The Best Action Figure Ever

Let My People Go

Midvale imposes moratorium on new taco carts

MIDVALE, Utah (AP) -- Don't expect new taco carts in Midvale for a while.

The City Council has approved a six-month moratorium on new carts. Council members say they're worried the carts compete with traditional restaurants. Assistant City Administrator Phillip Hill says some also don't like the appearance of the carts.

Hill estimates there are about seven carts around town.

The moratorium on new carts is meant to give city staffers more time to update regulations.

The moratorium also prevents new business licenses for other vendor stands, such as those selling fireworks or flowers.

West Valley City earlier this year approved an ordinance limiting the number of taco carts. Salt Lake City has regulations on where they can operate.

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Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

We made a boy!!!!

There was a strange pressure I felt after we had two girls in a row. I love my daughters very much, they are in no way lesser than a boy. Where does this desire to have a boy come from? I don't know, is it fear of oblivion? What's in a name? Regardless, it's very satisfying to know that my family name won't perish with me.

Passing the buck

My friend and colleague Paul directed my attention to a blog that parodies Zizek. Here he is welcoming you to the gym. If you've ever heard an interview with Zizek, or seen a video of him speaking, this will make you laugh.

the ghosts of Bergson and Deleuze

I've been interested in the subject of memory and images for some time now. I tried to read Matter and Memory and had an easier go at it than I did with Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Still it wasn't easy to wrap my head around. Next semester we will be reading Deleuze's cinema dyad and I'm excited to revisit them with greater understanding and the guidance of my professor. As I continue my ghost work, I want to explore the ghostly aspect of memory and images: reflected, projected, remembered and so on. I'll be getting at some of that in my M.A. thesis, but there is need to go deeper.

There is no question, cinema is ghostly; Plato's allegory of the cave is an uncanny prefiguration of such. An up and coming film thoerist, Gilberto Perez, titled his book on film The Material Ghost, check it out here. There have been a few books published recently that hint at the same, The Virtual Life of Film, and Framed Time. This all may seem obvious, but what are the implications? For now, check out this blog, which is a cool coupling of Deleuze's theories and some good photography. For those of you that have Cien años de soldad, think of José Arcadio Buendía's death in virtual space. He dies in an image, which is then intrinsically tied to memory. I wonder if remembering isn't some sort of projection, as the title of a book on Deleuze suggests, The Brain is the Screen.

nostos

I've been thinking a lot about place lately, then I read Heidegger. For reasons I don't understand, a place that feels closest to home for me is county Kerry Ireland. I would like to be buried there in a pine box..nostos.

screen theory

there's nothing on...

What is the Real?

Plagued as of late by the fear that I may just be a myth, I've been seeing indicators everywhere that pure perception may not be possible, that everything is phantasmagoria. In this fog of thought which often times resembles a Tarkovsky film, I got an e-mail from a friend with a link to an article by Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic who's book, The Sublime Object of Ideaology, I happen to be reading at the moment. Below is the conlcusion of the article, I think you may, dear reader, see a connection between my intillectual wanderings and Zizek's take on the current state of affairs, or maybe I'm just shining my own shoes. Incidentally, the title of the article is "Through the Glasses Darkly"

"[W]as the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running."

If you want to read the whole article, go here.