Even Verso Books is now infected, and becoming as unscrupulous and hucksterish as their bestseller. On their Zizek page:
Reviews
“The most dangerous philosopher in the West.”
– Adam Kirsch, The New Republic
But Kirsch actually wrote:
“The most despicable philosopher in the West.”
It was Zizek who called himself "the most dangerous philosopher in the West."
I'm convinced that nothing more than school-boy jealousy is at the heart--if there is such a thing--of Z.'s project. As far as the distinction of "most dangerous philosopher" goes, he's still a sad punk compared to Heidegger...or Sarah Palin, for that matter. That must suck. Hard.
ReplyDeleteI think the Zizz is so thrilled to be labelled "of the West" he really would trumpet "foulest smelling turd of the West" if he couldn't slip anything better by the drooling fans.
ReplyDeleteSorry- this isn't Zizek related, but I was so excited I had to tell somebody. Have you heard the news? Us women need to work on making ourselves "invisible", or we'll never... blah blah blah... something about subjects. Viva la revolucion, etc.
ReplyDeleteWhy does that sound familiar? Oh yeah, I think I remember that drunk old man who used to rant in the park saying that women shouldn't be all uppity-like and should keep to themselves and cover up. Unless they're at home in bed with dear husband or whatever.
My inconsiderate employers ahve kept me largely out of the loop for the last three weeks.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm catching up on the trailor for Marx Reloaded.
So it is only partially apropos Zizek, but I googled up producer of the clip.
It's clear why Z. appeals to her. she pursues rebels and visionaries, as you can see here:
http://www.medeafilm.com/about.html
'Have you heard the news? Us women need to work on making ourselves "invisible",'
ReplyDeleteegad, where is this? i guess that follows from badiou? or more hammering the female 'self-exploitation'?
did you ever see Letter to Jane? I love Goddard of course but the white male resentment in that just overfloweth. And I think a lot of that anger is boiling up now, with the kind of frenzy of emasculation the real ruling class, its very creme de la creme, is inflicting on a big chunk of lower bourgeois.
http://www.medeafilm.com/about.html
ReplyDeleteeverything there especially funny next to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4
with the kind of frenzy of emasculation the real ruling class, its very creme de la creme, is inflicting on a big chunk of lower bourgeois.
ReplyDeleteTHE CUTS. Yes.
Oh I was talking about something I saw on the Infinite Thought blog about how women need to become "invisible" or they can't become real subjects, or something to that effect.
ReplyDeleteReading this yesterday it was even more striking to me, I think, how strange it was due to a couple of incidents that I'd witnessed a few hours before. I was in an upper division chemistry course and the professor explained that our lab notebooks were bound in pink this year because the women had done so much better than the men last semester. It was some kind of cheap ploy to drum up "competition" so the males in the room would get ambitious- because evidently this is the only way to get young men to care about anything these days. Anyway, the mere mention of this launched the professor into a full-blown rant about how when he was in college (and he's only around 35), science classrooms were full of men, with only a couple of scattered women who had to work extra hard just to keep up. Now, look around folks- it's 75% women in here! And they're kicking the guys' asses in everything. He said all of this in good humor, with a chuckle and a smile, but when the class snickered he added "Women are taking over everything, I'm serious!" and threw up his hands.
In this light, and given the sort of casual sexism I see everyday in my academic life, I found the suggestion that women become "invisible" pretty harrowing. It's a message that *may* have made some kind of sense 50 years ago in the U.S.- maybe?- if it were stated as a sort of tune in and drop out of femininity slogan. But we're so far beyond that now, we're just in a completely different political territory. The only way I can read a demand for women to be more "invisible" given the cultural context we're living in is as a reactionary bit of seething resentment at the gains women have made.
But of course, having said this, I'm sure comeback is bound to be something like "chemistry is The Man, women who work as chemists are just helping corporations fabricate Capitalism 2.0" or whatever.
Surely, science is now in a "race to the bottom" in which everyone loses, when we allow women to outnumber men and take their rightful positions of privilege and authority within the discipline.
