The Curious World of the Last Stop

A somewhat surreal article in the Times about the last stops on the NY metro:

At the city’s often-threadbare fringes, there is an inescapable sense of lonesomeness. There might be a Last Stop Deli, a forlorn bar, a maintenance yard populated mostly by rows of empty trains. There is, surprisingly often, a cemetery.

Yet to visit all the system’s extremities is to see that the last stop is not a single, monolithic place. There are subway lines that end, logically, where the city runs out of land; lines that end, anticlimactically, where builders ran out of money; even a few that fetch up in bustling downtowns of one sort or another. From the marshy lowlands of Tottenville to the lush hills of Riverdale to the ceaseless clangor of Flushing, the end of the line manages to take in the entire breadth of the city beyond Midtown Manhattan.

After living in DC for a year, I can confirm the universal sense of urban ennui that awaits commuters at the end of the line. Also, the article reminds me of two songs worth checking out: “End of the Line” by Max Larkin & The Relations (available here, and our interview with Max Larkin here) and “Dirty Blvd.” by Lou Reed.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Heartbreak Hotel

A very interesting look at the evolution of a song over at Fragments of a Cale Season. This song goes through the wringer.

[S]omewhere between playing mit der Polizei and coming out of his lost years, in the less innocent days of good friends, fast women, lots of drugs, and possibly too many studio recordings… he started playing it on solo piano. And no more was this man kidding around.

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Rick Perlstein: “A Liberal Shock Doctrine”

Rick Perlstein writing in the American Prospect:

Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.

(Via A Tiny Revolution.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

The Bankruptcy of America, Starring Aquaman

Ken Layne, managing editor of Wonkette, writing for Political Machine:

The United States of America is bankrupt, morally and financially. This country stands for nothing but bad loans, brute force and blind consumption. Everything is literally crumbling, from our roads and bridges to our financial system to our “bring all children down together” public schools. The White House’s response to the Russia/Georgia war gets a smirking “whatever” from Moscow. Who are we to be telling anyone not to invade little countries? We’ve been doing it with great fanfare and steady failure since Vietnam, and we’re bogged down in so many doomed occupations today that Robot Troops are the only hope. Maybe we can buy some from Japan, on credit. Or that famous swimmer Michael Phelps can save the country by, uh, swimming very fast to various problem zones, like Aquaman.

(Via Mike Soron.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

141 Tiny Terror Combos Stolen

Thieves broke into Orange HQ at Borehamwood on Saturday night (16th August) and stole 141 Tiny Terror combos with a total retail value of £62,000. So far, 121 Tiny Terror combos have been legitimately shipped into the UK and 2 pieces to Hungary, no others have been shipped anywhere in Europe…

I put in a price inquiry on one of these with a great guitar site a few months ago. The original Tiny Terror head has earned some great reviews and from what I’ve heard in youtube videos these combos have a really great sound. I envy the thieves.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Communism

Mike Johnduff at Countermemory:

On the left, things seem just as nuts. There is no theory of this spread and the resistance to it, except those promising ones of micro-loans. This leaves them with the specter of Lenin: communism has not died out there either. The idea of mobilization (Zizek) and the general idea that social-democracy is, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, a “compromise” (“Is Everything Political?”) is flawed.

Regardless, one thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter—one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it. The key is to see that it does not return into our thinking as a big massive homogenous thing: we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Frederic Jameson’s insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists, against the pragmatists (and one needs to apply this critique to the Lacanians and to the Nancy-type radicals too), that this is actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Violence and its Vicissitudes

Jodi Dean:

What Zizek omits, though, is the creative, productive dimension of resentment. It can create power relations invested in refusal (an acquaintance of mine once used the expression ‘anti-war profiteers’). Differently put, even heroic resentment can become ordinary and normalized, ultimately exhausting itself and rendering the heroic feeble and pathetic. The challenge, then, of heroic resentment is this very risk, this unavoidable uncertainty.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Conclave Obscurum

Don’t ask me to explain what it is, but if you can get it to load it’s worth the wait.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Reuters Published Fake Propaganda Photos

It is interesting to note that the boy’s supposedly injured right leg, “bleeding” profusely from the thigh, seems to be supporting itself. The soldier on the right also appears on many of the photos below in various capacities.

A very similar situation to the Iranian photoshops. Now I’m waiting (hoping) for the Errol Morris analysis.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

James Mollison’s The Disciples

Galleries of concert goers. An example:

Some more from the set can be found on The Guardian, but you have to go to the end of the slide show to figure out what concert they’re taken from.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

The Most Trusted Man in America?

An interesting profile piece on Jon Stewart and The Daily Show in the Times. It reminds me that I should probably start watching it again.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments