July 2011
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S&M
Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why lovers are not so punished is that the lunacy is so ordinary the whippers are in love too.
As You Like It (3.2)
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First Things First 1964: A Manifesto
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students who have been brought up in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable means of using our talents. We have been bombarded with publications devoted to this belief, applauding the work of those who have flogged their skill and...
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“I’m not against the war. I’m against the troops.”
– Bill Hicks
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List of Prisoners
First, here’s young Master Rash. Then is there here one Master Caper. Then have we here young Dizzy, and young Master Deepvow, and Master Copperspur and Master Starve-lackey the rapier and dagger man, and young Drophair that killed lusty Pudding, and Master Forthright the tilter, and brave Master Shoe-tie the great traveller, and wild Half-can that stabbed Pots.
Measure for Measure...
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“Consciousness is like the light trapped in the greenhouse of language.”
– Mark Kingwell
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You're Paying for the Design
The self as we experience it is like the graphic user interface developed by those proto-Macintosh visionaries at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, a comforting and simplistic piece of make-believe that presents a friendly visage, the familiar illusion of the desktop, masking the intricacies of machine code buzzing away below, all those marching zeros and ones. The conscious self is no more...
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Three Stages of Capitalism: Stage Three
Suppose for a moment that there are three clear stages of capitalism, defined minimally as the dominance of markets by money.
The third stage, postmodern capitalism (for lack of a better label), is with us still. We witness both the cultivation and the manufacture of desire—and the wild proliferation of it. The market engine is still producing consumption, but now it is consumption of the self in...
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Three Stages of Capitalism: Stage Two
Suppose for a moment that there are three clear stages of capitalism, defined minimally as the dominance of markets by money.
The second stage, late capitalism, is what caught the Frankfurt School’s gimlet eye in the middle of the last century. Now the engine of the system is the production not of goods and services but of consumption itself. That is, rather than merely cultivating longstanding...
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Three Stage of Capitalism: Stage One
Suppose for a moment that there are three clear stages of capitalism, defined minimally as the dominance of markets by money.
The first, classical capitalism, defines the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, more or less the moment that Veblen analyzed. The engine at this stage of development is the straightforward production of goods and services. In order to...
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Sunglasses Etiquette
There are those who have become obsessive about sunglasses in a way that comes close to high-functioning autism. These are people who expect you to know that their specially made frames come from the same Italian workshop that made the pair that Steve McQueen wears in The Getaway, before they take you seriously.
Deyan Sudjic, quoted by Mark Kingwell
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“23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning”
– Kerouac on Technique
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Democratic citizens
There is a simple reason why most contemporary democratic systems focus their energy, and their discourse, on how social services are delivered in exchange for taxes.
Democratic citizens, with their well-stoked individual interests and the priority placed on their own families, need not possess any conception of civic virtue. They need not participate with vigor in public life; they need not even...
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Big Bang Theory
We have lost sight of the key lesson of all politics, which is that origins of political order are either insupportable, mysterious, or both. To know everything about the [Chinese] legal system, for example….is to still know nothing about why the state should ever have a monopoloy on the unpunished use of lethal violence.
Sooner or later all politics is realpolitik. And here, as Derrida...
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Modern blackmail
As penalties for both homosexuality and abortion increased in the late 19th century, so, too, did the practice of blackmail. In fact, it was during this period that blackmail developed its modern form: threatening to reveal damaging information about someone’s private behavior. The French writer Leo Taxil noted that prejudice against male homosexuals made them easy prey for blackmail. And in...
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Hollywood
allabouttoledo:
“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”
Michelangelo Antonioni
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