“To be interested in the popular culture of contemporary America is to be interested in our popular architecture; the architecture of those buildings in which we live or work or enjoy ourselves. They are not only an important part of our everyday environment, they also reveal in their design and evolution much about our values and how we adjust to the surrounding world.” J.B. Jackson from The Domestication of the Garage (1976)
“We are living through a moment where the past is no more, but the future hasn’t yet arrived. This produces such anguish. It’s as though we are trapped in a hole in time where the past doesn’t help us, but we don’t know what lies ahead either.” Heloísa Starling
“DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.” Umberto Eco, 1994
Montessori’s revenge
“In the present state of architectural and environmental design, almost no problem has yet been made to exhibit complexity in such a well-defined way that it actually requires the use of a computer. The effort to state a problem in such a way that a computer can be used to solve it will distort your view of the problem. It will allow you to consider only those aspects of the problem which can be encoded—and in many cases these are the most trivial and the least relevant aspects.” Christopher Alexander
“Can’t you count, Albert?” Artur Schnabel to Einstein during a rehearsal
Hail, cretin!
“I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.” Adorno & Horkheimer
“The Great War lasted four years; the US has been occupying Afghanistan for eleven years and Iraq for nine. You cannot maintain combat operations for that length of time without fostering, both deliberately and otherwise, a militarism closely connected to a sense of personal liberation through violence. War is carcinogenic to the body politic, and the cancers it generates appear in all kinds of unexpected ways.” Jeff Sparrow
mathwashing
“The immoderate, the obscure, the tentative, the adventure counselled by the demon within.” Camille Mauclair describing what Camille Saint-Saëns was not
“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” Tom Waits
“One person reads Werther and shoots himself, another reads Werther and, because Werther shoots himself, decides to live. One behaves like Werther, the other like Goethe. A lesson in self-examination? A lesson in self-defense? Both.” Tsvetaeva
“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” Kafka
Action pants
genital panic
genital panic
“all flesh and no soul, all buildings and no architecture, all property and no land, all electricity and no light, all billboards and nothing to say, all ideas and no principles.” Peter Plagens on Banham on L.A. in 1972
“We do not have to pursue the flattening-out of human experience. I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And, today with equal importance, the art of suffering, the art of dying.” Ivan Illich
Brahmsianer oder Wagnerianer?
the worthy
and the unworthy poor
and the unworthy poor
first thought
best thought
best thought
You have the watch
We have the time
“Don’t confuse yourself with humanity!” Andrei Platanov
A cantankerous press
an obstinate press
a ubiquitous press
the only thoughts to which a thinker is essential are lies
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
“He felt a terrible inner resistance but could not feel what it was that it resisted.” DFW
Der Stadineurotiker
“As crimes pile up, they become invisible.” Brecht
“The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.” George Steiner’s “To Civilize Our Gentlemen,” in Language and Silence
“Rem Koolhaas took Cedric Price and combined him with Superstudio without politics. I think Rem is dangerous. He is a power man.” Dan Graham
poepsjiek
“we the undersigned declare that we have nothing in common with each other” Sartre & Camus
“Ils ne sont grands que parce que nous sommes aux genoux.” Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud
“Language is best used when most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.” Beckett to Axel Kaun
“Little is known of his domestic circumstances except that his wife was also his aunt…”
“If some artists in Chicago (or elsewhere) were working in a different visual or political idiom than the New York avant-garde, it had to be—by the field’s still-current definitions—because they were behind. If those artists happened to be African American, the impression of belatedness chimes harmoniously, if unintentionally, with dominant white-supremacist narratives. If they produced works that weren’t commercial, that haven’t survived (itself anything but happenstance), then there is, further, no financial and institutional compulsion backing them up. Whether the field has unconsciously accepted racist constructions or has rather shown its discomfort with them by looking the other way, art history has often failed to recognize the challenges black artists in the 1960s and 1970s directed not just at entrenched institutions but also at the presuppositions of the white avant-garde. From this point of view, it was not just a matter of correcting biased aesthetic judgments and producing appropriate demographic representation. Rather, the critique addressed the central preoccupations with aesthetic autonomy and the avant-garde—preoccupations that, consciously or not, supported (and support) a racist worldview. Art since 1900 is recognizably an extreme, but an extreme that forcefully shapes the landscape of what is possible to think and study about twentieth-century art. What kinds of questions could students whose engagement with the century starts with this book even begin to ask?” Rebecca Zorach
“Beneath the fog is the absolute obduracy particular to capital: its character as a set of compulsions which force themselves just as inescapably on the capitalist as the proletariat.”
