a letter calling on university chancellors and presidents to declare their campuses to be "safe prot

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Friday November 25, 2011 · 9:44 PM PST

2011/11/25 · 21:44

Open Letter to Chancellors and Presidents of American Universities and Colleges From Your Faculty

We have witnessed, over the past two months, police departments using significant amounts of force against individuals peacefully participating in the Occupy movement. But during the week of November 13 – November 19, there was an astonishing escalation of the violence used by municipal police departments against non-violent protesters.

We hoped that even as politicians and municipal police violently responded to the Occupy movement, college and university campuses would remain safe locations for non-violent political dissent. But that has not been the case. In fact, universities and colleges appear to be using the same tactics in their interactions with unarmed, non-violent members
of the university community as we have seen municipal police use against the broader Occupy movement.

WOIDgang

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Friday November 18, 2011 · 9:02 AM PST

2011/11/18 · 09:02

YOU SAY MIC CHECK...

Reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.

And this is what one of our founding fathers, Gouverneur Morris, thought of a meeting of concerned citizens of New York back in 1774:

The mob began to think and reason. Poor reptiles! It is with them a vernal morning; they are struggling to cast off their winter slough. They bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend on it.

Based on last night's rally at Foley Square in downtown Manhattan, I'd say the snake's still struggling; or maybe just digesting its last meal, Mike Bloomberg, who looks like a fear-frozen rodent to begin with. (Gouverneur Morris, by the way, died when he tried to insert a whale bone into his penis. Now what does this have to do with Occupy Wall Street?)

WOIDgang

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Wednesday November 16, 2011 · 1:51 PM PST

2011/11/16 · 13:51

WOID XX-17. Please dump this book.

When the Nazis began their bookburnings the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger was furious: because he was so popular with the public the Nazis had decided to spare his books. To Feuchtwanger this was the ultimate humiliation: what had he done to not deserve their hatred?

I am a lot more fortunate than Feuchtwanger: for one thing, one of my books was among those tossed into the dumpster at Zuccotti Park a few days ago. Tomorrow, November 17, I'll be marching to Wall Street with two copies. If those are dumped I'll bring more.

And I invite my fellow-writers and readers to bring their own favorite books to tomorrow's march, and proudly hold them up. The book is mightier than the truncheon and the pepper-spray. In the long run, anyhow.

Paul Werner, PhD, DSFS.
Editor, WOID: a journal of visual language

This is your brain on art.

WOIDgang

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Monday November 14, 2011 · 3:20 PM PST

2011/11/14 · 15:20

I)
I don’t pretend to understand neuroscience. This puts me a step ahead of neuroscientists who pretend to understand Culture. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat? He was probably putting her on…

Until I heard a lecture by a neuroscientist, Mark Solms, who understands culture very well, and understands how neuroscience frames and finds new answers for cultural, philosophical, ideological issues that have been at the center of thought since the Enlightenment. That old problem going back almost three hundred years, that a blind person can “see” objects she’s never seen before? Easy, but in the process neuroscience upends the rationale behind the philosophical disputes of the eighteenth century – disputes whose influence is still felt in late 20th century philosophy and aesthetics.

Even Wikipedia gets it right:

Solms's aspiration is to develop a valid method for relating the clinical findings of psychoanalysis with knowledge generated by the neurological sciences (what Freud attempted to accomplish more than 100 years ago), an undertaking known today as the scientific field of neuro-psychoanalysis.

Solms isn’t interested in “proving” or “disproving” Freud, “scientifically.” In an exchange at the end of his lecture he responded to a story that Freud at one time was approached by a scientist who claimed he could “prove” that Freud’s theories were scientifically correct. Freud was not interested. As Solms pointed out, Freud was not opposed to neuroscience, he'd started out as a neurologist himself; rather, Freud was too sophisticated to believe the problems of human behavior could be solved through empirical observation. At the same time that Freud was distancing himself from empiricism and positivism the Vienna Circle of philosophers centered around the absent Ludwig Wittgenstein was moving in a similar direction. Meanwhile Karl Popper, a junior scholar who was barely tolerated in the Circle, was attempting to save positivism for Democracy, because if you can’t prove there is a free market how can you philosophically defend capitalism? I suspect the scientist who approached Freud was his own follower Wilhelm Reich, who was attempting to validate Freud’s insights by means of Dialectical Materialism: between science as understood by Izvestia and science as understood by the New York Times there is no settling the point of precedency.

WOIDgang

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Tuesday November 08, 2011 · 4:26 PM PST

2011/11/08 · 16:26

reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.

Tomorrow, November 9th on 72nd and York at 6:00 pm, I'll be at Sotheby's Manhattan. I won't be inside with a paddle, bidding up the artwork, though I've done my share of that. I'll be standing on the sidewalk, on the picket line next to my friends and co-workers in the art world, the art handlers from Teamsters Local 814.

WOIDgang

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Friday October 21, 2011 · 3:05 PM PDT

2011/10/21 · 15:05

reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.

Dear Noah Fischer:

First of all my thanks, and the thanks of many, many among us in the art world, for joining our fight and for bringing into the open the disgraceful dependency of so-called "High Culture" in America on the oligarchic 1%. As you put it so well:

For the last few decades, voices of dissent have been silenced by a fearful survivalist atmosphere and the hush hush of BIG money. To really critique institutions, to raise one’s voice about the disgusting excessive parties and spectacularly out of touch auctions of the art world while the rest of the country suffers and tightens its belt was widely considered to be bitter, angry, uncool. Such a critic was a sore loser.

