Horse and Hay (window dressing), NYC - All reproduction rights reserved David L’Hoste

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Archive of past issues of <:> i n t e r a l i a <:>:
http://lhostelaw.com/iaa/ia_archive.htm
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1. A Word A Day — paralipsis
2. Graphics of the Day — by David J. L’Hoste
3. Quote of the Day — Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
4. HotSites - Eclectic blogs I keep returning to.
5. Reading List:

A. Who Runs the Internet?
B. You Say You Want a Devolution?
C. The Making of the 99%

6. For Art’s Sake - Voices of Music
7. WTF? - Two students suspended for “Tebowing”!
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1. A Word A Day
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paralipsis

PRONUNCIATION:
(par-uh-LIP-sis)

MEANING:
noun: Drawing attention to something while claiming to be passing over it.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin paralipsis, from Greek paraleipsis (an omission), from paraleipein (to leave on one side), from para- (side) + leipein (to leave). First recorded use: 1550.

NOTES:
Paralipsis is especially handy in politics to point out an opponent’s faults. It typically involves these phrases:
“not to mention”
“to say nothing of”
“I won’t speak of”
“leaving aside”

USAGE:
“Political correctness has breathed new life into the paralepsis, the rhetorical device whereby we make a statement by first announcing that we are not going to make it. When pundits write ‘No one is suggesting…’ the American eye reads ‘I’m suggesting.’”
Florence King; If ‘Words Mean Things’, Then All is Lost; Times-Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia); Feb 19, 1995.
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From Anu Garg and A Word A Day:
http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/
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2. Graphics of the Day — by David J. L’Hoste
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THIS ISSUE:
Recent Portraits - Cathy and Matthew - three images.

Recent Portraits - Carsen and Braniff - four images.

Seen Around New York City - 17 images.

9/11 Memorial - six images.

LAST ISSUE:

French Quarter Facades - 11 images.

The Big Apple - five images.

New York Public Library - eight images.

Small Hours in City Park - eight images.
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GOTD Archives:
http://lhostelaw.com/iaa/ia_graphics.htm
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3. Quote of the Day — Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
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Old Boys

I would’ve never believed that I’d forget you:
the sound of your laugh, the size of your hands,
that one day I’d have to rub my forehead
like a genie’s lamp to pull out your last name.

I would have slit my tender paten to pulp
to shake bloody and swear that one day
we would share a last name, or at least
a flamboyantly oversized prom picture.

But now, I could form a terrible band
with all the boys I thought would pant
their presence forever on my heart, but
instead evaporated almost completely,

leaving only the tease of our nicknames,
the soft ghost of their favorite tee-shirt,
and the dusty ordinary ellipse of what
could have been.

Copyright © 2011 Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz All rights reserved
from Oh Terrible Youth

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4. HotSites - Eclectic blogs I keep returning to.
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The James Kalm Report - Vlog from artist, James Kalm, who cycles to various art openings in Manhattan and videos and critiques the art while trying to avoid being asked to leave.

The Noumenon Revelation - Traci Lynn Matlock’s life exposed in images and writings.

The Sartorialist - pics of high fashion of the street from Paris, Milan, NYC, etc.

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5. Reading List
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=A=
Who Runs the Internet?

By Sarah Stankorb
December 9, 2011
EXCERPT:
Most of us leave breadcrumbs behind us online. Say you’re shopping online and a pair of leather boots catches your eye. You zoom in, reading reviews. Finally, you refocus and click a link to a Washington Post article. There, in an ad box to the right, are those boots. It’s like they are meant for you, calling out to you.

Of course, what happened is that cookies on your browser have allowed third-party companies to target advertising and follow you into other virtual space. You are being watched, anonymously. It’s creepy, but as harmless as a roadside billboard.

But there may be new reason to wonder about your virtual trail. Last week, an Android developer alleged publicly that a clandestine smartphone app called Carrier IQ automatically included in some phones with no opt-out, records all keystrokes — that means text messages, web browsing.

DeNardis grants that for network management, monitoring, and diagnostics, some personal information needs to be sent back and forth between devices and carriers, “but it should be very, very limited.” In the case of Carrier IQ, she adds, “If it’s true that all of the text messages and keystrokes are being logged — it’s outrageous. There is no rationale for that kind of extensive network logging for any network management reason.”

Flipping the Kill Switch

If information is always being sent from your device to your carrier, DeNardis asks what feels like a trick question. “Is anything you do on the Internet anonymous?”

