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In Brooklyn, Condos by the Numbers: “They could be...

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:57:48 -0400

In Brooklyn, Condos by the Numbers: “They could be worse.”

najvasol: An offering to the Brooklyn sun-gods with Aleza...

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:45:32 -0400

najvasol:

An offering to the Brooklyn sun-gods with Aleza Klass. Brooklyn, 2013

gender theory is like pringles: once you pop, your linear fetishization of other discourses is...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:10:27 -0400

gender theory is like pringles: once you pop, your linear fetishization of other discourses is fucked

“He was scarcely twenty years old. He was slender and flaccid at the same time; he gave the...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:59:08 -0400

“He was scarcely twenty years old. He was slender and flaccid at the same time; he gave the uncomfortable impression of being invertebrate. He had studied with fervor and with vanity nearly every page of Lord know what Communist manual; he made use of dialectical materialism to put an end to any discussion whatever. The reasons one can have for hating another man, or for loving him, are infinite: Moon reduced the history of the universe to a sordid economic conflict. He affirmed that the revolution was predestined to succeed. I told him that for a gentleman only lost causes should be attractive…”

— The Shape of the Sword / Jorge Luis Borges

STARFISH CITY As English Heritage explains, in their list of...

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:17:02 -0500

STARFISH CITY

As English Heritage explains, in their list of “airfield bombing decoys,” these misleading proto-cities were “operated by lighting a series of controlled fires during an air raid to replicate an urban area targeted by bombs.” They would thus be set ablaze to lead German pilots further astray, as the bombers would, at least in theory, fly several miles off-course to obliterate nothing but empty fields camouflaged as urban cores.

They were like optical distant cousins of the camouflaged factories of Southern California during World War II.

how many crimethinc kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:59:35 -0500

how many crimethinc kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Now take a look at architectural objects around us: they appear so...

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 09:29:39 -0500

Now take a look at architectural objects around us: they appear so...:

Now take a look at architectural objects around us: they appear so geometrically sophisticated, from the pyramids to the beautiful cathedrals of Europe. So a sucker problem would make us tend to believe that mathematics led to these beautiful objects, with exceptions here and there such as the pyramids, as these preceded the more formal mathematics we had after Euclid and other Greek theorists. Some facts: architects (or what were then called Masters of Works) relied on heuristics, empirical methods, and tools, and almost nobody knew any mathematics—according to the medieval science historian Guy Beaujouan, before the thirteenth century no more than five persons in the whole of Europe knew how to perform a division. No theorem, shmeorem. But builders could figure out the resistance of materials without the equations we have today—buildings that are, for the most part, still standing. The thirteenth-century French architect Villard de Honnecourt documents with his series of drawings and notebooks in Picard (the language of the Picardie region in France) how cathedrals were built: experimental heuristics, small tricks and rules, later tabulated by Philibert de l’Orme in his architectural treatises. For instance, a triangle was visualized as the head of a horse. Experimentation can make people much more careful than theories.

Further, we are quite certain that the Romans, admirable engineers, built aqueducts without mathematics (Roman numerals did not make quantitative analysis very easy). Otherwise, I believe, these would not be here, as a patent side effect of mathematics is making people over-optimize and cut corners, causing fragility. Just look how the new is increasingly more perishable than the old.

— Taleb - Antifragile, p. 222

davidbuckleyborden: Street Wear Map Mapping of sneakers hanging...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:20:35 -0500

davidbuckleyborden:

Street Wear Map

Mapping of sneakers hanging from power lines between the Orange and Red line subway alignments in greater Boston.

Arch GIS, Google Street View, Illustrator, Photoshop

8” X 9”

February, 2013

likeafieldmouse: Noriko Furunishi

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:24:31 -0500

likeafieldmouse:

Noriko Furunishi

go on a total disaster of a double date with your best friend, get plastered and try to cheekily...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:45:00 -0500

go on a total disaster of a double date with your best friend, get plastered and try to cheekily alleviate awkwardness but just end up wildly exacerbating it, aggressively encourage reluctant conversation about hallucinogens, accidentally lock a stranger out of his building in zero degree wind chill, feel your damp hair actually freeze solid on the way

qualis artifex perio

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:57:00 -0500

qualis artifex perio:

8. intentional abolition of art is only more art

sandhilldeign: Greenland, Somalia, Papua New Guinea, Mexico,...

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 11:32:24 -0500

sandhilldeign:

Greenland, Somalia, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Norway, Jordan, Argentina, Senegal, India, Spain

Already, the juxtaposition of creation and eschaton is manifest, but Benjamin will shift his focus...

