Is it possible to make a photograph of New Jersey regardless of where you are in the world? The Pierro Gallery and iheartphotograph.com invite photographers, designers, and artists of all kinds to participate in this global open call for work. Details are here.
Contact your reps to oppose S. 2248 and support the Feingold-Dodd amendment to strip retroactive amnesty.
According to the Senate website, the schedule for this afternoon is as follows (Note: all are in ET):
2:00 p.m.: Convene and begin a period of morning business.
3:00 p.m.: Resume consideration of S.2248, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance bill.
8:30 p.m.: Proceed to the House of Representatives for the president's State of the Union address.
First up in terms of voting will be the cloture vote that Sen. McConnell moved on Friday, regarding closing debate on S.2248. If the "no" votes take it, then there is a subsequent cloture vote to allow for a 30-day extension of the PAA, as I understand it, so that both the House and Senate can take time to go through the materials on NSA domestic spying that the Bush Administration finally turned over to the House Intel committee late last week. (Piles and piles of paper, which they have been pouring over all weekend, I hear.)
If that fails, then we are potentially back to debate on S.2248 and all of the proposed amendments that various groups have been trying to put forward to improve the bill -- or change it in some way, depending on the amendment. And we are again facing the potential of a Dodd filibuster, among other efforts to block wholesale passage of telecom immunity and basket warrants, among other constitutional and legal problems with the bill.
Or Sen. Reid could remove the bill from consideration altogether if the 30-day extension is not agreed to, the PAA would expire on Friday, and we would then go back to the FISA bill as it stood before this whole chain of idiocy began -- and we could start fresh with the House RESTORE Act as a base for negotiations potentially. Or any number of other scenarios that can be spun out from there. - FDL
"While the Mayor's office drags its feet, a slew of local politicians came out yesterday afternoon to show support for the displaced tenants of 475 Kent Avenue and call for a swift resolution of the problem and return home for the tenants. Senator Connor as well as representatives of Assemblyman Vito Lopez and Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez all showed up, along with Councilman David Yassky (left) and Assemblyman Joe Lentol (right). "This is an extremely dangerous precedent if the city can just put loft dwellers out on the street with six hours notice," said Yassky. CB1 environmental chair (and city council hopeful) Evan Thies called on the Department of Buildings to issue a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy once the immediate fire hazards in the basement had been remedied." - more at Brownstoner
Some numbers if you are interested in contacting local reps on behalf of your fellow citizens and neighbors.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
City Hall
New York, NY 10007
Phone 311 (or 212-NEW-YORK outside NYC)
Fax (212) 788-2460
Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez
Brooklyn Office
266 Broadway, Suite 201
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Phone: 718-599-3658
Councilman David Yassky
District Office Address
114 Court Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Phone: 718-875-5200
yassky@council.nyc.ny.us
Assemblyman Joe Lentol
DISTRICT OFFICE
619 Lorimer Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-383-7474
message to the city - this is absolute bullshit profiteering - business as usual for working people.
PRESS RELEASE:
FROM: 475 Kent Tenants Association
MATZO-GATE
NEW YORK CITY'S ARTISTIC COMMUNITY UNDER ATTACK
The live-work building located at 475 Kent Ave in Brooklyn's coveted waterfront neighborhood of Williamsburg was issued a Vacate Order by the NYC Fire Department on Sunday, January 20th at 7:30PM, the day before Martin Luther King day. Tenants were given until 1:30 in the morning to leave the building on a frigid January night.
475 Kent is a microcosm of New York City's cultural and economic activity with creative professionals generating an estimated $15 million in annual revenue. The vibrant community of 200 working artists - photographers, architects, writers, musicians, sculptors, filmmakers, designers, painters, printmakers, etc. is under attack.
It seems that the D.O B. is intent on making sure people will never be able to return to their spaces until all repairs are made and the building has a residential C of O, a prospect that could take years and millions of dollars. This renders 200 inhabitants most of whom are self-employed, small business entrepreneurs, both homeless and out of work. This building has been consistently and viably supporting creative professionals lives and businesses for ten years. The illegal eviction at 475 Kent comes on the heels of the evacuation of 17-17 Troutman in Ridgewood. That people's livelihoods and homes are being put in complete jeopardy makes one wonder if this is a trend and begs the phrase “follow the money”.
