Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
GD society of the spectacle
G M-C splitting, bingo/ninths, substrait (underground dailies)
energy and how to get it
UbuWeb | UbuWeb Papers
Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing
Raphael Rubinstein
This paper originally appeared in March/April 1999 edition of the The American Poetry Review
Combining his quest for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter Benjamin once dreamed of authoring an essay that would consist entirely of quotations from his sources. I'm not sure what my motivations were, but last year I wrote a poem largely composed of direct quotes from a 1979 guide to artists' videos. For the texts of other recent poems I've lifted from such sources as the table of contents of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an obscure 1960s film, an article on the Swiss pop music scene, and the intermittently legible legend on an old Mexican retablo. In some cases I simply transcribed the passage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about these acts of literary larceny is how satisfying I find the process. Even though the words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I get from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. Why, I wonder, should it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines someone else has written into a text I intend to sign with my own name?
It is to answer that question that I decided to delve a little into the history of what could be called "appropriative literature." I wasn't interested so much in the 20th-century tradition of collage poetry--exemplified by "The Wasteland" and The Cantos--as in a more extreme approach in which, rather than weave obvious quotations into his or her words, the writer becomes a kind of scribe, transferring small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals that these words were written by someone else.
The epitome of this kind of writer is, of course, Borges's splendid invention Pierre Menard, the fictional early-20th-century French poet who sets out to rewrite Cervantes's Don Quixote word for word. (In the 1980s, Borges's text was often cited in relation to so-called appropriation artists such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince.) The idea of erasing the lines between authors was one which Borges returns to again in his short essay "The Flowers of Coleridge." There, he raises the notion previously espoused by Shelley, Emerson and Valéry that all literary works are the creations of a single eternal author (a point he tries to demonstrate by tracing a recurring idea through Coleridge, H.G. Wells and Henry James). Arguing for the essentially impersonal nature of literature, Borges reminds us that George Moore and James Joyce "incorporated in their works the pages and sentence of others" and that Oscar Wilde "used to give plots away for others to develop." More recently, a whole school of literary theory has developed ideas remarkably similar to those Borges espoused. Roland Barthes, for instance, famously defined the text as "a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original"
The following list doesn't include any Wilde-derived stories, alas, but there are plenty of instances of writers utilizing "the pages and sentences of others." I don't pretend that this is an exhaustive list -- I'm no literary scholar and didn't go far beyond what I could find on my own shelves. However, I think it does suggest the extent and vitality of the modernist tradition of textual pilfering. If nothing else, it has given me a better idea of why it seems so natural, and so creatively satisfying, to avail myself of the words of others.
(In emulation of Borges's bibliography of Pierre Menard's "visible" works, I've assigned each entry a letter.)
love letters from nola (tony fitzpatrick)
It’s hard to think of a building that has suffered through more indignities than the Yale School of Art and Architecture. On the day of its dedication in 1963, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemned the oppressive monumentality of its concrete forms. Two years later the school’s dean brutally cut up many of the interiors, which he claimed were dysfunctional. A few years after that a fire gutted what was left. By then the reputation of the building’s architect, Paul Rudolph, was in ruins.
hotrod hoedown east coast fall event
The plight of public schools in New Orleans have been a hot topic lately. This past Monday the School Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish was released; it calls for a large-scale rehabilitation of the city’s educational infrastructure. This news falls in the larger context of a shift toward privatized education which, depending on how you look at it, is either a welcome solution to an entrenched problem of low-performance (as portrayed in this week’s New York Times Magazine), or a sinister example of “disaster capitalism” (as per Naomi Klein). In either case, something important gets lost in the conversation; that is the impending threat to New Orleans’s modernist architecture.
ct salt marsh barn
duo dickinson
Some 34.2 million viewers watched the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing on Aug. 8, 2008. However, following the spectacular show, Western news reports charged that organizers of the event had deceived the audience by using trickery to augment the proceedings, including having a little girl lip-synch a patriotic song and representing contingents of ethnic minorities with actors. Critics claim as well that the ceremony’s spectacular fireworks show, which was conceived by Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang, wasn’t all it seemed to be.
