Author: J T. Ramsay

Down­load: Liars — “Drum Gets a Glimpse” Red Desert. June 25th @ BAM. It does­n’t even get men­tioned. Anto­nion­i’s first col­or fea­ture is an out of print tri­umph not to be missed. Sick with the ennui that per­me­ates his films, with mis-en-scene to match.

Down­load: Bat­tered — “Obliv­ion Awaits” Can of worms: opened. Artmetal.html says it all, but then there’s an argu­ment pre­sent­ed in the sev­en ensu­ing pages meant to edi­fy an unfa­mil­iar audi­ence with “intel­li­gent” met­al. It’s a vari­ant of the high/low cul­ture debate, usu­al­ly reserved for sun­der­ing HipHop, or from a “pop­ulist” per­spec­tive, mod­ern art, but applic­a­ble…

Notes on Excepter, Edan, Prefuse 73 and The Coup, Boris and Espers forth­com­ing, as well as com­men­tary on the recent New York Times Mag­a­zine fea­ture on Sunn and Boris. In re Wray’s arti­cle, see Mike Pow­ell’s thoughts here and George Steele’s there first. Sunn as mys­tique or pas­tiche, char­la­tan or reifi­ca­tion? Whith­er drone? More reg­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion forth­with.…

As nation­al­is­tic fer­vor gets whipped up in back­wa­ters across the coun­try, we’ve seen the return of the “jobs that Amer­i­cans won’t do” trope. Not only is this patent­ly false, as there are plen­ty of cit­i­zens cur­rent­ly work­ing ter­ri­ble, dis­gust­ing jobs every­where, but it relies on a false sense of how labor mar­kets are actu­al­ly constructed.

Apolo­gies for the extend­ed absence. Late­ly I’ve been fol­low­ing one of The New York Times’ sev­er­al blogs, Deal­Book in par­tic­u­lar. In lieu of access to Wall Street Jour­nal, this offers up inter­est­ing tid­bits per­ti­nent to Marx­ist cri­tique. Every­thing is mon­ey, you see, and there are no exemptions. Recent nota­bles includ­ed an inter­est­ing look at the…