The events on Sunday night were precipitated when the FDNY inspected the basement of 475 Kent Ave. and “discovered” two 10' diameter metal canisters containing grain used for making Matzo. The Matzo bakery has been in the building for more than ten years. The DOB and fire department have inspected 475 Kent Avenue regularly for the past ten years and would have had to be blind if they were not fully aware of the existence of a Matzo bakery and the grain. The presence of the grain resulted in a so-called “hazardous emergency” situation that gave FDNY and DOB license to vacate the building. When some residents and the landlord offered to alleviate the problem and remove the grain from the building on Sunday night the FDNY replied “you are not qualified to move the grain”. They then issued the vacate order.
What ensued was unmitigated chaos under the direction of our friends at the OFFICE OF EMERGENCY MANGEMENT starring the New York City Fire Department, Department of Buildings, NYPD, Health Department, Department of Agriculture and the Red Cross. Their only area of competence was at holding closed-door, inter-agency meetings, in which no tenant representative was allowed, every two hours in their brand new location trailer. How many City agencies does it take to unscrew a lightbulb? We'll let you know, we're still counting.
Upon the issue of the vacate order 200 people scrambled to rid 110 spaces of their most crucial belongings. The following day people were given 6 hours access to remove their belongings, tools and equipment, a scenario that for most people who had been in residence for 5 - 10 years with substantial equipment and installations was completely untenable. From there the scene snowballed. On Tuesday January 22, tenants arrived with moving trucks at 10am having been told they would have another 6 hours access to the building. They found all entrances blocked by NYPD and FDNY and no one was allowed upstairs. Finally, at 1pm the leaders of each agency stood on the staircase and delivered their plan to the crowd:
- residents would be allowed into the building six people at a time for one hour, followed by another group of six people each being granted one hour.
Do the math.
No, we'll do it for you. 200/6= 33.3 hours it would take to allow each person ONE hour access to collect their stuff. Then they shut down the elevators, insuring that the task was impossible. People, in a panic that this would be their last chance to save their belongings, began to carry equipment and valuables down ten flights of stairs, creating a real hazard.
As of Wednesday, January 23, the grain has been removed from the basement of 475 Kent Avenue, alleviating the immediate “hazardous” condition. Now the tenants have been allowed a final three days, six hours a day, to access the building. On Sunday night, January 27, the building will be padlocked prohibiting all further access for the foreseeable future. Why the building is safe enough to access for four days, but suddenly deemed unsafe again on Monday is a mystery to which DOB, OEM, FDNY has not provided an answer. Although requested repeatedly the DOB has never provided a complete list of the violations on the building. We know one of these violations is an inoperable sprinkler system, a problem that can mitigated with the presence of fire-guards while the system is repaired, allowing continued occupancy of the building.
Since the 1960's New York City's tacit urban renewal policy has been reliant on artist's moving into derelict buildings in less desirable neighborhoods. The city does nothing to bolster or support economic activity in these down and out areas, nor do they do anything to create affordable, legal, usable space for live/work entrepreneurs. 475 Kent is a prime example of this kind of turn-a-blind-eye urban renewal that has been a boon to the City of New York. A decade ago South Williamsburg was a dangerous neighborhood. Once artists take the initiative to live on the edge and restore and renew unused real estate in what were marginal areas the City becomes predatory. The transformation of Williamsburg by the artist community into one of New York City's most desirable neighborhoods encourages the city to move artists out as they calculate the tax revenue of luxury condo developers moving in. No one in any city agency cared about our health and safety ten years ago. Now that our building has become hot property the City is ready to muster all the powers of its many agencies to assist in the muscling of the property from the owners and the tenants. The tenants of 475 Kent Avenue call into question the hypocritical policies being put forth by the agencies of the City of New York. We cannot help but wonder what forces are driving this vacate and why the agencies are suddenly so concerned for out health and safety.