The impressive fireworks display included a series of 29 giant footprints, made of white starbursts, that seemed to traverse the sky from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic Stadium. But the TV presentation of the fireworks, broadcast to the world as well as shown on the giant screens within the Olympic Stadium, included not the actual event but rather a 55-second digital film of the 29 footprints, complete with simulated camera jitter and haze, seamlessly inserted into the broadcast.
Representatives of the Beijing Games have stated that the digital trickery was necessary because the actual effect would not have been clearly visible in the prevailing atmospheric conditions, while filming it from the air would have endangered the helicopter pilot. Here, the artist himself responds to the controversy:
The use of worn-out horseshoes as magically protective amulets -- especially hung above or next to doorways -- originated in Europe, where one can still find them nailed onto houses, barns, and stables from Italy through Germany and up into Britain and Scandinavia. Additionally, wall hangins made in the form of horseshoes are common. In the Middle-East, one finds the terra cotta blue-glazed horseshoe plaque. In Turkey small metal or blue glass horseshoes are blended with the protective all-seeing eye to form a unique apotropaic charm i call the horseshoe-and-eyes that is believed to ward off the evil eye.
There is good reason to suppose that the crescent form of the horseshoe links the symbol to pagan Moon goddesses of ancient Europe such as Artemis and Diana, and that the protection invoked is that of the goddess herself, or, more particularly, of her sacred vulva. As such, the horseshoe is related to other magically protective doorway-goddesses, such as the Irish sheela-na-gig, and to lunar protectresses such as the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is often shown standing on a crescent moon and placed within a vulval mandorla or vesica pisces.
Whenever a structure wins the accolade of “Britain’s most hated building”, or crowds bay beside a demolition as at a public architectural execution, the victims will be brutalist buildings.
Brutalism is one of Britain’s two contributions to modern architecture. The other is “high tech”, the engineering aesthetic of metal and glass that has, in effect, become the style of the City , the emblem of modernity. Brutalism, an aesthetic based on bulky cliffs of concrete, remains locked up in its filthy, rain-stained bunker, dismissed as modernism’s idiot relative, reviled, unpopular, a manifestation of everything that went wrong with architecture. One of its finest British proponents was Rodney Gordon, who has died aged 75.
Gordon remained unknown beyond architecture circles. His brief, flashy career largely happened in the office of Owen Luder in the 1960s, meaning his name was rarely associated with a building. In that time the office designed a handful of astonishing, sculptural buildings, nearly all of which have been, or are being, destroyed. The finest was the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, a terrific essay in sci-fi concrete that was left to rot by an unsympathetic council and chain stores that would rather have been somewhere else, somewhere with a bit less . . . character. Opened in 1966, its fiercely modelled form embraced a shopping centre, a nightclub and apartments. By the 1980s its apartments had never been fully occupied because of problems with damp and malfunctioning services, the nightclub had degenerated into a shabby casino and the top of the multistorey car park had become the south coast’s most popular spot for suicides after Beachy Head. It was demolished in 2004.
this dynamic new office space serves as a green remodeling example, having been fashioned from 90% reclaimed materials - the highest percentage in the country. the office space design integrates the Rebuilding Center's office space with the design and philosophy of its warehouses. ORANGE began by creating the stunning array of reused windows that surround the building, and has taken its problem-solving genius inside this truly amazing space.via mb
ART adores a vacuum. That’s why styles, genres and mediums left for dead by one generation are often revived by subsequent ones. In the 1960s and ’70s public sculpture was contemporary art’s foremost fatality — deader than painting actually. The corpse generally took the form of corporate, pseudo-Minimalist plop art. It was ignored by the general public and despised by the art world. At the time many of the most talented emerging sculptors were making anything but sculpture. Ephemeral installations, earthworks and permanent site-specific works were in vogue, and soon the very phrase “public sculpture” had been replaced by public art, an amorphous new category in which art could be almost anything: LED signs, billboards, slide or video projections, guerrilla actions, suites of waterfalls. But over the past 15 years public sculpture — that is, static, often figurative objects of varying sizes in outdoor public spaces — has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one.
21 (PLUS) ACRE PARADISE IN THE WOODS OF VENUS, FLORIDA FOR SALE BY OWNER
via vz
buynow price $3,000.00!
