Dig

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John Berger, 100. John Berger Estate. Aeon. Verso.

Like most of us he was a conflicted creature of his mentors, accidental and elected. He sought out the mandarin art historian Kenneth Clark as an ally and referee while he pursued recognition as a painter. (They would later, a little erroneously, be cast as opposites when the BBC Ways of Seeing seemed to undermine Clark’s earlier series Civilisation.)

[…]

There’s a good argument for saying that Berger’s writing and his growing public persona were more profound and provoking than his choice of subjects. But isn’t this true of many great critics? You don’t read Baudelaire on painting and modern life because you’re convinced Constantin Guys was the greatest artist of the nineteenth century. Berger’s criticism is a bit like this: his urge to champion is really secondary to the force of what he has to say about art and society, about the perils of looking and the urgent necessity of making.

Brian Dillon, e-flux

Also, Muzyczuk in e-flux.

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A brilliance takes up residence in flaws—
a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design
refuse. The wine collects its starlets
at a lip’s fault, sunlight where the nicked
glass angles, and affection where the eye
is least correctable, where arrows of
unquivered light are lodged, where someone
else’s eyes have come to be concerned.

For beauty’s sake, assault and drive and burn
the devil from the simply perfect sun.
Demand a birthmark on the skin of love,
a tremble in the touch, in come a cry,
and let the silverware of nights be flecked,
the moon pocked to distribute more or less
indwelling alloys of its dim and shine
by nip and tuck, by chance’s dance of laws.

The brightness drawn and quartered on a sheet,
the moment cracked upon a bed, will last
as if you soldered them with moon and flux.
And break the bottle of the eye to see
what lights are spun of accident and glass.

In Praise of Pain, Heather McHugh

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Material Memory by Liene Bosquê. 2016. Exile Projects.
[A] monograph exploring the Brazilian-American artist’s multidisciplinary practice and its engagement with architecture, memory, place, and human presence. […] Alongside extensive documentation of her work, … the book features essays by Adriana Herrera Téllez, Cristiana Tejo, Jennifer Inacio, Alexandre Araujo Bispo and Luna Goldberg.

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I had no maps marking the past
neither from those that endured it nor
from those that perished when history
was burying whole cultures
in its mass graves
had no parents
who kept the past alive who could walk
the trail back to the world before
nations disappeared languages vanished
truth left few tracks or signposts except
a commodified noun of a town or a festival
I’ve wandered through
life searching
for the language of the water and the earth
of the trees just so I can say I’m grateful
for the medicine in their animal habits
for the wind’s fortune
in effaced trails
I’ve unearthed a spiritual vocabulary
a path to an archeology hidden
like a jackrabbit among the tumbleweed
I am healed by the music of wind
quenched of spiritual thirst by the patter of rain
blessed by the sentience of this earth
and I’m swept up in my dreams
as if by a bird of prey lifting my spirit
so high I can finally see all the roads
leading me to my ancestors

Map, Edgar Silex

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[…]

James Baldwin wrote:

“The place in which I’ll fit
Will not exist
Until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,

New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,

Where there is always soil
For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us/the spice of us
The hollers and the rhythms and
The beats of us.

In the echo of our
Ancestors,
Who made certain we know
Who we are.

City of Insistence,
City of Resistance,

…

Proof, Cornelius Eady

No relief in Florida’s elections results.

The Affective turn; Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick (aeon)

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By dissociative life I mean a life lived in intimate relation to life in a lifeworld that is also, and at the same time, apprehended ambivalently, from engaged distances, in an affective structure where inhabitants dwell in a detachment that does not signify an absence of feeling.

[or]

… being in life without wanting the world (Berlant)

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Obama Joked and Skewered, Susan B. Glasser (New Yorker)

That was the interesting thing about how the Administration responded to the speech I gave the other day. They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. Did not argue with that! They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families. They didn’t say anything about that! I accused this Administration based on the facts that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that! The President wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him! But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House.

And they mobilized. I mean, it’s all crazy, but this was the really crazy part. They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke—not to inflation but to that joke! The White House even called the Secretary of the Treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy, the person who’s supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable, the guy who’s supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory. . . . And the Treasury Secretary, he happens to be a former hedge-fund manager worth half a billion dollars. And he was out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory, explaining how he ordered the delicious French-dip cheeseburger instead of the egg rolls. Now, look, this is not something I ever thought of. I inherited this major financial crisis. I never called my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and said, ‘Man, you’ve got to go to Arby’s, order roast beef. No cheese, though. That may look élitist.’

To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory.

Barack Obama