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[Nov 03] Monday afternoon and paper revisions are now inevitable. Let me get this thought out before it leaves me. Carl Boggs talks about a the privatization of the Public Sphere. This public sphere was once a place (imagine coffee shop communities) where people came together and "engaged" themselves in rational-critical discourse/coversation/debate/etc. Now, according to Boggs, this community has been co-opted by corporations who aspire to perpetuate a society based on consumption. In other words, there motto is something like "we produce, you consume" or "we sell and you buy". Reinforced by the incorporation of cultural resistance into this consumer-based economy, as in the fetishization of art--M.T.V., Bridget Riley designs on 80's T-shirts, and CEO purchases of avant-garde paintings, for instance, opposition is difficult to spell out. Boggs refers to this co-optation of the public sphere by large corporations as "corporate hegemony" or "corporate colonization". There might be some form of resistance, but only one where conflict feeds on an anti-political cynism which doesn't translate into the power to converge into any large and meaningful social movement.

Stephen Duncombe's Zines: The Politics of Alternative Culture is particularly relevant here. Where as Duncombe agrees that cultural resistance is often broken into a diffuse set of objectives who's ability to coalesce outside of its own microsphere is limited by its "anti" sensebilities, he does believe that there is a driving consciousness that, at best, is prefiguratively political. The idea that the alternative culture of zines, self-published journals, web blogs, and the like, lack a cohesive power structure able to make in roads into politics is credible. But in another sense, as Duncombe asserts, there is some hope that a certain type of democratic consciousness could arise out of the ground of these movements. This type of consciousness is the necessary suffocation of the anti-politics of which Carl Boggs speaks. And, this bespeaks the type of public sphere which should have been hoped for from the outset.

[Oct 24] Friday night, Vanilla Coca-cola, the collected works of Mike Davis (of Ecology of Fear/City of Quartz/Magical Urbanism fame) scattered across my desk and I still have yet to accomplish anything substatial on my paper entitled "Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles"--at the end of the day I might just name it something else. I'm struggling with this idea of 'grounded' fear, a solid anxiety rooted deep in society's dominant biases. Racially motivated urban development, political smear campaigning, the "otherization" of America, etc., are the relevant topics within this fear fabric (all within the context of Los Angeles). I seem to write a paragraph here and there but sitting in front of a computer all day entails a number of detours--e.g., websurfing through various Bookmarks like thenation.com, or gaurdian.uk.co, or the NY times site. I've spent substantial time watching the live feeds from the WKLA channel 5 news in California as I was hypnotized by their surreal coverage of the massive fires presently surrounding Los Angeles. Where does all the time go? Well it also went into reading Joseph Conrad's "Youth" whilst listening to a new Engine Down CD and waiting for water to boil, amending(if not changing completely) my previous outline for a paper that was once titled "Global Stage: Re-emergence of the Public Sphere", which I've now decided is doomed--since there is no re-emergence to go on (now the title's become "Cultural Resistance: Democracy of the Alternative Public Sphere" or something like that). Other news...variations of the word blog: Blogosphere, blogability, blogstatic, blogomatic, etc.

[Oct 03] Mogwai played the Metro last night and I feel reassured that my online order to Ticketmaster was well worth the money There was another band, but the name slips me Boas was supposed to open for Mogwai but something must've fell through at the last minute, being that their t-shirts and cd's were For Sale at the front. They played for about 2 hours, maybe a little less, but the over all delivery was pretty tight All in all, it was a good way to end the week--which now culminates with Thursday. Friday always seems to be Day One because that's when I begin working on the next week's readings, assignments, etc. I was happy to have got the first major paper out of the way on Wednesday--looking over it gives me pity for anyone forced to read it. Powershifts: Overconsumptionism and the Age of Reagan. Who would want to read such things? I also continued on with the collection of Latino/Hispanic demographics in the larger Chicago metropolitan area for the Institute.