The Role of the Intellectual and MTV according to Adorno

Adorno being Adorno in Minima Moralia: The circumstance that intellectuals mostly have to  do with  intellectuals,  should  not  deceive  them  into believing their own kind  still more base  than  the  rest of mankind. For they get  to know each other in  the most shameful  and degrading of  all situations,  that  of competing  supplicants,  and  are  thus  virtually compelled  to  show  each [...]

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Suture

Thinking about the logic of the interstice and film mediality (this paper will never be finished…) and came across this, from Sylvia Plath. Quite striking, although from what I recall of the time I (accidentally) cut off the tip of my middle finger in the door, it wasn’t nearly as aesthetic an experience: picture 11 [...]

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The Learn’d Astronomer

I was walking to the library this evening in the midst of a rainstorm, hopping from dry spot to dry spot sort of jack-knifed together under an umbrella when I noticed a single bunny looking serenely up at the sky in the middle of the park I always walk past. On the way home, at [...]

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Cry-Baby, Cryin’ All The Time

Bombay Sapphire was on sale this weekend, so I was basically forced to make G+Ts and watch Cry-Baby. No, seriously: there was no other choice. If you have eyes and ears and haven’t seen Cry-Baby… you should fix that. I have this dream where the young Johnny Depp and Matt Damon circa The Talented Mr. [...]

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On The Power of Desire

Will be edited, pulled from the end of my last (too long) post. Mostly just in love with these Rilke poems.   Another intriguing example I came across was Rilke’s “Die Liebende”, which goes like this [my translation]: Ja ich sehne mich nach dir. Ich gleite mich verlierend selbst mir aus der Hand, ohne Hoffnung, [...]

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Setting the Record straight, pt. 2

The second half of this, which ends with me elaborating the various reasons for why discourses on seduction are passed down to us in an already gendered way. Then, however, I realized in a sort of dialectical twist the real brilliance of Y.’s insight: I thought about (perhaps thought about again, because I enjoy thinking [...]

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Setting the Record Straight, pt. 1

Another reader feedback session. Yvette writes (names obviously changed, much as I wish I knew someone named Yvette) in response to the most recent posts: oh but the other thing i wanted to tell you is that i read your blog, as you know and the queerfeminist in me had to cringe a lot even [...]

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The Rhetoric of Seduction

You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming. Feeling spent and petty for exhausting my writerly libido making fun of fashion bloggers (fish, barrels), so I want to write something vaguely literary. The topic is derived from a quote I stumbled across in Baudrillard’s book on [...]

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In which Guy Debord turns over in his grave

The society of the spectacle is upon us. As if we needed further signs that the apocalypse is nigh, fucking Scott Schuman (of the Sartorialist) has decided that it has become acceptable for street fashion photographers to begin shooting other street fashion photographers. In regards to this, he writes (below a picture of his girlfriend, [...]

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Self-Indulgence

Whiskey, Wagner, Wilco (not necessarily in that order… but more whiskey leads to more Wilco, as it should). O sink hernieder Nacht der Liebe gib das Vergessen, dass ich lebe; Feeling bathetic, a little bit, reading R.B.’s “A Lover’s Discourse” and chasing ghosts around in my head. I am a sick man… I am a [...]

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