For those not familiar with the area, North 7th and Bedford intersection is considered this global geographic center of hipster trendsetting; an invaluable piece of real state for advertisers. The “REAL IS ON THE RISE” phrase is presumably a nod to a recent single by Drake, who is no stranger to causing scenes of unrest in New York.

UPDATE:  A reader sent in another great piece of propaganda spotted in Williamsburg today

Books aren’t selling well, and the result is a desperate and dark era for content merchants, the ones who have historically determined what qualifies as “literature.” They see themselves as going the way of switchboard operators, carriage chauffeurs, and all other redundant analog labor. They are desperate for a later-day Twain or Dickens, a man of the times who can come out of the digital world to harness its momentum and keep their factories running; someone who knows how to get the wealthy yet thrifty young demographics to buy their paper once again.

The first of these cybernetic heroes has emerged as Tao Lin, the mediocre minimalist whose shallow characters and banal plots resonate with the emptiness of hipster existence. Sure, his critical reception was a disaster, but he achieved that elusive type of success marketers religiously call “going viral,” a feat so potent it has proven literary criticism an artifact of less desperate times in publishing—a time when consumers not only wanted to buy new books, but they wanted good ones. Now that the time of the book and its critic, a time of meaningful and significant content is long gone, the tyranny of the shitty-but-marketable writer is upon us.

It is in this dystopic setting that Canadian writer Andrea Coates has mobilized a sprawling piece of criticism against Lin, a figure whose popularity is largely based on his ability to absorb and render obsolete all criticism, especially from the passé intellectual realm. Coates‘ critique is intellectual, for sure, but its strength is that she brings the fight to Lin’s terrain, The Internet, where experimentation in text, form, and taste run free, especially in terms of overhead. A scatterbrained polemic, she tries many avenues. She attacks his work, especially the dismal “Richard Yates.” She focuses on the man as he markets himself—the vegan, the libertine, the exploiter of young female talent. She says he is sexually repressed. She says he is boring. She says if he were any worse a writer, he would have to work in advertising. The attacks on Tao and what he represents take up more textual area and become more a focus than what he does with words. He, not is work, is the primary target.

Tao Lin is a Self Absorbed Guy, but he has internalized the Attitudes of those who keep the Cages: despite it’s Manifestation in his Literature, Tao Lin behaves, in his OnLine Identity, as if he is Completely unAware that the Theme of his Work is that our Consumer Identities are destroying us by keeping us Captive within them, unable to live our Lives as we ought to: Freely, Emotionally.

Our Consumer Identities trap us, use us, and destroy us: Capitalism raises us in a Cage of Consumerism wherein Every Action must be mediated by the Market. In the City, Capitalism feeds off us at Every Turn. It co-opts our ProFunDity as Beings by making us its Slaves and then convinces us, via School, Advertisement and Media, to replicate its Memes of Production in Order to perpetuate it, and so Tao does: Every Thing about Tao Lin screams: Capitalist Brand. The Truth is, it is him who has been branded, by Capitalism, and so now he is its Slave.

The essay appears self-aware of the Faustian bargain that is feeding the troll, criticizing that which eats criticism; opposing a power structure which only learns to be more successfully cruel from its opposition. Her method thus resorts to counter-position of ‘caged’ and ‘free’ prose. Coates presents herself as the alternate pole of her criticism: “Where Tao Lin is Caged/I am Wild,” she says, before the essay moves completely into the realm of self-promotion.

And while the form of her criticism achieves a mirror-like disruption of Lin’s shit-into-gold success machine, one can’t help but wonder if there is actually a way through the shitty game of paper-selling, or if by attacking Lin as a means to both further a polemic against the acceptance of late-capitalist ennui in literature and to further her own career. She too must play on the same freemarket field of self-promotion and websavy virus-baiting. She is a “Slave” as well, albeit a more colorful and rebellious one.

By and large, Coates will be successful for all the reasons she doesn’t want: the spectacle of controversy between players in the literary realm, the success of writing based on its novel form, the want for a new, sexy young literary popstar. For her, this last point may be the most self-defeating. We like Coates because she is an anarchist, she’s pretty, she cares about stuff, and yet she still seems fun! We begin to imagine that we will like her writing before we have even read it. Like Lin, she is engaged in a process of seducing us by creating a character of herself—one largely divorced from her work.

It was once true that “Lorca died and Hemmingway survived”, but what now that they’re both dead, and their literary field is someplace you can tour and visit monuments. While it is noble for Coates to throw in the towel on Tao Lin and his Kmart Realist prose, she needs to aim her throw a bit farther—against not just the man and his genre but against nostalgia for bygone eras when literature and its criticism were imagined to be socially relevant wholly outside of its existence within the marketplace. Most of all though, Coates needs to throw in the towel on authorship itself.