WOIDgang

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Friday October 14, 2011 · 6:17 AM PDT

2011/10/14 · 06:17

Just got back. A few impressions.

By now you all know that Mike ("Deer in the Headlights") Bloomberg chickened down. Mike is in bed with the real-estate industry - literally: his partner owns shares in Zuccotti. Wish I were a fly on the wall tonight...

1) Not a large number, maybe 20,000 at most, probably closer to ten, but choice. Supposedly 11 City Council Members (I only saw one, perhaps the others endorsed without actually showing.) Barbara Bowen, head of the PSC (City University of New York's Union), a number of other union folks. Russell Simmons - the guy with all the cameras around him.

2) A few interesting conversations; one with a Wall Street lawyer who's totally behind the occupation. He claims he actually read Capital...Book III! Surprisingly, he was interviewed, probably by mistake. Get me rewrite!

3)Generally, the best way to be ignored by the throngs of newshacks was to wear a jacket or a nice dress. A very stylishly dressed woman (even for New York) was holding up a hand-made sign stating that she is employed, that she's middle-class, and that she totally supports the occupation. She looked so lonely I felt like offering her a drink.

4) Conversely, the most dangerous place to be was between a "radical" and the press. One particularly foolish young provo almost half my size tried to shove me out of the way while shouting: "Sir, get out of the way, we have a march to go to." Save the testosterone for the cops, kid, it's safer. Or for your online fantasies. Ditto.

Hoipolloi Cassidy
Editor-inter-Pares
WOID: journal of visual language
http://theorangepress.com

March on Wall Street

WOIDgang

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Thursday October 06, 2011 · 11:24 AM PDT

2011/10/06 · 11:24

WOIDgang

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Tuesday September 27, 2011 · 1:40 PM PDT

2011/09/27 · 13:40

Teaching without students
writing without fame
is hard.
It's nice to go out mornings
With the freshly written sheets
To the waiting printer, through the buzzing market-
place where they sell meat and appliances
You sell phrases.
- Bertolt Brecht.

No society can for any length of time remain master of its own production and continue to control the social effects of its process of production, unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.
- Friedrich Engels.

I meet a woman at a demonstration - she's involved with a program that sends books to prison inmates, so I show her one of my books and her first reaction is, "What kind of book is this?" Then I tell her about my pricing system; that I adjust my prices according to the buyer's ability to pay: for books, $5.00 if you're unemployed, $20.00 for Institutions, $40.00 if you're rich; free for prison inmates, on demand. And $200.00 for rich assholes, which is going to put me in a bind with Bernie Madoff since he's rich, an inmate, and an asshole to boot.

WOIDgang

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Wednesday September 07, 2011 · 3:11 PM PDT

2011/09/07 · 15:11

WOID XX-10. Typographical scoundrels.
Reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.

Seems the director John Huston was setting up for a Western when his principal, John Wayne, spoke up:

Mr. Huston, what's my motivation here?
- Excuse me?
- Yeah, when I walk into the saloon, what am I supposed to be feeling?
- Duke: you push open the swinging doors, you stand where we put the X, you say "Dirty Deke, I've come to take you in." But whatever you do, don't feel!

WOIDgang

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Friday August 19, 2011 · 12:17 PM PDT

2011/08/19 · 12:17

WOID XX-08. Ruthless cosmopolitan
reprinted and abridged from WOID: a journal of visual language

Philip Levine has been chosen Poet Laureate of the US - He's one of us.

Not, according to the liberal media. For it is a fact universally acknowledged by the Universal Class that Poetry is on the side of the angels, and since liberals are angels, well, what would a poet do but celebrate the values of liberalism: work is tough, of course, and being of the working class; but, there's a grandeur there, a noble resignation in those who might have made it out and failed, and that's what Levine's about, yeah, right:

The working class is endangered, yet we select this great voice of the workers in order to savor the loss like a great Scotch. It goes down beautifully, but the loss remains.

WOIDgang

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Sunday August 07, 2011 · 5:19 AM PDT

2011/08/07 · 05:19

WOID XX-06. Horrors of the Wack Museum. (Second part of a two-part article)

Hayek, Popper, Gombrich: 1935 was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. In the meantime Popper settled for teaching ethics to sheep farmers in a glorified community college in New Zealand, a Rick's Cafe of the Mind from which, over the next nine years, he tried for a better position in a more congenial place by writing a series of popular potboiler articles and books, among them The Open Society and its Enemies; but when it came to finding a publisher the relationship between Popper and Hayek began to resemble that between Rick and the Peter Lorre character, or between a research assistant and her project director:

But when I first came to Casablanca I thought...
You thought what?
[Shrugs.] What right do I have to think?

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a letter calling on university chancellors and presidents to declare their campuses to be "safe prot

Last night at OWS

Bloomberg, Please dump this book.

This is your brain on art.

See you at Sotheby's

Pre-occupy Museums

Wall Street: Inside the Liberated Zone

March on Wall Street

Demand-Side Economics

Typographical scoundrels.

Philip Levine: Poet Laureate

Art and Delusion