I came originally from a place that had a serious cool deficit, so I really became a nerdish tabulator of cool. As a writer, I wanted to know how it worked because I judged it to be one of the only engines of global commerce that I had any talent for deconstructing.
[gallery] The source of this impasse is the design itself—a signature work of the overpraised architect Frank Gehry, whose whispered name is enough to raise goose pimples from the (wise and learned) hides of postmodernist aesthetes like the Fine Arts commissioners. It’s worth noting that the laborers who are charged with actually building his designs have a rather different reaction, as across the globe one overpriced Gehry creation after another spouts leaks, shows sudden and mysterious stains, and sends loosened objects flying off his innovative surfaces onto innocent passersby. Maybe this accounts for the first stirrings of an overdue anti-Gehry consensus forming among international tastemakers. Facing a hostile question at a press conference in Spain recently, Gehry responded by raising his middle finger. Artists often speak in symbols.
As the bodies charged with approving his design have raised humble, incremental objections, very delicately—nobody wants to get flipped off by a starchitect!—Gehry has made the minimum adjustments necessary. But the design’s essential absurdity remains: a vast urban rectangle dotted at the edges with 80-foot columns and enclosing great marble boxes of mysterious purpose. If anything, the absurdity may have increased with each revision. The too-high columns were silly enough when they served to hoist enormous metal scrims depicting scenes from Ike’s home state of Kansas; now Gehry has eliminated two of the three screens but the columns are still there, standing lonely and functionless, like the ruins of an ancient temple blown up by art critics.
[gallery] During the session for the seminal “Great Balls Of Fire”, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sun Records boss Sam Phillips engaged in an impassioned, drunken theological dispute about rock’n’roll, the singer worried that he might be leading people away from God.
The subsequent recording is one of rock’s most charged performances, the outburst of a man who suspects he may be condemning himself to burn in hell, but just can’t help himself. “Well, we’ll know one day,” he tells biographer Rick Bragg. “That’s what worries me.”
School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, preacher, and therapist.In each of these three roles the teacher bases his authority on a different claim. The teacher-as-custodian acts as a master of ceremonies, who guides his pupils through a drawn-out labyrinthine ritual. He arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the intricate rubrics of initiation to life. At his best, he sets the stage for the acquisition of some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any profound learning, he drills his pupils in some basic routines.
The teacher-as-moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong, not only in school but also in society at large. He stands in loco parentis for each one and thus ensures that all feel themselves children of the same state.
The teacher-as-therapist feels authorized to delve into the personal life of his pupil in order to help him grow as a person. When this function is exercised by a custodian and preacher, it usually means that he persuades the pupil to submit to a domestication of his vision of truth and his sense of what is right.
The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.
And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves even when nobody else would. The decades have proved that our way was largely right and the critics were wrong, so our habit of not listening has become deeply entrenched. It even became a bit of a bonding ritual to attack critics of the culture because they usually didn’t understand what we were doing beyond a surface level. It didn’t used to matter because nobody except a handful of forum readers would see the rants. The same reflex becomes a massive problem now that nerds wield real power. GamerGate made me ashamed to be a gamer, but the scary thing is that the underlying behavior of attacking critics felt like something I’d always seen in our culture, and tolerated. It only shocked me when it was scaled up so massively into rape and death threats, and I saw mainstream corporations like Intel folding in the face of the pressure we can bring to bear.
[gallery] Love House, Takeshi Hosaka, architect
Accurate Post Titles
I Paid an Obscene Amount of Attention to Something Stupid But I Had an Emotionally Complex Response to It So It’s Totally Worth Your Time to Read This Post
I Confirm All Your Worst Suspicions About Some Group of People You Viscerally but Vaguely Dislike
I Describe Something I Mildly Dislike as the Worst Thing in the World Because Clicks
I Describe Something I Mildly Like as the Best Thing in the World Because Clicks
Something Terrible Happened to This Celebrity and While I Won’t Say So Directly I Am Really Glad About It and You Will Be Too Because It’s Not Like They Deserve To Be Richer and More Famous Than Us
Žižek himself is a curious mixture of illusion and reality. In Trouble in Paradise, he speaks of Hamlet as a clown, and he himself is both intellectual and jester. Shakespeare’s jesters are conscious of their own unreality, and Žižek seems to be, too. As a man for whom the adjective “colourful” could have been specially invented, he is a cult figure who sends up his own cult status, a man in deadly earnest who is also an accomplished self-parodist. There is something fictional, larger-than-life, about his constant globe-trotting and flamboyant antics, as though he has strayed out of a David Lodge novel. His gargantuan appetite for ideas is admirable but also faintly alarming. One would not be altogether surprised to hear that he was put together by a committee and consumer-tested on various student focus groups.
When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. For to occupy every spare moment in reading, and to do nothing but read, is even more paralyzing to the mind than constant manual labor, which at least allows those engaged in it to follow their own thoughts. A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it. Just as you can ruin the stomach and impair the whole body by taking too much nourishment, so you can overfill and choke the mind by feeding it too much. The more you read, the fewer are the traces left by what you have read: the mind becomes like a tablet crossed over and over with writing. There is no time for ruminating, and in no other way can you assimilate what you have read. If you read on and on without setting your own thoughts to work, what you have read can not strike root, and is generally lost.
[gallery] morning walk along the Brazos
