the imperfect necessities of state intervention.
Archive for May, 2009
#314 – Alleyway Allegory
Monday, May 25th, 2009#313 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations
Sunday, May 24th, 2009consumer advocacy from c. wright mills.
You cannot “possess” art merely by buying it. You cannot support art merely by feeding artists — although that does help. To possess it you must earn it by participating to some extent in what it takes to design it and to create it. To support it you must catch in your consumption of it something of what is involved in the production of it.
— C. Wright Mills, “The Man in the Middle,” in The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills, ed. John H. Summers.
#312 – Accuracy in Reporting
Thursday, May 21st, 2009at last, new york times reveals truth about neo-liberalism.
From the New York Times Op-Ed page:
Thomas L. Friedman is off today.
#311 – Ralph Stanley for President
Saturday, May 16th, 2009the politics of music revealed.
Franklin Bruno posted an image by Mecca Normal‘s David Lester back in March that, for me, maps out the deep politics of culture. Or maybe the better way of saying it is that it maps out the deep culture of politics.
Here, politics are “not obvious.” Instead, they are something at once more humble and more profound: they are all about self-expression, the heavens, and the individual in relation to the rest of the world. They are about one person “getting” another person and conveying that communication on paper. They are about a clawhammer style half-mastered, a shadow of blue or gray sketched just right, a hopeful clang of strings, a person sitting in front of another person, the brushing of a banjo, a painting acknowledging the passage of sound.
Politics become about instruments passed across the generations through mass production and consumption, yet reclaimed; instruments turned anti-instrumental. They are about things and sounds and images translated back and forth from bodies to feelings to representations — a circle broken and fixed again, a circle unbroken. They are all very quiet and hushed — “not obvious” — and then you look and the brushed hand begins to roll into a pulsation.
David Lester’s note to Franklin Bruno on the painting:
“The politics are not obvious” is a painting I did that a banjo player bought after seeing it displayed when Mecca Normal played a barber shop in Olympia and a bookshop in Seattle during a west coast tour in 2004. The man later sent me a cassette of his banjo playing. He recorded just this one copy to send to me. This was art. This was political.
Image: David Lester
#310 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009a reminder from bygone days.
Commerce must serve society or it is not commerce, but piracy. – “Progress” advertisement, N. W. Ayer & Son Advertising Headquarters, circa 1900
Special thanks to Charles McGovern, Sold American.
#309 – It’ll Blow Your Mind
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009neuroscience is like Pink Floyd laser show night at the planetarium.
…You are trying to get at some true vision of the basic material, but there isn’t one. – Antonio Damasio
Rocking light show, for sure, but the most significant thing about Bruce Adolphe’s composition, “Self Comes to Mind” — which was inspired by Antonio Damasio’s neuroscientific research on emotions, creativity, and the brain — is that it is not reductionist.
This is your brain on music.
“I think the topic of neuroscience,” Adolphe told NPR, “is like nature has been in a more traditional way.” To Adolphe, science can serve “like the inspiration of mountains or looking at the sky full of stars.”
This is a better way to think about the relationship between the arts and sciences, which we often place in opposition when in fact they have much in common if we think of them as deepening our sense of wonder rather than solving questions once and for all.
In Adolphe’s composition, there is a sense of mystery, complexity, and celestial fullness to the music. As the brain lights up the screen behind the musicians, we see the brain as representation and the thing itself, all at once. It is simultaneously material and it is filled with abstraction. The music wanders, meanders, unsure of itself. With each note, you lose yourself and, at the same time, grow more mindful.
You can hear the composition on NPR’s website.
Image: Hanna Damasio / Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center, USC