mammon-machine:

wandatinasky:

a lot of artists are fascists. a lot of artists are also unwitting apologists for neoliberalism. if you’re reading a novel or watching a movie that is focused on familial strife and makes no reference to the larger political/economic/cultural frameworks that structure the central conflict and the relationships between the main characters, be very wary.

If you read a whole novel which has not one single reference to dracoreptillian humanoid shapeshifters then be aware of the mind washing perpertraded on you.

If you look around the table and can’t figure out which person is the sucker it may very well be you.  If you look around the table and have no recollection what you are doing at the table and who any of these people are and whether they are actually interested in the stupid fucking music and television shows they are always talking about, or whether those stupid interchangeable celebrity gossip, philosophies, empty topical jokes, shit talk, exist to allow boring people to interface with each other at arms reach until they are dead, forever; you’re not allowed to think like this, that would be vainglorious elitism to think otherwise, and if you refuse the terms of the discourse then you lose your place in the conversation.  So know that you have to have an opinion on Lena Dunham and Freud and whatever fucking now school Lubbert Das on a magazine cover or school book page in 2013.  

If you are reading a novel and you don’t understand that the the “larger cultural framework’ is ultimately a recursive loop made of individuals from within and without perhaps you don’t understand that descriptions of the particular and specific are more emotionally/intellectually honest expression (even in fantasy) than the broad political stroke.  Or perhaps I’m wrong and we can all lay down on Mayakovsky’s grave (after he shot himself) and read his beautiful department store poems about good rubber soles and buying shares in commercial airliners as part of the interior circuit of a man, that structure all conflicts between all individuals, the only evils at home and around us a mysterious race of saboteurs who want to throw wrenches into the works and fuck up our tractors for no good reason.  Who could know their motivation?  I’m just taking it as a given that the race of saboteurs are real and are trying to destroy our society, and why think about or focus on any human individual as something beyond a political pathology?  That’s the saboteur’s trap, and if you get to close to them, start treating them like people, you too can become one; one moment a good clean dude, the next fucking up a whole line of distributor caps as they roll off the production line and are shipped across the nation, the damage done, the silent touch of terror bending and breaking off the delicate extremities of our resolve.  

If you believe in exploring through inquiry and creation the infinite variations of human strengths and weakness, the comedy, terror, drama, the hells and heavens we make for ourselves and others, all that we can create, all that we can destroy, and don’t do this in EXPLICITLY political terms, especially terms originating from the 19th century, then I don’t want to know you.

If you are reading a working novel sitting on top of a broken novel you might be a redneck, sir, and I respect you for it, but please show me the broken novel because I don’t understand how that works, I’d like to try and read it.

lessig:

(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)

Since his arrest in January, 2011, I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer. He…