August 27, 2005
Great Moments in Journalism #1
As it turns out, Kai has also created a fragrance. Its working title: Balloon. "The inspiration is making love with me in a field," he explains, "and feeling safe. My favorite thing is when I meet certain women and smell their cheeks and there is a scent of a balloon." He says it reminds him of his childhood. Balloon kicks like a mule, the scent both rubbery and synthetic. "It smells like a used condom," observes Ange.
From "Kooks Crack Up," New York magazine, August 29—September 5, 2005.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
August 9, 2005
1981 = 2005
Last week I dipped into Peter Schjeldahl's The Hydrogen Jukebox, a selection of his writings from 1978-1990. One paragraph in his first Village Voice column, published in January 1981, remains incredibly relevant twenty-four years later:
Beneath hip veneers, many journalistic art critics today are testy, defensive, and carping. This may be because they are beset from without by hordes of the recognition-starved (one's mail some mornings is like a nest of open-mouthed baby birds) and from within by a haunted sense of their own powerlessness. Such purposeful power as critics used to have disappeared with the time lag between the appearance of something new and its acceptance, a transition that dealers manage now seemingly in a matter of hours. The art-worldly function of criticism has become largely ceremonial: after-dinner speakers at the victory party. Thus critics tend to dig in their heels.
I recently dug my heels in for a short piece to be published in October, and found myself voicing similar concerns (albeit not as elegantly).
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Tom Nairn on twentieth century shifts in radicalism
In the course of an introduction to his essay on the recent G8 summit in Scotland, Tom Nairn makes interesting points about the formation of the 'club,' the historically recent emphasis on economics, and an unexpected forerunner of '68-style remaking of everyday life (Mussolini):
Continue reading "Tom Nairn on twentieth century shifts in radicalism"The oil crisis of 1973-75 was the immediate pretext for the foundation of the club, and similar factors have remained central to G8 ideology. But these were only part of a much bigger shift – that is, the elevation of economics into a new popular faith. It passed from being the necessary condition of socio-cultural development into something approaching the sufficient condition of all human welfare and hope. As philosophy, the old left-wing formula of ‘historical materialism’ may have been better known. But the right now took this over, to outdo it with the vengeance of the formerly repressed. A counter-radicalism of marketolatry soon relegated the older versions to museums or sects. As Andrew Bacevich points out in The New American Militarism, ‘radical’ came to mean Trotskyite mince reprocessed into neo-conservative sausages.
Situationist-style disreputables refused old and new rules alike, naturally; but such dissent served mainly to fortify the ‘realism’ of the mounting counter-revolution. Before long, ‘no alternative’ would be allowed to the latter’s common sense, which froze up political initiative (and hence democracy) in East and West alike. Thus the salience of economics was guaranteed – leading to 1989’s relatively quiet consecration of the Western gospel over its old competitors. The Internationale of market forces won out, bearing with it an ideology of ‘globalisation’, meaning not just one world, but the ball in the inevitable (and hence correct) hands. No other-worldly religion had ever enjoyed such fortune. So bourgeois historical materialism did more than buy out the Marxist competition. It underwent an apotheosis: the socio-economic ‘basis’ or structure became itself a commanding superstructure of ready-made ‘ideas’, far more intimidating than anything known in 1968 (let alone 1917, or in Mao Zedong’s takeover of 1949).
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
August 8, 2005
Sybille Bedford on New York's summer heat
An excerpt from The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey (1953; later republished as A Visit to Don Otavio), which begins at Grand Central Station before chronicling her journey to and through Mexico:
We emerged into the Hall of Mosaics [at Grand Central Station]. It was steaming like a Chinese laundry, the heat hit us on the head like a club. Summer in the large American cities is an evil thing. It is negative, relentless and dead. It is very hot. The heat radiated by concrete and steel girders is synthetic, involuntarily manmade, another unplanned by-product of the industrial revolution. This urban heat grows nothing; it does not warm, it only torments. It hardly seems to come from the sky. It has none of the charm and strength of the sun in a hot country. It is neither part of nature nor of life, and life is not adapted to it and nature recedes....
All day a grey lid presses upon the City of New York. At sunset there is no respite: night is an airless shaft and in the dark the temperature still rises. The heat is all enveloping, emanating invisibly from everywhere, from underfoot, from above, from the dull furnaces of saturated stone and metal. The hottest point is reached in the very kernel of the night: each separate inhabitant lies alone, for human contact is not to be endured, on a mattress enclosed in a black hole of Calcutta till dawn goes up like a soiled curtain on the unrefreshed in littered streets and rooms.
I will present irregular selections from my reading until I have time to return to writing for this site.