The Race Race was a daily half-hour show presented by Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel, covering the McCain v Obama US Presidential election. Because they didn’t play songs, Chris and Craig needed a lot of short stings and sweepers to break up the sound of the show, and to give them time to get organised before they went to a caller or a guest. Some of these were satirical things written by Chris, some were pulled straight off the news and remixed over beats, static and noise. Listening to the show, it was often hard to tell which was which.
'Behold! Human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light... here they have been since childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so they cannot move, and can only see before them. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.'
"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