Gargalesis
Philoslothical
“The decisive fact about American history is that the Anglo-Americans who thought they had created their own place allowed themselves to become a minority in that place.” Michael Walzer in Manifest No.1
Hispandering
façadomised
“Lord come to our help yourself, and not your son for this is no time for children.” 19c Griqua prayer
“We have to do away with a false and misleading dualism, one which abstracts man on the one hand and technology on the other, as if the two were quite separate kinds of realities…. Man is by nature a technological animal; to be human is to be technological…. When we speak of technology, this is another way of speaking about man himself in one of his manifestations.” Daniel Callahan, 1971
bungaloathsome
morose code
How inappropriate to call this planet “earth,” when it is clearly “ocean.” – Arthur C. Clarke
The tactile: Simulation is a poor substitute for the sensation of light, wind, and heat. The relational: Rendering programs are too easily used to hide problems, which accounts for some of their commercial success. The incomplete: Precision tends towards overdetermination and algorithms produce totalized pictures.
Ignorance is not innocence
“Another person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own.” Freud
Buhsturm
“Every great city needs and element of disorder, or at least of the eccentric or the atavistic, to temper its arrangements.” Jan Morris
Caosmismo
“The same Eastern ‘Scrogin’ would ask his guests if they had ever seen a mancannon; and, on their replying in the negative, a greybeard slave was dragged in blaspheming and struggling with all his strength. He was presently placed on all fours and firmly held by the extremities; his bag-trousers were let down and a dozen peppercorns were inserted ano suo: the target was a sheet of paper held at a reasonable distance; the match was applied by a pinch of cayenne in the nostrils; the sneeze started the grapeshot and the number of hits on the butt decided the bets.” from Sir Richard Francis Burton’s “Terminal Essay” in the Arabian Nights
“Until the gag is chewed fit to swallow or spit out the mouth must mutter or rest.” Beckett, 1932
“The rich have feelings in every part of their possessions, so it was much easier to harm them.” Rousseau
regretamine
“Chloroform would be better, or the kick of a mule; but in their absence you must put up with a cocktail.” Mencken
At fifteen, Hermann Hesse was sent to an institution for epileptics and defectives in Stetten, “to put an end to his defiance once and for all.”
Katzenmusik
Pleasure activist
Ohrwurm
Occidentosis
“The mystagogue who has no real mysteries to promulgate…” H.F. Chorley on R. Schumann in The Athenaeum, 1852
“Whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former.” Graeber
The late lamented has left me quite a mess
“In a word should the Proustian arse-hole be considered as entrée or sortie?” SB 25 August 1930
unrelieved alertness
“Your shoulders were gripped / by the paws of epaulets” Voznesensky
“You must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you, one day.” Clov
Promoozika
And that which governs me to go about / Doth part his function and is partly blind
An eight-year old had never spoken. One day, when the whole family was sitting down for breakfast, the boy asked, “Do we have any jam?”
The family was stunned. When they’d recovered, the father said, “How come you’ve never said one word before?”
The boy said, “Well, up until now, everything’s been okay.”
