Monday, June 30, 2008

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Monday, June 23, 2008

Eyes mark the shape of the city


Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

Our line of sight chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it—a sea of neon colors. They call this place an “amusement district.” The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumping out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game center crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar; teenage girls with brilliant bleached hair, healthy legs thrusting out from micromini skirts; dark-suited men racing across diagonal crosswalks for the last trains to the suburbs. Even at this hour, the karaoke club pitchmen keep shouting for customers. A flashy black station wagon drifts down the street as if taking stock of the district through its black-tinted windows. The car looks like a deep-sea creature with specialized skin and organs. Two young policemen patrol the street with tense expressions, but no one seems to notice them. The district plays by its own rules at a time like this. The season is late autumn. No wind is blowing, but the air carries a chill. The date is just about to change.

(Words by Haruki Murakami, photo by Altus@Flickr)

Friday, June 20, 2008

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Is This The Modern World?


Over the past two years we've seen Virgin sell flights to China on the back of the Great Proletarian Revolution; Che bars and Revolution bars packaging Guevara and Lenin as a theme pub for facile media types; Kate Moss sport a Che T-shirt; Miss Selfridge adorn its shop floor with Soviet-style worker models; Red or Dead sell shoes under the gaze of Vladimir Ulyanov and Mao; style mags celebrate Paris '68 without referring to its politics; empty gestures from the People's Wardrobe; Harper's Bazaar send Naomi on a photo shoot to Cuba; Professor Head revel under the shadow of Baader's gun. A desperate desire for resonant - but sellable - symbols has permeated all areas of our 'lifestyle culture'. Consequently, our high streets and designer salons are awash with 'bourgeois anarchists' who claim they're not interested in politics while surrounding themselves with images of a generation who actually gave a shit.1 1. As soon as revolt is defined, it has provoked the measures for its own containment.. A. Trocchi

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Friday, June 6, 2008

Pol Pot Noodle

In the Nineties, the Bolshevik revolution provides the backdrop to a vodka commercial rather than the blueprint for our seizure of the means of production: Che advertises the internet. In everyday life, the actual term 'revolution' is now more likely to denote a change in banking practice than a transfer of power. As such, the most radical concepts in opposition to the capitalist spectacle are emptied of meaning and put back into circulation in the service of alienation - they become advertising slogan

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Prada Meinhoff: Carnaby Street Preachers




A predilection for radical chic has been omnipresent throughout late twentieth century culture - Warhol's Mao Tse-Tung, Joe Strummer and the Red Brigade, the Stone Roses' lemons, Public Enemy and the S1W, Black Grapes' Carlos etc. etc. etc. Concurrently, the astute revolutionary has always retained a sense of 'pop' - be it Lenin's celebration of cinema or the Red Army Faction's penchant for crushed velvet flares and white Mercedes. More recently however, due respect has been eclipsed by shallow parody as the once inspirational become an empty aesthetic for ad lads and art school fashion designers - people who, if their subject matter had their rightful way, would be swinging from the nearest lamp-post. The revolutionary has been repackaged as fashion accessory, and where Victorian dinner party hosts once invited Marx or Engels 'round for nibbles, today's chattering classes book a holiday to Cuba and purchase situationist style clothing from London's more fashionable boutiques

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Disappear Here

"...the newspapers kept stroking my fear. new surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. evidence suggested that we were not doing well. researchers gloomily agreed. environmental psychologists were interviewed. damage had "unwittingly" been done. there were "feared relapses." there were "misconceptions" about potential. situations had "deteriorated." cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. the populace was confounded, yet didn't care. unpublished studies hinted that were all paying a price. scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. no one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. and no one argued back. no one challenged anything. anxiety was soaking up most people's days. everyone had become preoccupied with horror. madness was fluttering everywhere. there was fifty years of research supporting this data. there were diagrams illustrating all of these problems--circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. you couldn't help being both afraid and fascinated. reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn't seem very important in the long run. we were doomed. we deserved it. i was so tired..."

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Touch of Evil

"Shadows from the buildings creep along the parking cars
While the women spank their babies and the old men just drink all day in bars
And the people that never see it always end up as the ones who've seen it all
And the liquor store is crowded, while an empty phone booth rings another call
And the hills that used to all seem green now look an ugly brown
And no one ever found any movie stars on the stormy side of town
Where it keeps rainin all the time..."