cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

WFMU will be featured on New York Noise -- the NYC-area local access cable video show. In addition to an hour's worth of cool videos, there'll be footage shot at the Record Fair, and cameos by a number of WFMU DJs. The WFMU feature will air on NYC cable channel 25 on November 19th at 10 PM, December 2nd at 9 PM, and December 4th at 10 PM. More info on New York Noise can be found here.
tape it tivo it watch it


[link] [add a comment]

TWOJ Baudrillard (Annotated Bibliography)


[link] [1 comment]

9-11 Probers Leave Questions Behind


The private watchdog group formed by the former members of the 9-11 Commission is closing up shop. The announcement of its last media event—a December 5 briefing where the 9-11 Discourse Project "will issue its final assessment of progress on all 9/11 Commission recommendations"—came today. This is no surprise: The project (funded by entities like the Carnegie Corporation, the Drexel Family Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) was intended to last for just a year after the commission expired in August 2004, its mission to "educate the public on the issue of terrorism and what can be done to make the country safer." But even if this end was long planned, it doesn't mean everyone thinks the job is finished.
"I think it's really ironic that they are closing up shop at a time when their credibility is being called into question because of Able Danger," says Debra Burlingame, whose brother was pilot of the plane that hijackers flew into the Pentagon.

Able Danger is the secret military intelligence unit featured in stories published this summer in which military officers claimed that they had information about lead hijacker Mohammed Atta a year before the 9-11 attack. What's more, the sources of the story claim they told the 9-11 commission about it, but that information was left out of the final report. The 9-11 commissioners have dismissed the story as overblown, claiming in an op-ed piece just this week that their staff checked out the story and found no evidence it was true.

Able Danger isn't the only question that people keep asking. People who lost firefighters sons, husbands, and brothers still want answers regarding the issues of command & control and radio communication. "The questions that remain unanswered are the whole stuff of chapter 9," says Sally Regenhard, founder of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, who lost her firefighter son in the towers. "What happened to New York?" Others feel the commission played politics with its finding that Iraq and al Qaeda had no meaningful connections. And Burlingame feels the commission was never disposed to really examine what damage was done by the legal "wall" separating intelligence and criminal investigations at the FBI, since one of the commissioners, Jamie Gorelick, played a role in interpreting that rule during her Justice Department stint under Bill Clinton. Other commission members had similar conflicts on other issues, leading to a lot of recusals.

[link] [add a comment]

"How did a group of 9/11 families go from being seen as the entirely sympathetic victims of perhaps America’s greatest tragedy to being viewed as a self-interested obstructionist force that could hold up ground zero’s progress for years, banishing any sign of cultural life downtown—except, perhaps, for the culture of mourning?"
The Grief Police - No one says the 9/11 families aren’t entitled to their pain. But should a small handful of them have the power to reshape ground zero?
What Bernstein and his IFC colleagues hadn’t counted on was the families. Ielpi and other family activists had long ago come to believe that the memorial for the September 11 victims should be much larger and more prominent than ground-zero developers had envisioned. They saw the IFC as competition—not just for land but for the public’s attention and, not least, charitable donations. In private meetings, they argued that the IFC would take the emphasis away from what happened to their loved ones—and would even use some of the artifacts from the disaster, like Fritz Koenig’s Sphere sculpture from the Twin Towers’ plaza, that they wanted for their memorial. The IFC was meant to be aboveground, the memorial below; the families complained that visitors to ground zero would be distracted by the IFC and its street-level cultural center before they descended to the memorial.

When their lobbying didn’t succeed, they took the battle to another level. In June, a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a 9/11 family member named Debra Burlingame all but accused the IFC of being a left-wing Trojan horse, suggesting that intellectual elites were trying to sneak a blame-America museum onto sacred ground. Under the Take Back the Memorial banner, the family members made the rounds on cable talk shows, appeared before Congress, and were cheered on by right-wing blogs. The PR battle was fought until September, when Governor George Pataki, who had once called for an array of cultural institutions to rise from the ashes, yanked the IFC from the plan for downtown that he largely controls. Burlingame and Take Back the Memorial were victorious.

Now Ielpi, clearly emboldened, makes it plain that the IFC’s defeat was just the beginning. With him on the twentieth floor this morning is Michael Kuo, whose father, Frederick Kuo Jr., perished in the south tower and who is using his master’s degree in urban planning to help Ielpi with his latest project—the establishment of the Tribute Center, a tiny family-initiated visitor center opening soon, next door to the shrouded Deutsche Bank building. Staring out at a stirring, unobstructed view of the pit, the two men present their long-term wish list for all sixteen acres. First, they and the other members of Take Back the Memorial want a memorial that, unlike the current underground Arad design, would dominate the revived site, an unmissable reminder to all Americans of Ielpi’s and the other families’ darkest day. To that end, Take Back the Memorial would like to commandeer the proposed cultural building, or at least its parcel. If the group is successful, that would inflate the exhibition space for the World Trade Center Memorial and Museum to about four times that of the Holocaust Museum.

