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.
AG2024_1130108a or too much—now depends on
Category: landscape
AG2024_1130107a or often concealed
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
AG2023_1120272a or sights the dark earth offers
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
always adheres
“Something barbaric always adheres to the deliberate destruction of a work of art” — Judge Michael Ponsor quoted in Stephanie Bailey’s article on Christoph Büchel for ArtReview (041424).
Everyone’s entitled
to her own magic bullet
theory of self. There’s
the get-to-know-you
game we play …
[…]
I play my game.
I await the next campaign.
Stylized Facts, Zoë Hitzig
“… making it one of the most expensive liquid commodities in the world — after snake venom, Chanel No. 5, insulin, mercury, and human blood.” D.M. on HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e in The Drift : Isuue Twelve.
Adam Shatz, Israel’s Descent
The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after one of them has slaughtered the other in such staggering numbers. The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.
But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide …
[…]
Or in the words of the nation-state law of 2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: ‘The right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters proclaim: ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.’ What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is, for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.
[…]
Opposition to anti-black racism is embraced by elite liberals; opposition to Israel’s wars against Palestine is not. They braved doxxing, the contempt of their university administrations, police violence and in some cases expulsion. Prominent law firms have announced that they will not hire students who took part in the encampments.
[…]
short-term impact is undeniable: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and the myth of Israel’s invincibility. But its architects, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza’s own people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they recently appeared on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list, they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence but possessing little strategic vision.
Israel’s Descent , Adam Shatz in LRB
People don’t at first notice the change, or when they do are prepared to accept it as ‘necessary’
Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough in England has more than doubled and all other forms of homelessness (for instance, families living in temporary accommodation) are at record highs. Around eight hundred libraries have closed (a fifth of all libraries in the UK, most of them in deprived areas) and more than two hundred museums. In many cases, surviving institutions have reduced their hours and cut staff. More than a thousand publicly accessible swimming pools have been closed, and nearly 60 per cent of public toilets. So many bus routes have been cancelled that buses now cover 14 per cent fewer miles than in 2010. Councils face an estimated £14 billion backlog in road maintenance, with up to 50 per cent of roads judged to be at risk of complete deterioration within fifteen years.
[…]
Why,? with this record, did the Tories keep on winning?
Carnival of Self-Harm, Tom Crewe in LRB
Cake and comfort
“Cake and comfort must come first!” … “and perhaps, in some imagined utopia” – ZS
constructing paths and praxis toward an otherwise
Reading List: Publishers for Palestine. Afterall.
These experiences shaped my understanding of what Quijano meant by ‘delinking’ (desenganche). Delinking from what – from the assumptions, principles and accumulations of meaning built upon the promises of modernity. 11
The second step of delinking is relinking. Relinking with what? According to Afro-Colombian thinker, activist and artist, Adolfo Alban Achinte to relink means to re-exist: not just in the sense of resistance but fundamental re-existence, for which there is no blueprint. It would be imperial to think that the necessary creativity once you delink from conceptual and emotional frameworks has been already mapped. It is up to the delinkers, so to speak, to work on their own relinking through their own memories, trajectories and forms of domination. However, I would say today that it is of the essence to relink with earth, with Pachamama (mother earth) as it is voiced in the South American Andes.
This exchange makes clear that decolonisation (as decoloniality) in the twenty-first century is not a master plan for liberation but a myriad of delinkings to re-emerge and re-exists in whatever communal we (each of us) find ourselves wounded by coloniality, which again are not the same for everyone.
Thinking and Engaging with the Decolonial: A Conversation Between Walter D. Mignolo and Wanda Nanibush.
Also, On Decoloniality, a series edited by Walter Mignolo & Catherine Walsh. 2018. “… constructing paths and praxis toward an otherwise of thinking, sensing, believing, doing, and living.”