“Ils aiment beaucoup à enculer des canards agonisants, à cause du duvet, paraît-il.” Alfy
jusquauboutiste
“But lies from which great truths may be construed.” Fontaine
“In the sense that ‘natural weather’ means cloud formations, storm systems, and precipitation which are unaffected by human beings, there has been no ‘natural weather’ since the first fire was intentionally ignited by early man.” Weather Modification Association, Some Facts About Seeding Clouds, 1977
“You have to feel sort of overwhelmed, I think, to start.” HST
normal disaster
Bleeny
Bleeny
Bonanza bleeny!
“Am I wrong in believing that not the least of the church’s contributions to the community is the provision of so many unorganized, disinterested, completely free, independent, undemanding men who move through the meshes of an ever more organized, centralized and impersonal society in this unpredictable way?” Douglas Wollen, methodist preacher, 1969
Fuck-off-o-gram
“Dearest, I am bewildered to distraction by the perplexities of maturing womanhood. I can stand the strain no longer. What shall I do? I should like to jump into a volcano.” It began in February, 1933
“Beethoven is nonsense, Pushkin and Lermontov also.” Lev Tolstoy
Pyro-Seismic Morphology
“I was struggling to survive and didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature.” Howard Moskowitz on junk food
We are From-here people
“The hollows inside him contracted until their sides touched and set off waves of dull apprehension. The barriers which protected him as long as he didn’t acknowledge them, knocked each other over and his mind, caught unawares again, was over run. He tried to separate the fears and deal with them one by one, rationally, but he couldn’t cope. They were all the same fear and he could not even separate the causes. He only knew that the source of it all was mass, the feeling of things multiplying and expanding, population, buses, buildings, money, all interdependent and spreading — a remorseless uncontrollable, unguided growth which ballooned around him, refusing to go bang and yet lacking the assurance of an infinity. ” Mr. Moon
encraption
“A conspiracy of fatness and blindness, backed up by a sinister mindless kind of reasoning that is only necessary to justify what is already a fact and what will always be a fact.”
Olympic papoose board
famillionaire
phallometric
“You still have too much. Lose it all.” from RS
“What always seems to me incredible with the reactions aroused by certain operatic productions is the fact that they are hardly imaginable in the case of other art performances, like films, videos, etc. A part of the audience and critics alike seem to be hoping that the opera might escape contemporary realities, social problems, and the violence that surrounds us. As if the opera should close its eyes and avoid looking at the audience, looking at the share of trouble, anguish and fear hidden in the soul of any of its members. But opera is not a museum of ancient art. It is a living art, which must resonate with all the energies of a given society, be they the worst.” Krzysztof Warlikowski
recrudescence
“Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.” Randolph Bourne, 1918
Gamefecation
It ain’t necessarily so
The drowning machine
“I’ve given up on the notion that even a ‘famous’ writer can make a decent living by means of journalism… Crime, I think, is the long-term answer.” HST
OBSTACLES CAN BLOCK ROAD TO DREAMLAND
Nostalgeria
“We have access to methods of monitoring what is occurring on the planet Earth.” Russian Minister of Emergency Situations, Vladimir Puchkov
“The Volga river will be Germany’s Mississippi.” Hitler
Sit in the saddle and ride mankind
responsible dissent
“an anti-bug system that sprays a fine mist of ground chrysanthemums”
Her academic awards and distinctions are too numerous to list
I just got back from a quick shot in the East, and called from the airport but you weren’t home again. Who are these old crones who answer your telephone? I have a picture of some gout-riddled old slattern on her knees in your hallway, waxing the floor when the phone rings and rising slowly, painfully, resentfully, to answer it and snarl “He ain’t here.” Anyway, I called.
Hunter S. Thompson to Tom Wolfe, February 26, 1968
Hunter S. Thompson to Tom Wolfe, February 26, 1968
I decided one morning to test sobriety,
to waken at dawn to sparrow chirp and dark clouds
blowing seaward from the Bultaco factory,
to inhale the particulates and write nothing,
to face the world as it was. Everything
was actual, my utterances drab, my lies
formulary and unimaginative.
For the first time in my life I believed
everything I said.
