Magonia As Hyperobject: “If the UFOs are psychic devices, then the real question is not about the devices or machines themselves, but what they serve as such equipment.” Metacosmos: “Behold the time machine called ‘metacosmos’ that pounds on the fabric of reality. The machine does not travel, it prints a timeline, and the world moves. Unceasing,…
Tag: cities
#WEEKENDLINKS
Culinary Mysticism — review of “Pig,” starring Nicolas Cage (IM1776) Rob does not hate Portland; like Socrates, who dismisses outright the idea of fleeing Athens for Thessaly, he sees it from the standpoint of eternity, and so both loves it and knows it to be deeply broken: Amir: “If the city floods we can always…
Lost and Found in the Cartographical Matrix
I’ve been thinking about “place” a lot lately. Thinking about “place” led to me write this blog post, which got me digging through the great book Applied Ballardianism again, and a chapter called “Cartographies of the Infinite,” where author Simon Sellars contemplates whether future cities can be “tuned to produce a kind of stereoscopic urbanism.”…
w̴e̶e̴k̶e̵n̸d̵ ̸l̶i̴n̸k̴s̶
#1: A General Theory of Collaboration: “Anyone who reads Vaclav Havel’s Power of the Powerless will be struck by Havel’s portrait of Czechoslovakia forty years ago—with its voluntary window-slogans; its endless parade of crusades; its inexorable machinery of human cancellation. Havel had the right strategy for the subjects of the total state. First, they must…
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Cities and the Balance of Power: “Cities are like massive information-processing units, with real-estate markets revealing the value of being able to access the networks involved. People put a dollar value on physical colocation and proximity to others who have similarly paid a high price to access density. This implicit sorting lies at the heart of…
Baudrillard: “America”
Taking inventory of my summer reading. Here are some favorite passages from Jean Baudrillard‘s “America.” (Emphases mine.) Driving This sort of travel creates its own peculiar type of even and innervation, so it also has its own special form of fatigue. Like a fibrillation of muscles, striated by the excess of heat and speed, by…