149 business cards has great meaning to me as it attempts to do several things at once. First, it functions as a kind of self-portrait or autobiography through the people I’ve met and places I have visited. Though, it must be noted only a certain type of people and merchants create & carry business cards. I have met or visited almost everyone or businesses in this book except maybe one or two. So in this way it is a kind of timeline or map to my past. It is very honest. In a more obvious way it serves as an address book. ...

The long poem 24 hours is made up of twenty-four sections, each section consisting of twenty-four lines. This is a very different poem for me. Intellectually it came out of conversations about obsession I had been having with visual artists. Emotionally it’s one of my most personal poems, a poem about my own mental health, addictions, grief, and an attempt to understand myself through repetition. The first draft of the poem was written over a twenty-four hour period of insomnia, panic, and a kind of energetic wondering about the Self.

Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What’s not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it’s hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It’s becoming clear that the tech industry’s promised “innovation” is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond ...

“As I see it, creativity includes things like opening a hotel in Kabul,” Boetti said in an interview in the 1970s, adding, “an undertaking that would be crazy even in Italy! But there you realize it’s a true challenge: even presenting yourself as something other than an artist, when you have no anchorage and must completely reinvent yourself, physically and as a character. For instance, over there I always wear a jacket and tie with dark glasses, and I’m very dry and stand-offish with people…” The One Hotel opened in Kabul in the autumn of 1971, during Alighiero’s second trip to ...

On the edge of the Catholic cemetery at Portbou, Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan (b. 1930) was commissioned to create a memorial to Walter Benjamin on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in the town on September 26, 1940. Inaugurated on May 15, 1994, the monument is entitled Passages. A rusted steel pathway leads to a hooded entrance, which opens onto a precipitous staircase cut directly into the cliff. The staircase appears to open directly onto the sea crashing on the rocks below. The viewer is, however, protected from falling into the sea by a massive wall of glass placed at ...

Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence. Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a “deepfake autofiction” novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be “as cringe as possible.” The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.

“The tension implicit in any photograph is the tension between an inert, black-and-white, two-dimensional object, and an event that actually existed in the phenomenal world. A successful photograph mediates, though never completely resolves that tension.” In 1972, as his career was beginning to take off, Lewis Baltz conducted a revealing interview, his first considered statement about photography. Never published, the interview has recently resurfaced, and is printed here for the first time. In an increasingly sardonic exchange Baltz describes the character of his practice, articulates his position within and against the world of photography, and comments on his intellectual heritage and ...

The etymology of the word author refers to an act of creation, an act of augmentation, from the Latin verb augere. Author instantiates creation, the expansion of the pre-existing. In 1967 Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in his famous essay to state once more that the crisis is that of the author as a single subjectivity and as a term that condenses prestige, undermined by the de-subjectivation strategies of automatism, fortuity and fragmentation of the historical avant-gardes, as well as by the machinic act and by the reproducibility of the second avant-gardes. Fifty years after Barthes’ paradigmatic formula, this lack of ...

I actually went to work in the mines in Carbonia to run away from a girl I had got back from prison camp on August 29 I had got back home from Germany I had a bit of a holiday at home I was really emaciated I was really down I stayed at home all the time I didn’t do anything I read some newspapers some books some stuff I found lying around I passed the time like that but then I needed money and I couldn’t find any work and so I went to sea I traveled around just ...

‘Do me a favour, will you? Keep away from the windows. Somebody might – blow you a kiss’ – Mike Hammer, Kiss Me Deadly, 1955…

Contested Landscapes is dedicated to different rural regions—their landscapes, their producers, and their work. The paths of the family of the artist Sandra Schäfer and those of the famous German photographer August Sander cross in the Westerwald, a rural area in Germany shaped by farming and mining. A hundred years ago, the photographer August Sander captured his series of peasants there including the artist’s relatives. Schäfer’s “homecoming” is represented in the book by three works dealing with the changes of the landscape, its farming, and Sander’s photographs, as well as amateur ones from Schäfer’s family. Contributions from Schäfer’s interlocutors reflect ...

In the last weeks preceding the collapse of his rational powers, Nietzsche wrote, “I am a rendezvous of experiences”; the word is indeed rendezvous. He meant that he had spent his life running toward the world and that the world had been running toward him.This double attraction, this movement, had been central. The immense generosity of his mind had made him the meeting point of cosmic forces, of the social currents of his time, and of the ideas that he seemed so often more to capture than to create. This generosity was a form of love. He showed us in ...