You are bidding on an orginal 1955 Packard Custom Clipper 4dr Sedan. There is no reserve!!! This car must go!!! The car has 35880 original miles, powered by a 352 V8 with 4 barrel carb and a freshly rebuilt Ultramatic Transmission. The Car Runs and Drives as is! The car comes complete with all parts, just awaiting restoration. Equipment included (All items are in working order unless noted): Power Brakes, Power Steering, Power Windows (Pass. Front does not work), Power Antenna, Radio (Does not work), Power Drivers Seat (Needs Repair, Half of seat works), Optional Torsion Level Ride System. Here is a list of work done and or parts replaced. New Windshield, New Brakes, Brake Hoses (Steel Lines), Rebuilt Master Cylinder and Power Brake Unit, Overhauled Radiator, Rebuilt Water Pump, Valve Job on Engine Heads, Overhauled and Seal Coated Gas Tank and a New Fuel Pump. Details: The back of the rear seat needs to be reupholstered, the entire front seat and the bottom of the rear seat are in excelent condition, the front seat is still wraped in plastic. There is some minor rust on the right rear bottom quarter panel and lower left side tail lamp, otherwise the rest of the car is solid. The Carburator needs to be rebuilt.
m. schwartz coachbuilder
the big book of barris
american sportscars
concept car timeline
The prevailing attitude is that dragstrips and other racetracks were driven away primarily as a result of urban development. As I began to show last month, it just ain't so. In my search for the locations of former SoCal strips, I was astounded to find, in approximately nine out of ten cases, that the settings were still bare, vacant land or-as in the case of Ramona-the former track is still right there, with weeds growing through it. In fact, this seems to be the case nationwide. In a monthly series in the magazine's Straight Scoop column, Car Craft has been running photos sent in by readers of still-existing but abandoned dragstrips in all parts of the country, and that's been going on for more than three years. Think about it. Most strips were built in pretty remote areas-for obvious reasons-in the first place. In most cases, this is the last acreage to be developed
pacific northwest regional architecture blog
shelter institute projects
wfmu logo contest (congratulations to the winner - 1st page, upper left.) excellent choice!
The politics and the photographers who shaped those images under the auspices of the federal Farm Security Administration come to life in “Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the F.S.A./O.W.I. Photographers,” an hourlong documentary on most PBS stations Monday night. The film shows how Mr. Stryker turned a small government agency’s New Deal project to document poverty into a visual anthology of thousands of images of American life in the 1930s and early ’40s that helped shape modern documentary photography; more than 160,000 are now at the Library of Congress.
Before television or the Internet, when many Americans lacked even a radio, the photographs told stories that would have remained elusive to those out of eyeball range. Ms. Lange and Mr. Rothstein, along with celebrated figures like Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, used their cameras to preserve scenes of winding bread lines, dirty-faced families in front of their ramshackle farmhouses or in jalopies with their possessions piled high, as well as the stark “colored” signs of segregated public facilities and somber black children picking cotton.
Domenic Priore. The Connoisseur of California Culture returns to the program, this time in his role as host of the film series "Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock, Rebellion and Hollywood Hippies,"
Roots of Communal Revival 1962-1966
One of the great flowerings of communitarianism in America came with the era of the hippies in the 1960s and early 1970s. The rural hippie communes were media attention-grabbers, full of photo opportunities, wild anecdotes, and the weirdest-looking people most Americans had ever seen. Press coverage was massive from about 1969 through 1972, and a string of popular books soon emerged, most of them travelogues of the authors' visits to communes. A fair body of scholarship eventually developed as well.
One standard theme in all of that coverage and scholarship, however, was oddly misguided. In case after case, observers of the new communalism seeking to explain the origins of the communes concluded that they were products of the decay of urban hippie life in the Haight-Ashbury, the East Village, and other enclaves. The hip urban centers, so the thesis ran, might have briefly been joyous centers of peace and love and expanded consciousness, but they soon devolved into cesspools of hard drugs, street crime, and official repression of dissident lifestyles. The hippies at that point fled for the friendly precincts of the countryside, where they built communes as new places for working out the hip vision.
