Comm'n Place

"…but the situations derived from them are seldom developed, with the result that his work is..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 01:37:16 -0400

“…but the situations derived from them are seldom developed, with the result that his work is full of gobbets of raw, unassimilated pain…”

- Robert Towers, “So It Went,” rev. of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, New York Review of Books, November 25, 1976, 29-30.

The 21 fiercest things Richard Nixon ever did - Salon.com

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:02:07 -0400

The 21 fiercest things Richard Nixon ever did - Salon.com:

“15. He is like ‘we dropped some bombs here guys hashtag DEAL WITH IT’”

occupiedterritories: Arne Svenson, The Neighbors Svenson has...

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:40:52 -0400

occupiedterritories:

Arne Svenson, The Neighbors

Svenson has turned outward from his usual studio based practice to study the daily activities of his downtown Manhattan neighbors as seen through his windows into theirs. Svenson has always combined a highly developed aesthetic sense viewed from the perspective of social anthropology in his eclectic projects with subjects ranging from prisoners to sock monkeys. His projects are almost always instigated by an external or random experience which brings new objects or equipment into his life- in this case he inherited a bird watching telephoto lens from a friend.

The grid structure of the windows frame the quotidian activities of the neighbors, forming images which are puzzling, endearing, theatrical and often seem to mimic art history, from Delacroix to Vermeer.

Voyeuristic and investigative, The Neighbors is social documentation in a very rarified environment. The large color prints have been cropped to various orientations and sizes to condense and focus the action. In a recent review in Photograph from his LA show C. Wagley wrote, “had you not read the press release, you might think these were film stills from some slow-moving art-house picture.” Svenson has shown with the gallery since 1992 and is known for such diverse bodies of works as the aforementioned Prisoners (1997), Sock Monkeys (2003) and recent book projects Strays (2012), Chewed (2011), and Mrs. Ballard’s Parrots (2005). He recently completed the solo exhibition About Face at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. His work is in the collections of the Mutter Museum, Philadelphia, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"sovramagnificentissimamente [‘very, very magnificently’]"

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:15:40 -0400

“sovramagnificentissimamente [‘very, very magnificently’]”

- Dante, De vulgari eloquentia (via)

SL Letter of the Day: I'm Out | Slog

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:52:00 -0400

SL Letter of the Day: I'm Out | Slog:

I’m a late twenty something male. I was out at a house party last night celebrating the end of the semester with fellow grad student friends when I was scolded by a peer for using the word “cunt.”….

In some deep-future Margaret Atwood Memorial Museum of the History of Misogyny, this letter should be bronzed. Such eloquent testimony to the power of the sensitive straight-guy mind to suss out every layer of meaning of every human communication—without even trying out such a supple instrument on the question of what that woman felt when you called her a cunt.

(Same blog, same day: “Man of Great Personal Integrity” Sentenced to 80 Years in Prison for Genocide. Character does count, I swear, but you can’t send in the Geiger counters while the bombs are falling.)

Internet of Dreams: Twitter Non-people

Fri, 10 May 2013 02:08:36 -0400

Internet of Dreams: Twitter Non-people:

internet-of-dreams:

Lovely post by Ken Hollings on the spectral “non-people” haunting twitter:

If you examine their profile a little more closely, these accounts usually have just 22 tweets (occasionally 20 or 21 but I have yet to see one with more than 22). They are usually worth examining, however, as…

Oops: cyborgs.

Opportunistic, even, the way he always found something to get genially worked up about for the New York Review of Books

Fri, 10 May 2013 02:03:12 -0400

"What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 23:27:32 -0400

“What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy and of being able, if required, to review them all and show up the inconsistencies within each system…what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognised her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion?”

- Kierkegaard, 1835, Journals (via)

"For one of the stars in the thigh of the Dog had a tail, though a dim one: if you looked hard at it..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 23:20:26 -0400

“For one of the stars in the thigh of the Dog had a tail, though a dim one: if you looked hard at it the light used to become dim, but to less intent glance it was brighter.”

- Averted vision. Aristotle, Meteorology (via)

"All music is just performances of 4’33” in studios where another band happened to be..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 18:23:11 -0400

“All music is just performances of 4’33” in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.”

- xkcd, silence

"We climbed out of the van an hour later, and Danny was just standing there, still wide-eyed, trying..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:45:59 -0400

“We climbed out of the van an hour later, and Danny was just standing there, still wide-eyed, trying to reproduce what he’d heard. “Tick-tick-tickin’. Tick-tick-tickin’ away.” His internal circuitry, transistors tenderly knotted by his parents to the silicon with little bits of yarn, had blown and caught fire. He was in another land.”

