Axylus Digest

Fund this great project printing beautiful posters for the...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:51:11 -0500

Fund this great project printing beautiful posters for the Occupy movement.

"Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to..."

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:23:04 -0500

“Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.”

- The Social Graph is Neither

champagnecandy: fantagraphics:alaina: “Do you have any books...

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:25:47 -0500

champagnecandy:

fantagraphics:alaina:

“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”

one of Flannery O’Connor’s drawings from high school or undergrad, which will be included in this forthcoming book devoted exclusively to her artwork.

y’all. Flannery O’Connor made comics. my day is awesome now.

Video

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:26:06 -0400

Jamie Johnson, The One Percent (2006)

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:05:34 -0400

Two reactions to the film:

I’m sure people love to hate this film for a number of reasons. What struck me is why this young man, if he’s so serious about finding answers about wealth and inequality in the U.S., never bothers to talk to any of the people who devote their lives to study these issues in a rigorous way. A considerable part of the discipline of sociology in the U.S. is dedicated to questions of class, inequality, stratification and related issues. Instead he talks to Ralph Nader (ok), Kevin Phillips (so-so), and Robert Reich (ugh!). What he gets from these eminent men, all of whom are first and foremost actors in the political system narrowly defined, are lamentations about how everything is oh so bad. What gets lost is the most crucial part of the story, which is that inequality in America isn’t just a lamentable moral shortcoming, but a social struggle. If he’d talked to somebody like Fran Piven, Johnson could have learned about the poor people’s movements that engage in this struggle. If he had talked to a scholar of class, he could have found out about the history of the movements that resisted massive inequality and exploitation—and took a pummeling by his fellow one percenters. This history absent in his story, so we are left with the bleak picture of sociopaths calling the shots.
Wow, I did not realize that Milton Friedman was so dumb. Maybe it’s his old age at the time of the interview or the fact that he has to put up with this whippersnapper who didn’t do his homework. Even so, I thought the kneejerk equation of taxation or social policy with “socialism” was confined to bozos like Glenn Beck. I thought Friedman had a more sublimated version of ruling-class ideology. Not so. Friedman also reveals the authoritarian streak in his personality when he abruptly cuts off the interview (though again, perhaps that’s just a justified reaction to the whippersnapper).

So protestiert die Müdigkeitsgesellschaft

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:47:16 -0400

So protestiert die Müdigkeitsgesellschaft:

In my first German-language piece of writing in quite a while, I reflect on #OWS using the concept of fatigue society.

"As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp...."

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 23:29:43 -0400

“As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp. I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. In other words, the 99 per cent. I saw conversations taking place between people and groups of people whom I’ve never seen talking with such openness and sympathy in all the years (which is to say, my entire life) I’ve spent in New York: grannies talking to goths, a biker with piercings and tattoos talking to a woman in a Hermes scarf. I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of “vagueness” one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarity—clarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities. I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, I’ve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I’ve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we’re all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it. In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing we’re being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralyzing us until just now. I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion—until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.”

- Francine Prose at Occupy Writers

Paraphrasing loosely from Thomas Kern, Soziale Bewegungen:...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:46:58 -0400

Paraphrasing loosely from Thomas Kern, Soziale Bewegungen: Ursachen, Wirkungen, Mechanismen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2008), p. 155:

Most scholars of social movements agree that political demands are not central to social movements; social movements operate first and foremost by occupying public space.

Found in Flushing, Queens, September 2011. I have difficulty...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 13:52:00 -0400

Found in Flushing, Queens, September 2011.

I have difficulty expressing just how happy it made me to find this artefact. It’s too perfect to be satire.

The flier reads:

Come & experience the hottest
NEW church in NYC

September 18th, 2011

6:30pm

Sheraton LaGuardia East Hotel
39th Ave. btwn Main St. & Prince St.
on the 6th floor JADE ROOM

www.hipsterchurch.com

appetizers & hors d’oeuvre served
w/
organic fair trade coffee

family friendly

come hear professional musicians
&
get inspired by our pastor

America plus nothing

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:58:10 -0400

America plus nothing:

In my latest on The Immanent Frame, I briefly review Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die. Spoiler alert: I like it.

"Es ist dies eine konsequent ausgebaute These [dass die Erkenntnis der Welt der einheitlichen..."

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:40:50 -0400

“Es ist dies eine konsequent ausgebaute These [dass die Erkenntnis der Welt der einheitlichen physikalischen Sprache bedarf], die sich durch immanente Kritik kaum erschüttern ließe. Man kann jedoch ihre historische Herkunft und ihre damit zusammenhängenden dogmatisch-metaphysischen Züge aufweisen.”

- Jan Patočka, Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, p. 47.

That is why I am here not among the ibises. Why the permanent...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:10:00 -0400

That is why I am here
not among the ibises. Why
the permanent city parasol
covers even me.

It was the rains
in the occult season. It was the snows
on the lower slopes. It was water
and cold in my mouth.

A lack of shoes
on what appeared to be cobbles
which were still antique

Well wild wild whatever
in wild more silent blue
the vase grips the stems
petals fall the chrysanthemum darkens

Sometimes this mustard feeling
clutches me also. My sleep is reckoned
in straws

Yet I wake up
and am followed into the street.

—Barbara Guest, “A Reason”

Ghanaian bootleg movie poster for Army of Darkness, found here...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 23:00:11 -0400

Ghanaian bootleg movie poster for Army of Darkness, found here (via).

Video

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:40:34 -0400

Inhambane district, Mozambique, July 2011.

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 23:12:28 -0400

Inhambane district, Mozambique, July 2011.

Sammy Sosa skin cream / Michael Jackson disease Maputo, August...

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:09:00 -0400

Sammy Sosa skin cream / Michael Jackson disease

Maputo, August 2011.

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 03:59:46 -0400

Maputo, August 2011.

"Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the..."

Mon, 23 May 2011 18:31:49 -0400

“Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”

- Bob Dylan

"The purpose of this little program is to expose the seductions of rhetoric, not to criticize actions..."

Sun, 22 May 2011 23:20:04 -0400

“The purpose of this little program is to expose the seductions of rhetoric, not to criticize actions taken. Despite my admiration for many of the actions taken in the name of insurrection, I’m suspicious of how easy it is to substitute style for substance in the communiques describing these actions. And this is not to say that all “insurrectionist” texts are meaningless, despite its difficulty, I found the Coming Insurrection to be, with all its excesses, a serious (if contentious) contribution to revolutionary thought. And, to point out just one other exemplar, the recent “Communique from an Absent Future: The Terminus of Student Life” is by and large an excellent piece of analysis. This program is intended only to demonstrate the pitfalls of language which sounds too good to be meaningful.”

- Automatic Insurrection

"Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by..."

Wed, 04 May 2011 11:09:04 -0400

“Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.”

- The infinite wisdom of David Brooks