Archive for 2008

08w18:3 What the Old Farts Don't Get About the Economy

by timothy. 0 Comments

Young earn less than parents did: Census | Tobi Cohen
http://www.thestar.com/article/420331
“Young people entering the job market today may be better educated, but they’re earning less money than their parents did a generation ago, according to new census data released Thursday by Statistics Canada.”

08w18:2 What the Old Farts Don't Get about Obama-mania

by timothy. 0 Comments

What The Old Farts Don’t Get
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the Obamasignsjeffhaynesafpgetty forces arrayed against him are too strong — just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo — then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that…they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

Opting out of that is not immaturity, it’s intelligence.

08w17:4 Clay Shirky

by timothy. 0 Comments

Here Comes Everybody | Clay Shirky

Link to above video of presentation:
http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/855937/

Transcript of presentation:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset. It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society. If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. […] Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement. […] So I tell her [a TV producer] all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story [about Pluto’s talk page on Wikipedia] and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

Clay Shirky | KUOW’s The Conversation
http://www.kuow.org/MP3HIGH/MP3/Conversation/Conversation20080314.mp3

08w17:2 The Artist Statement of the Year

by timothy. 0 Comments

Found it yesterday via Andrew Sullivan (who’ I’m loving for Obama-mania analysis). Sullivan linked to the Perez Hilton site, which in itself is a gold mine for the comments, such as:

Disgusting! says: Stupid stupid attention seeking bitch! This made me feel sick to my stomach reading about her yesterday. Regardless of whether its real of fake, shes put the whole thing out there. You art school bitch, next time you go for your 5 mins, have a think about what your stupid actions could do. I know a couple of women who went through heart breaking miscarraiges and it has scarred them for life. Hope you get lynched, you cold blooded witch.

Buffy says: What a complete and utter sociopath

cambel says: I weep at the complete intellectual vacuum this shows in our elite universities. Not only did what she said dance around subjects like Michael Flatley, the fact is she could have said the same thing in 2 paragraphs. What you see with her is somebody who is used to having teachers say “Please turn in a 15 page paper by Friday” She only has 9 pages of info but she inflates, repeats, and mixes the wording and language to produce the extra 6 pages. Unfortunatly, after years of doing so she no longer has the ability to express herself any other way. It’s sad, I almost feel like I’m reading something written by somebody with Downs Syndrome and a spell checker.

wow says: First of all Gere, that’s getting extremely annoying.. stop promoting your crap site here.

second, what was this biyatch blabbing about? im sorry i didn’t have my dictionary handy… was she explaining herself or trying to cram as many SAT words in one essay as possible?

devan in canada says: SHE’S AN IDIOT….half of what she is saying is lifted directly out of feminist theory textbooks and great lecturers on the ideas of bodily ownership, expression and freedom.

i’ve heard all of this stuff before, but with more meaning and sincerity behind it. not just from some girl in leopard shorts and fringy boots trying to be radically female.

she’s just another hack, trying to be original and thought provoking, but instead she has ended up looking like another silly art student with a outrageous idea and no strength to hold it up

Stupid Bitch says: She could have gotten her point across simply by stating “I was bored and lonely. Not all this bullshit trying-to-impress-the-reader jargon.

adriana banana says: HOW FUCKING SAD… This bitch is sick, first of all I don’t understand all of the long ass words she is using, but I’m not dumb enough to realize that even though she comes around as really smart, she is the MOST ignorant person I’ve heard of… I can’t believe this bitch, I never damn anyone, but this person deserves to die. Ew, She makes me so fucking sick

Aliza Shvarts’ Artist Statement | Perez Hilton & Friends
http://perezhilton.com/2008-04-18-she-attempts-to-explain-herself
“Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “‘meant’ for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not ‘meant’ for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are ‘meant’ to birth a child. When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.”

08w17:1 Luc Tuymans Fail

by timothy. 1 Comment

This totally confirms my art-world cynicism. (Via Boing Boing)

Further, Tuymans image is apparently this one (a screencapture from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil at 29:50):


Fucking Monkies from Chris Marker’s visit to the Japanese sex museum


Luc Tuymans’ ‘relevant’ version from the above video

John Ralston Saul, in Voltaire’s Bastards (p497-498):

“The official artists do amuse the court of critics, experts and social followers. In a way they are more conservative and patronizing than the official artists of the late 19C. Take Lichtenstein, for example, who was pushed to paint blown-up versions of comic strips when, in 1960, one of his sons pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book ad said, ‘I bet you can’t paint as good as that.’ He painted an outsized picture of Donald Duck. In 1962 he caused a sensation in the art world with his cartoon-based show at the Castelli gallery in New York. In November 1963 Lichtenstein said, ‘My work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn’t call it a transformation…. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I’m using the word; the comics have shapes, but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified.’ 19 This may sound surprisingly pretentious from the mouth of the leading pop artist, but Lichtenstein, after all, for a good part of his life was a university professor of art. On the other hand, copying comic strips made him rich and famous. This process had to turn, however, on one shared assumption – that Lichtenstein was an artist, while the cartoonists were not.”

“There could be no clearer example of how completely the craft and art functions have been separated by Western society. In hijacking the secondary idea of personal artistic merit, the artist himself loses track not simply of the technical craft so essential to earlier painters, but of the real relationship between the painter’s image and the public. Lichtenstein ripped off the true public images – the comics – while denigrating them and thus amusing his fellow experts. Like most people caught up in the abstract reality of ritual, they assumed quire naturally that the cartoon was just an amusing tool to be manipulated by their talents. There really isn’t much difference between Marie Antoinette’s bon mot over bread and brioche and Warhol’s soup cans. They are both expressions of clever artificiality, not of intelligent relevance. “