Category: Poseur Alert

“Maybe I will send [president Bush] a little something; socks perhaps, or felt pens. Or balloons. He’s family. I hate this, because he is a dangerous member of the family, like a Klansman. To me, his policies deal death and destruction, and maybe I can’t exactly forgive him right now, in the classical sense, of canceling my resentment and judgment. But I can at least acknowledge that he gets to eat, too. I would not let him starve, and I will sit next to him, although it will be a little like that old Woody Allen line that someday, the lion shall lie down with the lamb, although the lamb is not going to get any sleep. That’s the best I can do right now. Maybe at some point, later, briefly, I will feel a flicker of something more. Let me get back to you on this.” – Anne Lamott, blathering on mindlessly in the current Salon.

“The domestic housefly insinuates itself into the most banal aspects of our daily lives, haunting our homes with its privileged view of our intimate activities. The fly’s size and scale ensures its admittance into the human drama of love and hate, sin and retribution. But what would happen if we were to inhabit, to haunt, the body of the fly: how would we perceive the world around us? … Our approximation and abstraction of reality becomes indiscernible as technology continues to mediate our everyday experience. Tele-presence art, however, attempts to be less concerned with the technological feat than with the breaking down of unidirectional communication structures distinguishing both visual arts and mass media. Within the installation, Fly, the utopian rhetoric invested within the notion of telepresence is ultimately usurped by the ultra-trite, supra-insignificant act of possession.” – from a web experiment summarized as follows: “One dead fly with one microprocessor implanted into the fly body. The chip is a fully operational web server on the internet, and enables online viewers to enter and exit the fly corpse.”

MUST-READ: Stu Taylor on why the world needs America’s interventionism.

POLICING VOMIT: Oxford University cracks down on a sacred Brideshead tradition. The nerve. When I was there, we all did it.

SUNSET OVER EUROPE: Extremely cool photo taken by the Columbia Space Shuttle before its demise. Courtesy of Rush.

“You may well scoff at Christian kitsch, but be on the lookout for “Hurt”; the video is loosely and beautifully made, and, by running the stark song up against set pieces and still-lifes of trinkets, it manages to make perishing kitsch stand in for end-of-life regrets. The song contains the word “focus”; it contains the word “hole.” Cash has “hole” down-it’s a country word, his frown hardly splits to say it-but “focus,” as in, “I focus on the pain,” is a conspicuous trace of the hi-fi songwriter Trent Reznor. In Cash’s awkwardness with the word, he shows a hint of loathing for the song, whose theme is self-loathing. Cash plays the song on the guitar, with mounting panic from the piano. Today is his birthday.” – Virginia Heffernan, Slate.

POSEUR ALERT II: Stringing Rodin up.

“Stockhausen wasn’t so wrong — in a media-glutted world, Sept. 11 couldn’t help but become the ultimate reality show. So enamored were we of its rare, shocking authenticity that we replicated its image into infinity and leached it of its meaning. Of course, it still works as a rhetorical cudgel that the administration can use to suspend the Constitution and most accepted norms of international behavior, but that just underlies how hollow it’s become — it’s a political device, like the Pledge of Allegiance, sanctimoniously recited on the Capitol steps.” – Michelle Goldberg, Salon.

“In acquiring the land we also acquired a mortgage, which meant that we could no longer live from royalties and occasional journalism. Our solution was to set up a business – using my knowledge of the intellectual life and my wife Sophie’s social gifts – offering a new kind of consultancy in public affairs. Thus was founded Horsell’s Farm Enterprises, characterized thus by its business card:

Britain’s leading post-modern rural consultancy, specialists in landscape-maintenance, literary criticism, equitation, hedge-laying, musicology, typesetting, publishing, dry-stone walls, writing, journalism, countryside restoration, museums, composition, pond-management, public affairs, log-cutting, logic-chopping, rare breeds of chicken, sheep, dreams; also hay and straw.”

– Roger Scruton, from his hilarious article in the Spectator, where he defends being paid by tobacco companies to write and place articles in newspapers as a bid to protect Britain’s traditional country life.

“That scene was my introduction to [Seinfeld], and I quickly saw how a significant part of it was created along those lines: tableaux of human fecklessness imagined and presented with an adamantine clarity no less intoxicating than the smooth stone of “Apollo and Daphne,” the riotous imagery on the dominant wall of the Sistine Chapel.” – Bill Wyman, Salon. Actually, the essay is otherwise pretty good and insightful.

The Harvard professor John Stilgoe, cited for a Sontag Award below, has a professional website that makes Cornel West’s seem unpretentious. Well, at least Stilgoe can spell. Stilgoe’s work is described by Harvard as follows:

“Stilgoe conducts research on subjects ranging from catoptromancy and catoptrics, surviving marine disaster, nineteenth-century mechanistic stress, crossroads, and the future of cybernetic-free gores: each topic forms the core of a book in press or in progress.”

Cybernetic-free gores? Is that a new kind of presidential candidate? My favorite quote from the site, sent to me by a reader, and adorned by a picture of Stilgoe looking like Indiana Jones, is the following:

“Right now I work on several projects. One involves the growing interfaces among fantasy, advertising, and cyber-space rendering of real and surreal environments: lately I focus on fantasy illustration from the 1885 to 1910 period, the illusions wrought by moonlight on Romantic-era observers north of latitude 45, the fast-changing imaging of powerful, healthy women in challenging environments, and the growing inability of even well-educated people to look acutely at altered images of humans, humanoids, and animals and notice they are altered… The next project is around a bend in a salt creek. Anyone seen a grue?”

Larry Summers, get this guy in for an ‘interview.’ Seriously, I think we have a new contest here, don’t you? Poseur Alert invites submissions of the most pretentious, egomaniacal, loopy websites from various scholars in this nation’s great universities. Special attention will be given to those who can’t spell and whose pretentiousness is up there with, say, Cornel West.

“She was only 22 years old. Yet in an instant, Aaliyah Dani Haughton joined an exclusive but heartbreaking club: stars who are gone too soon. Aaliyah was Mercury rising. She was Saturn with brilliant rings of movies, songs and laughter getting brighter and hotter. But she was more. Unlike others on the verge of greatness, Aaliyah’s success had already mounted the horizon and was coming at her like a sunrise in a hurry. She had already reached places that once existed only in her dreams. But she wanted mega-stardom on the scale of Barbra Streisand’s. When word came of her fatal plane crash in The Bahamas last Saturday, we mourned a star, not the hope of a star. As did two other rising stars — James Dean and Selena — she left too soon for the world to know truly how far she could go.” Rochelle Riley, Knight Ridder.

“For the bourgeois salarywoman as for someone working at Burger King and spitting on your onion rings, life brings many experiences whose only antidote is putting on the headphones and listening to Canibus rhyming “Die Slow” or “Watch Who You Beef With.”
“The Man’s claws are digging in my back,” Big Pun sings, “I’m trying to hit him back.” An e-mail doing the rounds last autumn called DMX’s “Party Up” – with its chorus, “Y’all gon’ make me lose my mind, up in here, up in here” – the national African-American workplace anthem. The journalist David Hackley called it the chant of progressive African-Americans after the Florida election. But if hip-hop is especially skillful at articulating anger, its real greatness is in the scope of its preoccupations. Rap has a range of reference and ease with tradition, from Schopenhauer to Langston Hughes, rarely found in American popular culture – even if Ja Rule’s Latin is misspelled and Machiavelli is more referred to than read.” – Mina Kumar, New York Times, August 22.