going to school in a cave in rural china.
Culture Rover finds these photographs amazing: a school in rural China, constructed in a cave. They do not have modern amenities, and of course should, but still, there is something so cool about going to school in a cave, particularly one (see photo below) with a basketball court in it.
Images: Chinese Lives Blog
set your seismoscope to “the deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development.”
A haunting quotation from Fernand Braudel, historian of the longue duree, on financialization — which he perceives as the historical progression in each epoch of capitalism from the more material activities of commodity production, manufacturing, and trade to the far more abstract activities of financial markets: leveraged capital, derivatives, book-keeping party tricks, and other modes of numerical legerdemain.
Every capitalist development of this order seems, by reaching the stage of financial expansion, to have in some sense announced its maturity: it was a sign of autumn.
- From The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. III, 246.
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
Is the end nigh? Probably not. But maybe something is ending and something else beginning in the longer story of capitalism, at least that’s the story told, in different rhetorics, by Matt Taibbi and David Harvey.
Image: Rolling Stone.
mingling sentiment and sophistication on friday night lights.
Principal Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) and Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) on Friday Night Lights.
In Slate’s TV Club, Hanna Rosin made the off-hand comment that the television show Friday Night Lights is “a strange hybrid of sentimental and sophisticated.” This stuck me as one of the best explanations of the show’s ability to find new emotional authenticity among melodramatic plot lines.
The sentimentality comes in the stories, but the sophistication comes almost entirely in the modes of presentation. As Rosin notes:
The themes are not so different from middlebrow dreck like, say, Touched by an Angel — honor, heart, the power of inspiration, staying optimistic in the face of bad odds. The show is hardly ever knowing. Hannah Montana is also a TV teenager, but she would be an alien dropped into this version of America. And when the show goes dark, it’s on Oprah’s themes — missing fathers, serious illness, divorce. Yet, there is something about the show that transmits “art” and makes it inaccessible. It’s not tidy, for example, either in its camerawork or the way it closes its themes. It insists on complicating its heroes and villains, as we’ve discussed, which is why we like it.
As Rosin begins to explain, FNL explores melodramatic content without offering the standard cues of melodramatic form. This is how it breaks new ground as a television show. The approach dignifies the characters, even when they are at their worst. It honors their struggles, even when we are witnessing are the same, sad, old stories of the heartland.
Image: Courtesy NBC.
when recorded music inundates.
“Music exploded over the past 20 years,” [critic Michaelangelo] Matos says. “The figure Robert Christgau likes to put out there is, ‘There’s twice as much music made per year than there are hours to listen to it.’ This is pure conjecture on my part, but I would say that now it’s actually more music made per month than you can listen to in a year.” One thing’s clear: if your music-consumption habits are dictated primarily by the amount of space left on your hard drive, your ears will never catch up with your collection. – From Miles Raymer, “Sharp Darts: The Slow-Listening Movement,” Chicago Reader, March 5, 2009
NPR’s All Songs Considered SXSW Festival Preview episode contains a nice example of the overwhelming amount of popular music — or as Robert Christgau calls it semipopular music— that is available now.
Host Bob Boilen, producer Robin Hilton, Monitor Mix blogger/ex-Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein, and NPR music online editor Stephen Thompson admit that, try as they might, they simply cannot listen to and evaluate all the bands that will be appearing at the festival.
In one hilarious segment, they rifle through the first three seconds of a series of metal songs, which start simply to blur into the next. Your ears get tired just listening to them having attempted to listen to all that music.
Honorably, the NPR team admits that there is a kind of tragedy to their inability to give all the music a good listen. Surely, they note, there is a fan out there who cares deeply about each individual song. That’s not even to mention the performers themselves. But as a whole, the entire SXSW Festival is more than ears can bear.
The problem now in the dawning digital age is not exclusivity, but inclusivity, not a mainstream that marginalizes outliers, but rather a system so large that one might find it more easy to tune out the entire thing completely than engage in any particular detail.
Listening to the NPR All Songs Considered crew listen, one feels that the summation cannot be summoned, the total can not be totalized. A kind of bleak, weary, cynical passivity starts to take hold. Things are moving so fast, you feel like you aren’t getting anywhere at all. You are just a whir.
And this leads to a larger, more ominous sense of dread: what system is taking shape here?
The system itself cannot be named, there is no overview possible, butterflies flap their wings and tidal waves follow, but we can’t tell the butterflies from the tidal wayves anymore. We are, instead, awash in sound, trying to find a way to surf the surfeit.
Awesome, dude! But not in a good way. The new context (something George W.S. Trow foresaw as “the context of no context“) calls for a new kind of calculus of listening, a new sense of the self as listener, and from that new formation of identity, a new kind of community of listening.