Examples of this explanation of the origins of hippie communalism abound in both popular and scholarly writings. Maren Lockwood Carden, for example, writing in 1976, says matter-of- factly that the hippies' "first communes were created within the urban areas in which they already lived," and that beginning in 1966 "and especially during 1967 and 1968, such community-oriented hippies left the city." Helen Constas and Kenneth Westhues purport to trace the history of the counterculture "from its charismatic beginnings in the old urban bohemias to its current locale in rural communes," concluding that "communes signify the routinization of hippiedom."
Actually, however, the new communes began to appear before there was a clearly recognizable overall hippie culture, much less a decaying one; they represented a new outcropping of the much larger venerable American tradition of alternative culture, a part of which has involved communal living. Catalyzed by shifts in American culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the hip communes were not, in the beginning, products of hippiedom, but crucibles that played a major role in shaping and defining hip culture. In other words, the urban hippies did not create the first hip communes; it would be closer to the truth to say that the earliest communes helped create the hippies. While communes were indeed founded by hippies who fled the cities, they were johnnies- come-lately to the hip communal scene. When did the hippies first appear?
norman jaffe architect
becker house
the sea ranch
the moose
the klopman diamond
Hermendel's Koch-A-Lain
How Much Is That Pickle In The Window?
In case you had not heard before, this short is called "The Party". Robert Fortier is the hapless dude at this late-60s party. This short was directed by Robert Altman years before he did "M.A.S.H." (which was years before he directed "Nashville"). This short, set to the TJB's Bittersweet Samba, was created as the middle of a 3-part series for RA's personal guests.
rip jerry "more bass" wexler
2 new songs posted by quintron from his new album too thirsty 4 love
flip-flops
Thongs were inspired by the traditional woven soled zōri or "Japanese Sandals", (hence "jandals"). Woven Japanese zōri had been used as beach wear in New Zealand in the 1930s [2]. In the post war period in both New Zealand and America, versions were briefly popularized by servicemen returning from occupied Japan. The idea of making sandals from plastics did not occur for another decade. The modern design was purportedly invented in Auckland, New Zealand by Morris Yock in the 50's and patented in 1957. However, this claim has recently been contested by the children of John Cowie. John Cowie was an England-raised businessman who started a plastics manufacturing business in Hong Kong after the war. His children claim that it was Cowie that started manufacturing a plastic version of the sandals in the late 1940s and that Morris Yock was just a New Zealand importer.[4] His children say that their father claimed to have invented the name Jandal from a shortened form of 'Japanese Sandal'. John Cowie and family emigrated to New Zealand in 1959. Despite 'jandal' being commonly used in New Zealand to describe any manufacturer's brand, the word Jandal is actually a trademark since 1957, for a long time owned by the Skellerup company. In countries other than New Zealand, jandals are known by other names. For example, thongs, in Australia, where the first pair were manufactured by Skellerup rival Dunlop in 1960 and became popular there after being worn by the Australian Olympic swimming team at the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956. In the UK and US they are most commonly known as flip-flops.
Don Helms, whose piercing, forceful steel guitar helped define the sound of nearly all of Hank Williams’s hits, and who performed and recorded with a long list of other country greats, died Monday in Nashville. He was 81 and lived in Hendersonville, Tenn. The cause was complications of heart surgery and diabetes, said Marty Stuart, a friend and fellow performer. Mr. Helms played on more than 100 Hank Williams songs and on 10 of his 11 No. 1 country hits. He provided the dirgelike, weeping notes in songs like “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and added a catchy, propulsive twang to up-tempo numbers like “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” and “Hey, Good Lookin.’ ” “After the great tunes and Hank’s mournful voice, the next thing you think about in those songs is the steel guitar,” said Bill Lloyd, the curator of stringed instruments at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “It is the quintessential honky-tonk steel sound — tuneful, aggressive, full of attitude.”cold cold heart blues stay away from me bye bye blues
gould
