Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration. Unemployment obliterates the world of the unemployed individual. Cultural underdevelopment of the worker, as a technique of domination, is found everywhere under late capitalism. Authentic self-domination by individuals is thwarted. The false consciousness created and catered to by mass culture perpetuates ignorance and powerlessness. Strands of raven hair floating on the surface of the Ganges . . . Why can’t they clean up the Ganges? If the wealthy capitalists who operate the Ganges wig factories could be forced to install sieves, at the mouths of their plants . . . And now the sacred Ganges is choked with hair, and the river no longer knows where to put its flow, and the moonlight on the Ganges is swallowed by the hair, and the water darkens. By Vishnu! This is an intolerable situation! Shouldn’t something be done about it?
From Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Rise of Capitalism.”
Apparently nothing is more simple than to paint a rag-picker, a beggar or any other kind of workman; but there are no subjects which are so difficult to paint as these everyday figures. I do not think there is a single academy where one can learn to draw or paint a man digging or sowing seed, a woman hanging a pot over the fire or doing needlework. But in every city, however insignificant it may be, there is an academy with a whole selection of models for historical, Arabian, and in short, all kinds of figures, which do not exist in the real everyday world of Europe.
From a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother.
Brando’s Smile, a biography by Susan L. Mizruchi. Publisher’s blurb:
Susan Mizruchi presents the Marlon Brando you’ve never met.
When people think about Marlon Brando they think of the movie star; the hunk; the scandals. Susan L. Mizruchi finds the Brando others have missed: the man who collected four thousand books; the man who rewrote scripts, trimming his lines to make them sharper; the man who consciously used his body and employed the objects around him to create believable characters; the man who used his fame to foster Indian and civil rights. From Brando’s letters, audiotapes, and annotated screenplays and books—many never before available—Mizruchi gives us a complex person whose intelligence belies the high-school dropout. She shows how Brando’s embrace of foreign cultures and outsiders led to brilliant performances in unusual roles—a gay man, an Asian, and a German soldier—to foster empathy on a global scale and to test himself. In portraying a fuller Brando, Mizruchi portrays an even more fascinating man.
Biblioklept 