ReplyDeleteThe crucial quote from the piece linked at Apparent Thought is this: "Anorexia is not ‘caused’ by images of underweight actresses and models, nor will it be eradicated by the inclusion of more ‘realistic’ female bodies in magazines and cinema. To argue on this terrain is still to accede to the logic of capital: that a woman must be an image in order to exist."
ReplyDeleteThe first premise is partially true but reduces the causal complexities. The second manages a remarkable condensed confusion. Non-sequitur, overgeneralization and ultra-left.
But to return to the real quuestion raised here, who is the most dangerous fashion designer in the West? And why aren't they dressing Mr. Z?
ReplyDeleteBut to return to the real quuestion raised here, who is the most dangerous fashion designer in the West? And why aren't they dressing Mr. Z?
ReplyDeleteWho said anybody has to stay on-topic? Some will be allowed, some won't, as you'll see. Myself, I took the pink piws--somewhere between Evil White Male Supremacy and Red Bullshit Communism, eh?
http://www.theonion.com/articles/construction-complete-on-911-truther-memorial,18034/
Where's the OUTRAGE? I mean, not only at this scandalous sarcasm for something so 'cornerstone' to certain hidden corners of the bleugosphere, but also one must note the delicate omission of the outrage about the mosque 2 blocks from Ground Zero. I talked to a nice Lesbian last night, and she said that she was more upset by the building they are tearing down, and that she had had to defend Sarah Palin from someone who referred to her, in a New York Liberal tone, as 'white trash'. Frank Rich wrote in his Aug. 22 op-ed that there were no finished buildings in the Ground Zero complex. This is almost as bad as the bleugs when it comes to giving facts, I would have never guessed; you can usually trust old Unca Frank: Yes, 7 World Trade was finished, not partially complete, by 2006, so there's a new conspiracy to make me not believe the NYTimes: In fact, I was pretty shocked that, since he is in favour of the mosque (I don't think it's that important, but these are American Moderate Muslims, not stoners as per earlier this summer in Afghanistan, you know, the family and the rest of the village stone their 20somethings to death, such FUN!). But what's worse is ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER is actually 38 storeys all the way up! The cheek of Silvah-stein, Bloom-buhg, and the othah Jewish develo-pahs...I just discovered this past Thursday that I can already see the 37 and 38th floors out my window. I have noticed as well that the leftist bleugs have never written even ONE post on Ground Zero construction, and even Owen Hatherley's bleug is not replete with a plethora of Ground Zero information.
Dishing on the Zizz:
ReplyDeletehttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1516177
You're right Patrick. I was off topic. The real question is dangerous to whom? Besides himself.
ReplyDelete"You're right Patrick. I was off topic. The real question is dangerous to whom? Besides himself"
ReplyDeleteYes, I know. So answer the real question already. I haven't got time to worry about this slob anymore, although I'll admit he was dangerous to me once upon a time, but not because he split Marx from his Nape to His Gullet; and I've long had other things to occupy my time besides the Menace of Zizek to Patrick. While 'dangerous to himself', I doubt there'll be a 'Being John Malkovich' spinoff for Slavoj. About the only piece of info I get from Arpege's obsession with Slavoj is that he still must hold enormous sway over many dumb-lings of various sorts; we do appreciate your business...er, um, updates...
Living in a society where upwards of 70% of people qualify as overweight or obese, I find it sort of perplexing that so many feminists still harp on anorexia and body dysmorphia.
ReplyDeleteI mean, they exist, both are debilitating. Anorexia is one of the deadlier anxiety disorders. But it affects a *very* tiny sliver of the population, and lots more rich whites than anyone else.
I find most fashion photography inane and silly, but I think the ultrathin body type that USED to be favored by the popular media (now it's Beyonce and JLo and still pretty thin yet "curvy" women who are in) originated when Coco Chanel made it popular. Her aesthetic was always of a piece with romantic early 20th century notions of the free, modern jetsetting woman who wasn't especially worried about looking voluptuous or sexy. I don't find it difficult to understand why this appeals to women (and why it's used to sell clothes to women) over and against the Maxim, Stuff, ladmag vision of the ideal body type.
Anyway... totally irrelevant to Zizek, sorry.
Who dresses Z.?
ReplyDeleteVivienne Westwood, of course.
