A Website of the Radical Imagination
A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches there was fascinated to see undergraduates singing “God Bless America” in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined forty-eight hours before. … Read more
Bin Laden seems to have acquired his political ethics through religious rhythms coursing through his region of the world. Though I am an aging and settled secular person, quite a few of the people whose strivings I admire have drawn on sundry religious ways of being. The fact that I cannot emulate them in my … Read more
The author was in NYC from Sept. 9th to Sept. 15th and this piece was written in the week after the attack. A few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting article on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird … Read more
I’m all for enduring freedoms here and worldwide. I’m for finite human justice, “patient justice” (Bush) as a path toward peace, and Gaia’s Infinite Justice too. I want terrorists, war criminals, mass murderers of all sorts turned over to a world court for trials and punishment. Sometimes I can think I’m on the same page … Read more
On September 11, the question whether there would be war was, by 0900 hours, settled. But people didn’t know what was needed right away; and so they hurried to give blood, and all the city’s hospital beds were made ready for the wounded. Given the peculiarities of this first battle, however, the donors were turned … Read more
Questlove says it all well. American hip-hop is usually based on imitation, and it is meant to produce artists who are users of the existing tradition, not creators. And because of that, black culture in general—which has defaulted into hip-hop—is no longer perceived as an interesting vanguard, as a source of potential disruption or a … Read more
“Shake It Off,” director Mark Romanek’s recent clip for Taylor Swift, depicts bad new trends in beautiful old ways. It works the same way as the best ‘80s-‘90s music videos—using semiotics to express up-to-the-minute changes in pop culture, producing the sort of imagery commentators and marketers now glibly call “iconic.” The video shows Swift—a young … Read more