the Tea-Party© have claimed a flag

The tragedy is as follows: Herdsman grazes sheep on land that is soley in the hands of nature and is expected to maximize herd whenever possible. This may be of detriment to a neighboring herdsman. If encroaching sheep from an alien herd prevent neighboring herdsman from subsisting on what land is available, the neighboring herdsman will die.”

This may be how things mechanically happen, if culture were a machine. But we know it isn’t.

Why would a herdsman maximize his herd whenever possible if the herdsman has knowledge of his neighbor’s suffering, has adequate sustenance himself, and knows it would mean more time tending the animals? Hardin assumes the herdsmen have no empathy, no limit to labor and/or technology, and does not relate leisure time with a high quality of life.

Throw this theory out the window.

“Yet though it is fashionable these days to see nature as a derivative of culture, culture, etymologically speaking, is a concept derived from nature.  One of its original meanings is ‘husbandry’, or the tending of natural growth.

The world . . . charts within its semantic unfolding humanity’s own historic shift from rural to urban existence, pig farming to Picasso, tilling the soil to splitting the atom. . . Perhaps the pleasure we are supposed to take in ‘cultivated’ people lurks a race-memory of drought and famine.  But the semantic shift is also paradoxical: it is the urban dwellers who are ‘cultivated’, and those who actually live by tilling the soil who are not. ”

From The Idea of Culture by Terry Eagleton

OK kiddies, lace up your boots. This Saturday, September 4th, is a big night in Barrio Logan. Our friends at Set & Drift have invited us all (that’s you too) to the opening reception of Current at The Bakery in Barrio Logan. The show will be featuring Mercantile, a pop-up-shop showcasing hand crafted goods from 9 American designers as well as an amazing knitted lighting installation by Kwangho Lee.

As if this wasn’t enough, around the corner, Glasshaus is opening its doors for Device Gallery’s Creatures of Industry reception featuring the works of Greg Brotherton, Nemo Gould, Jeremy Mayer and Guillermo Rigattieri.

…There’s more, believe it. Across the street from The Bakery, the opening reception for the group photography show Keeping Time will be going off at Voz Alta. Allright, I’m tired of typing.

Sing-a-long if you know the words.

I love the title of this. you could put ‘Animated’ after anything and make it sound fun. David Harvey carefully suggests that it may be time to look beyond capitalism and The RSA does a magnificent job of making it playful and digestible.

If a Marxist perspective makes you squeamish then you may want to divert your ears and eyes. But hey, remember, being educated and using your brain to discern good ideas from bad ones is what makes you a good human… and plus, it’s Animated!

Tiga “Shoes” from AlexandLiane on Vimeo.

This song has always been just OK but the video just made me weep.

Every day on my way to the Jefferson St. L train I see this, read it, and think about it.  The creator is Skewville, a twin brother artist duo active in transforming the Brooklyn landscape.  A recent proposal, the Bushwick Art Park is visualized as a “green space” on a blocked-off Vandervoort Place, with murals painted on bordering buildings, and sculptures installed in the road.  With the park, Skewville aims to connect the long-existing population of bodega owners and industrial workers with the young people (often called “artists”) who arrived more recently, creating one thriving community.

As one of our brightest suns, Noam Chomsky, begins to set, we should again take note, before his light has gone out, of his contribution to the unending discourse between deception and truth.

“Verily, the universe swims in light. Everything is alive and alight. Man too is the recipient of inexhaustible radiant energy. Strange, only in the mind of man is there darkness and paralysis.

A little too much light, a little too much energy (here on earth), and one is rendered unfit for human society. The reward of the visionary is the madhouse or the cross. A grey, neutral world is our natural habitat, it would seem. It has been for a long time now. But that world, that condition of things, is passing.”

-Henry Miller 1963

This story, via my mom, a pretty radical knitter herself:

The book Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti compiles photos of knit interventions all over the world, along with accompanying texts and how-tos.  They even give a handy guide of the measurements of major buildings, bridges, and monuments in case you want to go all Christo and Jean-Claude.

Though the book came out last fall, the phenomenon is nothing new. Magda Sayeg, a pioneer in yarn bombing, began taking her work to the streets in 2005 in “response to the dehumanizing qualities of an urban environment.”  Stephen Colbert reported on one knitter’s response to American institutions like guns and SUVs in 2008.

A lot more photos are here.