Thank you Pinkerton. I feel like such a rube. How could I fail to recognize that distinctive touch. And having googled, what in the world is a "titty leather bag"?
ReplyDeleteAnodyne, I'm thinking that the problem goes way deep here. Once the body-image argument gets taken to the next-plane of 'invisibility,' the anorexia dwindles to a pretext, this reasoning has executed a double abstraction. If the image problem is solved by the annihilation of image-access the ultra-skinny image itself no longer matters. Nor does any other particular image.
And if the particular image does not matter, how much less do the material problems. Obesity and anorexia have become only image-potentials, not factors in women's lives. Not issues to rasie and address.
Rhetorically, I suppose, anorexia only serves as a hook. It indicates the audience they would like to snag for the image-analytic substitute for politics.
The image argument, at least in this form, does seem uninterested in real women, working-class women, specially WOC, and concrete issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Westwood
ReplyDeleteOh christ, she's str8 out of E.A. Poe, like, say 'The Raven'.
I might as well be efficient, and conclude my thesis on 'weak art' as it inevitably invades 'invisibility'...or did I mean that the other way around?
Yes.
Okay. Invisibility, or the refusal to exploit worthy things for the market, begins to assert itself first in the form of 'weak art'. That is not because it is intrinsically 'worthless', but rather because it has not gathered strength yet to become visible. It files requests for visibility at premature stages, and that these are 'premature' must because there is a very good reason: Even if that reason is bad or evil or even wrong. Therefore, since the reason the invisibility has been maintained, the invisible images may then assert themselves in baby steps until they are able to be accepted a little bit more fully in Britain.
So, we are saying that, all irony aside (at least for me, who said the rest of you had earned that privilege?), that we DO want fully realized and fleshed-out images of wrongly rejected non-Empire invisibles, but we do not want them until they are 100% finished, hardened off and polished. This is not because of anything other than that the mob will beat them to death if they are not faits accomplis, rather than plaintive pleas.
Thank you. I had used up too much space with my image-making machine at other locales, and would like to thank Mlle. Arpege for her usual beautiful largesse (while remaining slimly built, and hopefully not eating too much Parisian Glaces in order to compensate for the withdrawal symptoms, which should be ending soon.)
I have decided that there has been a severe deficiency in my education: I do not know anything about backgammon, how it is played. Once again, God bless wiki.
anorexia...sad. agree, anodyne. and I don't see how the voluntary self starvation and malnutrition of white privileged women can be discussed apart from involuntary starvation, which affects so many more women and girls.
ReplyDeleteas you say chuckie, it just is a pretext for talking about these vague maximally abstract substitute problems.
just seems the conversations of this little zizzian circle takes place in a bubble. they don't seem at all aware of what women - scholars;, theorists, activists - have said about all this for the past thirty years. its just like teenagers hungry for attention pontificating about everything as if their every passing "personal observation" was a marvel. but this is social media and reality tv effect - because they have learned to vbehave as if they were celebrities, as if people were constantly interviewing them just out of interest in them personally. that what they have to say is idiotic or obvious or cliché then does not matter since they presume - their posture presumes - an audience who is interested in their thoughts because they are theirs. the whole point is to brand themselves, not to contribute to any kind of discussion, of any interest. the perpetual job interview plus AA meeting plus class president campaign speechplus social media profile. My name is Sissy, I'm an anorexic. I think feminism should pay more attention to women "on the ground" in "other countries" and less to vibrators and chocolate. I think people should work less and play more. My favourite bands are .... and my favourite movies are..... I want two red pills.
how can there be "anorexia" without a subjective dimension of the starving individual? Without the presumption of individual interiority, "anorexia" is just starvation or malnourishment - just pellagra and candidiasis and beri-beri and anemia unless distinguished by its self-infliction and all the mental states and intentions as understood by "folk psychology". Isn't the important thing that of all the starving female bodies, the ones that bourgeois white academics are interested in are also bourgeois and also white, this teeensy weeeensy minority in whom they are always most interested, whether starving or not?
ReplyDeleteI kept thinking about this purported political analysis of anorexia. Eventually, feeling little slow on the uptake. And slowly mounting the soap box. Which leads to such length, I’m splitting this comment in two.
