(from here, and other great shirts one can wear ironically…)

Of course, it makes me think of the many instances of “Conservative Humor Fail,” which I haven’t quite figured out.  Why does that happen?

On the other hand, when it comes to Syrian graffiti, it seems that one of the few “free” spaces for Syrians and supporters of the Syrian revolution to spray is Beirut. Stencils and writing in support of the revolution/opposition and against the Syrian regime are being spotted either fully rendered or blacked out. We have heard of arrests, tortures and killings of teenage Syrians who have sprayed slogans on the walls in Dera’a and Homs against the Syrian regime. It proved that in Syria it is not only a matter of censorship but also a matter of life and death. The Syrian government has also banned spray cans from the stores and Syrians need a special ID at the moment to purchase spray cans.

Sure, it’s not even close to that draconian here, yet the contrast opens up a frame through which we can view a quality common to all graffiti writing:  namely, that all graffiti is necessarily political, you know, a priori.  While the style of lettering may have traversed the space from illegal culture to legal, graffiti itself is not a lettering style, but an act; not a noun, but a defiant, antagonistic verb.

(from the article above)

From the perspective of the viewer, the aesthetic function of any particular piece of graffiti may shift along a spectrum, from “political” to “artistic”, and indeed, even the individual artist may consider his or her work to be apolitical, yet it only remains so as long as it is kept confined in the sketchbook.  Once on the wall, a work of graffiti is always completely political, the artistic/design components functioning (for the viewer especially) as a “sugar coating on the bitter pill”.  The difference between a tag or hastily-scrawled screed and a fully-realized “piece” is primarily one of complexity in design.  The political function of the act itself, however, is consistent.

(from here)

(from here)

This, from our own hemisphere:

Cf.  This, and this.

Just thinking about thinking about non-ironic self-criticism makes me want to curl up.  (It’s probably easier to say that what I’m thinking about doesn’t really have any thing to do, necessarily, with the topic of either of those.  But there’s something striking about the tone and general intent that I’m apparently not ready to confront just yet.)

This period of the Court’s history led into what is known as the Lochner era, for the most famous case of its day. In an early attempt to protect workers from exploitation, New York passed a law prohibiting bakery employees from working more than sixty hours a week or ten hours a day. In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court declared the state law unconstitutional, on the ground that it interfered with the “right of contract” of both the employer and the employee. For a five-to-four majority, Justice Rufus Peckham found the New York law an “unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.” In simple terms, the majority in Lochner turned the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, into a mechanism to advance the interest of business owners. The Court basically asserted that most attempts to regulate the private marketplace, or to protect workers, were unconstitutional. The Lochner era reflected conservative judicial activism, which has a long history at the Court. The decisions of the nineteen-thirties, which rejected central aspects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, also showed how conservative Justices would overrule the democratically elected branches. It was only in the Warren Court era, in the fifties and sixties, that liberal judicial activism became a force at the Court, as the Justices began overturning laws that violated the rights of minorities and women.

Question is: what would be so wrong with some kind of regulation that prohibited more than forty hours a week, so long as pay remained tied to production? Shouldn’t “the market” take care of this restriction? In otherwords, if the baker can only bake forty hours per week, the price of his/her goods should go up, as there will be less supply for the demand. I Understand this is simplistic.
]]> http://terraceagenda.com/2012/05/15/quick-thought/feed/ 2 37.708538 -97.444929 37.708538 -97.444929 Zack! http://terraceagenda.com/2012/05/10/analyze-everything-redux/ http://terraceagenda.com/2012/05/10/analyze-everything-redux/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 02:38:04 +0000 Zack! http://terraceagenda.com/?p=3936 Continue reading →]]> Next thing you know, Patr’s gonna start telling me it’s just taking the subway, getting from home to work to bar to bar to home:

Mr. Udagawa, 47, and Ms. Moeslinger, 44, are the principals of Antenna Design, the company behind the last major changes to New York’s subway cars, in 2000 and 2006. Of the city’s 6,374 subway cars, 3,504 bear the pair’s interior and exterior designs, as do MetroCard vending machines and other accouterments of underground life. These are people who obsess about the effects of steel dust on MetroCard readers or the ways light and color can influence riders’ moods.

“We subscribe to the idea of City Beautiful,” Mr. Udagawa said, referring to an architectural and urban-planning movement from the 1890s and 1900s that sought to use attractive design to make people better citizens. “It promotes the idea that a nice environment creates nice behavior.”

And thereby proving the critico-poetic implications of Pac-Man.

There’s no point in putting up some video of a Beastie Boys song that you can reminisce to, you know them all already.  I’ll say this to the positive:  they helped to make hip hop more accessible to more people, which is good, mostly.  I don’t think hip hop needs, or ought, or is required to be accessible.  Maybe the better way to say it is that they helped more people access hip hop.  And that is an always good thing.

Start with the Beastie Boys, and you’ll find A Tribe Called Quest, which will then lead you to nearly every important hip hop artist from NYC in the 90′s, too numerous to mention. That’s the most important legacy of MCA and the Beastie Boys, as I’m reading it.  Not them, although that’s fine too, but everything else they were connected to.

For instance:

Pacman displays all the patho-obsessive characteristics that are the special achievement of the first generation peasant. Pacman does not live, he survives. Pacman does not know the freedom and enjoyment of the drift; he is locked in a Malthusian trap without cheat codes, doomed to struggle ad infinitum to overcome his hunger in the knowledge that the next meal will be even harder to acquire. To eat more is to be chased with added vengeance.

Just passing it along.  I always enjoy a simple concept (like Pac-Man) that turns out to evoke much larger themes.

Incidentally, Charlie Chaplin was one of my favorite actors when I was younger.  I have no idea why–the only movie I think I’ve seen of his is that one where Morton Downey Jr plays him.  I did read a biography about him, though, so there’s that.

Best part is really Rudy doing his best to separate his face from his skull, looks like.  The “Mitt Romney, you’re a racist” lady is, while probably right, a little too 2011 for my tastes.  Of course, I still like the glitter bomb, so what do I know?

(By the way, the better video is at TPM, Giuliani is way more entertaining there)

I don’t ride the buses because they absolutely suck.  The routes are generally crappy and the availability/frequency is mostly inconvenient. That said, does it make sense to continue to cut services and routes in order to hang on to the remaining scraps of what we’re calling a “transit system”?  If it gets more awful, I’d think less people would use it, leading to less money and then more cuts and then rinse/repeat.

A better solution is to place a value on the ideology of public transportation.  Is it something that we can all appreciate even if we don’t use it? I would gladly pay an extra two bucks a year to make up that gap in the budget if it meant having a less-awful transit system.  I’d pay an extra five dollars a year if it meant having an awesome transit system.  I might even use it, then.

The argument is that a useful, and not merely functional, public transportation system is a service a city ought to have, period, like parks or libraries or public schools.  Even if you don’t use those services frequently or at all, you still benefit from the “halo” of improved quality of life that these things give your fellow citizens.

I know I should probably have added more “blue” words to this, but it just seems so darned commonsense.  Meanwhile, tax breaks for private businesses continue.