475 Kent Tenant's Association
From Harper's:George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled “A Charge to Keep.” Bush was so taken by it, that he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography. And here’s what he says about it:
I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves. - GWB
Bush identifies himself as the horseman pictured above, a missionary defying the obstacles and spreading truth. However the painting by William Henry Koerner has nothing to do with this narrative. The truth behind the painting is actually in comical contradiction to the Bush narrative.
You have to laugh some despite the tragically dark irony here. A horse thief - a lynch mob -one step ahead of justice... I've always contended that painting acts like a mirror :)So Bush’s description of “A Charge to Keep” struck me as very strange. In fact, I’d say highly improbable. Now, however, Jacob Weisberg has solved the mystery. He invested the time to track down the commission behind the art work and he gives us the full story in his forthcoming book on Bush, The Bush Tragedy:
[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.
Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”
-Weisberg
In the final part of this week's Q&A with Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, I asked Viveros-Faune how it was that he worked as an organizer and co-director of two commercial art fairs (Volta in NYC, Next in Chicago) at the same time he was the Village Voice's art critic. One of the fairs, Next, is owned by Merchandise Mart, a major player in American art fairs and the owner of NYC's The Armory Show. The arrangement puts a Village Voice art critic in bed with a major art market player. "Why isn't that the most basic kind of conflict-of-interest?" I asked.Viveros-Faune's answers are in the post below this one, or here.
This is a textbook case of an unethical conflict-of-interest. Would Roger Ebert work for a film distributor? What if the LA Times' theater critic decided what plays are shown at Geffen Playhouse and was financially reliant upon the success of those plays? What if NYT art critic Grace Glueck sat on the board of an art museum? (Oh, wait...)
By virtue of being a Village Voice's art critic -- a job previously held by major figures such as Peter Schjeldahl and Jerry Saltz -- every other week Viveros-Faune holds either the third- or fourth-most-prominent position in the NYC art-critical landscape. Just like Saltz before him, Viveros-Faune is in a position to impact critical thought, to move the market, to decide what artists and what galleries make it -- and which don't. Viveros-Faune also has the opportunity to use his Voice presence as a way to review -- even promote -- artists and galleries he has selected for inclusion in the art fairs in which he is involved. (Conversely, if a gallery isn't interested in participating in a Viveros-Faune fair, he could punish them by refusing to review their shows.) Both fairs have big-dollar sponsors, and Viveros-Faune is listed as Next's contact for sponsorship. Would a critic negatively review artists owned by one of his sponsors? Or would he be extra-likely to consider artists owned by a sponsoring private management group? The possibility of impropriety, the exact sort of thing ethics are supposed to prevent, is acute. That is flat wrong.
Because conflicts-of-interest strike at the very heart of the integrity of journalism, newspapers and other news organizations are typically extra-careful about avoiding them. Nothing is more devastating to a newspaper than the revelation that it employs someone who may be using the newspaper as a front for that individual's private interests.
This sentiment then lead to the actual termination of Viveros-Faune by the Village Voice. This of course has sent some shock waves for sure and certainly positions Green as a now established ethics watchdog in the art journalism field.
The recent chain of events that led the Village Voice (one of New York’s most important sources of arts criticism) to end their relationship with critic Christian Viveros-Fauné raises some questions about the practicality of applying The New York Times style code of journalistic ethics to the arts publications that can’t offer NYT-sized salaries.In closing, the major points that all of this brings up for arts writing seems to go like this.Indeed, given the widely perceived diminishing influence of art criticism (due to the overwhelming power of certain collectors and the market in general in determining what art is seen as important by museums and other collectors), a question I heard repeatedly in the wake of the Voice’s decision was, is it even realistic to expect quality criticism from writers without deep interest/influence in the commercial side of the art world?
In light of the practicality of living on what arts writing pays and being insightful without inserting oneself deep within the commercial structure in this particular age, and given that whether there’s a more pressing conflict of interest to address is no longer relelvant, perhaps attention can now be turned to the issues Christian raises. In particular, is it time for the code of ethics to specifically address critics lecturing for money at universities whose artists or exhibitions they later write about, accepting paid travel and hotel expenses in return for press (and the rules for acknowledging that), confluences of power like that represented by the Frieze art fair, writing catalog essays for pay, and the rest of it?
