A friend from graduate school sent this out this morning. Great read.
“The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm.
Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.”
Look at that sweet face, so innocent, so young, and so, well, douchey.
Blogger at large Sara Laurence sat down with Tom to get to the bottom of his daily habit.
“Comedian Tom Sibley hosts a bi-monthly stand-up show at Legion in Williamsburg and maintains the increasingly popular and hilarious, albeit nausea-inducing blog, Subway Douchery, which captures everything you’d want to unlearn about our fellow straphangers in the subway. Between doing regular stand-up and acting gigs around town, Tom took some time to answer a few questions.”
“In Country” is the result of five years’ work by Ms. Karady, who interviewed dozens of veterans and asked them to talk about their most traumatic war moments. She then overlaid those memories onto their present-day lives, in the suburbs, back at school and, in one case, on the streets.
Ms. Karady, 43, described a process that she called equal parts journalism and psychotherapy. “This thing is replaying visually in the person’s head, and we really have no idea what is going on,” she said. “But the idea, conceptually, of taking that moment and recontextualizing and placing it in the civilian world, is based on a therapeutic model.”
Jeff Wall meets Martha Rosler. I love these and wish I could fly to San Fran for the day to take a look in person.
Gallery Four presents part one of a two part series. Volume One features new sculpture, installation, photography, and video works by four artists from Idaho, New York, and Baltimore. You & Me Living Today (anatomically modern explorers) examines our ever-baffling material culture as an adaption to ironic biological confines. Evolutionary pitfalls abound, we continue to explore the boundaries between our bodies, our rituals, our desires, and our visceral responses to a haphazardly nurtured environment.
Many talented young designers today have abandoned their roles as improvers of the general visual environment. Many only want to work on cultural work, or not-for-profit work, or on projects they perceive as “good-for-society” which may have a high profile within the design milieu, but don’t really reach ordinary people. These designers are afraid to get involved in mainstream packaging, promotion or corporate work. They forget that these are the products and messages that most people really encounter in their daily lives, that these products and services are at the heart of the American condition, and that there is responsibility for us as designers, always, to raise the expectation of what design can be. We are responsible for that daily experience. These “ivory tower designers” leave the job to others (ad agencies, schlock shops, etc.) who are simply doing it for the money, and are often cynical about the outcome.
I still hate the name, but I’m coming around to the idea.
This interview with Wired’s Creative Director, Scott Dadich shows great insight into why printed publications need to begin designing for the tablet device.
