#david watson

[majestativa]

Who could ever understand the world? Its four-leaved clovers? Wasn’t the world itself monstrous, weren’t we its glorious rotting abscesses?

— ALINA REYES ⚜️ The Butcher, transl. by David Watson, (1995)

[citizenscreen]

Popular Western series “Rawhide” premiered on CBS #OnThisDay in 1959. Pictured: Raymond St. Jacques, Clint Eastwood, and David Watson.

[tyforthevnm]

My Chemical Romance at The Outer Fields, Auckland, NZ on March 11, 2023 | David Watson for The 13th Floor

[sacredwhores]

Mike Haggerty - Black Sex Party (1986)

[jgthirlwell]

01.12.26 Shoko Nagai and David Watson at the Striped Light series at the Flux Factory in Long Island City, Queens.

[forbidden-sorcery]

The revolution remains beyond our reach. Our revolutionary desire must squarely face the fact that disaster itself tends to fuel the system that generates it, which means that we must abandon the pathetic hope that perhaps this latest horror will be the signal that turns the tide (as Chernobyl was supposed to be, and Bhopal). In Where The Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak points to “the great paradox of the technological mystique: its remarkable ability to grow strong by virtue of chronic failure. While the treachery of our technology may provide many occasions for disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence on technical expertise”.

David Watson - Stopping The Industrial Hydra

[gatutor]

Kim Hunter-David Watson "Regreso al planeta de los simios" (Beneath the planet of the apes) 1970, de Ted Post.

[meatthawsmoth]

“Bookchin’s attitude about writing is particularly uninformed. ‘Inasmuch as a written language did not appear until well into historical times,’ he says, ‘the languages of early peoples were hardly “conceptually profound.”‘ (SALA; 39) But the anthropological record is abundant with testimony on the complexity of language and significance among primal peoples encountered by explorers. Darwin was astonished to discover that the Patagonian indigens he encountered, who had few tools and went nearly naked, had an involved language with some thirty thousand words. Perhaps Bookchin doesn’t consider the Australian notion of songlines of the Dreamtime to be as conceptually profound as Aristotelian entelechy, but that is only a preference.

.... The absence of alphabetic writing, he argues, ‘not only severely limited the scope of the cultural landscape of early times, but even fostered hierarchy.’.... That writing was a threat to power was a ‘fact shrewdly known to ruling elites and especially to priesthoods, who retained stringent control over literacy and confined a knowledge of writing to ‘clerks’ or clerics.” (RS: 79) By this extraordinary logic, writing is more democratic than the oral tradition - evidenced by the control over writing exercised by early states, a control they could never have imposed over orality.

Stanley Diamond shatters this mystique, noting that written history was not an act of the repressed and enslaved but of the oppressors and conquerors, and the initial purpose of writing ‘to keep tax, census, and other administrative records; it was, in short, an instrument for the recording of official histories written by bureaucrats.’ .... It would surely be inane to recommend abandoning writing, but to repeat the same old imperial tale of the intrinsic superiority of writing at a time when myriad languages of tribal peoples are yearly disappearing, is truly repugnant. That the oral tradition is and was conceptually (and poetically) profound is confirmed by the fact alone that Homer essentially only recorded what had been recited for generations.”

- David Watson, Beyond Bookchin