Mister, is that some smart in your pants or are you just happy to see me?
This is from the " Best of 2009" "challenge" that I am "doing." The original post is here!
December 7 Blog find of the year. That gem of a blog you can't believe you didn't know about until this year.
The very first real web thing I ever did was called fevertheorist and that was back in the days where I read critical theory and all sorts of brainiac things and wrote really long, detailed entries that surprise me even now with the intensity of thinking and articulation I had back then. This was back when there were no blogs, there were just "webjournals," and people still used Angelfire to make sites. (Oh, God, remember those days! Why am I getting stupidly nostalgic for the blink tag?) I don't have a lot of time these days for being able to read tomes upon tomes and then write essays on them, but instead I like to read blogs written by professional brainiacs who write about the same things I did, only ten times better than I ever could. My favorite blog discovery this year was on this level -- the marvellously-named sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy. It's written by Owen Hatherley, a British academic and journalist who writes on architecture, cities, urban studies, film, music and all sorts of arty-cultural-political things, all with a certain leftist, class-oriented perspective that's so often missing these days from discussions of aesthetics. I first discovered Owen while Googling information on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul for something or another -- he had put up part of his master's thesis on Fassbinder online. Then my roommate, who is in the graduate architecture program at Columbia, posted something he'd written for BD on Ice Cube and architecture. (He writes for other magazines and papers, everything from Frieze to The Guardian to many, many others.) Anyone who can work Ice Cube into a discussion on brutalist architecture intrigues me to no end, and that he's pretty foxy, too, is icing on the cake. Anyway -- it's a great read if you're interested in cities, in buildings and how our spaces are shaped and created by choices and conditions, all expressed with really smart, sometimes sarcastic and very British writing. It's definitely a brain workout, but worth following.