June 2009
42 posts
1 tag
jacques dutronc / et moi et moi et moi [en vouge]
TPM and Enzensberger
The Balkanized Monolith
Understanding Enzensberger in the Internet Age
Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s landmark essay, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” was originally published in the New Left Review in 1970, during the waning years of the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration. In it, he critiqued the current use of radio and television, arguing that their effectiveness as an inherently...
toldja mom. →
the atomic trucker →
[ms. claire macdonald]
elif batuman's fairly awesome dissertation →
[you should read the whole chapter]
brilliant. →
Michael Bay finally made an art movie. →
“Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a...
Sanford! The Musical! →
ruh-roh
i have the sinking feeling this michael jackson affair is going to become reagan-redux. remind me not to read the news for two weeks.
Michael Haneke's Cache and Panopticism
Panoptic Memory:
In his book The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio describes painter-photographer Edward Steichen’s renunciation of photographic pictorialism and his eventual embrace of straight photography – a direct result of his work in aerial surveillance during World War I. Using Steichen’s experience to illustrate the early-20th century tendency to equate photography with reality, Virilio writes,...
rivers and tides →
[lovely and exhausting]
finding my goddess →
[i was unaware that the angelic realm of intellectual substance required copyrights] - from disco infernholz
1 tag
jens lekman / a sweet summer’s night on...
robot racism. →
via jenna.
“Especially given the stellar reputation of Boost Mobile, I was very disappointed...”
–
- what might be the best English sentence ever written, contained within a coworker’s page-long letter of complaint to the aforementioned company [only tangentially related to Tom Fellegy’s hilarious and probably accurate conjecture that Boost Mobile is a government-run sting operation...
Palace of Ashes
Australia’s Unlawful Bid for East Timorese Oil
In a 1999 radio interview given to Scoop Australia, Australian Prime Minister John Howard reiterated what has become the dominant narrative in explaining his country’s relationship to the East Timor’s thirty-year struggle for independence. Two months before, Australia initiated and led the International Force in East Timor (InterFET), a UN backed...
“In 1969, John Rendall and Anthony Bourke bought a 35-pound lion cub at Harrods...”
– here’s what happened…
via futility closet
im already behind... →
new yorker: annals of medicine / atul gawande →
Death and the Salesmen
Death and the Salesmen:
Mad Men and the Marketing of Thanatonic Masculinity
In his critical essay “The History of Masculinity,” R.W. Connell points to the paradoxical position that men of metropolitan countries now inhabit, at once in a position of economic and discursive power and increasingly exposed to movements of feminism, sexual liberation, and so-called “utopian thinking” (Connell 257). He...
1 tag
japandroids / the boys are leaving town...
“i finally got your letter and the punctuation hit me like a truck.”
– wussy
In Pursuit of Mediocrity
A Structuralist Consideration of Sophrosyne in Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase
There is a scene that occurs a third of the way through Haruki Murakami’s novel A Wild Sheep Chase, in which the unnamed narrator is brought to speak to the “black-suited secretary” of the Boss to discuss the particulars of his impending journey. The men’s subsequent conversation includes explicit and metaphoric...
