Look, it's not that I love Guided by Voices less.....
Well, I still love soccer. I actually knew that before last night's USMNT game v Ghana. It seems I still have affection for the home team - I screamed when Brooks' header broke the draw in the 86th - forgive me, abandon me, do what you need.
Psst. USMNT is not very good, and it lost for the tournament it's only striker - only player, actually - who can outrun a defender. I do not get the fascination for Michael Bradley, who would make a fine holding midfielder but just sucks as an offensive facilitator.
In 2010 I not only wrote constantly about the World Cup but live-blogged the USMNT games, some of you participated. Not going to happen this year for no greater reason than I don't want to. Progress, I suppose, of some sort, with tradition Fine Metaphors Abounding applying.
- Rainy fascism island: How to characterize this period post-crash, or post-post-crash if we assume that the measures taken (austerity, the destruction of the welfare state) have largely been set in motion, if not completed? The deliberate shifting of blame that saw the public sector punished for the crimes of the private allowed various other modes of the dis- or rather misplacement of resentment to be mobilized. The targets are the same as they ever were—migrants, the un- or underemployed, those in need of help or support—but, given that the structures that enabled help and support had largely been dismantled even before “austerity” measures were imposed, there seems little left to attack. Those outraged by people receiving benefits, or those telling people to just get a job, must know that what meager benefits there are do not support a life, and that in many places there simply are no jobs to get. But nevertheless, resentment remains, or at least, somehow, a fantasy version of it can be mobilized such that resentment acts as a kind of looping device, self-nourishing and ever-expanding. What should we call this state of affairs? How best to identify it, in order to redirect or dismantle its energies?
- Giovanni puts the right words in Tony Blair's mouth.
- Nobody politics.
- Indistinction.
- Memory as genre in contemporary art: The dread spectacle of the Whitechapel’s (useful) anthology is enough evidence, turning any historical practice of memory to use, turning the brand of memory (“on account of their scars“) into a brand in the other sense, a personal brand to be replicated & circulated, the market niches of identity politics: memory becomes a genre in contemporary art in the way that, half a century ago now, Pop was. Part of the blame can be laid on Sebald’s Anglophone (particularly English) reception, in wh/ genuine historical anguish came to function as an alibi for an endless trot down memory lane.
- Nocturnal existence.
- :-p with a World Cup update.
- Skull blogging.
BLOODY MARY
April Bernard
Note who’s got to go
today, don’t fuss
about the means,
just go ahead behead,
impale, starve, strappado,
the sheer assortment
of choices enough
to make a crown
crow. They never
loved me enough.
It must be said: They
were a disappointment.
When divine mother
love wears out, I just
reverse the robe
from blue to red.
I like a flat ground
to build the next town,
city, empire of disgust.
All the waste you see,
that’s what I did,
none of that happened
to me. I did that.
I made that. I killed that. I.
