I wish I could so recommend Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated highly enough to make you all go out and buy it this instant. Sadly, it’s unlikely I could pull this off. Continue reading
Mediated
An Example of Historical Distance & Difference: Πειρασμός, Historical Drift, and Reappropriating a Mutation as the Original
In an earlier post, we looked at the Greek word “χάρις“, namely, the way that the historical sense of this word is bound up in a very stratified social setting, and how translating it almost always ends up becoming a proxy war for different confessional agendas (I should add that it is difficult it is to think past these agendas, because they are rooted in a history of interpretation generated by reflection on the original word through various cultural contexts and historical epochs).
Perhaps I should also add: ignoring this history-of-interpretation ignores some of the latter fallout of this word, ignores at least part of the history of its effects, and so neglects to treat properly the word itself.
Here we shall look at another Greek word: “πειρασμός”, nearly ubiquitously mistranslated as “temptation”. Continue reading
Excerpt #5 — Walter Benjamin on Film
Benjamin on film and theater (&c.):
XI. The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such [233] extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. — unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.
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Laboratory Music
In 2012, I would often work at my mother’s house in the late evenings until early morning, trying to finish the first of what are now four bookshelves. There is and was simply not enough space at our rented house to work on it, but I could then occupy both a barn and a workshop at my mother’s.
There is an old radio in that workshop which turns on whenever the lights do. It is in an inconvenient location, and the antenna is super-finicky, so I simply end up listening to whatever station it’s tuned to when I’m not in the barn. Back then it was Pop music. My musical diet is fairly strict: I make it a point of largely only listening to Classical, Folk, and some British/Irish stuff (Radiohead, etc.). I’d forgotten what Pop was like. So I thought: this was another chance to examine it anew.
Of the many things I’d wished to write about after the dozens of hours listening to Pop radio in those months, after looking at my notes, three main points emerged. Continue reading
Machines for Eating and Humans for Feeding
Or: What I Learned from Working at Dunkin’ Donuts.
The view from the bottom is really quite spectacular, but those who have always lived there rarely see clearly. They’re not stupid –they know roughly where they are– but they’re trapped by so many tethers they find elusive, and they have no map for how to get out. The rest of us cannot see the truth about ourselves until we have dealt with the truth about them. I worked with them for two months. In immediate hindsight, here are six observations:
1: “Minimum Wage” really means that your employers would likely pay you less, but that they can’t legally get away with it.
This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “human resources.” Resources: like oil or coal. When people are paid only enough money to fund some small entertainments, or to pay their cell phone bill, then what does that say about the way that their employer values them? –as better coal, or as worse coal, but always as coal. This demotivates. One is sensitive to this, even if one is not aware of it.
It’s true that good help is hard to find; it’s also true that good help is impossible to retain or appropriately incentivize on what is approximately an $8.50/hr. minimum wage: employees become as disposable as the coffee filters, and care about their job as much.
Of course, these jobs are not designed as career jobs, and high turnover is expected, so a critical reader may waive this all away as so much whiny cavaliering. Employees are seen as deluded for trying to turn a temp gig into a permanent one.
Into the Clarities 