Category: landscape

… it is that lack of agency that is the cause of economic failure and social and political instability within the eurozone. Countries like Greece, Italy and even France or Germany lack the power to adjust their economies to suit domestic markets, conditions and interests. This economic helplessness enrages the public and has led to the rise of what is euphemistically known as ‘populism’. The plain truth is that Greece, Italy and France are not alone. Europe is not unique in its subordination to the private authority of globalised, dollarized financial markets. All democratic states are powerless in the face of a global monetary system ‘governed’ by private market forces. This is highly relevant to the Green New Deal. Why? Because mobile agents active in globalised, deregulated financial markets have very little interest in supporting states that need to wean economies away from dependence on fossil fuels and from the all-powerful corporations that dig up, distribute and make money from those fuels.”

Ann Pettifor, The Case for the Green New Deal.

Green, small, liberty, power

Small, liberty, green, power

Liberty, green, small, power

Power, small, liberty, green.

“Scale, impersonality, hold: these are some minimal contours of mediations that merit a new day in the sun. For enhancing circulation, immediacy stylizes essences that automanifest, language that concretizes, images that denude, streams that surge, and dissolutionisms that blur. The ensuing continuities, intensities, and expresses cradle the allure of that style . By contrast, a style of a different sort, less bent on negating mediation, would offer production that must be undertaken, possibilities that require relay, discontinuities in coordination, long-rather than short-cuts when adumbration and even artifice better suit the matter, order processing without same-day-delivery guarantee. In quest of that other style, this mediation against immediacy, this book synthesizes at saucy scale , speaks impersonally without “I,” and composes prose that holds off intuition and holds out interpretation.

Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism

“Minorities, since time began,
Have shown the better side of man” – Dunbar

Nawi at LACMA.

nhc.noaa.gov Beryl and others might come this way.

The Case for Joe Biden Staying in the Race The known bad candidate is better than the chaos of the unknown. Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker.

David Remnick on the Case for Biden to Step Aside, New Yorker.

The subjects of her portraits are often concealed by an out-of-focus blur. This blur is her most recognisable – and beguiling – technique. She achieves it, she says, by keeping the shutter open while holding the camera very still and hardly breathing. The filmmaker Arthur Jafa argues that the blur is an act of resistance, circumventing ‘the ability of photography to function as evidence’ since ‘you can’t identify anybody.’ According to Jafa, Smith is exercising her Black subjects’ ‘right to opacity’: their freedom from the scrutiny of white society. In Julius + Joanne, her subjects are simply bodies in motion, repositories of light.

But Smith is also defending her own right to abstraction, to an expressiveness and lyricism that go beyond documentation.

On Ming Smith, Adam Shatz

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
ever you love best.

…that reminds me now: Anactória,
she’s not here,

The Anactoria Poem, Sappho, translated by Jim Powell