1. Arts writers’ ethics are all over the map - and in the current $billion dollar industry, boundaries are ever more eroded as criticism is marginalized by the market.
2. Many critics are working artists and/or arts professionals (ala CVF) and many exhibit/publish their work, usually in their local markets.
3. Do objective, conflict free guidelines make for quality criticism? Criticism is by its nature subjective. Intimate knowledge and involvement may be the best course for refined understanding.
4. Where is the discourse of the art world being shaped? Anywhere? What forces are shaping this?
5. What about blogs? Is there a code of ethics to be applied?
6. What would be the acceptable new terms of engagement for "writers who do not wish to merely watch from the sidelines, and who are functioning on a substantially transformed art-world field of operations" ?
7. Many seem to concede that without conflict is there interest for the critic and/or public? They argue that the intimacy of the insider status is what drives them to write and "care" in the first place. The personal relationship side of artist/critic/gallery is the motivator.
Nothing gets me quite like the seventies - and the closer we move to a recession and further into a Nixonian decline it is good to find a music place like Art Decade. This is really an amazing archeology of the music of the seventies. Audiophiles take note and look and listen.
Be glad your life is different. Some video footage here of the exodus from Gaza.
"There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love." - MLK
As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it’s like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees — including the vast majority of faculty — really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce.
Marc Bousquet, a major figure in the academic labor movement, exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education — a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. Assessing the costs of higher educations corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university.
He also addresses the predicament of the Humanities - although this is happening in other fields too.
It discusses the nightmarish experience of working-class students recruited to work midnight shifts five school nights every week at UPS on the promise of education benefits that few persist to receive. Per shift, they earn about what administrators spend on a sushi lunch. Most drop out, and many get injured. Only a fraction persist to degree. In some terms, because of the obligation to pay back tuition remission if they quit this horrendous job “early,” more students were working off their “education benefits” without actually taking any classes than were enrolled.
Thinking of grad school in the humanities? Are you ready to gamble your future–your marriage–your kids’ future–your health–your retirement? In part 2 of my interview with Monica Jacobe, she describes how graduate school resembles a lottery. “You can do everything right, ” she says, “and you still won’t get a job.” After a median 10 years of study, most humanities PhDs will have dropped out or not received a degree. Of the minority who do earn a degree after ten years, and perhaps four or five years of job-hunting, 40 percent of language PhDs will still not have tenure-track employment. That means no tenure-track job of any kind–not in North Dakota, not in a community college, not at a religious school where you have to sign a loyalty oath to the pastor. And if you do get that job–in what could be your late 30s or even early 40s–what awaits most is a salary similar to a moderately experienced bartender or a 23-year-old police officer. In many fields this means that perhaps 1/4 of the folks who started graduate school over the past decade might get a shot at lousy pay in the tenure track. If present trends continue, that percentage should drop considerably for folks entering grad school this year, to 1/5 or even 1/6. Of course since the vast majority of qualified persons who might have thought about grad school but couldn’t afford the luxury never even applied, talent–especially working class and middle-class talent–is rushing away like water over the falls. And if family wealth determines who can afford the professorial life as a sort of jolly volunteer-ism, the wealth gap means that folks from racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to see themselves as able to afford this particular form of philanthropy.
For more on this publication check out Bousquet's blog and his YouTube Page.One of the more vexing things about this is how it isn’t seriously discussed in academia. In Continental thought, at least, you have all these academics who devote their life to thinking the political, yet when the issue of the academic market comes up they suddenly revert back to conservative ideologues, arguing that they arrived at their positions based purely on merit and their hard work (the American myth of the autonomous self-made man that pulls himself up by his own bootstraps), disavowing the opaque power relations governing advance in academia. On the one hand, there’s the tragedy that would-be grad students have to make life defining decisions very early on, despite often lacking the necessary background knowledge that would allow them to make wise decisions. That is, they need to make informed decisions as to where to study and who to study with. If these decisions are poorly made at the outset, the student, despite doing outstanding work, will often be doomed from the start as they won’t have the necessary professional connections and letters of recommendation to get them noticed on the market (e.g. their supervisors won’t have the clout to effectively pick up the phone on their behalf and contact other departments).
