“My original motivation had to do with epistemic relativism,” explains Sokal, “and what I saw as a rise in sloppily thought-out relativism, being the kind of unexamined zeitgeist of large areas of the American humanities and some parts of the social sciences. In particular I had political motivations because I was worried about the extent to which that relativism was identified with certain parts of the academic left and I also consider myself on the left and consider that to be a suicidal attitude for the American left.”

Sokal’s intention was to write a parody of this kind of relativism and to see if an academic journal would publish it. The end result was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, which was published in the journal Social Text in 1996. With extensive quotations from the thinkers Sokal was targeting, such as Lacan, Irigaray and Baudrillard, the article pulls off the powerful trick of constructing the parody almost entirely out of the parodied (something which, ironically, some of the post-modernists Sokal attacks would surely appreciate).

Randy Miller, President of Original New York Seltzer and sponsor of Alphy’s Soda Pop Club.

“It is a kind of ’size-matters’ syndrome, and if something should be changed, it’s this. I mean, being rich is fine, but there should be a limit to it. I just have my smallish Finnish coast guard boat that I happened to find out about from my shrink. But we’re not supposed to talk about those private things, so back to what we were talking about . . . I didn’t mean to stray onto boats. For many in this business, if they can make something and multiply it by nine, it’s like having a shot of heroin in the arm, a kick. I don’t have a kick from that. I get off on running the company, making a decent profit, paying people fairly, and having more than a decent life for myself—but that’s it.”

Thanks, Jessica.

His “Raw Cuts” are my favorite serial releases in quite a while, absolute and total destruction. (Thanks, Nate.)

All-time favorite Hopper performance (Blue Velvet)

“There should be something smaller happening, although I can’t really say I’ve found it, which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. If there’s a really good thing going on now and I don’t know about it, I think that’s kind of right. If I know what’s going on, then it’s not truly new, if you know what I mean.”

Interviewed by Fraser Cooke. Two figures I am perpetually mixed on.

Legendary DJ’s from that era like you, DJ Bobcat and Dr. Dre were able to make that transition from being DJ’s to Music Producers. How were you able to make that jump?

I have to credit Dr. Dre for that. Back in the days when I was spinning with Uncle Jamm with Bobcat, on the otherwise of town there was another promotional group called The Wreckin’ Cru which Dr. Dre was a part of with Lonzo. It was a competitive thing back and forth. If we both had a party on the same weekend, we were all putting up posters and snatching each other’s down. Then Dr. Dre and I had met each other through a person that had record store booth inside of the Roadium Swapmeet. Dr. Dre was always there at the time making mixtapes. Through that he had begun to do his own productions and had gotten familiar with drum machines and other equipment outside of the turn-tables. He showed me the ropes on all of that and I had gotten bitten by the bug. I then had the opportunity to show some of my work to Russell Simmons out in New York. I went to Def Jam with a cassette tape of all the tracks that I had put together. I even went out there with the drum machine that Dr. Dre was using.

Even if you’re peripherally into skateboard culture, this (pretty long) talk with Fabian Alomar is worth a check out. So is this pretty old interview by Jeff Tremaine. Thanks to Hall for putting me onto both.

Excerpted from this [3.6mb] interview PDF.

Bookshop now open — email your order (or order online) and receive 15% off all books, catalogs, editions, magazines, monographs, multiples, and videos, between November 24, 2009 and January 1, 2010. All orders placed by December 11th, will be delivered by December 24th. Orders placed online will receive a 15% refund. Happy Holidays!

Publishers
032c, A&R Press, Bas Morsch, Book Works, Capricious, Charlie White, Christoph Keller Editions, C Magazine, Coins, David Kordansky Gallery, Fillip, FormContent, Four Corners Books, Glen Cummings, Adam Michaels, Harsh Patel, Hassla Books, Hunter and Cook, Hypen Press, JRP|Ringier, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Laura Bartlett Gallery, Laura Palmer Foundation, Manuel Raeder, Mono.Kultur, Museum Paper, Nieves, OK-RM, onestar press, Paperback, Paper Monument, Passenger Books, Peres Projects, Seems, Primary Information, Semiotexte, Slavs and Tatars, Steidl, Textfield, The Power Plant,Tramnesia, True True True, Turner, Vier5, Walker Art Center, Wallspace, Walther König, Wear, and more.