Pastorius was most identified by his use of two well-worn Fender Jazz Basses from the early 1960s: A 1960 fretted, and a 1962 fretless. The fretless, known by Jaco as the "bass of doom", was originally a fretted bass (at the time Fender did not manufacture fretless Jazz Basses) from which he removed the frets and used wood filler to fill in the grooves where the frets had been, along with the holes created where chunks of the fretboard had been taken out. Jaco then sanded down the fingerboard, and applied several coats of marine epoxy (Petit's Poly-poxy) to prevent the rough Rotosound RS-66 roundwound bass strings he used from eating into the bare wood. Even though he played both the fretted and the fretless basses frequently, he preferred the fretless, because he felt frets were a hindrance, once calling them "speed bumps". However, he said in the instructional video that he never practiced with the fretless because the strings "chew the neck up." Both of his Fender basses were stolen shortly before he entered Bellevue hospital in 1986. In 1993, one of the basses resurfaced in a New York City music shop, with the distinctive letter P written between the two pickups. The store told Bass Player magazine it was brought in by a "student" of Jaco's, and the asking price was $35,000. In early 2008, the bass of doom, last seen with Jaco in Central Park shortly before his death, surfaced in New York City. It is unknown where the bass of doom has been for the last twenty years, but it was examined by several experts as well as bassists Will Lee, Victor Wooten and Victor Bailey, and is almost certainly Jaco's. The bass of doom's appearance has also drastically changed, since he smashed it shortly before his death, and it now has flame maple veneers to hold the shattered pieces together. Jaco also had two Jaydee Basses made for him shortly before he died; a fretted and a fretless.wiki entry
defendneworleans blog
via justin (stair porn) anthony
FLW gas station
via lisa
Stanley Marcus' Lakewood house, for decades the most glamorous residence in Dallas, may be torn down by the couple that once spurred efforts to preserve it.
The Lovvorn family has made some changes to the Marcus house, including painting the red-brick exterior and altering the entry, since buying it in 1994. From left are Janie, Tricia, Justin, Ben, Parris, Patty and Mark Lovvorn. The announcement by Dallas banker Mark Lovvorn, who bought the house from Mr. Marcus in 1994, brought a mixture of shock, surprise and anger from preservationists statewide.
But Mr. Lovvorn, chairman of Providence Bank of Texas, said restoring the house is economically impractical. He said he and his wife, Patty, intend to build a new house for their family on the 3-acre site. The Dallas Central Appraisal District has appraised the house and land at $1.8 million.
"Our family has always loved this house and appreciated the history of this house," he said. "That said, there are things we would like to do that you can't do with a house this size and this age."
Mr. Lovvorn sent a letter late last month to the Texas Historical Commission, notifying the agency that he intended to demolish the house, triggering a 60-day waiting period. The commission has since exercised its option to extend that period an extra 30 days and has asked to meet with the Lovvorns. Mr. Lovvorn said he would welcome the opportunity to discuss alternatives.
Beyond imposing a waiting period, the commission has no power to stop the demolition.
Jack A. Weil, a garter salesman, breezed into Denver in 1928 in a new Chrysler Roadster to start a new life. He exceeded his hopes and became a king of cowboy couture — almost certainly the first to put snaps on Western shirts (17 on a shirt), and most likely the first to produce bolo ties commercially. His Rockmount Ranch Wear Mfg. Company has sold millions of shirts, including at least one shipment to Antarctica, since it started in 1946. Clark Gable wore one in “The Misfits” with Marilyn Monroe, and Heath Ledger’s shirt in “Brokeback Mountain” — plaid fabric, diamond snaps and saw-tooth pockets — was Style No. 69-39.
A major figure in the modernist international style design movement, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) has only recently been given proper historical recognition for her revolutionary furniture and architecture. In this fascinating documentary profile, filmmaker Jörg Bundschuh tells how Gray abandoned the privilege of an aristocratic Irish-Scottish family to live a bohemian life in France, where she took lovers of both sexes, enjoyed fast cars, designed sleek tables and chairs and helped create one of the most famous houses of the 20th century.
Thursday August 14 at 9PM
Friday August 15 at 12:30PM
Friday August 22 at 6AM
edgar oliver in an irish commercial as genie
via vz
A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.via vz
“When Color Was New,” a smart, compact show at the Julie Saul gallery, puts things in perspective. Its focus is work from the nineteen-seventies, when Jan Groover, Joel Sternfeld, Mitch Epstein, Joel Meyerowitz, and others were challenging the notion that color was vulgar and commercial. Pictures by Paul Outerbridge and Harry Callahan set historic precedents, while others, from the eighties, by Nan Goldin and Boyd Webb, suggest color’s subsequent and unstoppable surge to dominance. But the seventies were the turning point. If one photograph sums up the breakthrough, it’s William Eggleston’s worm’s-eye view of a rusty tricycle on a Memphis street—the icon of his 1976 MOMA show, which cracked the black-and-white photography establishment. But Eggleston’s trike has a context, and between Stephen Shore’s frozen dinner, Martin Parr’s fast-food counter, and Helen Levitt’s vivid gaggle of runway-ready street urchins, this show provides it.