ReplyDeleteOn reflection, it appeared to me that this argument is the same rhetorical constellation as the slut-shaming ‘critiques’ of a variety of women’s appearances and sexual behaviors. And then, that this constellation is also shared by the autonomist arguments for the ‘refusal of work.’
When I commented earlier, I noted the overly abstract and vague formulation of “making ourselves invisible.” I tried to paraphrase that goal, but not very successfully. My second try came up with ‘imageability.’ So the strategy is to eliminate imageability. In any immediate sense of eliminating imaging technologies and activities, this goal is impossible. But it is qualified here as women’s own task, to be achieved in and of themselves. If the task is to eliminate women’s on provision of imageability , the question becomes who is providing it. Concretely, the women who pose for these images. Skinny models. Models who presumably achieved their appearance as the cost of the pathology the critique finds so alarming. The critique implicitly attaches the blame to these women and targets them as the ones responsible for the offending images. Although the critique explicitly attributes responsibility to undifferentiated requirements of ‘capitalism,’ its logic elides this responsibility and foregrounds the collusion of women with exploitative and oppressive practices. Collusion has replaced exploitation and oppression as the issue. The abusive consequences for feminist politics and polemic have made themselves sorely evident in internet fora.
The autonomist strategy of the ‘refusal of work’ parallels this critique of the female image. The critique of the image , when interpreted literally, is a refusal of work, but of a particular work due to its substance, rather than of ‘work’ due to its coerced and exploitative character. It makes sense that the argument for ‘refusal’ appeals to Power’s autonomist affinities. When she expressed her interest in this analysis, she might have suggested how it’s totalizing argument needs to be tempered. The argument of collusion among autonomists lends itself moralizing, sectarian charges just as it does among feminists. In Selma Jame’s makes clear distinctions: “The challenge to the women’s movement is to find modes of struggle which, while they liberate women from the home, at the same time avoid on the one hand a double slavery and on the other prevent another degree of capitalistic control and regimentation.”
ReplyDeleteThe complementary considerations in strategy, to liberate and to avoid another degree of control. At the moment, liberation in and through struggle is not total, and subjection to the control of capital is unavoidable, but gradated. If concern over the commodity form of body-images in fact deserves a priority in feminist struggle, its analysis would have to propose a strategy in which women’s solidarity does not replicate patriarchal stereotypes of women’s motives and behavior which makes commodity body-images less profitable. The question of priority necessarily has precedence. What struggles promote the widest solidarity, ameliorate the greatest degree of control, and advance the broadest liberation.
Sorry, I get wound up and write like a cominternist.
ReplyDeletethanks chuckie
ReplyDeleteagreed to everything, and this point about it fitting in with the refusal of work especially good.
I think also one has to recall this
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=18174466&postID=2219691008521865504
10am [CANCELLED Slavoj Zizek "The view from up here: Communism from above is
no communism at all" CANCELLED]
Sandra Harding "Communisms from below"
Donna Haraway "On Interspecies Communism"
Gianni Vattimo "Weak Communists"
Judith Balso "Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible
name for politics?"
bell hooks "Ain't I a Communist?"
12am Skill sharing workshop: Alter-communisms!
Bring your experiences and visions from local and transversal struggles
Concluding Collective Trance: Channelling Karl Marx
and this
AA Gill writing of Abby [sic] Titmuss puts it thus: '[she]speaks of her breasts inability to remain covered as if it were a medical condition she had to live with with as much good humour and stoicism as she could muster. The outbreaks of exhibitionist sexuality were like eczema attacks: disgusting, unsightly, but not her fault.'
and this
Strange is the rage reserved by so many feminist ladies for the
few girls wearing the hijab. They have begged poor president
Chirac, the Soviet at 82 percent, to crack down on them in the name
of the Law. Meanwhile the prostituted female body is everywhere. The
most humiliating pornography is universally sold. Advice on sexually
exposing bodies lavishes teen magazines day in and day out.
13 A single explanation: a girl must show what she’s got to sell.
She’s got to show her goods. She’s got to indicate that, henceforth,
the circulation of women abides by the generalized model, and
not by restricted exchange. Too bad for bearded fathers and elder brothers! Long live the planetary market! The generalized model is the
top fashion model.
as the context for the demand women become invisible.