A good read.

“That’s part of my problem with writing around graphic design: it uses such grand, revolutionary, pompous rhetoric, and in most cases they just don’t fit the subject matter. I guess it’s because that sort of rhetoric—ideologies, systems, strategies, which seems to ape the language of war and social change—comes from a particular sort of art or architecture writing. When it gets filtered to graphic design, which is mostly everyday and ephemeral, it just doesn’t fit right. I find it a bit embarrassing That’s why most design writing feels like self-justification, which is just dull.”

Two projects that fit loosely into a larger idea of supporting ideas that work quietly and locally.

I have a few projects from this Porto-based label via trades with my friend Isabel (who produced the work above, from BF10/Wanda II). BdF’s website is pretty clear and concise as to aims and background information, so there’s not much else to say here other than this is one of my favorite imprints.

I met Maki Hakui in NYC at this years Art Book Fair, and her magazine School was the only title I ended up shelling out cash for. I support her mission to avoid discussing the usual aspects and figures of Japanese art culture, and going straight to intimate, direct dialogues with its lesser exposed – but equally interesting – women creatives.

“I think most Purple Fashion readers are new readers, if you can call them readers, I think they’re part of these people that go through magazines, look at them but don’t really read. I’m doing a magazine to avoid this way of looking at magazines. If you glance through Purple Journal and now Les Cahiers Purple, if you don’t enter in it, like in a book, take the time, then you don’t get anything from it. It’s not about visual excitement. A story like the one of Purple certainly never happened before. Olivier Zahm and I starting a magazine together in 1992, worked together for 12 years and went in such different directions that we decided to split. But we both feel “Purple” is us so we keep this name.”

Interviewed by Juan Moralejo for his new project, Foco.

Elein Fleiss projects via Textfield.

Old interview I didn’t see, he is heading up a new line for A Bathing Ape called Ursus. Drawing by Skate Thing.

Trevor Jackson is the man.

Momus video interview.

An interview, and some background on his Boy’s Own label.

“Dub is one of them musics,” he muses. “You have flirtations with other things but you get bored and you always go back to it. It works on a really basic level. It borders on the religious to me, sometimes, when I listen to it.”

“Every city has its own gang history, part of Chicago’s are Gang cards, most prominent in the 70’s and early 80’s”

Klansmen dingbats!

Thanks Ray for the link.

by Julie Bosman

The scruffy players in brick-red jerseys and secondhand shoes hailed from Haiti, Togo, Mexico, Honduras and Harlem. The fresh-faced team in black had neatly trimmed hair, new gear and degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Syracuse, Pace and universities in China and Australia.

Most of the players in black work together at the Royal Bank of Canada, bonded by the financial cloud hanging over their industry. The reds, too, are united by financial circumstance, sharing a temporary address, 1 Wards Island: a homeless shelter.

They faced off the other night at Chelsea Piers, perhaps Manhattan’s premier soccer spot for young professionals, and this spring also the base for the newest team in Street Soccer USA, a 16-city network of homeless players that started in 2005 in Charlotte, N.C., and is under the umbrella of Help USA, a national homeless services provider.

The idea behind homeless soccer is something like this: Take a group of poor people, disconnected from the regular rhythms of life, lacking both physical exercise and much to look forward to. Add soccer.

In Ann Arbor, Mich., and Austin, Tex., Minneapolis, St. Louis and Washington, the program has been credited with helping players pull themselves out of homelessness. There is even a Homeless World Cup. This year’s, the seventh, is scheduled for September in Milan.

“When I’m out there, I feel like I can’t do any wrong,” said Dexter Burnett, 47, who played soccer in his native Jamaica, where his speed earned him the nickname Pepper. He was laid off last fall from a job as a medical assistant. “It allows me not to think about my situation so much and just relax and enjoy the moment.”