wire mesh fence panels
raked stair panel
infill panels
welded wire mesh / woven wire mesh framed and unframed
wire infill panel
hang m high vintage western wear
WFMU Radio Greats Weekend starts tonight and runs all weekend, August 8-10! Tune in as legendary WFMU DJs from years past drop by to help celebrate 50 years on the air. Special guests include Danny Fields, Wildgirl, Meredith, David Newgarden, Nicholas Hill, William Berger, Neal Adams, Mark Allen, Douglas Wolk, Stork, Vin Scelsa, Steinski, Hova & Belinda, R. Stevie Moore, Mark Allen, John Schnall, Bart Plantenga plus surprise guests and rare airchecks. More info below.
This year, the prestigious car show on the Monterey Peninsula of California ventures beyond the usual collection of Duesenbergs and Rolls-Royces to celebrate the futuristic concepts and design studies of the General Motors traveling showcase known as Motorama.
In its heyday during the 1950s, Motorama delivered the automaker’s message of postwar optimism to millions of curious spectators. On display will be the 1938 Buick Y-Job that begat the dream-car era; 17 Motorama showpieces from the 1950s; a 1959 Corvette racecar that forecast the ’63 Sting Ray; and one of the custom-crafted trucks that hauled Motorama exhibits around the country.
IQ light
no american distributer but avbl on ebay starting at 14.99 / via lisa
oxblood and other homemade paints
foam dome
thx dave
NEO-CONCRETE MANIFESTO, FERREIRA GULLAR 1959
_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+
Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica:
A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation
for a Telematic Future
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Hélio Oiticica (193-1980) was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of the twentieth century and is now recognised as a highly significant figure in the development of contemporary art. His influence has continued to spread since his premature death in 1980 at the age of forty-two.
Oiticica produced an outstanding body of work, which had its origins in the legacy of European Modernism as it developed in Brazil in the 1950s. His unique and radical investigations led him to develop his artistic production in ever more inventive directions. He challenged the traditional boundaries of art, and its relationship with life, and undermined the separation of the art-object from the viewer, whom he turned into an active participant.
This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on Oiticica's lifelong preoccupation with colour. It explores colour as a vital focus of his work from the outset of his career, tracing the conceptual and technical processes that led to his liberation of colour from the two-dimensional realm of painting out into space: to be walked around and through, looked into, manipulated, inhabited and experienced.
time lapse house construction
fall fashion trends: uhh, there are no trends
i think were all bozos on this bus
e-workers dot net
via reference library
sterling gt (vw kit car)
Finally, at clearly marked or somehow mutually agreed upon places, everybody starts conducting beautiful “zipper merges.” That’s the technical term — one-two, one-two or one-two-three, one-two-three — as indicated by the roadway configuration. The process has now worked at its ideal efficiency/equitability ratio: if all have behaved correctly, the tunnel passage has been both benign and, relatively speaking, quick. Personal sacrifice has been called for, to be sure. The former sidezoomers have sacrificed the pleasure of high-speed bypass, also known as I Beat Out the Stupid Sheep Just Now, Ha Ha (less truculent rendition: I Want to Get Home More Than I Care About Strangers Whose Faces I Can’t Even See). The former lineuppers have sacrificed the pleasure of self-congratulatory umbrage, also known as Hmph, Good Thing Society Has People Like Me. Together we have all ascended to the traffic decorum of the army ants, who as Vanderbilt observes are among the earth’s most accomplished commuters, managing to get from one place to another in large groups without cutting each other off, deciding their time is more valuable than everybody else’s, or — apparently this is the fast-lane domination method for certain traveling land crickets — eating anybody who gets in the way.
got a light mac?
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilizationvia lisa
We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. (Cover story of Adbusters Issue #79, hitting the newsstands now.)