Hating fashion models. Similar to focussing fury on how much players in the NBA make. Not the owners, not the publishers, not the shareholders of the giant media companies....the fashion models and basketball players.
Amazing that the brave Badiou and Missy Power don't want to hear from girls wearing hijabs at all. Don't find their blogs, don't quote them. They remain texts to be read, texts over which Badiou and Power can war with those wicked and depraved "Feminist ladies" who have forced these racist policies on the poor cowed Chirac and now Sarkozy.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first saw this I thought well he's an old geezer, and he's just trying to be catchy and memorable, but after that performance on Taddei's show (the Taddei Show) where he literally excluded women from humanity, he just nauseates me.
it's hilarious really:
ReplyDelete"Then there is the visibility of the otherwise dispensable woman in hijab – she has become highly contested ground in recent years. Is she conspicuous? Is she trying not to be? Is her veiling oppressive? Is it ‘a personal choice’? Power quotes Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou..."
really one should cut to him sitting at a little schooldesk in high heels with a shmata on his head, painting his fingernails.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shmata
ReplyDeleteArpege, I rilly don't see why you think we'd have read all the Yiddish bleugs. I had to look this up as well as hijab, which I got confused as jihab and 'found no results' for awhile.
Christian is coming in the spring and wants to take me and Jack out as we begin promoting our asses. Since Jack won't let C. pay, you can come too if you're here, but you have to show your corset if you expect to get your check paid the way I will...I admit I like your image of Badiou painting his nails. Baudrillard and Zizek is one thing, but who would have thought it would come to this? Maybe Missy Power will now get rid of her Maidenform...
UNfortunately, this time we can't go to La Caravelle, that gorgeous place closed, but we are going to try to find a parallel to it so that we can feel exceptional...I know you like Gabriel's, but I have found that the reviews of the food don't match the atmosphere of corporate culture in the views...xxx
I tell Jack new 'Mademoiselle Arpege Stories' twice a week, so you are a very publicized young New Yorkaise in your expat status.
heh heh
ReplyDeletei heard cipriani in the sherry netherlands closed? is it twoo? that's a tragedy. that was incomparable.
oh cipriani. cipriani. you were on the ground in other countries!
ReplyDelete"Cipriani offers the world's most sought after social experiences" - class warfare, celebrity or invisibility?
ReplyDeleteI don't know, but a glance at the menu will tell you that a fresh Gullet of Marx will cost you "market price."
ReplyDeleteCouldn't help it....
It had been closed, from what I can google, from 2005-2007, but seems to be open now. But, mlle., you have solved the problem by bringing the Sherry Netherland up, which is documented as My Most Glorious Failure in the 3rd Chapter of the new book; so we daren't go there. In fact, all the luck is one block up, and I've mentioned it to you before. That's appallingly expensive, but has always been a 'Paris New York' sensation, and has one of the last cabaret scenes in it. One gets an entree (which is exorbitant enough) and wines by the glass, unless one wants to abuse one's (admittedly rich) host. But we don't, as he is not someone odious. The Sherry always reminded me of Neuschwanstein, and it's been remodelled and restaffed since I had business there. I think a la Vielle Russie with the Faberge Eggs is still there, but haven't been by for awhile.
ReplyDeleteI just wrote Christian that your witchcraft had led to the right replacement for La Caravelle. Also closed since you were here are Lutece and La Cote Basque, although that might be even before. But one doesn't have to act like at Le Cirque, where you might be seated badly and still feel as though you have to order every single course (even with the wrong date.)
Practically speaking, it's unlikely that you'll hit the town at the same time, and I'll take you to Julius's just like I did traxus. They're not at ALL sexist there, and we go there nearly every week--it's just like Fred McMurray and Shirley MacLaine, you know, and I can't get that old theme song out of my head (every time we come in, the bartender goes to the back and lowers the lights for us, and I'm NOT KIDDING! All they'd need to do is make it descend into a basement and you'd feel just like 'Miss Kubelik')
The refusal of imageability is more than just a variety of the refusal of work.
