Amy Goodman Talking Really Fast

Clipped this methed-up roll call from the end of Amy Goodman’s recent Democracy Now interview with Michael Pollan. Here’s the Mp3:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Madonna using plastic surgery …

Madonna using plastic surgery to become asian Marlene Dietrich?
http://bit.ly/1lFCvP

Second-hand Rose / She's wearing second-hand clothes

Bebe Sahara Benet, a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race
Some of us here at The Next in Line, wrestling with dissertation deadlines and mid-winter blues, have found relief in an unlikely source: the Logo show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Some people have described it as a parody of the typical reality-TV show competition. But there’s actually little [...]

Carnival Badu

Last night I saw Erykah Badu in a free concert at Wingate Field, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Showtime was 7:30, but my friend Justin and I arrived to line-up around a quarter to 4. Overkill perhaps. But soon after we arrived, the lines — security insisted on keeping two separate lines for men and women, oddly– [...]

Notes on The Dark Knight

Of course The Dark Knight is disappointing. With an Everest of hype and B.O. you can smell from 30,000 feet, how could it not disappoint?
There’s a lot to complain about on the technical level: sloppy editing, drab lighting, the illegibility of the action sequences. This review of the movie by Ron Silliman illuminates for me [...]

Hype: Diva Compex

Premature hype, but I noticed some other bloggers posting about this, so I’ll say it as well: I’ll be one of the contributors to a book of essays, forthcoming in 2009 from Univ. of Wisconsin Press, called Diva Complex.
Diva Complex: Gay Men on the Women Who Shaped Their Lives, an anthology edited by Michael Montlack, [...]

The Problem with Unity

Paul Krugman, in his latest op-ed column, offers up a rational but untenable solution to the Democratic primary impasse: that Obama should select Clinton as his running mate. Krugman’s proposal isn’t itself convincing. Clinton would bring all her negative baggage to the ticket without, it seems, offering any substantial lift. But the basis of Krugman’s [...]

Like a Prayer

Idol Hands

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes suggests that what makes us develop sentimental and erotic attachments to certain photographs is not so much the photograph’s studium — the subject of which the photograph speaks– but the punctum, a mysteriously compelling, often “ill-bred” detail. The punctum “pricks” us with accidental poignance.
Barthes, meet Idol. The Idol finalé of [...]

Figure/Ground

Moma always turns out beautiful websites tied to their exhibitions. What I like about the pop-up site for their Design and the Elastic Mind show is how they manage to balance extreme function and extreme fancy — to the point where the functional information (all that block text) becomes more like a background pattern, while [...]

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