Occupied Territories

Arne Svenson, The Neighbors Svenson has turned outward from his...

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:27:00 -0400

Svenson has turned outward from his usual studio based practice to study the daily activities of his downtown Manhattan neighbors as seen through his windows into theirs. Svenson has always combined a highly developed aesthetic sense viewed from the perspective of social anthropology in his eclectic projects with subjects ranging from prisoners to sock monkeys. His projects are almost always instigated by an external or random experience which brings new objects or equipment into his life- in this case he inherited a bird watching telephoto lens from a friend.

The grid structure of the windows frame the quotidian activities of the neighbors, forming images which are puzzling, endearing, theatrical and often seem to mimic art history, from Delacroix to Vermeer.

Voyeuristic and investigative, The Neighbors is social documentation in a very rarified environment. The large color prints have been cropped to various orientations and sizes to condense and focus the action. In a recent review in Photograph from his LA show C. Wagley wrote, “had you not read the press release, you might think these were film stills from some slow-moving art-house picture.” Svenson has shown with the gallery since 1992 and is known for such diverse bodies of works as the aforementioned Prisoners (1997), Sock Monkeys (2003) and recent book projects Strays (2012), Chewed (2011), and Mrs. Ballard’s Parrots (2005). He recently completed the solo exhibition About Face at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. His work is in the collections of the Mutter Museum, Philadelphia, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"In 1997, NBC canceled the sitcom “The Single Guy” after two seasons; it had an audience of 20.1..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:06:03 -0400

“In 1997, NBC canceled the sitcom “The Single Guy” after two seasons; it had an audience of 20.1 million people. This month, NBC is on the verge of renewing “Parks and Recreation,” which has an audience of 2.5 million, which tells you everything you need to know about the dwindling viewership for network TV. The highest-rated show this season among 18- to 49-years-olds — the demographic advertisers really care about — is not even a network show: it’s AMC’s “Walking Dead,” a cable show that drew a total of 12.4 million viewers for its recent season finale.”

- Willa Paskin, “Network TV Is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits?”

"From the 19th century onward, liberally educated people from a variety of backgrounds have had at..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:58:01 -0400

“From the 19th century onward, liberally educated people from a variety of backgrounds have had at least four ways of responding to the onward march of industrial capitalism and state-supported ideology: they can become bourgeois (like most college professors), they can become anarchists (which means dropping out and behaving badly, like Rimbaud, Tzara and the Sex Pistols), they can become aesthetes (like Baudelaire, Wilde, Joyce, Woolf, and all the great modernists), or they can become revolutionary political activists (like Mother Jones, Lenin, Fanon and Malcolm X).”

- James Naremore, Movie Mutations

"Everything is at once hideous and hilarious, from the gory apparition of the parasitic creature in..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:38:59 -0400

“

Everything is at once hideous and hilarious, from the gory apparition of the parasitic creature in the bathtub to the zombielike orgy in the swimming pool at the end. [Shivers] neither idealizes nor condemns these transgressive moments of physical violation and orgiastic excess. Rather, it slyly suggests that the bourgeois sexual ‘revolution’ in fact merely reproduces the aggressive, hysterical logic of a commodified competitive society. Transgression is not transcendence.

Cronenberg is thus equally skeptical of “left-Fruedian” visions of personal and social liberation through the lifting of repression, and of right-wing claims that desire must always be repressed because it is inherently evil and disruptive. These positions are, in fact, mirror images of one another. They both posit a soul, an originary human essence—whether good or evil—and ignore the shady complicity that always already contaminates desire with the regulation and repression of desire. Humanist visions of unlimited freedom and conservative visions of original sin (or of inevitable limits) both strive to reject monstrosity, to deny the violent ambivalence of bodily passion. Harmonious utopian projections and anxious defenses of the status quo alike betray a continuing need to idealize, a panic in face of the excesses of the flesh. Both ideologies are trying to transcend the anxiety and insecurity implicit in the state of being a body.

”

- Steven Shaviro, “Bodies off Fear: The Films of David Cronenberg”

"Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually..."

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:28:45 -0400

“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions.

Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.

In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:

The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.

In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.”

Lana Turner, photographed by Laszlo Willinger (via)

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:55:55 -0400

Lana Turner, photographed by Laszlo Willinger (via)

"Think about these things, reader. Don’t sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:14:17 -0400

“Think about these things, reader. Don’t sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and you have read them, and the odds against either of us ever having existed are greater by far than one to all of the atoms in creation.”

