Dennis Kucinich at the Democratic National Convention

Wake Up America! Elf Power!

"More universalist than American"

Fascinating article in India Times on Obama. 

Neuroses

This is awesome!

urbanagri

Weisser & Vetter


things as they        optimistic coalescing

"a satisfactory heuristic"

such marked
thought to
def. worth

the geographical
more confidence than form

“mit controlled atmosphere”
the essence of a park

fl/oral history

“Es ist mein zweiter Aufenthalt in Detroit”

in the evenings closed freight cars travel in the opposite direction

a park from memory      cull from

2-3 bedrooms
56% property tax relief
F.A.R.M.

“Of course!”
“Ok”
“Everything I’ve got belongs to you”

Democracy in America

"In the heat of the struggle each partisan is driven beyond the natural limits of his own views by the views and excesses of his adversaries, loses sight of the very aim he was pursuing, and uses language that ill corresponds to his real feelings and to his secret instincts. Hence arises that strange confusion which we are forced to witness."
--Alexis de Tocqueville

Abu Ghraib

From this disgusting and incredible New Yorker article: (I found these pics online, not from article.)

“The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost,” Davis said. “They’re in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn’t want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it—the place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy.”

Delaney/Obama

Interview with the always charming Samuel Delaney. Reminds me of the issues facing our next Prez!

Prescience

Reading Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City_ and watching mainstream media's lead up coverage of tonight's primaries. It's like reading a diagnostic manual. (I mean that in a good way!) Example:


"[F]ollowing the Reaganite tendency to fetishize both the offensive example and the patriotic norm, the increasingly monopolistic mass media act as a national culture industry whose mission is to micro-manage how any controversial event or person changes the meaning of being "American." The constant polling used by this media apparatus, which includes the solicitation of testimony on talk radio and television, along with telephone interviews, has paradoxically enabled the standards and rhetorics of citizenship to become so privatized and subjective that even privileged people can seem legitimately to claim "outsider," if not "minority," status. With political ideas about the nation sacrificed to the development of feelings about it, nationality has become a zone of trauma that demands political therapy."

While I think that nationality has in many ways always been a "zone of trauma"-- perhaps indeed created or determined by the various "political therapies" applied to traumatic encounters of nationalism-- I take Berlant's points here to be spot on in terms of the diagnosis of the present situation and its extreme creation and reinforcement through public images and narratives of private citizenship, which ultimately reduces public claims of legitimate trauma to private experiences available to anyone. This is what perversely allows power brokers like Hilary Clinton to claim victim status. Question is: what kind of "political therapy" might we exercise to correct this development? Voting? Hah! More like a national lobotomy.

Obamanauts

A fascinating and informative piece in the new Republic detailing Obama's economic and foreign policy advisors.

How cool

Lauren Berlant has a blog!

Impatient

Lately, I have become impatient with the thought, the seeming necessity, of the inexpressible, the unknowable. My romance with excess is at an end. I do not deny it exists--that which is (will be) forever unknown at the same time that it is always irreducibly present. But the attempt to comprehend a certain kind of being, to complete the circuit (a copula) that connects my will to grasp formlessness to that which is seized as its own impossible complexity--with that I have grown bored. My romance with the everyday, however, has just begun.

The Next President

I wish