- Go to Homeschool | VICE United States

You're Out: The national pastime's shocking death toll—Slate

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:28:43 -0400

You're Out: The national pastime's shocking death toll—Slate

"This is why I think English professors should stick to analyzing the phallogocentric ontology of..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:51:29 -0400

“This is why I think English professors should stick to analyzing the phallogocentric ontology of desire in Paradise Lost, instead of turning disorders of organic brain function into ‘Hot or Not.’”

- Trend of the Week: Obsession Obsession | I Hate the New York Times

"Winogrand once remarked that he wasn’t worried about missing a picture while reloading his..."

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 21:34:00 -0400

“Winogrand once remarked that he wasn’t worried about missing a picture while reloading his camera because there was no picture to be had during that moment.”

- Paging Oscar Wilde? Lyle Rexer, “An Obsessive Embrace: Garry Winogrand’s late spirit,” Harper’s, February 2013, 63.

"Cowper regretted his birth ‘in a country where melancholy is the national..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:16:29 -0400

“

Cowper regretted his birth ‘in a country where melancholy is the national characteristic’, and admitted he had often wished himself a Frenchman. The French themselves apparently referred to suicide as death ‘à l’Anglaise – according to the English fashion’. The World’s John Tristman was one of many writers at home and abroad to link the English temperament with suicidal tendencies. In 1738, a journalist (possibly Samuel Richardson) claimed that suicide was England’s ‘new Religion’. Melancholy seemed to infect everyone and everything: even a sedan chair, narrating the history of its life and adventures in London in 1757, admits that it has flirted with self-destruction: ‘Since my reparation, I have … had a very particular dejection of spirits. Whether I am almost tired of a foolish and ridiculous world, I can’t tell …’. Two decades later, the Abbé Millot could still remark on ‘that rage of suicide, whereof England affords so many examples’. The English, he claimed, grow weary of existence ‘upon principle’. A national proclivity for self-murder was, perhaps, the inescapable counterpart of wealth, leisure, liberty and refinement. Spending power, and the freedom to think, generated variety and originality – hence, the argument ran, the surfeit of excellent English authors. But such benefits also encouraged, as in ancient Rome, effeminacy and madness. And then there was the weather, often presented as a fatal agent in the ‘English Malady’.

Many eighteenth-century writers argue that trade supports human virtue. Yet trade, reliant on slavery, also generates luxury and the kind of enervation associated with melancholy. Poor people conveniently lacked the time and imagination to kindle suicidal thoughts into action; they were too busy working. A truly aristocratic temperament, on the other hand, was inherently proud and self-destructive, doomed to squander its tremendous gifts and resources. One ‘well born’ correspondent summed the position up with exquisite absurdity in The World, again in 1756: ‘I grew to think that there was no living without killing oneself’.

”

- Freya Johnston, Suicide Watch, TLS, Jan. 16, 2013

Genre exercises with cheese. (via)

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:53:00 -0400

Genre exercises with cheese. (via)

Nathan Jurgenson, Strong and Mild Physical Dualism, Cyborgology,...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:33:56 -0400

Nathan Jurgenson, Strong and Mild Physical Dualism, Cyborgology, Oct. 29, 2012

bostonreview: Apartment buildings in Hong Kong look a bit like...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:06:02 -0400

bostonreview:

Apartment buildings in Hong Kong look a bit like the Borg cube. (Via iO9)

"The daughter is sad. _I’m so sad_ says the daughter. _Why are you sad?_ asks the mother. The..."

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:04:00 -0400

“

The daughter is sad. _I’m so sad_ says the daughter. _Why are you sad?_ asks the mother. The daughter doesn’t know. The days go by. The daughter isn’t getting better and the mother worries, frets, paces. The mother isn’t a doctor, she’s a poet, so she brings home a book. _I’m too sad to read_ says the daughter but it’s not for reading, it’s for figuring: it’s a thesaurus. _You can be as sad as you need to be says the mother but you must know what kind of sad you are. Are you sad-lonely, sad-desperate, sad-lacking-in-faith?_ The daughter sits at her desk and looks at the words she has written on the sheet of paper. It’s not that the words are any less true than she imagined, it’s not that they’re smaller than she thought, but they’re limited, they have boundaries, they’re finite, and she’s bigger than they are, surprisingly bigger and more vast than these words on the page, written in her own hand. Go figure. She starts to feel better.

What I love about this story is the idea that truth is something you can creep up on, one word at a time; that there’s some sort of alchemical math you can perform to ratchet the lens into focus.

”

- Language as neither handle nor staircase but speculum: inadequate speculum. Richard Siken, Journal, Day Three, Harriet: A Poetry Blog, Poetry Foundation, May 3, 2006

"[I]n the mental health care system here there are two classes of people—those in crisis and those..."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:09:15 -0400

“[I]n the mental health care system here there are two classes of people—those in crisis and those who have money. The rest of us get lost in the middle until we become a big enough problem.”

- Emily Walker, Meanwhile, Up in My Head, Gawker, April 6, 2013