Instead of watching the video of her smoking weed and burning “Richard Yates“, watch this much better video of Coates reciting her work:

MoMA is exhibiting work from one of the most renowned Mexican painters of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera. Diego influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution, believed that art should play a role in empowering working people to understand their own histories. Meanwhile MoMA buys and sells millions of dollars in art at Sotheby’s auction house. Sotheby’s has locked out 43 Local 814 union art handlers, claiming they are unable to negotiate a new contract with them. “The auctioneer proposed cutting the handlers’ workweek to 36 1/4 hours from 38 3/4 hours and increasing the number of temporary laborers, according to both sides. The union said new work rules would decrease eligibility for overtime, resulting in take-home pay declining 5 percent to 15 percent. Temporary workers without medical or pension benefits would replace unionized art handlers as they retire or find other jobs. Chief Executive Officer William Ruprecht, yearly salary doubled in 2010 to $6 million dollars.”

 

More information on the strike from L Magazine and Sothebys Bad for Art. Not in the video: an anti-art contingent of the protest that detonated stink bombs in each gallery, clearing large portions of the museum.

A poster calling for a General Strike has been circulating in New York City as American Occupy camps and global parallel movements discuss the plausibility of calling an international strike for May Day. The poster is an adapted version of one made for Oakland’s November 2nd General Strike. Aside from the date and location change, another notable difference is the flag-waving figure appears to now less dudely attire.

This week, a new New York City group calling itself Strike Everywhere posted this message calling for the strike:

5 DAY WEEKEND

Friday APRIL 27 – Tuesday MAY 1 , 2012

GLOBAL GENERAL STRIKE

MAY DAY 2012

At work, under constant surveillance, we struggle for a daily wage, simply to increase the profit margins for our bosses. Previously, the ruling classes had slaves and indentured servants, forcing labor relations through brute force. Today they still have us as slaves and servants through wage labor contracts and fraudulent notions of debt. As we have all seen, debt can be forgiven, in the trillions, to those who own society; but for the rest of us debt is inexcusable, and our lives, our time, our futures, are always negotiable.

May Day is known the world over as International Workers Day, a day commemorating violence by police and strike-breakers against workers engaged in a general strike to bring about the 8 hour work day. This struggle for the 8 hour work day was not the end goal for those who put their lives on the line in Chicago in 1886, but it was part of a broader aim of destroying the very means of our oppression— capital and the state.  This war continues. So too the general strikes of 2012 will establish a decisive drive towards the materialization of a social force to be feared by bosses and politicians the world over.

It’s time to become this force – a social force capable of attacking our enemies when and where it hurts and sustaining and defending each other in this transformative global moment; a force able to fight and win, a force able to collectively end these indignities and give us the necessary leverage to overcome mediation and to determine our own futures.

This is a call for a 5 day weekend beginning Friday April 27th, culminating in global General Strike on Tuesday May 1st. We propose using this mobilization as a tool for realizing more global solidarity and mutual aid while creating and strengthening the necessary relations and conditions for revolutionary potential – here and now. We will strike, assemble, block and shut down the city!

We are New York City Anarchists, Anti-capitalists and Autonomists; we are joining the call for global revolution. In the coming weeks local groups and individuals, along with regional and global allies will help develop and facilitate a framework to organize, coordinate and propagate activities for a 5 day weekend. This will include local and regional organizing bodies, websites and information hubs, resource and skill sharing, and various actions, events, and outreach efforts in the lead up to the General Strike.

From the struggle that brought the 8 hour work day, to the people who want it all – everything for everyone

Excerpt from short story by Don DeLillo about watching the crisis unfold from a prison for financial crimes. 

“All of Europe is looking south. What do they see?”

“They see Greece.”

“They see fiscal instability, enormous debt burden, possible default.”

“Crisis is a Greek word.”

“Is Greece hiding its public debt?”

“Is the crisis spreading at lightning speed to the rest of the southern tier, to the eurozone in general, to emerging markets everywhere?”

“Does Greece need a bailout?”

“Will Greece abandon the euro?”

“Did Greece hide the nature of  its debt?”

“What is Wall Street’s role in this critical matter?”

“What is a credit-default swap?

What is a sovereign default? What is a special-purpose entity?”

“We don’t know. Do you know? Do you care?”

“What is Wall Street? Who is Wall Street?”

Tense laughter from pockets in the audience.

“Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy.”

“Stocks plunge worldwide.”

“The Dow, the NASDAQ, the euro, the pound.”

“But where are the walkouts, the work stoppages, the job actions?”

“Look at Greece. Look in the streets.”

“Riots, strikes, protests, pickets.”

“All of Europe is looking at Greece.”

“Chaos is a Greek word.”

