The future of the impressive personal library – funny, but also a philosophical nudge to consider the role of books as public branding artifacts, not just personal intellectual experiences.
January 31, 2012
January 31, 2012
citybreaths: Shanghai, 2010 by Peter Bialobrzeski
One picture from a series at Zeit.de. The pictures are all part of the book The Raw and the Cooked by Peter Bialobrzeski, in which the transition in Asian megacities from traditional forms of housing to high-rises and shiny architecture is captured. Found at Enter The City
(via swintons)
January 31, 2012
Soap Operas With a Message - NYTimes.com
Around the world, from North India to South Africa, there are dozens of television and radio shows that tightly weave social themes into entertaining narratives, a technique often referred to as “entertainment-education.” Writers develop fictional characters that model positive or negative behaviors, and through their stories and struggles, audiences learn about issues ranging from domestic abuse to personal bankruptcy. Unlike American daytime soaps, these shows usually air during prime time to entire households. Successful soaps tend to be smartly written, sexy and replete with plot twists and love triangles. In the best-case scenario, the show becomes popular, and viewers begin to incorporate some of the themes into their lives.
However, said Singhal, the intentional placement of educational messages in mass media is relatively recent. Within television, many experts pin the origin to a Peruvian telenovela called “Simplemente María” (“Simply Maria”), which aired in 1969. The show, which ran five nights a week for two years, followed the story of María, a humble farmer who migrated to the city and began working as a maid. Through hard work and determination, she learned how to read and sew, and eventually became a famous fashion designer. The show became so popular that when María married her literacy teacher Esteban on the show, 10,000 fans gathered outside the church where the wedding sequence was being shot, dressed in their Sunday best and ready with gifts for the “newlyweds.” Enrollment in literacy classes shot through the roof soon after the show aired, as did sales of Singer sewing machines.
(Source: abbyjean)
January 30, 2012
If You Teach A Man To Photograph: Haiti, As Seen By Haitians
“Foreign photographers come to Haiti,” says renowned photographer Maggie Steber, “but all too often they start and stop with the earthquake.”
Steber, an American, is one of those foreign photographers. But she started well before the earthquake — some three decades ago — and hasn’t stopped. Since 2010, Steber has been an adviser for the nonprofit FotoKonbit, an organization that promotes photography in Haiti.
“When you see what Haitians think is beautiful to photograph, important, profound,” she says, “you learn more about them than anything an outsider can show you. And they do it better because it is so intimate.”
January 29, 2012
(photo via clarityandchaos, Soup von lantzschi)
Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, which opened in early July, occupies a tiny storefront that formerly housed a tattoo parlor. Folks, this is the kind of gentrification that we love, and the only kind that society needs.
Address: 523 SE Morrison St. Portland, OR 97214
January 27, 2012
Paris Versus New York: two cities come head to head in graphic design battle.
Paris’s Pierre Bourdieu versus New York’s Robert K. Merton.
January 26, 2012
Cultural Marxism
The state of the world today is not pretty. It is timely to revisit the works of Antonio Gramsci and his fellow intellectuals on cultural Marxism. Whatever is happening has been foretold, long before bailouts and censorship became a staple in our vocabulary.
So what is cultural marxism?
It includes the disarmament of the public, the invalidation of self-defence and the incitement of fear.
It includes not only censorship of various kinds, but also the erosion of privacy, the debasement of the schools.
It includes the dogmatisation of the universities. It includes the concentration of wealth, the concentration of ownership of corporations and the concentration of control of the media.
It includes the promotion of immaturity and the reduction of society to a mob of narcissistic adult children to further the interests of the ruling class.
I am certain that without having to mention specific events, many have already come to your mind. Perhaps the most chilling prediction of cultural Marxism is how people today believe that they are privileged, simply because they have not been visibly marginalised.
Classical Marxism drives those at Foxconn’s iPad factory lines into jumping off buildings; Cultural Marxism drives people to the line at the Apple Store into a culture of commodity fetishism.
John Fonte’s “Why There is a Culture War” serves as a good introduction for anyone who wish to dig deeper.
Power, in Gramsci’s observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through something called “hegemony,” which means the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.
January 24, 2012
Barney Frank, ladies and gentlemen.
January 24, 2012
“It’s really sort of a sore spot because we live in what I call an age of conformity, where you have to travel with the herd. If you don’t travel with the herd and if you don’t say yes to that little man who’s leading the pack, you’re branded as a rebel. I am trying desperately - I hope - to be an individual. I think there’s quite a bit of difference. Actually, I can’t stand them, they drive me out of my mind. The rebels. I see them at parties and they sit in corners looking terrible sensitive and introverted, and yet my feeling is they’re just as mediocre as the people they despise who are the conformists. Their answers are always pre-determined, the rebel always has to say no to everything society asks of him just as the conformist always has to say yes.” - Paul Newman, on being labelled a rebel
(Source: twelvevacancies, via swintons)
January 24, 2012
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