- Three Colors: Red, December 1994 (via ebertquotes)

The shaming of indie R&B

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:56:08 -0400

jordansargent:

I really like inc.’s album. It’s my favorite album of the year, for whatever that’s worth in early March. It seems like more people feel “eh” (or worse) about it, which I understand — it’s slight by design. But the album has also been swimming upstream in some circles because it’s indie R&B, both literally (it’s on 4AD) and in terms of aesthetics. This, I think, is unfair — but that’s not the real issue.

Creatures of the internet who grew up on pop or R&B or rap have been bred to cast suspicion on our indie rock friends and foes. How open and adventurous are they as listeners? What are their worldviews? Are they SECRET RACISTS? Et cetera. That mindset is not totally without reason, but it’s also not at all disentangled from the infiltration of R&B into indie rock culture.

In fact, of course, there is a direct connection. A decade-plus (nb: I’m confining this discussion to the Pitchfork era, more or less) of the cool kids telling the squares what they ought to like has finally led to what we have now: Indie rock audiences elevating R&B albums to the same level as canonized indie records, indie rock audiences breaking major R&B acts before R&B audiences and indie rockers making their own R&B music.

This is what people wanted, right? Or maybe, it turns out, it’s just what people wanted in theory. Regardless, it’s more than a bit disingenuous to spend years imploring indie audiences to open their ears to R&B only to turn around and shut the doors after R&B has been listened to, loved and internalized to the point where it’s influencing indie music. It’s a cycle of shame where the blame is now being passed off onto the victim.

Which is to say this: if you’re going to cop to fathering the style, it makes you an asshole to abandon the baby.

"In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally..."

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:24:19 -0500

“In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.””

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Good, Racist People”

"The current crop of affluential women artists are not especially positive examples of egalitarian..."

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:58:23 -0500

“The current crop of affluential women artists are not especially positive examples of egalitarian empowerment. The peculiar mix of ambition and self-regard that percolates in late-capitalist culture has given rise to a new role for the female superstar that lies halfway between exploiter and exploited. If they are not stereotyped in the high old-fashioned way, today’s female popstars are targets of a commodification that is more worrying because it is more universal. In previous eras, the female pin-up was exploited by men as a sex object; in the neoliberal period, she has become an infinitely serviceable fashion icon, an eclectic mannequin of lifestyle envy for men and women consumers alike.”

- Alex Niven on Women Make Noise (via @lindsayzoladz)

"Yet until recently the dominant strains of queer theory have tended to privilege the avant-garde. At..."

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:56:17 -0500

“Yet until recently the dominant strains of queer theory have tended to privilege the avant-garde. At one point in my life as a scholar of queer culture and theory, I thought the point of queer was to be always ahead of actually existing social possibilities. On this model, it seemed that truly queer queers would dissolve forms, disintegrate identities, level taxonomies, scorn the social, and even repudiate politics altogether (and indeed, there is one wing of queer theory that does privilege this kind of negating work). But this version of “queering” the social text strikes me as somewhat akin to Eve Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid criticism: it’s about having the problem solved ahead of time, about feeling more evolved than one’s context. Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever appears useless. For while queer antiformalism appeals to me on an intellectual level, I find myself emotionally compelled by the not-quite-queer-enough longing for form that turns us backward to prior moments, forward to embarrassing utopias, sideways to forms of being and belonging that seem, on the face of it, completely banal.”

- Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, xiii (via starlit-mire)

kurtwalker: Detective (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985) fave title card...

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:02:02 -0500

kurtwalker:

Detective (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

fave title card in the history of cinema

raraspeaks: sun ra business card

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:48:32 -0500

raraspeaks:

sun ra business card

"PITCHFORK. So if there is no difference between popular music and commercial music nowadays, does..."

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:50:00 -0500

“

PITCHFORK. So if there is no difference between popular music and commercial music nowadays, does that mean that there is no space for resistance to commercialism?

TIMOTHY TAYLOR. I think there is: Kids who have a garage band but don’t have any intention of signing with a label, or people who sing in a church choir, are a form of resistance. For another project, I’ve been interviewing indie rock musicians here in L.A., mostly associated with Burger Records. I interviewed one person who doesn’t copyright her music, has a day job, and doesn’t have an interest in trying to make a living as a musician. She told me that her goal is to try to stay in the shadows. So I think the only way to resist capitalism now is not so much to try to overthrow it—I don’t think that’s going to happen—but to do things that capitalism doesn’t care about, or is not interested in. A lot of people who don’t have any interest in making a living at music derive a lot of pleasure from playing or singing, and that pleasure matters.