From Philipe Levine’s “Black Wine”
Ironic mimesis is not critique, it is the mentality of the slave.
toilets for all
That hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense
YOU MY BASTARD
come in and be convinced
Goldberg goes into the deli. Taking his seat, he asks the waiter “How do you prepare your chicken?”
The waiter says “Oh, sir, we’re very honest here. We tell ‘em right up front ‘You’re not gonna make it.’”
Irrelephant
Waiter! I’ve raised my finger
“It is as if in losing our ideological certainties since the end of the Cold War, the Left resentfully creates a monster of the working-class people who didn’t play out the historical role assigned to them.” Christos Tsiolkas in The Toxicity of Smugness
“To see most clearly the manifestations of human instinct, it is useful to start with the rich.” E. O. Wilson
That was the trouble with not being a psychopath. Every avenue was blocked.
The book goes in the head, not on the head
“One must know how to go too far.” Cocteau
Warumverbot
Maîtresse en titre
Ni vitesse, ni bruit
“They will understand nothing if it does not occur to them that a human society can have, just as they do, an interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes that, while conforming to well defined needs, provoke tumultuous depressions, rise of dread and, in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state.” Bataille
Fur in our friendliest places
Living in a global interior
Protect me from what I want
“On the one hand, gated communities are anathema to the egalitarian ideal. On the other, gating and exclusion are the preconditions of a new civilising mission Europe now feels obliged to carry out at home.” Jeremy Harding in the LRB
a new vocabulary often masks old clichés
David Graeber quoting Jonathan Katz’s “Don’t become a scientist” “You have to spend much of your time being someone’s flunky, but even once one isn’t, he says, you have to spend your time making proposals rather than doing research. ‘And because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity. You have to spend your time and talents anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than solving an important scientific problem. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal because they have not yet been proved to work.’ There you go. That’s why we don’t have flying cars.”
He made suggestions. We
acted on them.
acted on them.
Inconsistently sincere
herbivorous modernism
a valley where they have no idea
Fine buildings will look after themselves
Putinoids
A degree of suffering that previous generations might not have been able to afford
Apostasy comes more naturally to him
“If society were to outgrow the idea of an age of childhood, it would have to become liveable for the young.” Illich
“The body of the leader will serve as one of the enduring symbols of these two lost decades. Carefully and surgically preserved, mythologised for its virile strength (he reckoned he could go for hours, although the recorded conversations amongst his protégés suggest otherwise), airbrushed, the face frozen in a permanent smirk: this was our transubstantiated political body, the vessel in which we projected one last time the belief that our post-war economic miracle was for real, and lived on. But no more. As of today we wake up in a different body, which may not even be male, with a different skin, which may not even be white, and we’ll have to learn again what it means to look after it.” Giovanni Tiso on Berlusconi
Pigeons never forget a face
“What they’re learning is how to manipulate graphics in order to sway opinion and build their own myth through various forms of performance and graphic chicanery… As these people grow up, it will impact poorly on public space… There are victims here, and the victims will eventually be all of us when these mismanaged kids grow up and turn into even lighter-weight Zahas — if you can imagine such a thing. They will have trained all their lives to make pictures and never have learned anything.” Philip Nobel
Whorish materials
“It’s time people accepted that there’s no such thing as ‘the’ public: there are several publics who have different needs and different areas of interest, and each associate something different with art.” Ute Meta Bauer in on curating [PDF]
“Behind every rugged individual is a government agency.” Thomas Sheridan
A pair of her shoes sold for 200 rubles and was cooked and eaten by her admirers
The greater the spirit, the greater the beast
“The thing I regret most is letting Charlie [Jencks] have his PhD.” Banham
same sort of straining nervousness that you see in overbred show dogs
Inappropriate fragrance or aroma: fear
A new and abusive school of criticism
Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.
eat the rich
Honour thy error as a hidden intention
calamity water
RESISTANCE IS FERTILE
Graeber on the agoraphobia of the state in “There Never Was a West”
“It is only once it becomes absolutely clear that public speech and assembly is no longer itself the medium of political decision-making, but at best an attempt to criticize, influence, or make suggestions to political decision-makers, that they can be treated as sacrosanct.”