That’s not all. Next, Ielpi points out the outline of the Twin Towers’ foundations, which the families are fighting in court to have completely preserved, like a Roman ruin; to win that one, they would have to stop construction on the new Santiago Calatrava–designed PATH Terminal, which broke ground this month. To the northeast is the Gehry performing-arts-center site; some family members are uncomfortable with the idea of, as some have put it, dancing on the graves of victims. Then there’s the surrounding scheme for 600,000 square feet of retail space, which some families would like to screen for taste (no Victoria’s Secret, thank you)—and Larry Silverstein’s five planned commercial skyscrapers, including the Freedom Tower, the tenants of which the families may also have something to say about (Middle Eastern businesses, on ground zero?).


[link] [2 comments]

After the Avant-garde Sylvčre Lotringer

One thing about the avant-garde is that it's mostly humorless. Dada is the glaring exception, but it never was a group to speak of; there were too many holes everywhere. Dada never took itself seriously, didn't even capitalize its name. Andre Breton and his men, on the other hand, capitalized on everything. Breton published the famous Anthology of Black Humor although had no sense of humor to speak of and was color blind. He was a totally uptight little man. Didn't he say that he would never show himself naked in front of a woman if he were not in a glorious state of erection? No wonder he kept his hair long and wore a cape. I don't think he would have ever dropped his pants in front of the Academy as Kafka's chimpanzee did. Kafka's monkey obviously had nothing glorious to show, or to prove, all he wanted was finding a way out , certainly not a way in. He'd been wounded and captured, so he copied human ways as monkeys do in order to be let out of his cage. He couldn't care less about the Academy, just repaid them in their own coin, showing them his ass in lieu of his wound. This is what the avant-garde is supposed to do, drop its pants in front of academies, and not lick their ass.

The avant-garde never monkeyed their way out of their cage. On the contrary, they tried everything to be admitted to the club . Why otherwise would they spend all their time abusing everybody around, like the Situationists? It wasn't exactly the way to keep their distance. The avant-garde wanted everyone to pay attention to them, especially those they attacked. In reality, they became the watchdog of the art world, its most indispensable appendage. It is not surprising then that it was rewarded posthumously. It was all a con-game. They were the bouncers of the art club, standing at the door and keeping the others waiting in the cold. The most exclusive and nasty they were, the more seductive. That's also what happened to French Theory in America. Everyone begged to be let in, terrorized at the thought that could be left out. And then they moved on to something else. They couldn't care less what it was all about and it didn't change anything in their lives. All they cared for was their glorious erection.

The Academy had no way of knowing whether the chimpanzee was candid or pulling their leg. That's what I like so much about humor - it remains imperceptible. The chimpanzee was playing with the code upheld by the Academy and they were too uptight to admit it, or even know for sure that he was challenging them. The real challenge that humor raises is its very existence. And even if it is recognized for what it is, there's nothing much one can do about it. You're damned if you do and damn if you don't. But this is what gets people thinking.

[link] [add a comment]

lori landay semiotics teaching notes


[link] [add a comment]

the new yorker

“ ‘The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography and contemporary art has lost the desire of illusion,’ ” he began. “ ‘After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguity.’ ”

After he read, Baudrillard expanded on his theme. “We say that Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland,” he said. “And the same for art. The art scene is but a scene, or obscene”—he paused for chuckles from the audience—“mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics—it’s something very, very different. And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form.”

[link] [2 comments]

Mattress-to-mattress living turns private live into public theatre, and Jasmine, after settlin in, began hovering in corners and doorways to observe her neighbors. She was particularl interested in a middle-aged couple, Caroly Tompkins and Gus Davis, who, despite long residency in New Orleans East, had what others in the shelter called “country-ass ways. After a lifetime with a volatile mother, Jasmin is skittish; Carolyn and Gus mesmerized her with their placidity. He is illiterate, with failing eyesight, and had worked as an oysterman before Katrina and its accompanying oil spills Carolyn has a mellow laugh and, in Jasmine’ estimation, a woeful fashion sense: she wore faded house dress, pink flip-flops, and a blac polyester do-rag every day. The couple’s great interest was their sons, aged one and almost three, whom Carolyn rocked for hours in donated chair to which someone had affixed stickers that said “Wassup?

[link] [add a comment]