ReplyDeleteRefusalism in general seems to hold considerable appeal these days. I wish I could explain that appeal. Sort of the 'political' and 'social' equivalent of the boycott. The consumer role in the relations of circulation projected onto ideas and onto the relations of production. With producer and consumer inverted.
That correlation and inversion certainly relate to the 'political' analysis of collusion and complicity. Again, I only wish I could spell out the relationship.
But as we have seen in analyses like Wendy Brown's the Foucauldian account of complicity and collusion also leads to implicit victim blaming instead of solidarity and the search for liberatory activism. The analyst who produces an account of complicity by the rhetoric of the argument itself distances themselves from any imputation of complicity and effectually distances themselves from the subjects of their putative sympathy.
thanks patrick
ReplyDeleteand yes thanks chuckie
the "complicity" bizniz also functions to strengththen the sexiust and racist mythology, usually for scapegoating
the tactic is as old as savonarola
"feminist ladies" - feminism and women are displayed as culprits of France'santi-hiijab law and all its islamophobia and anti-arabism, to cleanse white men, the ruling class the state, "poor Chirac". The speakers especially acquit themselves.
and now, in the depression, post-"crisis", women and feminism are constructed by this complicity case as scapeoats for everything - women and feminism (women's mass entry into the workforce) are causing unemployment and hardship and a "race to the bottom"! women's "consumerism", naked greed and insatiability, superficiality, now imageability are at the root of the inauthenticity of the society, the bubble and bust.
"It seems to me not implausible that the techniques that women might have used in a similarly pragmatic vein to ‘get a man’ and thus secure some sort of economic stability are now used, in a rather more limitless way, to ‘get a job’. The sexualisation of contemporary women, from which men are of course not exempt from either, reflects less a freely-chosen desire to express oneself as a fully-rounded sensual being and far more the desperate, yet eminently comprehensible, desire to insert oneself in whatever way possible into a cruel economic structure that will selectively use and value the ‘assets’ of its workers whenever it needs to. We should not be ‘blaming’ women for their complicity in such a logic, as if blame were ever a useful political category, but try better to understand it."
ReplyDeletethe feeble disavowal - no blame! just understanding! men too! - are necessary to distinguish the paragraph from something by Dinesh D'Souza or other avowed neocons.
that arrogant "we should", like the mad torchbearing prophet saving souls! not to harm but to heal! chase out de debbils!
ReplyDeletereally is sick-making.
and all has this egoistic character of anxious self-help. in ODW, the endless talk of vibrators and masturbation ( - a dozen mentions in fifty pages - is plainly some kind of exorcism. The book is dense with vibrators the way I used to put cigarettes in everything - she's obviously hooked on her vibrator and when she can't be using it she has to be writing about it, telling herself its bad and she can go without it ten minutes more. and this other person is writing about anorexia to tell herself it's bad and she shouldn't miss it and can live without it and its okay for her to have a normal bodyweight now. And all this scolding is for themselves, their own narcissism. the most damaged people are setting themselves up as scourges to berate other women for their own pecadillos inflated into their minds as enormous world-destroying evils. And then with sheer stubborn toddler insistence they repeatedly decalre this political and structural analysis and insightful and controversial and give themselves all these awards, for writing what is sub-standard copy of the kind you would find in Seventeen and Self.
Not that I don't think anorexia has to do with patriarchy. Clearly it does, though obviously it doesn't work like "show girls thin bodies valorized, cause anorexia". The standard of beauty of thinness on TV does demonstrably (there are studies) cause girls to feel fat and to diet and to be selfconsicous and self-loathing and also to apply those standards to others. It does not cause anorexia. Anorexia is complex, but there is often some "restraint shows the masters hand" thing asserted and patterns of certain kinds of relationships to certain kinds of fathers.
La Goulue? That's still there.
ReplyDeleteBut you want something shmancy. And cipriani is not
what about café des artistes on the other side of the park? it's atmosphere. food is okay but atmosphere is very nice.
or nirvana. is that still there?
Il Postino on 49th street is great. you may see sumner redstone if you go early.
