July 2010
55 posts
DROP OUT. HANG OUT. SPACE OUT.: Why Fox News/AM... →
This extra-long excerpt is taken from David Foster Wallace’s brilliant non-fiction piece Host.of this essay when I watched Rachel Maddow’s recap of the whole “Sherrod” story that I guess happened down south.
… …
Reading this reminded me of right-wing radio nutter Kevin James and the time he was on Chris Matthews hooting and hollering about how Obama was an “appeaser,”...
“A white man with no credibility makes a claim about a black woman with a public...”
– Tressie (via superhussyisms)
WatchRachel Maddow putting the Breitbart black-panic stuff in its proper cultural / historical context. Demonstrating, yet again, why she is the only person on cable news worth watching.
The one nit I would pick with this is that her conclusion really understates the role of Fox News as a cultural institution (rather than a political one), and all that that means within the context of 21st century...
The Notorious Cabrini Green →
(via tumblinerb)
Remember the movie Candyman? Remember how the horror of a killer ghost with a hook for a hand and bees in his mouth was amplified by the scary, urban location: “a notorious housing project”(that’s how they refer to it on the box)? Well, interestingly, they didn’t just make up a generic “ghetto” set in some LA back-lot. They filmed in the very...
Ecologists shun the urban jungle →
“Right now our backyards are black boxes,” says Laura Martin, an ecology graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York… “There are suburbs, villages and agricultural lands that are being completely left out of the picture as far as ecological processes go,” she says.
“While their [17th- and 18th-century liberal theorists’] doctrines liberated the...”
– Smith and Low (eds.) The Politics of Public Space (NY, London: Routledge, 2006) 2 (via marxistsinspace)
Glenn Greenwald: The Real U.S. Government →
suburbananarchist:
Glenn Greenwald on the recent Washington Post article.
So long as the word Terrorism continues to be able to strike fear in the hearts of enough citizens and media stars — as Communism did before it — the political class, no matter who is elected, will be petrified to oppose any of this, even if they wanted to, and why would they want to? They wouldn’t and they don’t....
California Blacks Divide Over Proposition 19 -... →
(via sunsmudge)
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-7-18) →
Liars (24)
Wavves (12)
Thelonious Monk (12)
The Rapture (11)
The Tallest Man on Earth (10)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“This fixation on factory labour as the locus of ‘true’ class-consciousness has...”
– David Harvey (via newleft)
1 tag
Did I just submit a conference paper proposal where I quote both a Baltimore City Health Department bed bug response plan and Wretched of the Earth in the same sentence? As a matter of fact, yes.
Watchdropouthangoutspaceout:
In the libertarian dystopia of the future… you get Pay & Sit - The Private Bench (via thedailywaaaaaaaaaat)
Borderland/Borderama/Detroit: Part 1 →
Detroit looks just like a city, except it’s not one any more. But instead of vanishing, like those Mayan cities of Mesoamerica, it persists in a death-in-life existence, and that is what lends the place an uncanny relevance and makes it so persistent an object for journalistic last words, none of them, of course, ever being the last word…Detroit is not so much a border as it is a...
Cipha Sounds Presents: The 75 Greatest Tunnel... →
tumblinerb:
Now in one convenient zip file. The internet wins again. You should absolutely read the text as well if you haven’t yet.
““The thugs, the drug dealers, the fucking jail dudes. Even the security guards were hustlers”
Ellison: On art and protest (1955)
sophiologist:
Paris Review: But isn’t it going to be difficult for the Negro writer to escape provincialism when his literature is concerned with a minority?
Ellison: All novels are about certain minorities: The individual is a minority. The universal in a novel—and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific...
“With capitalism, we did not go from a collective medicine to a private medicine....”
– Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine” (in Power, p.137) (via chuffedlittlebakedgood) (via pieto)
Interview w/ Frank B. Wilderson, “Wallowing in the... →
I might have feelings about justice, for example I feel that the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer was unjust; and that the verdict in the case (involuntary manslaughter) is also unjust. But justice is not a register that I trade in as a theorist. And perhaps not even as a politico. I am interested in ethics, which is to say that I am interested in explaining relations of power....
Zizek: 'Things cannot go on the way they are' →
“All signs are pointing to the fact that this welfare state dream is coming to an end.”
“Both Republicans and Democrats are actively supporting for-profit “education...”
– Marc Bousquet, “Hooked on Measurement“
I think I’ll try to incorporate the phrase “a hive of confusion, ambiguity, and error” into my syllabus for the fall.
“I want to focus for a moment on the distinction between voluntary and...”
– Oscar Grant, A Victim Of American Fear. || Adam Serwer (via shoulders)
“Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular,...”
– Adam Serwer (via meloukhia) (via abbyjean)
Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich →
barthel:
“Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population. More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars is seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic. By...
Structural Racism and a Tale of Two Islands:... →
Yesterday, The New York Times’ City Room Blog published a piece about the changing demographics of Manhattan which is obvious to anyone who lives here: Manhattan is getting whiter. In fact, Manhattan is whiter now than it’s been since the 1970s…Rikers Island is, in many ways, experiencing the mirror opposite trend of Manhattan. Ninety-five percent of the inmates in New York City jails...
Racism in Mexico rears its ugly head →
[T]his is Mexico, and definitions of racism are complicated and influenced by the country’s own tortured relationship with invading powers and indigenous cultures.
Many Mexicans will say they are not racist and that very little racism exists in Mexico, a nation, after all, of mestizos, who are of European and indigenous blood.
…
But the full truth is that racism is alive and...
“[P]ublic apologies are also politically dangerous, as mea culpas are often used...”
– Marc Lamont Hill, “Mel Gibson Save Your Apology” (thanks to Danielle for the link)
Black Scholars Having to Sue to Get Tenured: A... →
One finding of the report on Emerson College, which serves as a microcosm of what happens all across America, is that most African American tenure track faculty are vulnerable because “their energy and sense of belonging are being taxed.” The report also cites the “unintended bias” of non-black faculty, who end up concluding that black scholarship is not as valuable as...
The fact that it’s already July is giving me serious anxiety about being behind on my summer work, but the new Superego downloading as I type is a nice, if temporary, consolation.
"Nonprofits Defend the State – Need More Proof?!" →
People truly committed to social justice should be dialoguing with young people about how to escalate the attacks towards our real enemies: the state and capital. How can we move beyond smashing windows and begin shutting down and taking over the means of social reproduction? How can we stop school closures, layoffs, immigration raids, and police murders? What are the roots of racism, sexism,...
“Privileged bodies, whose mobility is unrestricted worldwide, get to decide where...”
– Tassja, “Different Kind of Border Patrol” (via tart-tart) (via bonesarecoralmade)
Jury clears activists who broke into Brighton arms... →
Five activists who caused £180,000 damage to an arms factory were acquitted after they argued they were seeking to prevent Israeli war crimes.
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The five admitted they had broken in and sabotaged the factory, but argued they were legally justified in doing so.
They believed that EDO MBM, the firm that owns the factory, was breaking export regulations by manufacturing and selling to the...