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 16:08:00 -0500

Already, the juxtaposition of creation and eschaton is manifest, but Benjamin will shift his focus decidedly towards the latter in The Arcades Project. Here this ‘inveterate adversary of myth’ focuses his energy on various ways of thinking through the break from the mythical hell and dream-work of capitalism, represented in its most advanced and decayed form in the Paris of the nineteenth century. He does so by means of the dialectical image, the caesura of the explosion out of history, as if waking from a dream. Yet the mark of his failure in this project lies in the very language he uses, for he resorts to sexual language, particularly in terms of women and maternal functions. But this language is precisely that of the biblical myths of creation and eschaton. Even when he does not explicitly invoke the Bible in his writing, the Bible leaves its mark where Benjamin’s texts overflow with the language of sexuality, the gendered text, women as mythical other and the incessant repetition of birthing metaphors. In other words, at the point where he seeks a way to think through the breach in the myth of capitalism he reverts to biblical myths, especially those of Genesis and the eschaton, a reversion marked by the language of the maternal function.

[…]

[H]is criticism concerning the appropriation of women is analogous to his criticism of myth: he sees the problems and yet cannot move beyond them no matter how hard he tries. For instance, even though he registers the profound reification and commodification of women in terms of the prostitute, the woman-as-thing that shows up the reality of ‘love’ in capitalism, he is all the same lured by the prostitute, especially in his early work, where she becomes a figure for knowledge itself.

[…]

Specifically, my argument is that the continual appropriation of the maternal body, of conception, pregnancy and birth, is a signal of another problem in Benjamin’s writing, namely the perpetuation of biblical myth. In fact, I would suggest that the mechanism by which he appropriates such images of procreation is to trace the removal of such functions from women under capitalism – who now become sterile prostitutes, corpses and mannequins, frivolous foci of fashion – and relocate them in the break from capitalism. And so we get the images of insemination and birth as those that mark the breakout from the spell of capitalism. Yet, it is precisely these images that land Benjamin squarely back in the realm of myth, especially the biblical myths of creation and the end of the world that appropriate precisely such imagery.

— The Perpetual Allure of the Bible for Marxism / Roland Boer

"At the heart of Benjamin’s intriguing and idiosyncratic appropriation of the Bible lies his failed..."

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 15:45:00 -0500

“At the heart of Benjamin’s intriguing and idiosyncratic appropriation of the Bible lies his failed effort to use the Bible in order to develop a way to break out of the mythical hell of capitalism. He does so by drawing on the final or anagogic level of the old allegorical mode of biblical interpretation, with its vast schema that runs from creation to eschaton. Thus, in the extraordinarily influential last chapter of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin offers a deep reworking of the fourfold medieval allegorical schema – literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic – to argue that, in the baroque mourning plays we find the marks of a fundamentally Christian mode of exegesis that is possible only in the wake of the Fall. For, in a fallen world, only ruins and traces remain of the prelapsarian world; allegory then becomes the means of a failed deciphering of salvation among those ruins.”

- The Perpetual Allure of the Bible for Marxism / Roland Boer

KEYS TO THE CITY: A set of “master keys” to the...

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 15:06:00 -0500

KEYS TO THE CITY: A set of “master keys” to the infrastructure of New York City popped up on eBay last month, leaving many public commentators and city officials alike concerned for the safety of the metropolis … After the keys were sold to a buyer who was actually “an undercover Post reporter,” an investigation found that “most of the keys did, in fact, work.”

TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS (FULL ALBUM)

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 14:01:00 -0500

TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS (FULL ALBUM)

"Failure to develop the spatial emphases inherent in Marx’s and later works…can also be linked to a..."

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:18:31 -0400

“

Failure to develop the spatial emphases inherent in Marx’s and later works…can also be linked to a deep tradition of anti-spatialism… A spatial dialectic, even a materialist one, with human beings making their geographies and being constrained by what they have made, was unacceptable.

Marxism was turned into a positivistic scientism under Stalin… Culture, politics, consciousness, ideology, and, along with them, the production of space were reduced to simple reflections of the economic base. Spatiality became absorbed in economism as its dialectical relationship with other elements of material existence was broken.

”

- Edward Soja. 1989. Postmodern Geographies (via geogthoughts)

CCC infoshop (in mke) got an eviction notice yesterday for Nov. 1

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:15:00 -0400

lifebeyondmeans:

Oh no! This sucks…can the years of chaos really be over? What will this mean for the fate of Riverwest?

more importantly, where will i go to eat what i stole from the co-op?

“ok so it’s alone, basically”

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:54:04 -0400

“ok so it’s alone, basically”

shallowxgraves: xxqueerxedgexx: Not sure who made this, but...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:54:58 -0400

shallowxgraves:

xxqueerxedgexx:

Not sure who made this, but thank you, whoever you are.

Word

oh hey, suzy/thatsucia did that! credit where credit is due