"An unrequited eschatological hope has always fueled the engines of accumulation."
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Monday, July 25, 2005
Laughter in a Sex Scene
"Pornographers will tell you that laughter in a sex scene is like a pistol shot at a concert. It ruptures the fantasy. In their guidelines for aspiring writers of eroticism, the publishers of Black Lace warn specifically against comedy. What they do not go on to say is that laughter is the operation of intelligence, an act of criticism, and the moment you subject porn, soft or hard, to intelligence, it comes apart like a mummified artefact exposed to light. Ditto The Da Vinci Code. Ditto the modern novel of highly responsible ideological intent."
Howard Jacobson, the Guardian newspaper, 2005
Howard Jacobson, the Guardian newspaper, 2005
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Sartre's cigarette
[A] good many of those who do not love Sartre are now willing to pay him due respect. Posters all over Paris advertise a grand, and perhaps excessively solemn, exhibition devoted to him at the Bibliothèque Nationale. ... Sartre's cigarette has been carefully airbrushed from the image, so that he looks as if he is about to make a rude gesture.
-- Prospect Magazine
-- Prospect Magazine
Sunday, July 03, 2005
The Silence of Things
Somewhere in the Industrial Age, objects shut up because their creation had become so remote and intricate a process that it was no longer readily knowable.
Or they were silenced, because the pleasures of abundance that all the cheap goods offered were only available if those goods were mute about the scarcity and loss that lay behind their creation.
Modern advertising -- notably for Nike -- constitutes an aggressive attempt to displace the meaning of the commodity from its makers, as though you enter into relationship with very tall athletes rather than, say, very thin Vietnamese teenagers when you buy their shoes.
It is a stretch to think about Mexican prison labor while contemplating Victoria's Secret lavender lace boycut panties.
The objects are pretty; their stories are hideous,
So you get to choose between an alienated and ultimately meaningless world and one that makes terrible demands on you.
Most consumers prefer meaningless over complicated, and therefore prefer that objects remain silent.
To tell their tales is to be the bearer of bad news ... against shrimp, against strawberries, against gold, and on and on.
It's what makes radicals and environmentalists seem so grumpy.
Rebecca Solnit, Alternet, 21 July 2003
Or they were silenced, because the pleasures of abundance that all the cheap goods offered were only available if those goods were mute about the scarcity and loss that lay behind their creation.
Modern advertising -- notably for Nike -- constitutes an aggressive attempt to displace the meaning of the commodity from its makers, as though you enter into relationship with very tall athletes rather than, say, very thin Vietnamese teenagers when you buy their shoes.
It is a stretch to think about Mexican prison labor while contemplating Victoria's Secret lavender lace boycut panties.
The objects are pretty; their stories are hideous,
So you get to choose between an alienated and ultimately meaningless world and one that makes terrible demands on you.
Most consumers prefer meaningless over complicated, and therefore prefer that objects remain silent.
To tell their tales is to be the bearer of bad news ... against shrimp, against strawberries, against gold, and on and on.
It's what makes radicals and environmentalists seem so grumpy.
Rebecca Solnit, Alternet, 21 July 2003
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Chuck Jones
A certain perversity attended the birth of many Chuck Jones cartoons.
He concocted the hilarious “Bully for Bugs” because a Warner Brothers executive stated that there was nothing funny about a bullfight.
He created Pepé [Le Pew] because no one thought of a skunk as the least bit amorous.
And he encouraged Mel Blanc to imitate a mogul’s lisp for the voice of Daffy Duck. Fortunately Leon Schlesinger was deaf to his own speech defect. Watching the rushes for the first time he exclaimed, “Jeethuth Chritht, that’th a funny voithe! Where’d you get that voithe?”
This whimsical attitude influenced Jones’s finest efforts.
What’s Opera, Doc? simultaneously parodies Wagner’s Ring cycle and Disney’s Fantasia.
"After all, when a major figure is being satirized, he demands an outsize lampoon.”
He concocted the hilarious “Bully for Bugs” because a Warner Brothers executive stated that there was nothing funny about a bullfight.
He created Pepé [Le Pew] because no one thought of a skunk as the least bit amorous.
And he encouraged Mel Blanc to imitate a mogul’s lisp for the voice of Daffy Duck. Fortunately Leon Schlesinger was deaf to his own speech defect. Watching the rushes for the first time he exclaimed, “Jeethuth Chritht, that’th a funny voithe! Where’d you get that voithe?”
This whimsical attitude influenced Jones’s finest efforts.
What’s Opera, Doc? simultaneously parodies Wagner’s Ring cycle and Disney’s Fantasia.
"After all, when a major figure is being satirized, he demands an outsize lampoon.”