”

- “The Sounds of Capitalism”

barthel: tomewing: rocketsandrayguns: “We looked at how we had constructed some of our more...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:57:54 -0500

barthel:

tomewing:

rocketsandrayguns:

“We looked at how we had constructed some of our more unusual songs, and a lot of them were made from concrete music, found sounds, and we looked at what we had explored in the past and we were trying not to repeat ourselves, and, well, we’ve done trains; we’ve done machinery. And then I actually said to myself “I realise now that everything that we’ve sampled from the real world – trains, machines, computers, guns, typewriters – they were actually accidental”. The audio that we had sampled was a waste product from the specific design function of whatever it was that we had recorded.

Let me clarify that: a typewriter is designed to type things onto a page, not make a clicking noise when you hit the key. A steam engine is not designed to go ‘chuff chuff’. That’s an audio waste product of the inefficiency of its engine. And as the world has modernised, the accidental audio by-products, waste products, of the things that have become concrete music are going to be less and less because the designers have designed out the waste so that the machinery of the modern world has actually become more silent.”

— OMD’s Andy McClusky, The Quietus interview

I trimmed the quote a bit to zoom in on this really interesting point about “audio waste”

I was thinking the other day about how there aren’t songs anymore with found-audio samples from interviews, like “Little Fluffy Clouds.” It was such a thing in the 90s, and now it’s not. What happened? If anything, it’s become easier to find these sorts of things. And I think that’s precisely the problem. Before, these snippets were rare, passed around on cassettes or bought as secondhand records at flea markets. But now, almost any interesting moment from media in the past lives on YouTube, and everyone has access to them. If you put them in a song, the listener hears someone playing a YouTube clip, not the sounds themselves. In the 90s, though, they would be hearing the obscurity, the rarity, the unexpectedness. The clip functioned as a signal of something ephemeral and therefore magic captured and preserved by an audio connoisseur. Now, however, it’s just another banal aspect of everyday life. You might as well put the audio from “David After Dentist” on your electro track. And you can do that, of course - but it will mean something very different now than it did then.

"George Bataille explains that the language of Sade is paradoxical because it is essentially that of..."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:13:16 -0500

“George Bataille explains that the language of Sade is paradoxical because it is essentially that of a victim. Only the victim can describe torture; the torturer necessarily uses the hypocritical language of established order and power. “As a general rule the torturer does not use the language of the violence exerted by him in the name of an established authority; he uses the language of the authority… The violent man is willing to keep quiet and connives at cheating… Thus Sade’s attitude is diametrically opposed to that of the torturer. When Sade writes he refuses to cheat, but he attributes his own attitude to people who in real life could only have been silent and uses them to make self-contradictory statements to other people.””

- Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty

I haven’t put all the pieces together, but I was thinking about the Weeknd recently when this passage came to mind. It seems highly relevant to the Weeknd’s aesthetic.

"Whenever a man came onto my bus, he had to drop trou, and I took a Polaroid of him, just to..."

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 15:28:24 -0500

“Whenever a man came onto my bus, he had to drop trou, and I took a Polaroid of him, just to emasculate him and make sure he knew he was in the vagina jungle. That’s what I call my bus.”

- Ke$ha

Photo

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:36:28 -0500

Jamieson Cox: I like the Tegan and Sara album as much as the next member of the...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:22:08 -0500

Jamieson Cox: I like the Tegan and Sara album as much as the next member of the...:

jamiesoncox:

I like the Tegan and Sara album as much as the next member of the music Twitterati - the first three songs in particular are near perfect - so this isn’t intended as a slight, but I found it interesting: isn’t the narrative surrounding this album basically a poptimist’s dream? Two indie rock…

snowconess: tzechar: G-DRAGON - CRAYON (LAM SUET...

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:17:36 -0500

snowconess:

tzechar:

G-DRAGON - CRAYON (LAM SUET RMX)

AUDIO: https://soundcloud.com/lamsuet/g-dragon-crayon-lam-suet-rmx

:)

oh my god
Taeyang cooking
god of cookery
yan can cook
lil b cooking
the stars are aligning
it is happening again