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Doors
Doors are approximately the height and width of a woman or a man. They are slightly larger, still, in order to accommodate for furniture, which is itself always measurable in body-centric formulations. For the most part, all furniture consists of various forms of resistance to gravity. Furniture always resists the flooring. Walls are also forms of resistance to gravity; they simultaneously serve as a shield against an outer world. Walls, however, are far less body-centrically formulated. Doors act alternately as both a shield and a breach. However, doors breach precisely in order to maintain the greater integrity and function of the surrounding wall. Furniture rarely affords any measure of protection. Doors are approximately halfway between a wall and a piece of furniture. Doors are humanized walls.
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In praise of Mama and Honey Boo Boo, latter-day Rabelais.
Cuneo, San Dalmazzo, and Dislocation.
San Dalmazzo Continue reading
June Zink Berlin.
Rarity and Plenitude: Rancière/Sadmalls/Love/Secret Culture.
“A morning without coffee is like something without something else” —Spencer’s Gifts.
New, Better Banalities. Occupy Wall Street.
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I drove back to New York from North Carolina on my birthday weekend to stand with a sign in Zucotti Park. Its symbolic power-of-place alone was enough to get me there and over any aesthetic or philosophical misgivings I might have with Leftist trope, which was definitely laid on pretty thick. But, hey, this is important… Hopefully, something that will crystallize into a popular critique of financial power roughly analogous to the 17th- and 18th-century critiques of political and religious power, critiques that sparked what some historians call the Bourgeois Revolutions— the English, French, and American. For it to be really effective though, it must be popularly understood, capable of strong, perfect platitudes. Platitudes that rightly delegitimize the “earnings” of billionaires as a latter-day form of divine right. Platitudes that understand money as a form of power; rather than as tokens given out for good behavior. Platitudes that understand taxes not as prices or fees but as an active counterbalance to the overconsolidation of financial power.
Blue Diabolism

Where to find me. Duke University. Book-hitting. Engaged in the dialectic. Ah.
VASST, Kant, Hypnosis, and Principled Didacticism.
Philosophical Research Group: “On Cellphones.”

Brandon Joyce writes:
I have long hungered after a Philosophical Research Group on Cellphones… and for obvious reasons: that topic is dripping rich; almost too rich for a single session. But, finally— whew— we made the attempt in my new Brooklyn homebase, with hot chocolate and some deliciously effective Nescafé Clásico; stoking our fires literally and metaphorically. What I’ll try to do, as far as a wrap-up, is offer a dense little introduction; then the minutes massaged into a somewhat readable form that runs from the science-fictional to the slightly more humanistic. I warn you though: it’s a doozy.
Where am I?
Mutant Pop and the Living Image: August 20th, Malmö, Sweden.
JOE GRILLO SOLO EXHIBITION
MUTANT POP GROUP EXHIBITION curated by DEARRAINDROP and BRANDON JOYCE
AUGUST 20 – SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
OPENING FRIDAY AUGUST 20, 6-9 pm, Malmo, Sweden.
| Pedro Bell Brian Belott Mat Brinkman Jes Brinch Melissa Brown Larry Carlson Brian Chippendale Andy Coolquitt Joachim Cossais Sally Cruikshank Christian Cummings Ronnie Cutrone Dearraindrop Trenton Doyle-Hancock |
Jim Drain Viking Eggeling Erró Yamantaka Eye Öyvind Fahlström Devin Flynn Ian Flynn Leif Goldberg Billy Grant Laura Grant Joe Grillo Alika Herreshoff Marianne Hurum Todd James |
Lisa Jonasson Matti Kallioinen Misaki Kawai Kaws LoVid Cary Loren Jason McLean Taylor McKimens Are Mokkelbost Stanley Mouse Eduardo Paolozzi Gary Panter Erik Parker Peter Phillips |
Annie Pootoogook Steve Powers Ron Rege Jr. Prophet Royal Robertson Kalle Runeson Peter Saul Kenny Scharf Jocelyn Shipley Kjartan Slettemark Vu Thi Trang Karl Wirsum Yuichi Yokoyama and more… |
“The Image has a life of its own. A very real and insolent autonomy. There are images— and entire symbologies— that are as real and weird as our own mothers and fathers. They are not just copies of the world; but squiggly, faithful parts of the whole. A daimonic, demonic influence.
The image, the symbol, the icon— and the whole plane of pop-mythos— have power, dignity, and even a biology of sorts. Cartoons, afterall, have cells. Scrawls and sketches serve as little anatomies and dissections of the living image. And like human and animal life, the image can even experience a kind of image-death. Or an afterlife; a creepy kind of undeath as zombie symbols, afterimages, or free-floating spiritual beings.
Mutant Pop occurs whenever these symbols and symbologies outgrow their sources. When they take root and incubate in impressionable minds. When they turn weird and grow tails and even get worked into a full-blown mythos at the hands of the giddy. Happy, harmless spokes-things assume self-consciousness. Fleeting-or-forgotten cultural moments, like Max Headroom, like Count Duckula, like O.J. Simpson, live on and haunt us through an infectious and hysterical freak culture. And the life-feeling within these images will, at times, even take on mystic or animistic dimensions; as a way of seeing God in the television, so to speak. A new, though somewhat noisier, mythos.
For this, the inaugural show of LOYAL gallery’s new harborside space in Malmö, Sweden, we’ve gathered up fifty-some artists under the heading of Mutant Pop— many of them great influences on Dearraindrop— to display a sort of visual genealogy between older Pop-masters and their newer mutant progeny. Offered as more than just innocent fun or frivolity, this exhibition will underscore the very deep commitment to meaning-making running within the Pop-sensibility.
This is the premise; this is the show. Both of which will be wrapped up beautifully in a full-color book by the people at Loyal, and distributed as gospel among guardians of the Living Image.
Brandon Joyce, Philadelphia, PA”
(For those unable to attend, the book will also have a long essay of mine entitled Mutant Pop and the Living Image; which might get a few of you going. I’ll post ordering info as soon as I can…)