The league is the brainchild of Lawrence Cann, 31, once a nationally ranked soccer player at Davidson College, who moved in the fall from Charlotte to New York, with one of the nation’s largest homeless populations, estimated at 35,000, but no established homeless soccer team.

With the help of a few volunteers, Mr. Cann cleared out a dusty gymnasium that had previously been used for storage at the shelter on Wards Island, a patch of land in the East River. He recruited a few reluctant players, promising they would not be punished for missing the standard 10 p.m. shelter curfew.

At an early practice on a rainy night in March, a couple of the 15 people standing expectantly in a circle had evidently been drinking. Most spoke little English. And they did not even know one another’s names.

“Hey, you,” one player called out before kicking a clumsy pass that landed far from its target.

Taking note, Mr. Cann imported a drill familiar to early practices of soccer teams everywhere: Before making a pass, the kicker had to call out the name of the receiver. He gave instructions in English and Spanish. He declared that anybody who showed up drunk or high would not participate that night (but could return the next week). And between running, passing and shooting, players are expected to talk to the coach about their goals outside soccer, their job searches and their state of mind.

Of the 30 people who have turned out for a practice, only six have not returned a second time.

“You need something to occupy your time around here,” said Woods Matthews, 45, a regular whose long braid swings when he plays. “That’s why people get so mad around the shelter. We don’t get any exercise, we’re all cooped up, and then people get in fights.”

As the players smoothed their ragged edges, Mr. Cann began to look for opponents.

Chelsea Piers, with its state-of-the-art facilities, is among the city’s most expensive places to play — $2,450 per team for 10 games — and normally has a waiting list of more than 25 teams. But the bad economy led a lot of corporate-sponsored teams to drop out. Mr. Cann raised the entry fee, Nike donated equipment, and Chelsea Piers provided matching jerseys, as it does for all the teams that play there.

Just getting to the field is a 70-minute trek: the M35 bus to Harlem, a downtown train, then a half-mile walk to the West Side Highway.

The homeless players lost their debut game, 14-4, playing without a single substitute. The next week, they faced a team from Bloomberg, the financial information company, whose players were politely intrigued.

“I guess I figure being homeless, they’ll play pretty aggressively,” predicted Louis Brun, 22.

Street Soccer NY lost again, 11-5. As the teams headed to the locker room, Mr. Burnett chatted up an opponent, asking if Bloomberg was hiring.

“If these guys can get out there, feel comfortable talking to new people, and not get frustrated, then it’s really going to help them integrate,” Mr. Cann said. “Then eventually they’ll keep jobs and not get kicked out of their apartments.”

He is already seeing progress: One player left the shelter and returned to his family. Another, Jarvis Strose, who had refused to meet with caseworkers and regularly missed curfew over two years of homelessness, arrived promptly at practice every week. A caseworker told Mr. Cann that a third man, who had developed a nervous disorder after being beaten in prison, was beginning to recover from his trauma because of the exercise.

On Tuesday, Street Soccer NY met the team made up mostly of Royal Bank of Canada workers, called the Gunners.

Chris Lodgson, 25, who plays center back on the homeless team, came straight from his new job at the cafe at Bloomingdale’s; he was planning to move from the shelter to an apartment in Washington Heights. He will continue to play with Street Soccer, which he said has been instrumental in his getting back on his feet.

“I don’t want to say it’s a return to being normal, but it makes me feel like myself again,” he said. “Two weeks ago, that was, like, the first time in a while that I forgot. I forgot where I was and what was going on.”

The red team took an early lead, passing fluidly, players calling one another by name. Players from the adjacent field wandered over to watch.

“Is that the homeless team?” asked one. “Wow,” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “They’re good.”

Mr. Strose scored his fourth goal of the game, panting with exhaustion as he ran off the field. When Mr. Matthews, sent in to substitute, kicked for a goal but missed the ball entirely, his teammates shouted encouragement.

“When we started, they didn’t know how to play,” Mr. Cann said. “They didn’t know how to pass. They didn’t trust each other.”

Final score: Homeless 10, Bankers 4.

Mr. Cann, surrounded by celebrating players, looked relieved. “We really needed a win,” he said.

Still clapping, he called out to his team, “Shake hands!”

Thanks Ryan