Culture

Widerstand ist zwecklos

Today I wore my newest, really nerdy obscure Star Trek reference translated into German, T-shirt for the first time. Widerstand ist zwecklos or Resistance is Futile. I like the fact that it is only a joke for German speaking Star Trek fans. But as I was walking out my door in the anarchy central neighborhood of Berlin today I was wondering if any of the anarchists next door would catch the Captain Picard reference. If not I could look forward to some new anti-state sayings spray painted on the door in the morning. But anyway as I was wearing this Tshirt today outside in the five minutes before the daily torrential downpour, I was thinking about the underground art resistance from the turn of the century in nyc, the complacent nation, the ransom corps, the hyperbolic destruction dance band, the wanderbus, waste0, blackkat, azoteus, orange line action, reclaim the streets, and critical mass.

Then as I was about to go to bed I came across this article on How the US crushed Youth Resistance and it reminded me about the generation gap between the people a couple years older than me and those a couple years younger than me in high school and college. Certainly amongst the older ones there were definitely more jerks. But there were also more people you could look up to as well, because they were not afraid to take a stand, have a voice, speak out, and be judged by what they say. There are also any number of younger people I look up to as well, but they tend to have a different more calculated collective resistance to them.

There is power in unbridled resistance... unless of course it really is futile.

 

FKK or Does Valmonte need a T-shirt

Apparently Valmonte Sprout was a bit conflicted when someone told her that, "nudity in art is sooo passe and unshocking and immature." And it led her to question how she whether she could be a civilized art person without wearing a t-shirt. To which a friend of hers asked

"What does wearing clothing have to do with being civilized? The rest of the general population needs to be deprogrammed from these absurd ideas of nudity that have cropped up over the years."

Which I thought was a very good question.

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Greetings

In New York City, if a teenager walks (skateboards) up to a group his/her friends, he kind of just slips into the group, maybe offering a smile to someone, or teasing someone a bit, almost as if theyve been there for a while and don't mean to distract from the momentum of whats going on.

In Berlin if a teenager walks up to a group of his friends (on a subway platform for instance) he/she walks around to each of the afore gathered people, looks each of them in the eye, does some sort of a predetermined hand greeting, and says something akin to hello how are you.

Now I understand that europe is much more ritualistic than the US and certasinly more than New York, I just wonder what are the benefits of one or the other method of greeting. I see how in the Berlin greeting everyone is more assured of knowing each other and how to address one another moving forward, which are both pluses. But to my north eastern sensibility it kind of seems like a certain waste of time, and seems to have an adverse affect on the dynamics of the group. For instance if the group is talking about something important and everytime someone else arrives they all immediately make a timeout to welcome the latecomer.

   

A Few of the Things

green drapes in the sun, inchworms, cultural-anthropologists, scribbling, ceiling fans...

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Back of a Bus

As Thiele once said, "When I get 533 pictures I probably don't even look at one of them."

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