Oh, The Whim!...

The Whim

E Joy's love note to the possible...

From In the Middle, E. Joy....

As if: an undulation between loss and finding. This is the inbetween space we're so fond of at In The Middle, and practices of affirmation in the space of the as if, if we're willing to risk them, are simply a way of responding to what we don't know: "the void which isn't one" (to gesture back again to the post-abysmal panels as a whole). This is to also realize, as Cary pointed out, that we will always be more than the sum of our vices and the ruses we devise to hide them. As always, Cary ended with a poem, Mary Karr's "Sinners Welcome," which, if the BABEL Working Group had an office, or a home, or a stalagmite-studded cave or cloud somewhere, this "sign," which is also a portal, "Sinners Welcome"--this would hang over the door....See the full post at In the Middle

NYR, review of Bauhaus and MOMA

Filler, The Powerhouse of the New

Oil "Avatars": James Cameron, Obama (from Ctheory.net)

Theory Beyond the Codes, Event-Scene

 The Obama Avatar
 ================


 ~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~  

  There's a Titanic in every life, an Abyss in every relationship,
     an Alien in the very best of us, and hopefully a saving Avatar
     at the end of the day.

 What do Barack Obama and James Cameron have in common? It turns out,
 maybe quite a lot. Both are technocrats with a burning purpose. Obama
 is a skilled practitioner of the technocratic regime of politics,
 that magical process of fusing diverse interests into the commons of
 public policy. Cameron practices the art of cinematic technology,
 translating the latest configurations of software technology and
 prosthetic devices into haunting stories of catastrophe. Taken
 together, they are the DNA of American liberal thought, expanding
 politics and cinema to new and unexpected degrees of freedom while at
 the same time expressing the limits of politics and cinema when
 reason wars with passion....[More at Ctheory]

Ethel Morgan Smith in NYT

Ethel Morgan Smith (author of From Whence Cometh My Help): Motherlode featured in the NY Times Mag