Babel Blog

Urban Spam

Alexander de la Paz — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:44:58 +0000

A. A curious sight in Chicago: a revolving door, center outfitted with a glassed-in display of carefully arranged products, none related to the other — POM, NIKE, DIOR. That one is predisposed to a mock-circumambulation in entering and exiting testifies to the contemporary unification of market and urban spaces — that is, the introduction of [...]

Reading Photography: Hayashi’s “The rotgut era (カストリの時代)”

Alexander de la Paz — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:38:29 +0000

For Hiroshima Day — The period of the US-led allied occupation of Japan, kasutori jidai (The rotgut era) cannot be remembered without revisiting rotgut, the off-putting liquor for which it is named. And likewise inseparable from the time's cheap and smelly motif is the rich photography of the era, which, made famous by Tadahiko Hayashi, [...]

Bolívar, Chávez, History & Ruins

Alexander de la Paz — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:14:00 +0000

"Whence the love of ruin. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory—in mourning—of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin? Than an impossible totality?"— Jacques Derrida “What impressive moments we’ve lived tonight! Rise up, [...]

Thou shalt not mix: Israel, race, and racism

Alexander de la Paz — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:43:22 +0000

لتارن و ريم —The ethical dilemma raised by an Israeli court's decision to sentence a Palestinian man eighteen months in prison for "rape by deception" after he lied to a Jewish woman about his race and had consensual sex with her is not one over rights or equality, but over the legitimacy of race as [...]

‘Pornistan’ and the spectres of orientalism

Alexander de la Paz — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:21:52 +0000

"They may call it the 'Land of the Pure,' but Pakistan turns out to be anything but," says Fox News correspondent Kelli Morgan in her article on Pakistan, the "world's leader," she claims, "in online searches for pornographic material." Now, this idea is far from new: such discourse is but an accent to the common tale [...]

Museum, Ruins, History

Alexander de la Paz — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:57:21 +0000

"Boredom of the ceremonial scenes depicted in historical paintings, and boredom in general. Boredom and museum. Boredom and battle scenes." — Proust The museum is the accumulation of ruins and culture, culture in ruins, which is to say in one word, history. There, ambiguity reigns: one is at a loss as to the whether all [...]

Remembering to Forget Foucault

Alexander de la Paz — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:00:11 +0000

"If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing." — Michel Foucault, What Is an Author? "In our societies, characters dominate our perceptions. Our attention tends to be arrested [...]

On Elia Suleiman’s “The Time That Remains,” History and Critique

Alexander de la Paz — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:11:50 +0000

Cinema can have love and often at first sight. But justice is something cinema cannot frame. It is always outside the frame. Cinema is inept also in that it cannot keep up with the devaluation of time and the shrinking of space. The very industrial revolution that gave rise to cinema is destroying both. The [...]

Aesthetics, Camel(s) and Charulata

Alexander de la Paz — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:31:18 +0000

The spectacles of shame in Ki-Yong Park's Camel(s) (2002) and Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) are majestically constructed, animated by an aesthetic quality of restraint that deploys as its artistic technology negative space—that is, the interval between, or what the Japanese call ma (間) and Eastern philosophy understands more broadly as śūnyatā. On this basis, shame [...]

Octopus Propaganda

Alexander de la Paz — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:12:21 +0000

The Octopus as Enemy in propagandic discourse channels the fear not of being devoured, but of being absorbed, defiled, converted into energy by a boneless, bloodless [...]