Tag Archives: thomas frank the baffler

Occupy my coolness

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Dave

The question that could be posited is whether articles like this, writers like Naylor actually reinforce the very behavior they seek to expose; since ostensibly bringing the matter to public attention may increase the value of the one-percenters, the distinction … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Andrew Potter, Ayn Rand, David Lynch, David Reisman, ginia bellafante, gustavus myers, jerome witkin, joel-peter witkin, John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, Marcel Duchamp, Muckraker, naylor crass struggle, Rick Salutin, Thomas Frank, thomas frank the baffler, Thorstein Veblen, tom naylor | Leave a comment

artistic terror : conceptual cowardice?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Dave

Is Marcel Duchamp a terrorist? In a figurative sense, a weapon of mass destruction. The super-bomb/dirty bomb alchemical chain reaction where crap is turned into monetary gold. Clearly, with the ready-made, there was an initial anti-hierarchical space of thought, something … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged Andrew Potter, Arthur Koestler, Edouard Manet, Edward Bernays, elliott barowitz, francis p. nauman, Heinrich Hoffmann, Joseph Beuys, joseph heath rebel sell, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, mark sagof, martin gough, norman kleeblatt, Pablo Picasso, renato poggioli, robert graham sculpture, rudolf herz, sidney janis, stephen foster, thomas frank the baffler, Walter Benjamin | Leave a comment

trench warfare

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Dave

The fact that an item is potentially useful has no relation whatsoever that it will actually be put to good use. In fact, poor use, may actually infer a greater value, an honorific value on the owner. Burberry has been … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Uncategorized | Tagged Alexander McQueen, angela ahrendts, burberry bespoke, christopher bailey, consumer behavior, emma watson burberry, forrester research, Humphrey Bogart, Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, marshall cohen NPD Group, paul sonne WSJ, pierre bourdieu, thomas frank the baffler, Thorstein Veblen | Leave a comment

99% percent proof: illusion of the target

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Dave

The underclass is always more vital than the higher strata, unburdend by the baggage of bourgeois liberal morality, preachings of violence which justifies borrowing, exploiting, and finally cannibalizing all transgressive life into commodity kitsch and diluted into pablum. The American … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged alec baldwin, andi zeisler, Bell Hooks, David Mamet, david shankbone, henry rollins, joseph heath, Kayne West, Liam Lacey, Michael Moore, occupy wall street, Paul Krugman, Roseanne Barr, ryan kavanaugh, susan sarandon, Theodor Adorno, thomas frank the baffler, Thorstein Veblen | Leave a comment

little criminals: occupy modify commodify

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Dave

The ingenious part of our system, our “culture” is its ability to absorb and renew the top twenty percent of the population. These newbies, if you could call them, what Pierre Vallieres might term the new “white niggers of America” … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged andrew coyne, Andrew Potter, Chris Hedges, cornel west, David Mamet, Edward S. Herman, Hannah Hoch, jacques duchesneau, jean charest, jean michel basquiat, John Heartfield, joseph heath rebel sell, Marianne Faithful, Marianne Faithfull, Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, occupy wall street, Pierre Vallieres, Robert ParkeHarrison, the duchesneau report, Thomas Frank, thomas frank the baffler, Thorstein Veblen | Leave a comment

a bigger bang: head shots and dumbing down

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Dave

Blame it on bourgeois ethics? Is the successful t.v. series The Big Bang Theory merely insulting in its violence; a violence which may be an endemic cultural trait within middle-class values, that repository of conservatism and arch determination to maintain … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged christopher caudwell, Chuck Lorre, gary mason globe and mail, Gustav Landauer, H.G. Wells, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Galsworthy, John Heartfield, Martin Buber, Max Beckmann, Michael Ferguson, richard f. hamilton, richard gruneau, Rick Salutin, thomas frank the baffler, vancouver stanley cup riots, Walter Benjamin | Leave a comment

haywain: pulling at straws of pessimism

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Dave

The Haywain by Hieronymus Bosch is almost as complex as the Garden of Earthly Delights. It carries a similar message; that of desperate pessimism. Even in the darkest of the Christian books of the Bible Hell exists for the damned, … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged bill stover solyndra, bosch the haywain, brian harrison solyndra, Charles de Tolnay, christopher jesus ferguson, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Guy Debord, Hieronymous Bosch, howard lederer full tilt poker, joseph heath, Lord Byron, meir margalit, Michael Moore, occupy wall street, Pieter Bruegel, thomas frank the baffler, Thorstein Veblen | Leave a comment

old wild men

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Dave

The terse mottoes, the defiant songs. These were the liturgy and hymnody of the One Big Union’s cause.To the hard-bitten laborers of the I.W.W., the union was a home, a church, and a holy crusade.It lived always in the blast … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Alexander Berkman, arturo giovannitti, carlo tresca, elizabeth gurley flynn, Emma Goldman, henry rollins, i.w.w., j. edgar hoover, j. mitchell palmer, Joan Baez, Joe Hill, joseph ettor, old wild men 10cc, palmer raids, Thomas Frank, thomas frank the baffler, william d. haywood | Leave a comment

men of property

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Dave

Joseph Conrad characterized John Galsworthy as a moralist, someone who tended to betray instead of revealing ” the very truth of things.” In part, the sterling example of an ineffectual empathy, a sterile compassion that was reluctant to transform an … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Adbusters, Arnold Bennett, attilio pusterla, edward garnett, Emma Goldman, galsworthy the silver box, giovacchino toma, giuseppe pellizza da volpedo, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, john galsworthy the pigeon, John Sloan, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Conrad, joseph heath rebel sell, mary cassatt, Naomi Klein, ralph mctell streets of london, thomas frank the baffler, Virginia Woolf | Leave a comment

white outlaw: the ties that bind

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Dave

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation was a book written by Bell Hooks in the mid 1990′s. It seems like an appropriate complementary to Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.Hooks gained a certain amount of notoriety for her critique of … Continue reading →