Fickle Ears

When Yogi Berra plugged disability insurance, he could just as well have been talking about art: When you don't have it, that's whe...

A quick and bloggy addendum on looking for edification in all the wrong online places: As I continue to trawl/troll Blogspot for distant v...

Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media (1964) MIT Press edition (1994) In terms of the industrial age, it can be pointed out that the dif...

Marshall McLuhan "Woman in a Mirror" pp. 80-81 in The Mechanical Bride (2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951] This ad employ...

Marshall McLuhan "The Corpse as Still Life" pp. 104-106 in The Mechanical Bride (2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951] A gen...

The first time I heard or read the word "blog" was when I over-heard it on the radio while trying to work on something else. Some ...

"The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social b...

"It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement. A...

I stand by the opinion that Facebook was pretty cool and useful for its first several years of existence. It has long since ceased to be of ...

Daniel Boorstin The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [My notes say:] p. 231—"We wish our membership to be reported...

Daniel Boorstin The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [My notes say:] p. 194—"...a vague but attractive image he ha...

Daniel Boorstin The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [My notes say:] p. 174—the recording as itself a pseudo-event Thi...

Daniel Boorstin The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [My notes say:] p. 170—"Have you seen my snapshot of the Mon...

Daniel Boorstin The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [My notes say:] pp. 99-102—on museum art objects being experienced...

Daniel Boorstin The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) Readers and viewers would soon prefer the vividness of the account....

Daniel Boorstin The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) pp. 11-12—the four criteria for pseudo-events (1) It is not spontan...

Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) [My notes say:] pp. 251-252—On Isou's "way[s] of...

Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) [My notes say:] pp. 70-73—on the explicit drawing of para...

Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) [My notes say:] pp. 64-65—on what elsewhere gets placed u...

Anselm Jappe Guy Debord (1993) trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999) Debord claimed, and there is no reason to doubt him, that he never as...

Anselm Jappe Guy Debord (1993) trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999) A bubble that the SI found easy to burst was the excessive enthusiasm...

Anselm Jappe Guy Debord (1993) trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999) ...the Situationist criticism of the work of art is curiously reminis...

Anselm Jappe Guy Debord (1993) trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999) ...to actualize artistic values directly in everyday life as an art t...

Louis Chevalier The Assassination of Paris (1977) trans. David P. Jordan (1994) In October 1957 six government ministers along with the c...

McKenzie Wark 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (2008) The strategist is not the proprietor of a field of knowle...

McKenzie Wark The Beach Beneath the Street (2011) p. 106—music as the highest Romantic art; and Romanticism as the Dionysian opposite of ...

Nancy Isenberg White Trash: The 400-Year Old Untold History of Class in America (2016) p. 75 -- "Franklin certainly never endorsed s...