Gulf commercial shrimper Diane Wilson was arrested for interrupting BP CEO Tony Hayward's testimony on Capitol Hill. Hayward barely started his opening statement when Wilson, painted to look like she had oil on her, shouted, ""You need to be charged with a crime!"
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"Recreating—if that is the right word—the daily routine of mass murder at Auschwitz with miniature puppets made of plasticine may not seem a promising enterprise. However artfully done, it could make what actually happened look trivial, like a kind of game.And yet Kamp, staged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in the first week of June, by a Dutch group called Hotel Modern, was weirdly gripping."
"Much has been written and said about Adorno’s famous declaration that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I don’t think he meant that no poems should ever be written after the killing. A more likely interpretation of his dictum is that barbarism, of which Auschwitz was the purest example, cannot be the stuff of poetry. There is no poetic meaning to be culled from exterminating millions of people. In fact, there is no meaning in it at all."
"This is why the most successful accounts of the Holocaust have been witness accounts. They restore individuality, they give the victims faces and voices. The alternative is to use suggestion. Poetry—pace Adorno—is ideally suited to this. And so is the kind of performance put on at St. Ann’s Warehouse, where the beating to death of a plasticine figure evoked precisely the barbarism that Adorno thought was beyond the bounds of art."
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"For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since. As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask. Masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical."
"If we lose on this one, the culture loses. One person has astutely observed that ’we cannot win the culture war merely on Prop 8, but we can lose it on Prop 8.'
He (Blago)was asked by shouting reporters whether he was worried about the government's attempt to silence him and whether he had any comment at all.
"I'd better not," he said. "I'm dying to, but I can't."
The controversy over recent statements of Blagojevich and his lawyers was the latest culture clash between federal prosecutors, who want the trial to proceed with machine-like precision, and Blagojevich's defense team, schooled in the razzle-dazzle legal style of Chicago's Criminal Courts Building.
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"Listen up. I know the shit you've been saying behind my back. You think I'm stupid. You think I'm immature. You think I'm a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I'm Comic Sans, and I'm the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg."
