Awww, Depp.comms

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/339678/20120510/italy-depp-johnny-communist-manifesto-newspaper.htm   Its a long way from the filthy undercover school cop he played in 21 Jump St.

The piece-rate Worker

Turning our lives into sausage factory grunt work and mere value extraction. This is all too common. Before electronic rights became a standard in publishing contracts I used to scratch out that part (eg for my Calcutta book, and for ‘Dis-Orienting Rhythms’ – only the latter is online for free – see sidebar to download [...]

Collected Marketing Detournements for Goldies

- ‘I’m quite a fan of the Goldsmiths ad campaign. And I’m sure it’s accurately pitched at the target demographic. I have faith in #goldsmirk’. – ‘I liked this the first time round, but my critical theory course makes me think it might be a hoax. I stumble on Goldsmiths’ #goldsmirk – ‘I’d like to know just [...]

The £100 Pound Shop

Trinketization is clearly escalating over the river in Dalston, and I can’t say I disapprove. I have said before: Shopping is civil war. Here is evidence. But then, its choice, so do head out to support this venture where you can (perhaps by shoplifiting?) Point your browser here: http://www.onehundredpoundshop.com/our_promise_to_you.html (thanks to Joel McKim for discovering [...]

11 theses on art and politics (#5,6,7)

[Thesis five, six and seven (of eleven)]: 5. Trinketization would be a diagnosis of limited responses to global reconfigurations of commodity fetishism, where affect and shopping disguise an unbroken deal with hierarchical social relations locked in, unchallenged. Where class/race/gender politics was, we now have lip-service mockery of these same themes, articulated by the celebrity/televisual machine. [...]

Kamata

Back in Tokyo. This time staying in Kamata, which is a sort of central urban junction town, hence interesting. Rows and rows of those little bars, sushi and sashimi shops, yakitori, izakaya (居酒屋) and yakiniku (焼肉) places to eat. Most of them with about 12 seats, especially near the station and west (NishiKamata), but there [...]

A Radical Education.

Education is not a model good. I went to hear a pretty interesting discussion from Irit Rogoff, Florian Schneider and Kodwo Eshun as part of the build up to their Berlin Education Summit. There’s been quite a bit of chatter about this on various lists, which is fine, but this was the first time in [...]

Mind Boggling Trinketization

Very occasionally (why?) I feel the need to restate why it is that I use the word trinketization to refer both to the dessication of all life to mere commodities, and as a word for a critique of the poverty of theorizing that remains at the level of fascination with those commodities. Remembering that Marx [...]

four quibbles

Several arguments I’ve had lately have stalled in what I am tempted to call a kind of ‘ontological disarray’. That is, the people I start these conversations with, in affable conviviality (ie in the pub) seem to give up too quick and angry. We each know these are necessarily first moves, so why concede/defer? Is [...]

Trinketization: ‘Third World Tourism’ and the manufacture ofthe Exotic

I am sort of stuck in my room. Somewhat foolishly perhaps, I agreed to write an entry on Exotica and Tourism for Jonathan Gray’s encyclopedia (getting so there are too many such things about) and I agreed to a deadline of Jan 1st, possibly forgetting that I should be indulging in some tourism myself at [...]

Trinket Crimbo

XMAS TEACHES KIDS TO LOVE CAPITALISM This old graffito favourite (I will post pics sometime) returned to mind this morning when I was rudely awakened by some god-bothering Bishop (Nazir Ali) on Radio Four’s Today Programme complaining in ever so slow plummy tones that something about diversity legislation – vaguely referenced as ‘political correctness’ – [...]

Money talks: tracking dollar bills

Couldn’t resist a nod to the sly humour of these German researchers who somehow managed to get this research project up in Molochville. It has both a very serious mission in the medical field, and a subtly unremarked critical commentary at the level of the symbolic. Of course money travels like a virus. Uncle Bill [...]

In beer Mat Veritas Us

A bright new moment to soak up your time in the bar. Significations are ablaze, globalisation appears at its micro-moment, culture in a mass-reproduced, absorbent, four inch square: there is no other way to adequately describe advertising other than the ubiquity of abundance – we got it all here, ready to buy. It would be [...]

John Styth Pemberton’s Real Thing – 3am

Back to Blighty, past 3am and I can’t sleep – good, so that’s back to normal then. Jet lag is the real thing. But the real thing is coke. Aren’t you glad that ain’t true. I like those Cola slogans from the past: In 1896 the company’s slogan was ‘Coca-Cola: a brain tonic for women [...]

The Seven Year Itch

The film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, (dir. Howard Hawks – came out in the US the same year as the Kinsey Report – 1953. First Playboy out then too). It is famous for many reasons, but for me most importantly because it made movie stars into export commodities. This kind of export – crucially, like the [...]