“If there was anyone to apologize to, I would. But they’re all dead.” Paul McMullan interviewed on BBC
my teeth are caked on with other teeth
Sorry 4 leaving u in the dumpster last night
“I don’t feel enormously real: I suppose it is all in order: I suppose it is right to embark on such critical courses with no sense of drama, like opening a window.” Isiah Berlin on his impending marriage to Aline Halban, 1956
“The woman whose husband impregnates her in her bed, before sleep, is not erotic. The erotic woman is the one who, at snack time, calls her son and tells him to prepare a sperm sandwich for his little sister. That’s erotic because that menu hasn’t yet become commonplace.” Emmanuelle, page 155
“Up until about 1600, most of the world views that existed in different cultures did see man and the universe as more or less intertwined and inseparable … either through the medium of what they called God or in some other way. But all that was understood. The particular intellectual game that led us to discover all the wonders of science forced us to abandon temporarily that idea. In other words, in order to do physics, to do biology, we were actually taught to pretend that things were like little machines because only then could you tinker with them and find out what makes them tick.” Christopher Alexander
If your neighbour is suffering injustice and you can sleep, then just wait your turn
“Coriander had the feeling the boss wasn’t taking her seriously. She needed to molt the downhome caricature that had got her in the door and develop something more earthy, erotic, powerful. Cilantro. Yes.”
“Much as I enjoyed John Burnside’s poem ‘Hyena’, I must point out that he has his hyenas crossed (LRB, 30 June). The ‘giggle’ and pack behaviour referred to in the final stanza suggests the spotted (or ‘laughing’) hyena, but the first stanza (white mane, grey face, bat ears) describes the striped hyena, a solitary animal which does not ‘laugh’.” Mikita Brottman’s letter to the LRB 33.15
the city is not a spatial entity with sociological consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially
Do I have an economic life?
“Greece has 800,000 civil servants, of whom 150,000 are on course to lose their jobs. The very existence of those jobs may well be a symptom of the three c’s, ‘corruption, cronyism, clientelism’, but that’s not how it feels to the person in the job, who was supposed to do what? Turn down the job offer, in the absence of alternative employment, because it was somehow bad for Greece to have so many public sector workers earning an OK living? Where is the agency in that person’s life, the meaningful space for political-economic action? She is made the scapegoat, the victim, of decisions made at altitudes far above her daily life – and the same goes for all the people undergoing ‘austerity’, not just in Greece. The austerity is supposed to be a consequence of us all having had it a little bit too easy (this is an attitude which is only very gently implied in public, but it’s there, and in private it is sometimes spelled out). But the thing is, most of us don’t feel we did have it particularly easy. When you combine that with the fact that we have so little real agency in our economic lives, we tend to feel we don’t deserve much of the blame. This feeling, which is strong enough in Ireland and Iceland, and which will grow steadily stronger in the UK, is so strong in Greece that the country is heading for a default whose likeliest outcome, by far, is a decade of misery for ordinary Greeks.” Lancaster in LRB 33.12
“He writes so obscurely that you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorist part.” Foucault on Derrida, from an interview with John R. Searle in Reason.
management boy
Poverty is the invention of civilisation
That love is something that every man needs, not with a vegetable, but with something that looks you in the eyes.
Ear of the uncultivated
I write you from the Sonoran desert with the equinox looming.
SNACKRILEGE
IT’S NOT THE CRISIS, IT’S THE SYSTEM
THE INCUBATOR CONVERTED IMMEDIATELY TO A DAIRY
“China’s exceptional competitiveness is largely founded on the prolonged stagnation of manufacturing wages in comparison with other Asian countries at equivalent stages of development.”
via New Left Review – Ho-fung Hung: America’s Head Servant?