Ofterdingen and Kropotkin: May 2006

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Friday, May 26, 2006

Boil 1.92

BLDGBLOG interviews Mike Davis. Pt. 1 and 2.

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Boil 1.91

Last month Germany's real-life Robin Hood gang struck again, stealing a trolley of luxury food. But who are they - and why do they do it? And how did Luke Harding manage to track them down when the police couldn't?
(...)
Late last month Sievers's shop, Frische Paradies in Hamburg, was the victim of one of the most inventive - and possibly the funniest, though not to him - raids in German criminal history. At 10.15am on April 28, a group of activists dressed as superheroes burst into his gourmet supermarket. Wearing carnival masks and calling themselves names such as Spider Mum, Multiflex, Sante Guevara and Operaistorix, they made off with a trolley loaded with luxury goods.
(...)
In a note posted on the internet the gang said it had distributed the food among Germany's new underclass - interns who worked for months in glamorous publishing houses without being paid, low-wage nursery assistants, mums forced to take part-time jobs as cleaning ladies and "one-euro jobbers", performing menial tasks under a German government welfare scheme. The gang said it didn't merely object to capitalism. Instead it was making a stand against Prekarisierung or "precariousness" - the uncertainty facing 20- and lower 30somethings as they try to navigate their way through Europe's gloomy neo-liberal jobs market.
(...)
But unlike these older leftists, Hamburg Umsonst is a newer movement, loosely affiliated to a growing network of young anti-capitalist protesters from across Europe. The movement started off in Milan in 2001. It has now spread to more than a dozen European cities, including Paris, Palermo, Stockholm, Helsinki and London [...]

Guardian via Kommunikationsguerilla

Note: T. Eagleton used the term 'Lumpenintelligentsia', rather more elegant than 'Prekariat'.

Friday, May 19, 2006

File 1.58 Dead Poets Society

..but he had told me himself more than once that he never got up before twelve, and seldom earlier than one. Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go to the limit in that direction. He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a storm and wondering what on earth it was up to for hours at a stretch.
He had his scheme in life worked out to a fine point. About once a month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested. I didn't know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don't shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff.

P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves, 92-93.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

ARLANC 1.60

Into the night

Monday, May 15, 2006

hyssyttely

Pernille Anker - Ble Tonar Fra Lom

Sunday, May 14, 2006

ARLANC 1.59

We woke up one morning
and fell on a little further down.
For sure it's the valley of death.
I open up my wallet
and it's full of blood.

1429. Godspeed You Black Emperor! - [F# A# (Infinity) #01] The Dead Flag Blues (Intro) [16:29]

From behind 1.95

...as someone who regrettably never developed, who stuck all his life to the convictions and projects developed in early manhood, and whose determined clinging to the high ideals of art was a kind of unrealism and immaturity.

J. Barnes, "Flaubert, c'est moi" in NYRoB

Friday, May 12, 2006

From behind 1.94

Mahna Mahna? Wahb Deee wah dee dee
Mahna Mahna Wah Dee-dee deeh

Wiki and video

Thursday, May 11, 2006

suburban 0.4

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Boil 1.90

...dem Wahnsinn entgegenirrlichternd...

W. Herzog, Mein liebster Feind

Monday, May 08, 2006

File 1.57

When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
V. Nabokov, Transparent Things, 1

Saturday, May 06, 2006

Thursday, May 04, 2006

040506

Spoil 1.74

...for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that when the younger set dance in the summer-time it is with the very worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the corners, and the more popular, more dangerous girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers.
F.S. Fitzgerald, Bernice bobs her hair

Ofterdingen and Kropotkin