“If Tina Brown is following Maureen Dowd, does that make her quasi-MoDo?”
POSEUR ALERT: “Like Nepalese religious shrines tendered on cow dung, the blues disc is an ‘opportunity for devotion.’ In the three economies in which it occurs, of the market, of society, and of the self, a disc collection such as James McKune’s or Harry Smith’s becomes a kind of counter-capital, a harvest of illth, like Dickens’s dustman converting what is dispersed, discarded, ruined, and despised to what is recovered, concentrated, and renewed, rendering it at once rare and precious, scandalous and subversive. In the vertical archeology of the social body, it is an edifice of the repressed, making one’s own despised or ruined condition available for contemplation and turning it, by virtue of our irrepressible sociality, into a source of cultural power. ‘Whatever we worship we make sacred.'” – an abstract of an academic paper on blues recordings.
The Dish 