On the other hand, there’s academic “quicksand”. This, I think, is particularly egregious. Chances are, most are not going to get a position (or a desirable position) right when they go on the market. Faced with the brute material question of how to support themselves, they are forced to either teach a heavy load of adjunct courses for a pittance and without healthcare, or take a highly undesirable position at a community college, etc., where they have a heavy teaching load and a number of administrative duties. The reasoning of the candidate is that they’ll do this to make ends meet until they finally do get a position. What they fail to realize is that they’ve already fallen into the quicksand. First, they begin to get the ’stench’ of adjunct work, temporary assignments, or community college on them that looks to job committees like failure (the myth of merit rearing it’s head again: “they couldn’t make it so they had to adjunct!”) Rather than adjuncting being seen as a positive insofar as it confers teaching experience, it is instead seen as a negative implying a failure to effectively navigate the system. Second, and more importantly, the job seekers are mired in quicksand as their heavy workload prevents them from doing the research and publishing required to land a tenure track position. As a result, they end up either leaving academia together and beginning their lives much later than all their peers, or, if they’re very fortunate they land a fulltime community college position (where they’re universally disrespected by people both outside academia and by people at four year schools and research programs).
This state-of-affairs thus functions as a selection mechanism that reproduces the conditions for the possibility of the system of production. That is, those students who were fortunate enough to make informed decisions early on and go to top notch graduate schools (remember, most undergraduates lack knowledge of the top-notch research programs in academia as they are not yet researchers themselves) land the tenure track positions. Whereas those who attend fair but not stellar programs end up becoming the higher education “proletariat” without a real shot of advancing to those positions. There is something deeply wrong when an academic can publish books with highly respected presses, publish articles, have a stellar teaching record, and letters of recommendation from highly respected academics in the field, and still be unable to land a tenure track position (and here I’m not talking a research one position with grad students either, just a liberal arts position in a four year program). I am not sure what can be done about all this, but it does seem to me that the system is dysfunctional and in need of reform… Even if that means shutting down a number of graduate programs or admitting fewer grad students.
All this aside, whenever I hear faculty engaged in some variant of “critical theory” broadly construed (ranging anywhere from Adorno to Badiou) on search committees who begin talking like Reagan conservatives and placing all the onus on the individual, mocking job applicants and deploring how graduate students “whine” about the market, I want to punch them on the nose. It is astounding to me that any political theorist or continental thinker can so easily disavow their own role in these forms of exploitation. - Larval Subjects
That "wild and crazy", fast spending emirate of Dubai is at it again!Lyons replica to rise in DubaiThis raises a few questions. Why Lyons? I'm guessing it's a sentimental favorite for someone in power.What does this say about Arab development in general? This takes simulacra to new heights for sure. Then again I can't imagine a replica of Paramus, NJ going up anytime soon...The Arab emirate of Dubai will build a replica of Lyons under a $685M deal signed with the French city last week. Buti Saeed Al Gandhi, investment capital firm Emivest head, initially planned to build a French-language university in partnership with the University of Lyons but decided on “Lyons-Dubai City”, as the new metropolis will be known. Lyons-Dubai City will cover an area of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and will contain the university, a hotel school, a film library, subsidiaries of Lyon museums and a football training center run by Olympique Lyonnais.
While Darwin famously saw evolution as an exercise in species-enhancing competition, the Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin insisted that it was an exercise in cooperation. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), he argued that survival was fostered by cooperation within and among species rather than by murderous rivalries. Similar arguments can be found among evolutionary biologists and social scientists today, as Robert Wright shows in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2000). The communitarian paradigm offers a portrait of humans as naturally embedded in communities. Here, the political project is one of individuation: creating artificially the conditions for personal freedom from a cooperative democratic process. In this view, democracy is not a product of freedom, freedom is a product of democracy. Democratic societies do not secure cooperation by sacrificing freedom, they create conditions for freedom by associating us in cooperative communities.