Bice? midtown east?
how about that place capsouto freres? is that still around? downtown? that was fantastic. if you have not been there, go. it's for you.
or felidia
ReplyDeletefelidia is beyond belief good.
and its shmancy enough too
Chuckie though - the sum - today there is something a little new - commodity "left intellectuals", selected by capital and promoted in an astrotuf fashion to appear to emerge from that traditionally radical space in and around Universities. Everything they say and do is fake, a cardboard front: the Middlesex "occupation", the cheap publisher, the New Left websiute with its hostile email interviews masquerading as "original articles" by Noam Chomsky Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and Diana Johnstone and the like, the supposed comintern with "delegates from all over the world". Everything is simulacrum. And the focus of their attacks are feminism and anti-racism - women and people of colour. The agenda seems to be to restore white supremacist patriarchy, in its old guise as egalitarian universalism, after some cooptation of the challenges. Power and Toscano are reall Zizzy's flying monkeys. They pause to be applauded for adventures like the LRB effort to get RWJohnson fired, in which they assert that black people from Zimbabwe are NOT baboons. They want to reframe all the discussions at square one. Women are berated for neglecting breastfeeding. Toscano is especially treacly sentimental in the old french fasho vein, slightly teary eyed when he evokes the "black President" and pauses for laughter and applause of white self-congratulation. And his fantasy myth of Malcolm X tells of how he finally came to love and appreciate white men and subordinate himself to the "power of abstraction", the German Spirit.
ReplyDeleteLike the tea party and the edl, they are offering a style of dissent and dissatisfaction that places the blame away from the ruling class and maintains the alliance between teh white petty bourgeoisie and professionals, however downwardly mobile, and capital. The culprits are women and feminism, black seperatism, "multiculturalism" and the like.
"he agenda seems to be to restore white supremacist patriarchy, in its old guise as egalitarian universalism, after some cooptation of the challenges."
ReplyDeletethe tactics are adopted from David Lynch and other "niche" mass culture producers, the pseudo-indy
Oh mademoiselle, you do cheer me up!
ReplyDeleteNo, just the Cafe Pierre, which also has outrageous prices, but is always elegant--that's the block up from Sherry Netherland, they're kind of like twins. But the Pierre is really a grand and pretty place, I like better than the Carlyle, and the food is very good. But there's usually some 'Cole Porter singer' of good quality at the Pierre without having to pay that $60 (probably $80 by now) cover charge as at the Carlyle. The Alqonguin is not really for food, but if Karen Akers happens to be there, I've never seen here in person, she usually comes round then. The Pierre is always great, though, I think there's even a big mural that reminds you of Boucher, maybe. And they have one room where you can just have drinks too. I think Boulud's things are what C. has more in mind, though, but for celebration, you can't beat the Pierre.
Now NIRVANA! That's a possibility, goes all the way back to the 60s doesn't it, and I have never been up there. That will be like back in the old days with Top of the Sixes--those places were so much fun. I think Four Seasons trop cher, but I guess it does always have the 'kiss of chic', as the food critics say.
Will look up the other places, they do all sound good.
I don't know my magnates that well: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/arts/design/22dill.html
This Gehry building is just up from me, and I can never remember it except when I'm looking at it, thought briefly it was Sumner Redstone's place, but this IAC headquarters of Barry Diller. There was a Guggenheim show of Gehry back in early 00's, and after that, I never saw Gehry the same again: A lot of it sure goes way too far. Yuck, and some of those sculptures like huge scissors just awful. There's a pretty good docu on the Bilbao Museum, but Beaubourg better.
Actually, I don't require 'shmancy' so much, that's C. I think it odd that he goes to Paris a good bit and Lausanne has amazing French restaurants too, but when he comes here, he always thinks that it still has to be a French resto. I think that's a bit extreme, and that people should loosen up! That San Domenico on CPS is also supposed to be great.
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ReplyDeletepatreeek - ever eat at the Terrace, up there in Morningside heights from the year of the flood? I like heights, always loved top of the sixes though the food was mediocre. after that ended there was nowhere but nirvana to eat with a view like that in midtown. what's nice ythough is drinks at the Penninsula hotel bar up there. Very good NYC view.
