Hal Foster's new book comes off as a litlle bit menacing, according to Jason Farrago, reviewing The Art-Architecture Complex for the Barnes and Noble Review. With the allusion to Roosevelt's well-known phrase leading the charge, Foster menaces and critiques his way to a convincing argument that "'image-making and space-shaping' have become part of one continuous field ... and that might not be such a good thing."
Film critic and historian Richard Porton, author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination, will be introducing selected screenings from Anarchism on Film, a new series presented by Anthology Film Archives and Cineaste magazine, featuring "historical films that excavate a submerged anarchist history and films that synthesize an anti-authoritarian political impetus with innovative formal strategies."
The series will run December 16th to the 23rd. Screenings will be held at Anthology Film Archives, on 32 2nd Ave in Manhattan.
For more information on this series, visit Anthology Film Archives.
Astra Taylor, filmmaker, activist, and co-editor of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, writes for the Nation about the latest sites being occupied: houses and apartments under threat of foreclosure and eviction.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement approaches the three-month mark, encampments in Oakland, Manhattan, Portland, Los Angeles, and around the country have been evicted in a series of coordinated crackdowns. With temperatures dropping and police violence increasing, the movement is seeking out and discussing new strategies and points of escalation. A major tactic that has emerged from these meetings is literally "occupying the home front" by taking over and defending homes under threat of foreclosure and eviction. December 6th marked a national day of action to kick off this new campaign, and Taylor attended an event here in Brooklyn, in East New York:
On December 6, 2-3 PM EST, Alternative Radio will be broadcasting Part Two of "World in Crisis," a special two-part program and interview with Tariq Ali.
On December 17, 2010 Muhammad Bouazizi, a street vendor in a small town in Tunisia, burned himself to death. He was protesting harassment and mistreatment by state authorities. His death fueled a revolt in Tunisia which toppled the Ben Ali dictatorship. The spark spread to Egypt and within weeks the decades old Mubarak regime was overthrown. The so-called Arab Spring rocked the entrenched old order. Those revolutionary currents have stirred the waters elsewhere. The economic collapse is shaking things up in the U.S. Witness the Occupy Wall Street movement. Americans, fed up and struggling to make ends meet, watch their military bomb and occupy countries from Pakistan to Yemen, are taking to the streets. Citizens are challenging and questioning the status quo. Are we on the edge of genuine change in the structure of power and privilege?
Tariq Ali, an internationally renowned writer and activist, was born in Lahore, Pakistan. For many years he has been based in London where he is an editor of New Left Review. A charismatic speaker, he is in great demand all over the world. In his spare time he is a filmmaker, playwright and novelist. He is the author of many books including The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Pirates of the Caribbean, Speaking of Empire & Resistance with David Barsamian, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, The Obama Syndrome, and On History with Oliver Stone.
Following a recent appearance in Guernica, The Imperial Messenger has been excerpted in the London Review of Books. In the book, author Belén Fernández systematically demolishes the façade of principled criticism that Friedman projects, and exposes instead the mass of contradictory assertions and disingenuous equivocation—not to mention, terrible writing—that is the acclaimed New York Times columnist's true hallmark.
Ever since literary blogs, alternative news outlets, and nifty "read later" contraptions infested the once-venerable tangle of data that is the Internet, it has become dishearteningly easier to read good, intelligent writing that is as informative as it is well-crafted. Rambling, incoherent, cartoonishly bad and ethically suspect writing no longer populate our screens; and we have been left with nostalgia for the days when we still hadn't quite figured out our RSS subscription preferences.
Thankfully, Thomas Friedman is still getting published.
If you have not yet experienced the literary coup de poudre that is Friedman's writing, you can read his New York Times column, which runs twice-weekly because Friedman stauchly supports torture without legal consequences. For short but still painful reminders of the current state of political discourse in this country, you can follow @NYTFriedman on Twitter.
But burying this kind of rhetoric at the bottom of a reader feed is not enough—it has to be brought to light and thoroughly dismantled. If you want to understand how Friedman is "a testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media in the United States" and a mouthpiece for imperial violence and aggression around the world, you should read Belén Fernández's witty, incisive take-down of this apologist for empire.