(Source: doaweedance, via mountstnobody)
The Bells of Hell, the last public joint in the old tradition, closed on June 26, 1979. Fred Tamburri, last great after-hours proprietor, passed away on June7, 1986. By the summer of 1988, almost all of the old-style neighborhood bars, social clubs and gambling joints were gone. Giuliani became Mayor of New York in January 1994, and he finished off what was left of real life. Like the reformer Fiorello La Guardia, who had served as mayor from 1934 to 1945, Giuliani persecuted his own kind. A Jew named Bloomberg followed him in 2002. As there was little left in the post-mortem city to offend the new mayor’s delicate sensibilities, he outlawed smoking in bars. Welcome to the mall of mortuary mediocrity. The end.
King of the Jews - Nick Tosches.
This is how the NSPCC works… The charity responded to Hewson’s article by firstly trying to force her to gag her views. In an email to Hewson, Matt Hopkinson, the NSPCC’s chief press officer, dispatched a missive instructing Hewson to ‘reconsider’ her article. ‘I strongly urge you to remove or reword your article’, he warned. At the same time, the NSPCC contacted Hewson’s associates in the legal chambers where she works, demanding that they disassociate themselves from her personal views. It was a form of moral blackmail of Hewson. The message was clear: if you refuse to toe our line, we will create problems for you in your place of work and in the public realm more broadly. In other words, if you don’t shut up, we will make sure that your daddy punishes you.
— The moral lynching of Barbara Hewson | Frank Furedi | spiked
The man who comes in secret.
The central problem at the root of peepological research touches on the onanistic structure of liberal democratic society. A society which indulges itself in deceitful fantasies of freedom, integration, ideological metabolism and the like. Peepological research seeks to trace the root of the self-lie with the aid of models of pornographic consumerism. According to the working hypothesis of peepology, the range of the activity of the fly-man masturbating before a woman stripping off in virtual space can teach us something about our innate ability to ignore ourselves.The man who comes in secret teaches us about the human tendency to sketch a delightful reality in the eyes of the mind, in blatant disregard of oppressive circumstances.
A Guide to the Perplexed - Gilad Atzmon. (tr. Philip Simpson).
With thanks to moutstnobody and just to expand on it a bit, Lupe generously RTd about 20 replies to his question and it was all over in a couple of hours. Gotta love his lively way.
Think Again: Big Data - By Kate Crawford →
Summarises some of the most salient critiques of the big data hype: reinforcement of social divisions, huge potential for discrimination, privacy issues, and a very worrying privileging of quantitative methods over qualitative explanation.
Everyday Analysis: Cat vs. Rabbit: The Object of Desire →
An Everyday Analysis contributor owns a rabbit who is currently in a stand-off with a cat through a window, as seen here.
This ‘stand-off’ tells us something fundamental about the structure of our desires, and explains a major tenet of psychoanalysis. This is that we do not truly want,…
Voyeurism is nothing but ritualised curiosity. There are so many women in the world and they are so different from one another: Jacqueline has a slack arse and Bridget had pointy tits; Clare looks intelligent and Josephine has hairy legs. Only there in the theatre of lust, when you take your destiny in your hand in the unseen presence of women stripping off for you, only there do you understand the scale of the difference. In those years I realised the fabric of our lives has turned into a wank, a market-culture of self-release. More and more we are turning into consumers of simulations rather than dealing with life itself, actors who have left the stage and moved into the stalls. We need magazines, films, inflatable dolls and even puncture repair-kits, because the experiences we admire and boast of, experiences that were once within our grasp, have long since stopped exciting us at all. Apparently we celebrate the issue of sexuality in our progressive culture, while sex as such slipped through our fingers long ago.
A Guide To The Perplexed. - Gilad Atzmon. (tr. Phillip Simpson).
The Growing, Hidden Problem of Re-Recordings →
A little while back, I was compiling a playlist of ’60s hits in Spotify. The song I started with was “This Diamond Ring,” a 1965 single by Gary Lewis and the Playboys. About 20 instances of the song showed up when I searched for it—some of them on Gary Lewis best-of collections, some on compilations like ’60s Jukebox Hits and 60 Hits of the 60s. Clicking on one at random, I soon noticed that something was off. The vocals sounded strange—was that even Gary Lewis singing? And the snare drum was a very upfront, ’80s-style THWACK, a sound created using “gated reverb,” a studio effect that didn’t exist in the ’60s.
(Continue reading the article in Slate)