The answer is no, not really.

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Full Article: http://www.american.edu/americantoday/campus-news/20111209-internet-control-DeNardis.cfm
From: American University
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=B=
You Say You Want a Devolution?
For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.

By By Kurt Andersen
Vanity Fair Magazine
January 2012
EXCERPT:

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE From the fedora to the Afro, styles have changed with the times. Unless you’re living in the 21st century.

The past is a foreign country. Only 20 years ago the World Wide Web was an obscure academic thingamajig. All personal computers were fancy stand-alone typewriters and calculators that showed only text (but no newspapers or magazines), played no video or music, offered no products to buy. E-mail (a new coinage) and cell phones were still novelties. Personal music players required cassettes or CDs. Nobody had seen a computer-animated feature film or computer-generated scenes with live actors, and DVDs didn’t exist. The human genome hadn’t been decoded, genetically modified food didn’t exist, and functional M.R.I. was a brand-new experimental research technique. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had never been mentioned in The New York Times. China’s economy was less than one-eighth of its current size. CNN was the only general-interest cable news channel. Moderate Republicans occupied the White House and ran the Senate’s G.O.P. caucus.

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

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Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.

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Full Article: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201
From: Vanity Fair
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=C=
The Making of the 99%

Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
December 14, 2011
EXCERPT:
“Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” —E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
 
The “other men” (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution—the bankers, hedge-fund managers and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the “superrich,” only in recent years.

Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000-square-foot mansions, $25,000 frozen hot chocolate embellished with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007–08, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1 percent—to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy and our political system—stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.

Still, until a few months ago, the 99 percent was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) “articulat[ing] the identity of their interests.” It contained, and still contains, most “ordinary” rich people, along with middle-class professionals; factory workers, truck drivers and miners; and the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails and maintain the lawns of the affluent. It was divided not only by these class differences but most visibly by race and ethnicity—a division that has deepened since 2008.
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And here was another thing many in the middle class were discovering: the downward plunge into poverty could occur with dizzying speed. One reason the concept of an economic 99 percent first took root in America rather than, say, Ireland or Spain is that Americans are particularly vulnerable to economic dislocation. We have little in the way of a welfare state to stop a family or an individual in free fall. Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a year, though in a recession they are sometimes extended by Congress. At present, even with such an extension, they reach only about half the jobless. Welfare was all but abolished fifteen years ago, and health insurance has traditionally been linked to employment.

In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60 percent of American firms now check applicants’ credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.

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Full Article: http://www.thenation.com/article/165167/making-99

From: The Nation

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6. For Art’s Sake
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Voices of Music performs both renaissance and baroque music, drawing upon the many and varied sources for historical performance practice. Based in San Francisco, our venue in St. Mark’s Lutheran provides one of the finest concert experiences in the Bay Area. Performances are one on a part, with an emphasis on combining both instrumental and vocal styles of interpretation and ornamentation. Our ensemble is the first Early Music Ensemble in America to broadcast highlights from our performances in High Definition Video. In addition to the concert series in the San Francisco Bay Area, Voices of Music sponsors the Young Artists Concerts, which are specifically designed to work with the next generation of singers and musicians. Voices of Music is a Non-Profit 501(c)(3) with a wide range of educational and performance outreach programs.
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7. WTF?
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Riverhead students suspended for ‘Tebowing’
Originally published: December 15, 2011 9:23 PM
Updated: December 16, 2011 12:11 AM
By STEVEN MARCUS steven.marcus@newsday.com

Two Riverhead High School football players were suspended for a day because the school said they created a potentially dangerous situation by leading other students in a re-enactment of NFL quarterback Tim Tebow’s kneeling in prayer.

School officials said an estimated 40 students had gathered in the hallway this week to make the gesture, which is called “Tebowing” and is named after the Denver Broncos player.

Tebow has received national attention this season because of his strong religious beliefs and fourth-quarter comebacks. Tebow, who is Christian, has turned around the Broncos’ season with a 7-1 record as the starting quarterback.

His popularity has led to the “Tebowing” fad, where people kneel like Tebow in random places and then post the photos on the Internet.

Superintendent Nancy Carney said the suspensions had nothing to do with the religious nature of the gesture.

“It causes a potentially unsafe situation with 1,500 people in the building,” Principal David Wicks said Thursday. “If you have 40 kids kneeling down in the middle of a hallway, and God forbid a fire alarm goes off, they could potentially stop someone from getting to safety.”

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