Let us apply this short lesson in political theory to the American experience. In the American ideal of “liberal democracy,” the two tendencies embodied in this term are supposed to stand in a healthy tension. The “liberal” part of our culture is individualistic and competitive, focused on private freedom and property; the “democratic” part is communitarian and cooperative, focused on public freedom (civic freedom), justice, and the common ground that makes private property possible. Today, the liberal element dominates the democratic communitarian element, upsetting the delicate balance.
The American people have always had a healthy distrust of power, especially in its European hyper-collectivist incarnation (the Nazis and the Communists), in which an ideal quest for community and equality becomes an excuse for rampant despotism. But in allowing this understandable caution to morph into a distrust of democratic centralized government and community power tout court, Americans turned a seemingly innocent concern with social justice (welfare government, the safety net society, and a politics of cooperation, for example) into totalitarian vices.
From the start, democracy itself has bred a certain anxiety in America, an anxiety for which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the defining text. He predicted the formation of a rights-crushing majoritarian tyranny. Yet the specter of majorities run amok that has helped rationalize market neoliberalism and privatization, and has justified advancing the interests of capitalism before establishing civic democracy in places such as Iraq and Russia, has exacted a high cost. For collectivism has never been an American issue. The United States has always been a rights-encased, decentralized, federalist “weak-state” system, relatively impervious to the kinds of dogmatic statism that wrecked Europe in the last century. As my favorite Harvard teacher, Louis Hartz, liked to point out in calling for a more democratic culture, “The American majority has forever been a puppy dog tethered to a lion’s leash.” The new obsession with competition and market liberty constructs an illusory enemy—the supposedly overweening democratic state. The quest for equality and justice is caricatured as a striving for mediocrity and bureaucratic irresponsibility.
At the same time, the actual character of the competitive marketplace is badly misjudged. For the irony is that the rhetoric of market competition often masks private monopolies: less choice, not more. Democratic realists and impartial sociologists recognize that behind the façade of boastful competition lies a world of inequality and domination. While praising the competitive market, those who actually work the marketplace specialize in mergers and acquisitions, takeovers and cartels, liquidations and selloffs. Wealth is not produced, but reshuffled and expropriated. Real competition is avoided, and the risk in whose name profit is supposedly earned is socialized (the taxpayers bail out the corporate failures), while profits, though no longer earned by taking real risks, are kept private, reserved for shareholders and overpaid corporate managers. Deregulation is said to enhance competition, but in the airline and communication industries it has entrenched price fixing and facilitated cartels and the kinds of monopoly that “bundling” makes possible, as when Bill Gates forced computer companies to include the whole Microsoft software platform in the machines they sold.
This is not to say that competition is just a ruse. While it may fail to actually define the corporate hierarchies that masquerade as a market economy, it dominates American cultural life and pervades our psyches. It manages to twist our social interactions and pervert our sense of commonality. Most damagingly, perhaps, its relentless rhetoric—now integral to the vast marketing industry—persuades us that our most precious value, freedom, is tied up with privacy and dependent on freedom from democratic governance, whereas it is democratic governance that actually enforces the variety and pluralism the market putatively reflects and reinforces. Government marks the rule of law, and it is law that secures the conditions for freedom.
SELLOUT is a practical blog about an impractical lifestyle.
Artists face all the problems the consumer citizenry faces. We eat and drink and drive and buy things. We need health care; battle 30% credit card interest and stupid little fees; are having a harder time getting a full return on a gently used power tool at Home Depot. We will retire or get sick one day. We hate to admit it, but sometimes we need jobs. And at the same time, we are all trying to pull off a career that makes our parents feel just a little sick with worry.
What does it mean to be an artist in this era of corporate feudalism? We may talk about that. But this blog will focus on what it takes and how to do it better. Less painfully. With more dignity.
