'I see my sister and her husband. They're living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids, they're working hard. You can see something in their eyes... I asked my sister, 'what do you do for fun?' 'I don't have any fun,' she says. She wasn't kidding.'
Bruce Springsteen, 1979
'I was a cub reporter in Minneapolis in the summer of 1979. Some guy in the suburbs had wigged out. He was a young guy with an older brother in Vietnam if I remember correctly. He had a gripe about the local cops. So he climbed up the local water tower, fixed himself up with some food and blankets about 100 feet off the ground, and refused to come down until somebody addressed his greivances. So I spent a brilliant warm july afternoon looking at the water tower and listening to 'What a Fool Believes' on the radio. The wise man has the power / to reason away / what seems to be. As the sun began to set, President Jimmy Carter came on the radio. He started giving his speech about our national malaise, and he told a whole nation to come down off its water tower. I was thinking, Do I have a malaise? Right in the middle of Carter's speech, the guy on the water tower decided to come down. The police hustled him to an ambulance and drove off into the 80s.'
"Self-esteem is sacrosanct, and so we labour to turn arts education into a system in which no one can fail. In the same spirit, tennis could be shorn of its elitist overtones: you just get rid of the net."
"The abstract thinker, to whom the question of practical morality is indifferent, has always loved dancing, as naturally as the moralist has hated it."
james white and the blacks | arthur symons | nietzsche | disco
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
beyonce | mrs carter tour | walter benjamin | philosophy of history
