where looks don’t matter and only the best writers get laid / cluster mag
Science and rationalism are not inherently male or regressive. Yet the fact that the prominent new realist philosophers, as well as today’s web designers and programmers happen to be white/male/western, along with the fact that body-based subjectivity has been thrown out with the cyberculture bathwater, seem to perpetuate this classic alignment.
New Realism focused on object-based absolutes is admittedly provoked by and continues to provoke the postmodern concern (fear) that nothing is real anymore, the very concept that cybertheorists reveled in. As post-Internet lifestyle publication DIS magazine puts it, we are living “in a world in which there is no ‘alternative’.” No alternative lifestyle, no alter-identity, no end to capitalism. No argument there. We operate within, not against. This lack of absolute alternatives can feel like a trap. Maybe we hate—and fetishize—cyberculture because it was the last definable counterculture.
Biosphere 2
the avant garde diaries: an interview with biosphere 2 scientists sally silverstone & linda leigh
southern exposures
john jeremiah sullivan has a really lovely piece over @ bookforum about the james agee’s long lost / recently published manuscript that formed the basis for let us now praise famous men. worth your time.
Recently a scholar has argued that Agee’s prose became the feminine counterpart to Evans’s masculine photos. I don’t scoff at the idea. There was definitely psychosexual tension between the two of them. Evans slept with not one but two of Agee’s wives, and at one point Agee fantasized in print that he and Evans had participated in an orgy with a few of the tenant-farm girls and one of their fathers. Evans called this laughable. But artistic collaboration is a messy business. And Agee did believe, or at least entertain the theory, that what was most essential about the South was feminine, in the chauvinistic sense by which femininity equals possibility, availability; not that which impresses but that which is impressed upon. In a draft of the book—between the magazine version and what was published as Famous Men—Agee wrote, “In all the ways in which the South is peculiar to itself and distinct from all else it lay out there ahead of me faintly shining in the night, a huge, sensitive, globular, amorphous, only faintly realized female cell.”
There’s none of that kind of talk in Cotton Tenants. You do get curious opinions, such as that African Americans were not merely equal to whites but actually a “superior race.” Not that Agee paid much attention to blacks, in either of these works, but the force of white southern guilt, which has its own deforming effects to go along with or supersede those of southern racism, was strong with him. I wish he had written more about black culture. That isn’t really a criticism—he was doing a job he’d been sent to do; the magazine wanted cotton farmers, and more and more of those were white, a shift that had taken place in the years just before Agee and Evans arrived—it’s more just an expression of regret. How marvelous it would be to read him at length on the black southern music of that period, about which we know frustratingly little, in many respects, considering it turned out to be a dominant force in twentieth-century culture. (Something that also happened in 1936: Robert Johnson walked into a hotel room in San Antonio, Texas, sat facing the corner, and recorded “Come On in My Kitchen,” which if you want to talk about moral achievements …)
"No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say ‘Fuck off’ to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must—and must first—be done."
There are many stories from Tennis Ct, and I wish they could all be told today.
This is not, however, the story of the one-eyed dog that everyone called Ray Charles because of the way he wagged his head around.
Nor is it the story of the Philippine nanny who mysteriously took care of a different kid every week, never repeating one ever in her career.
And this is not the story of the actress who lived in 18, the big apartment with the bus shelter out front, which had a huge advertisement with her face on it that made her think thieves and rapists would now know where she lived.
This is the story of Kahn, the tall slender boy whose skin looked like a painting done with a loose wrist. Everything about Kahn looked effortless. He seemed to coast along Tennis Ct as if carried by a cloud. And he lived on that street all his life, and every day of that time, someone was in love with Kahn.
It was either Jennifer the kleptomaniac who had a penchant for pinching undies, or Therèse the bank teller who chewed more gum than anyone in history. For a while it was Benjamin, who would glance at Kahn while pretending to wash his Miata, or little Frederick who never felt anything deeper for anyone else, not even his parents or his toys so it must be love what else could it be. And eventually everyone had their turn to pine: Rita who flossed so much she had to have surgery, Nico Guzman who hated being left-handed, both Michael and Michelle who were fraternal twins and mortal enemies, everyone.
But Kahn loved none of them. Kahn was not of this world, he seemed to be in love with the great beyond, the hereafter, the next life. Perhaps that’s what made him so desirable, and not his easy simple floating way, but that he seemed to know the future, and still he smiled.
none of this is surprising anymore
“I just got finished watching ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ or whatever that movie is. I’m like, ‘I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming. Is there a terrorist in the building? Do y’all need my help?’”
good point
In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. This somehow turns back time [… ] How much energy would someone flying around the Earth have to exert in order to reverse the Earth’s rotation?
—Aidan Blake
Someone recently blew my mind by telling me I’d been misinterpreting that scene all my life. I like their take on it way better:
Superman wasn’t exerting a force on the Earth. He was just flying fast enough to go back in time. (Faster than light, I guess? Comic book physics.) The Earth changed direction because we were watching time run backward as he traveled. It didn’t actually have anything to do with the direction he was flying.
Now that I see it, it makes a lot more sense. I mean, as much sense as a red-cape-and-outside-underwear time traveler can make.
via nyt mag:
And this is what kills them, because conservatives always look at young voters like the hot girl they could never date.”
whoa guys
About 10 minutes into Adidas’ pitch about an innovative new uniform with sleeves, Warriors’ co-owner Peter Guber had seen enough.
“I went ‘Wow!’ ” Guber said of the August 2011 meeting. “It was a very profound change. And I think Adidas presenting it to us and giving us the option to be the first one to do this demonstrates our willingness to be inventive.”
