Long Sunday

Last Men, or the phenomenology of the camp

Just a link to some video,  found at American Samizdat.   And following on from here.  Update:  um, alright.  Who says we have to let them vote?  In an entirely more frivolous vein (or sinister, depending on how you look at it...and not that we'd ever want to become that kind of blog, heavens forbid!) here's the Fema Rap For Kids (courtesy of Mefi).  More on Katrina from a rhetoric/discourse-analysis tack here.

And on yet another note, some congratulations to Baghdad Burning are in order.

the real of the desert

Yesterday we went out to Joshua Tree. Heads full of U2 songs, we posed for album cover pictures. And snapped the last rays of the sun over the Cholla cacti that have found themselves just the right place in the sweeping bowl of the desert.

A national park, the place is managed with precision and your visit is guided and chaperoned by roadside exhibits, opportunities for learning. Much of the park is federally-sanctioned and mandated wilderness: a parcel of how we imagine the real. But the real is elsewhere.

We should really have a category called "military-industrial and surveillance"

William Davies has an extraordinary, timely article at the fantastic Open Democracy website:  The age of surveillance:  a new "dotcom boom"?  (thanks be, once again, to wood s lot).  Myself, I have nothing daringly neutral or witty to say about it.  But maybe I'll think of something later.  Read the whole thing; there are funny comments about "bedfellows."  Here's an excerpt:

The most important lesson that marketers and futurologists can learn about new technologies is not to extrapolate too far from the “early adopters”. Be it cars, telephones, televisions or computers, the long-term implications of new tools are never apparent at the outset, but only emerge once they have become ubiquitous across society.

(By the way, I'm personally very pleased that this blog does not have a category called, "Culture War."  And *not* because I deny that such a term exists.  Being careful about the words one chooses to dignify, such as through uncareful repetition is, "in my book", by no means an unimportant task.  Nay, duty.)