May 22, 2008

DC

Where are the ATMs? Coming from NYC where cash is so easily turned over, virtually on every other street corner, Washington DC definitely obviously seems much less "financial" but also much less tumultuous, obnoxious, and loud. So will the real ninth circle stand up?


Make no mistake about it: NYC is lost....lost and spinning terribly in its over-development and narcissism that runs amok. New Yorkers glorify in being here even if they are only passing through on their way to the Hamptons or to Connecticut. So why should they care? In DC everyone is on a team even if they do not even know it. Hence more lapel pins and identification cards draping around the necks of players, tourists, and small time lobbyists of all sorts, worn even as plastic badges of stubborn small-time honor. In DC its the spectacle of "pluralism." Those who are most animated are ambitious and self-serving, as they are in any city, but more ideologically driven. New Yorkers make no such pretenses. Teams do not matter here because everyone, whether they play in the streets or in the suites, wants to be rich, and so there is only one team. The beloved darling of a smirking Mayor of this liberal city, who, need I remind you, spoke at the 2004 GOP Convention was even once a Democrat. Now? I guess he has settled in just fine.



May 9, 2008

O B A M A N I A !














But what is it Americans really look to in a President?
Consider something Jean Baudrillard once wrote in the 1970s.
"One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But the
metaphysical despair of these people came from the idea
that images concealed nothing, and that in fact they were
not images...but actually perfect simulacra forever
radiant with their own fascination....All of Western faith
and good faith was engaged in this wager on
representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of
meaning, or that a sign could exchange for meaning
and that something could guarantee this exchange-God,
of course. But what if God himself can be simulated,
that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest
to his existence? Then the whole system becomes
weightless, and it is no longer anything but a gigantic
simulacrum-not exactly unreal but a simulacrum, never
again exchanging for what is real but exchanging in
itself in an uninterrupted circuit without reference
or circumference. "


"The Precession of Simulacra"