1975. Setting: NY and Damascus; Both see change in power from politics to something… else NY Politicians for 30 years had been borrowing money from banks to pay for growing services and welfare Early ’70s, middle class flees city, their taxes disappear too Banks lend city even more; worried about whether city could pay back its debt 1975: lending stops; city holds regular meeting to issue bonds in return for the loans, overseen by city’s financial controller Banks don’t show up; don’t want bonds This day marks radical shift in power Banks insist that, to protect their loans, they should be allowed to take control of the city…
Nothing [but us] is sacred
From Media
Filarete’s Conduits and the Production of Space
The Renaissance hospital constitutes a space in which rational organization confronts, conceals, and controls socially constructed objects of contamination and contagion. At the core of its architectonic function, Milan’s Ospedale Maggiore works to purify the impure body through a masquerading act, which disturbs and detaches the immaterial subject from its contaminated embodiment. Architects and humanists conceive of complex sanitary networks that permeate the building’s space, while remaining hidden, or closeted, behind porous walls. Extending the hydraulic metaphor to relations of bodies in space, one understands the hospital’s power relations as constituted by mechanisms that permit and block certain objects from…
Fast Trip, Long Drop as Video Support Group
You have to tell your own history to make it advance. And so the point, I think, of remembering is to reinvent ourselves. –Jean Carlomusto in Fast Trip, Long Drop Video never blossomed into humanity’s emancipator. It did not connect people by their nervous systems, eclipsing modern woes with a collective “global village.” Instead, video in its “guerilla” form fell victim to the machinery of the capitalist system—the very monolith it vowed to tackle. At least, that’s the narrative underlying many writers’ works on the subject in the 1980s.[1] These authors, though varying in degree of pessimism, maintain a…
The Missing Voice in Bruce Lenthall’s Radio’s America
In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall uproots his reader from the 21st century, propelling her into the Depression era and the dawn of modern mass culture. Lenthall discusses the complex arena of American society during the 1930s and 1940s, an amorphous domain that continually blurs the once distinct lines of the public and private spheres. Radio, Lenthall claims, propagated and sustained a new mode of discussion—one that enabled a few voices to influence the masses at unprecedented levels. The reader gains insight into radio’s communicative implications through different key players: public intellectuals, political figures, students of communication, aural artists, and citizens…
theorem serum 