…ment: Journal for Contemporary Culture, Art and Politics, 2: Dénouement (2011)

“From the financial crisis to natural and man-made disasters via the wave of political extremisms, our times are patterned with catastrophes of all kinds. While the contemporary meaning of catastrophe is commonly associated to the idea of disaster and collective trauma its origin mostly refers to a sudden turn, or a reversal of what is expected. Catastrophe would therefore be this shift that allows us to explore spaces that could not be accessed, whilst breaking with the existing or the normative. Issue 2 of …ment explores the dis-ordering nature of catastrophe whilst celebrating the potential of its narratives and imageries.

…ment is a journal for contemporary culture, art and politics published in irregular intervals. Through a multi-disciplinary set of editorial forms, the journal aims to reflect on current societal issues and debates.”

With contributions by Tobias Scholz, Jean-Charles Massera, David Riff, Daniel Bürkner, Jens Meinrenken, Walter Benjamin, Bo Christian Larsson, Heather & Ivan Morison, Gustav Metzger, DOXA. Also included in the journal is an excerpt Walter Benjamin’s Theses on Philosophy of History. The printed journal includes a special edition by Bo Christian Larsson.

Editor-in-chief: Federica Bueti
Associate editors: Benoit Loiseau, Clara Meister
98 pages

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Tim Wu: American Lawbreaking (2007)

An essay about the laws we are allowed to break in America and why.

With illustrations by Alex Eben Meyer
Publisher Slate.com
via Marcell Mars

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Adrian Johns: Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (2010)

A killing in the English countryside takes us inside the world of pirate radio in its mid-1960s heyday.

When the pirate operator Oliver Smedley shoots and kills his rival Reg Calvert in Smedley’s country cottage on June 21, 1966, it is a turning point in the careening career of the outlaw radio stations dotting the coastal waters of England. Situated on ships and offshore forts like Shivering Sands, these stations blasted away at the high-minded BBC’s broadcast monopoly with the new beats of the Stones and the Who and DJs like Screaming Lord Sutch. For free-market ideologues like Smedley, the pirate stations were entrepreneurial efforts to undermine the growing British welfare state as embodied by the BBC.

The worlds of high table and underground collide in a riveting story full of memorable characters like the Bondian Kitty Black, an intellectual femme fatale who becomes Smedley’s co-conspirator, and the notorious Kray twins, brazenly violent operators of a London protection racket. Here is a rousing entertainment with an intellectual edge.

Publisher W. W. Norton & Company, 2010
ISBN 0393068609, 9780393068603
305 pages

WFMU’s Too Much Information show hosting the author
The Curse of TINA (Smedley’s story told by Adam Curtis, BBC)

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