“Canceled flights, burning flags, stones flying this way, tear gas sailing that way.”

“Workers are angry. Workers are marching.”

“Blame the worker. Bury the worker.”

“Freeze their pay. Increase their tax.”

“Steal from the worker. Screw the worker.”

“Any day now, wait and see.”

“New flags, new banners.”

“Hammer and sickle.”

“Hammer and sickle.”

Their mother had the girls delivering lines in a balanced flow, a cadence. They weren’t just reading, they were acting, showing facial expression, having serious fun. Screw the worker, Kate had said. At least their mother had assigned the vulgar line to the older girl.“

Is New York the “Greatest City in the World?” The intuitive answer is no; it’s rat-infested, dirty, and overcrowded–mostly with miserable and/or crazy people. At the same time, it somehow manages to be one of the bourgiest cities on Earth, where food, rent, beer, and weed cost more than almost any other city on Earth. In spite (or perhaps as a result) of all this, New York remains the greatest city for one reason: not only did it invent punk, but it has remarkably remained its standard-bearer through decades of international reformulation.

Today’s punk scene, lead by the Raw and Bung punx, is thriving in a big way and it’s awesome to have zines like this one and New York Rules to keep tabs on what’s up in the city and beyond. GCITW, written primarily by a dude with the presumably spoonerist moniker Deed Runlea, features four band interviews, most notably with the DOs (Kira Roessler from Black Flag and Mike Watt from Minutemen) and Boston’s Night Birds, a cooking page on how to cook with dried beans, a Seinfeld fan fucktion, and an excellent op-ed on the editor’s love/hate relationship with Occupy Wall Street. Overall the zine has a voice and sense of humor all its own–definitely not ‘PC’ but honest and raw and packing the kind of punk snot one should expect from a zine whose cover is a chain-strapped boot preparing to stomp on the millionaire admins of the newly minted Brooklyn Nets.

Denver’s Shit Sheet is all written by Mike Kenneally of Albany Hardcore fame. Most of the content is a lenghty review of the new Husker Du book and an even lengthier interview with Mike’s favorite band, Leatherface. The Du review, littered with personal anecdotes and stories about the band he was disappointed were absent from the text, was pretty entertaining although irritatingly formatted into thin strips of white-on-black text that were sometimes upside down or cut lenghtwise. Was this design choice a failed experiment or DIY gone mad? Either way, the Leatherface interview’s more standardized lay out was a graphic breath of fresh air, although it could have been edited to be far more concise. I also would have liked to hear more scene-reportage about Denver, even though it is no candidate for best city in the world.

You can get the zine online here for just $2. I’m sure they also sell it at Academy.

Also check out Deed’s record label Shit Hawk Punks and his excellent show on Newtown Radio, Crust Never Sleeps.

Towards a New Manifesto:
Conversations between Adorno & Horkheimer, 1956

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A life-long intellectual partnership between two major thinkers, so close that their most celebrated single texts were co-authored and their names are difficult to dissociate, is rare enough to rank as virtually a sport of history. There seem to be only two cases: in the 19th century, Marx and Engels, and in the 20th Horkheimer and Adorno. Might they be regarded as prefigurations of what in a post-bourgeois world would become less uncommon? Their patterns differed. Marx and Engels, born two years apart, were contemporaries; once their friendship was formed, collaboration between them never ceased. Adorno was eight years Horkheimer’s junior, and a close working relationship came much later, with many more vicissitudes: initial meeting in 1921, intermittent friction and exchange up to the mid-1930s, concord only in American exile from 1938 onwards, more pointedly distinct identities throughout. The general trajectory of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research is well known, as over time ‘critical theory’— originally Horkheimer’s code-word for Marxism— confined it- self to the realms of philosophy, sociology and aesthetics; to all appearances completely detached from politics. Privately it was otherwise, as the exchange below makes clear.

This unique document is the record, taken down by Gre- tel Adorno, of discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, with a view to the production of—as Adorno puts it—a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. In form it might be described, were jazz not anathema to Adorno, as a philosophical jam-session, in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labour and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reck- less, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency. In substance, each thinker reveals a different profile. Horkheimer, historically more politicized, was by now the more conservative, imbibing Time on China, if not yet to the point where he would commend the Kaiser for warning of the Yellow Peril. Though still blaming the West for what went wrong with the Russian Revolution, and rejecting any kind of reformism, his general outlook was now close to Kojève’s a decade later: ‘We can expect nothing more from mankind than a more or less worn-out version of the American system’. Adorno, more aesthetically minded, emerges paradoxically as the more radical: reminding Horkheimer of the need to oppose Adenauer, and envisaging their project as a ‘strictly Leninist manifesto’, even in a period when ‘the horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one’.

Walter Benjamin (November 1931)