ReplyDeletebut if you haven't been, it occurred to me The Water Club is very special and festive without being at all fussy. it's next to the E. 34 street heliport, really at about 30th street on the access road of the east river drive. It's very very very very nice in good weather.
also another festive thing
http://www.marchirestaurant.com/
its a townhouse, there's no menu. they serve three courses, you don't choose - its usually whiting and then lasagna and some kind of meat. it's very unusual and charming. there was another place like this on downing street or thereabouts in the village, a townhouse that was a resto, but this has been there forever and it's neighborhoody and the food is lovely - not fussy, not inventive, but really good - and its not crazy expensive, and its romantic.
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ReplyDeleteMister Patrick: when you have dinner, could you suggest that mademoiselle start up her blog again? It really was one of the best around. No joke.
ReplyDeleteMr. Pinkerton, Miss Arpege does not take suggestions, much less orders. I can tell you one thing, though. It might be just because that takes up so much time, she tended to want to write VERY LONG posts on the old ones, and it does take time to then tend to the commenters. I'm sure she has it in mind. Yes, there was lots of good stuff on both of them, but she also had this one at the same time too.
ReplyDeleteGot it. Thanks. If you're going to do something, do it right....
ReplyDelete3llathanks really a lot pinkerton and patrick
ReplyDeleteone day perhaps i will start blogging again here
alphonsevanworden.wordpress.com
I hope you up a flare or smoke signal when, if, you do.
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ReplyDeleteYes, howzabout the Liz pink smoke from Cleopatra, and you can rent a barge like that. Ought to draw the ex.pat Egyptian OOO midwesterner audience. I like the idea of returning to Alphonse Van Worden too, more than Colonel Chabert, because I was the only one that thought Alphonse was a girl to begin with--out of sheer ignorance!
ReplyDelete"Liz pink smoke from Cleopatra, and you can rent a barge like that..."
ReplyDeleteSo perfect. Mr. Patrick, you do cheer me up!
"the ones that bourgeois white academics are interested in"
ReplyDeleteBingo. Well-put.
Call me callous, but I can't really muster up much heartbreak for rich white women who can afford to get treated for their anorexia and psychogenic illnesses. (Ever heard of that psychogenic parasite disorder that only exists in rich, bored mothers/housewives? The metaphorical richness of that must keep analysts occupied for hours at a time.)
Hey, who knows... maybe some day we'll go back to a time of "restricted exchange" of female bodies and everything will be authentic again. God, how enticing a vision is that? Maybe men will open doors for us again, too! Those were the days...
I watched some clips from Letter to Jane the other day. Oh my.
"It seems to me not implausible that the techniques that women might have used in a similarly pragmatic vein to ‘get a man’ and thus secure some sort of economic stability are now used, in a rather more limitless way, to ‘get a job’."
ReplyDeleteErr. Right. Isn't that why men get jobs, too- for the financial stability? Men have to sell themselves in the workplace as well in similar "limitless" manner. Why would it be somehow worse, or shocking, or especially noteworthy when women do it?
In fact, it seems that the author is the one sexualizing women inappropriately, when she writes as if women are putting themselves and the world in moral danger when they are forced to market themselves to get a job. She talks as if job hunting takes on a sinister, lascivious, sexually subordinate tone when women do it. It's just plain weird.
If in the past it was bad to seek financial security in a husband, and now it is wrong to look for it in a job, what the fuck are women supposed to do? Power posits some kind of unwinnable situation where women are held to standards nobody, including most notably they themselves, would ever even dream of applying to men.
I mean, really- what is she saying here? That the only politically kosher universe would be one in which women don't have to do *anything*, or rely on anybody, in order to feed and clothe themselves. Where food just magically appears on the table every night and no men or capital holders were involved in its making. Sign me up!
"she talks as if job hunting takes on a sinister, lascivious, sexually subordinate tone when women do it. It's just plain weird."
ReplyDeleteyes, everything she writes is infused with this tone. her prose is like one of those lapdogs she denoucnes for being like other women's "milkless" and thus "disgusting" "perverse" breasts, but always humping your leg.
I wouldn't say that about anyone who wasn't a specimen of
ReplyDeleteMeanness Mania
Did you ever read that, by Gerald Gill?
Letter to Jane -
ReplyDeletethe whole thing is on google
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-511397820540803155#