“MY STANDARD FOR VERISIMILITUDE IS SIMPLE AND I CAME TO IT WHEN I STARTED TO WRITE PROSE NARRATIVE: FUCK THE AVERAGE READER.” - David Simon
Three or four years ago, I got an email from a friend in which he described The Wire as the best thing he’d ever seen on TV, “apart from Abigail’s Party.” Here was a recommendation designed to get anybody’s attention. No mention of The West Wing, or The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or any of the other shibboleths of contemporary TV criticism; just a smart-aleck nod to Mike Leigh’s classic 1977 BBC play. It reeled me in, anyway, and I went out and bought a box set of the first series.
I’d never heard of the show. It’s not widely known or shown here in the U.K., although whenever a new season starts, you can always find a piece in a broadsheet paper calling it “the best programme you’ve never heard of,” and I didn’t know what to expect. What I got was something that bore no resemblance to Abigail’s Party, predictably, and very little resemblance to any other cop show. At one stage I was simultaneously hooked on The Wire and the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of Bleak House, and it struck me that Dickens serves as a useful point of comparison; David Simon and his team of writers (including George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane) swoop from high to low, from the mayor’s office to the street corner—and the street-corner dealers are shown more empathy and compassion than anyone has mustered before. The hapless Bubbles, forever dragging behind him his shopping trolley full of stolen goods, is Baltimore’s answer to Joe the Crossing Sweeper.
We talked via email. A couple of weeks later, we met in London—David Simon is making a show about the war in Iraq with my next-door neighbor. (Really. He’s really making a show about the war in Iraq, and the producer literally lives next door.) We talked a lot about sports and music.
—Nick Hornby
In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.
Full interview here.
There are more excellent excerpts at Rough Theory. It's comforting to know the meticulous nature of his concern for context. An economist concerned with context!I worked with Marx; I was only the scribe to whom he dictated, but that gave me the opportunity of observing his manner of thinking and writing. Work was easy for him, and at the same time difficult. Easy because his mind found no difficulty in embracing the relevant facts and considerations in their completeness. But that very completeness made the exposition of his ideas a matter of long and arduous work…
He saw not only the surface, but what lay beneath it. He examined all the constituent parts in their mutual action and reaction; he isolated each of those parts and traced the history of its development. Then he went on from the thing to its surroundings and observed the reaction of one upon the other. He traced the origin of the object, the changes, evolutions and revolutions it went through, and proceeded finally to its remotest effects. He did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings: he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion.
His intention was to disclose the whole of that world in its manifold and continually varying action and reaction. Men of letters of Flaubert’s and the Goncourts’ school complain that it is so difficult to render exactly what one sees; yet all they wish to render is the surface, the impression that they get. Their literary work is child’s play in comparison with Marx’s: it required extraordinary vigour of thought to grasp reality and render what he saw and wanted to make others see. Marx was never satisfied with his work – he was always making some improvements and he always found his rendering inferior to the idea he wished to convey …
Marx had the two qualities of a genius: he had an incomparable talent for dissecting a thing into its constituent parts, and he was past master at reconstituting the dissected object out of its parts, with all its different forms of development, and discovering their mutual inner relations. His demonstrations were not abstractions – which was the reproach made to him by economists who were themselves incapable of thinking; his method was not that of the geometrician who takes his definitions from the world around him but completely disregards reality in drawing his conclusions. Capital does not give isolated definitions or isolated formulas; it gives a series of most searching analyses which bring out the most evasive shades and the most elusive gradations.
Marx begins by stating the plain fact that the wealth of a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production presents itself as an enormous accumulation of commodities; the commodity, which is a concrete object, not a mathematical abstraction, is therefore the element, the cell, of capitalist wealth. Marx now seizes on the commodity, turns it over and over and inside out, and pries out of it one secret after another that official economists were not in the least aware of, although those secrets are more numerous and profound than all the mysteries of the Catholic religion. Having examined the commodity in all its aspects, considers it in its relations to its fellow commodity, in exchange. Then he goes on to its production and the historic prerequisites for its production. He considers the forms which commodities assume and shows how they pass from one to another, how one form is necessarily engendered by the other. He expounds the logical course of development of phenomena with such perfect art that one could think he had imagined it. And yet it is a product of reality, a reproduction of the actual dialectics of the commodity.
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