Not Robert Christgau’s nostalgic yearning for the days of monocultural yore, nor even Michaelangelo Matos’s promising notion of starting a “slow listening movement,” but instead something new and more difficult: a community in which the interconnection called forth by music is so deeply felt, the awareness of shared sound so resoundingly echoed, that a new understanding of particularity and universality might emerge.
Listeners of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your earbuds!
rethinking politics absolutely with bob dylan.
Bill Flanagan: Don’t you believe in the democratic process?
Bob Dylan: Yeah, but what’s that got to do with politics?
From www.bobdylan.com.
boredom & terror in christopher ‘ banal surreal gitmo photos.
Christopher Sims, Club Survivor, Camp America, 2006
Christopher Sims’ people-less photographs of the naval base and detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which he visited in 2006, are filled with ghosts. By portraying Gitmo as a kind of abandoned facility, Sims heightens the sense of both boredom and terror. On the one hand, the setting is so paradisical, with palm trees, rolling hills, and the ocean. On the other, we seem to be trapped behind barbed wire in an exurban housing development gone into massive foreclosure — and one in which you may hear occasional screams of bankrupted owners being tortured by their creditors just beyond the hills and walls.
Christopher Sims, McDonald’s, Naval Station, 2006
Christopher Sims, Suggestion Box, Camp America, 2006
Or wait, are we in some kind of museum of Gitmo Bay? Are we at some kind of historical heritage site? If we are, we know that the events of past are very recent — chillingly recent. If this is a museum still in the making, it’s a terrifying place in which playgrounds and cell blocks, lunch and torture, mingle beneath the relentless blue sky.
Christopher Sims, Playground, Naval Station, 2006.
The exhibition is currently at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC.
Images: Civilian Art Projects website.
graphic displays of the everyday.
My work comments on experiences in daily life — through dialogue, humor, mistakes, shapes & spaces, the way people are & constant conversation. — Kelly Lasserre
There remains a vernacular art of the cracks, spaces, and fissures of everyday life, even in the relentless online flow of digital networks and systems. Kelly Lasserre’s homemade prints, which view well online (and were featured on the gold mine of a website, Lost At E Minor), carry vital information from those spaces off the grid.
Initially, Lasserre’s prints appear innocent and playful, like some goofy Dr. Seuss-inspired sweater at a hipster craft fair, but their images and phrases stick with you. They speak in that voice inside one’s head, the one that whispers the truth even when one doesn’t want to hear it, the observation or revelation that is at once coming from somewhere else and welling up from deep within one’s core.
How Lasserre translates this voice into visual form is rather remarkable. Using the iconographies of the folkloric, the handmade, the cutesy, the antique store, the summer camp, she works with off-kilter, simple shapes, uneven, cursive letters, and one-size-does-not-fit-all organizations of the visual field. But these signals and symbols of the relic, the nostalgic, the rustic, the folksy somehow become scathing, wry, sometimes scary, and always uber-contemporary personal and social commentary. It’s as if an organic wax candle dripped with the light of a flourescent glare in an interogation room or the digital beam of a computer screen.
The apparent easy-going innocence and safety of Lasserre’s prints turns out to be haunted by insinuations of unease, intense scrutiny, concern, and vulnerability. This seems particularly the case with issues of gender and sexuality, but it applies to the broader terrain of the everyday that she investigates in her work.
These prints giggle and worry in equal turns. They express exhaustion and exhilaration, relief one moment and alarm the next. They seem filled with love, and also with a kind of gnawing pain. The iconographic form signals authenticity, domesticity, at-homeness, a comfort with the world, but the content communicates alienation and uncertainty.
Lasserre’s prints are most of all about the daily, funny, and often fraught negotiations one makes with other people, things, and activities: with friends, strangers, art-making, skylines, dishes, ice cream cones, animals, letters, language, counting, jealousy, shoes, hats, hoping, worrying, skin, hair, eyes, feet, failure, progress and — most especially — with oneself.
Images: Kelly Lasserre website
“I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.” – David Foster Wallace
the court theatre’s tragi-farcical take on Ibsen.
If you take the delusion from an ordinary man then you take away his happiness as well. – Relling
Laura Scheinbaum as Hedwig in Court Theatre’s The Wild Duck
Director Charles Newell and the Court Theatre ensemble created an unusual version of The Wild Duck in their recent production, which was based on a new translation of Ibsen’s drama by Richard Nelson. As the histories of two families come careening into each other, the actors overplayed their obsessions, drives, and the painful stripping away of delusions at the core of the play.
Whereas one might have the actors suck in all the dark energies so as to build to a seething, tense conclusion, in Court Theatre’s version, the parts were so overweening that they turned the tragedy into comedy. Which only, amazingly, made the tragedy that much more wincingly, outlandishly painful.
In this way, the version of the play did not allow one to identify with the characters so much as to stare at them in shock — an intriguing way of getting at Ibsen’s moody exploration of how important the delusions we live with might actually be.
from the corner of the local whole foods market.
