Muhammad Ali at 3:AM
Maybe Muhammad Ali came not to destroy boxing but to fulfil it. But he destroyed it nevertheless. Before Ali, boxing was an existentialist art form in the same way as jazz and the blues were existentialist art forms. By existentialist I mean places where people were busy drowning and it was an impertinence to try […]
Monuments of Fire
As far as I can see, I see plastic bags. It is spectacular. I am mortified, and deeply saddened, and ecstatic with bewilderment. And taking brief refuge in abstraction, I remember Sputnik, the Monolith and the Black Square, and I reconsider: perhaps when all is said and done the plastic bag will stand as the most sweeping and poignant icon of human achievement. But the landscape is heavier than metaphor and the air is leaden, draped in a scrim of inscrutability, something other than sadness, sharper than melancholy, and shallower. As if to see through it reveals only more of itself, and what it already is: the exchange of base things, a potlatch of kipple and murmur on the great chain of unending spasm and digestion.
By Jeff Wood.