave unfeelingly and unpleasantly, rather than because they represent an unattainable connection with some inaccessible reality. It is a matter of reconciling, or finding ways of living with not being able to reconcile, one’s full and contradictory humanity with the simplified and diminished humanity encoded as “femininity”; resisting (rather than transcending) confinement, the “women’s room” of narrowed scope and lowered expectations. The problem is then one of knowing what to do with oneself, where to put all that stuff for which there appears to be neither place nor name.
aboulie replied to your photo: one summer when I was in my early teens BBC2 did a…
Did they show Les Enfants du Paradis? I first saw it on IFC years ago, and it became quickly a personal favorite. Wish I could match a name to the film you had seen. If you find out, please let me know.
no that would be too old, it was a ‘contemporary’ french season around the early 2000s. I’ve still not actually seen les enfants though would very much like to, missed a chance a while back when the BFI toured a restoration of it that swung by my neck of the woods
I always feel like the title is on the tip of my tongue (‘highway 7’ or something along those lines isn’t it but is the closest thing that ever comes to mind), and since it became the highest grossing french film ever just googling stuff like ‘french film disabled people’ comes up with nothing but that ‘les intouchables’
anyway, it’s probably not even that good and I don’t care much for finding it again, just a nice curious memory I have from a formative period of my life
more than anything that post was about getting to the point that eventually I want a big poster of marx to hang upside down in my room and explain in different ways to each person who asks
one summer when I was in my early teens BBC2 did a whole long season of french films showing after midnight and I had a TV in my room so I could get away with watching them and this, it seems, is when I first seriously started getting into non-hollywood stuff, even if it was only mostly mainstream contemporary french romantic dramas, stuff mainly aimed at middle aged women (though this never put me off, if anything it made them more interesting). I remember only two of these films for sure and they were venus beauty institiute and 8 femmes
the one which really opened my eyes though was a film I can’t remember much of at all and haven’t been able to find since, and which in fact I think I only saw the last 45 minutes or half an hour of
it was incredibly low budget, the technics were really bare minimum, and it was set in a care home for the disabled, I remember there being some sort of central love story arc between (maybe) two of the carers working there, and one of the other plots involved them getting this really grumpy guy in a wheelchair to see a prostitute and have sex for the first time or something
I remember it had a bizarre meta-ending where something is resolved and the central couple walk back into the care home and go into a room where a projector is running the last scene or the credits sequence against a wall or something along those lines and they watch it and they put their arms around each other, or don’t, I don’t remember
and the other detail, the one that really sticks with me, is that the guy in the wheelchair they’re trying to get to see a prostitute has this picture of marx on his wall, hung upside down, and I don’t believe it’s explained
“A Swedish woman named Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer coined the term “Objectum Sexual” (or OS) in the 1970s after she married the Berlin Wall and took on the last name “Berliner-Mauer.” Of the phenomenon, Eija-Riitta says it’s not actually a recent phenomenon. “While unusual in Western society, in Eastern cultures people routinely believe objects have souls,” she said. “It is perfectly normal.” When the wall was taken down 10 years into their marriage, Berliner-Mauer was distraught but eventually shifted her affections to a local fence.”
— — —
“In Feb 2008, Erika Eiffel, an object-sexual living near San Francisco, California founded OS Internationale, an educational website and international online community for those identifying or researching the condition to love objects. The website generated a flood of international media interest.
Eiffel, whose name derives from her marriage to the Eiffel Tower in 2007, has been featured as a spokesperson in a variety of international articles, radio talk shows, and television programs and documentaries worldwide.
The logo for the OS Internationale is the Swedish Red Fence, Röda Staketet, and represents the fence of Mrs. Eklöf Berliner-Mauer who was the first acknowledged OS person to go public. The fence symbolizes transparency and division.”
