“Looking Good and Sounding Right”: Aesthetic Labor and Social Inequality in the Retail Industry Christine L. Williams1 and Catherine Connell1 Social Consequences of Aesthetic Labor Downloaded from wox.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on October 17, 2011 362 Work and Occupations 37(3) The demand for aesthetic labor in upscale retail work has altered the [...]
cloud atlas
I just finished reading Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Amazing book. While reading the first few pages about a stowaway on an ancient schooner, I flipped towards the end and noticed some reference to people downloading things on their Sony’s, and realized this novel had breadth. I then quickly learned that it also had chop, [...]
shadow of the wind
Just finished reading Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind. Just finished reading it. Missed walking Nikki and Shelly to work to do so. I woke up before her, and lied in bed reading it, and then was almost done, and she had had breakfast and coffee and shower, and I was still almost [...]
thomas hirschhorn
“Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.”-in Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee, via Ivar Hagendoorn. Some quotes on and from Thomas Hirschhorn, From an interview with Thomas Hirschorn by Craig Garrett: “I am not a social [...]
kaprow’s untitled essay
I was just reading An Untitled Essay, by Alan Kaprow (800k pdf), and it made me feel a little less worried about whether I am a crazy person or an artist. Because, the most honest answer to “why does this stuff I do have to be art” is “because if it is not art, then [...]
hardt negri empire
I have been meaning to read this since I first became a dotcommunist in 2000, and now I have finally found Hardt/Negris Empire Book for Free.
sarat maharaj
I’ve learned from Open Source that a too-reverent interviewer can become grating and supercilious, yet some great lines slip through this interview with Sarat Maharaj, such as: “In a globalized economy one finds forms of translation that are so true as copies that it unnerves the original” “He [James Joce] remains for me the “translator” [...]
the serbs
I’ve been reading The Serbs, by Tim Judah, and I am going to give you, not a complete history – hell, they have had several individual regimes that each lasted three times as long as the United States! I mean, back in 300 BC, the Celts took over for the Illyrians, and then the Romans [...]
zizek:kusturica:rule girls
Slavoj Zizek on Emir Kusturica and “Rule Girls”, among other things.
shklovsky’s defamiliarisation
“Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war….Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life, it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The [...]