BenGodot

This is what Jersey City may soon look like

Above is 499.SUMMIT’s design for a skyscraper prison. Working in tandem with a devil train and a weak sun filtering through city’s the burdened clouds, the plan intends to decrease recidivism rates in New Jersey.

Here’s another view of the prison, from outside Papo’s Bail Bonds, with a lost New York City cab (or disguised getaway car?) in front:

Excerpts from the diaries of Garrett Jackson

       Mitt Romney (left) and Garrett Jackson (right)

April 2, 2012: “While at the call center, the Gov and Congressman Ryan were giving me grief for a new, colorful sport coat I was wearing. The Gov called me over to help take a photo for someone, mentioning out loud that I was a pro with cameras. The Congressman quipped back that I may be good with cameras, but I was not good at picking out jackets. Everyone started laughing and I told them how Congressman Ryan had mentioned to me earlier that it reminded him of his couch from college. The Gov chimed in, ‘We were wondering where that couch had gone!’ It was quite an embarrassing moment, especially with all of the cameras rolling.”

March 21, 2012: “For a guy who is celebrating his 43rd wedding anniversary, the Gov sure hasn’t wasted any time today getting to work here in Maryland.”

March 20, 2012: “This was the second time the Gov has participated in a hangout—the first was a few months ago in South Carolina.”

February 27, 2011: “Mila Kunis..enough said”

On the subject on Tumblring…

It has been twenty-four years, two months, and nineteen days since Cleveland Browns running back Earnest Byner fumbled at the two-yard line in the 1988 AFC Championship Game against the Denver Broncos. (Special thanks to ConvertUnit.com’s Date Calculator for that calculation. The Date Calculator uses the Gregorian calendar. It takes into account leap days, but it cautions against “entering years before 1753.”)

This fumble has since been referred to as The Fumble. The Wikipedia page on The Fumble received a Start-Class grade from the National Football League WikiProject’s quality scale, which means that “the majority of readers will need more.” (The Wikipedia page for 2000 New York Jets third-round draft pick Laveranues Leon Coles is cited by the National Football League WikiProject as an exemplar of Start-Class quality.)

The Fumble occurred with seventy-two seconds left to the game, when Byner was tackled by Broncos defensive back Jeremiah Castille, whose Wikipedia page received Stub-Class ratings from the Biography WikiProject, the College Football WikiProject, and the Alabama WikiProject—but on which topic the National Football League WikiProject has remained silent. According to the National Football League WikiProject, the National Football League WikiProject Wikipedia page “does not require a rating.”

Here are Castille (left) and Byner (right) after The Fumble:

ConvertUnit.com also boasts a How Many Days Calculator. There are fifty-two Fridays in 2012, and fifty-three Mondays.

It has been almost four months since I last Tumblr’d

It has been one week since I last tumbled. It was in the citrus aisle of a Whole Foods.

Photo Essay

A “doughface” is one who bends easily to political pressure; doughfacedom has at its root indecision and timidity, not opportunism. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce are famous examples of doughfaces.

Mitt Romney, for example, would likely not be called a doughface, as his ideological shifts are more cunning than desultory. Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, might well have been so determined—had he been born a century earlier, when the term was in its prime.

Instead, during the 1976 election, the word-of-choice for Carter was “flip-flopper”—essentially the opposite of a doughface, within this limited spectrum. Perhaps this speaks to a shift in political demonization over the past century and a half: where once infantilization was the readiest means of blighting an opponent’s comportment, accusations of exploitative politicking now are.

Virginian Senator John Randolph, from which the conservative-libertarian John Randolph Club takes its name, coined the phrase; the John Randolph Club has recently expressed particular distaste for noted flip-flopper John Kerry.

Randolph often brought a coterie of slaves and hunting dogs with him to the Senate. Henry Clay, with whom Randolph had earlier founded the American Colonization Society, challenged the Virginian to a duel in 1826, after he delivered what Merrill D. Peterson called “perhaps the most offensive speech ever heard.” An August 4, 1856 New York Times article on the bout may be found here.

From Amazon.com’s description of Freedom:

Freedom is … a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund … make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues—among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock’n’roll—and in some ways can’t be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other.

From FNAC.fr’s description of Freedom (in translation from the French):

Freedom is the story of a love triangle, and it captures the emotional, moral, and political climate of the United States between 1970 and 2010 with incredible virtuosity.… It is also the fiercest indictment of what has become of America that we’ve seen in a long time. But [Franzen’s] greatest achievement is undoubtedly the character of Patty. A Satrian heroine in a novel by Tolstoy, she seeks to free herself—but of what?

I don’t know how to respond to these images—and my discomfort in turn becomes repentance: it feels like a rebuke to those who were oppressed by his regime, and who continue to be oppressed by the structural intransigence left in the aftermath of his reign. It can feel petty and glib to question the ethics of punishment in such instances, no matter its necessity.

Here are some more cages:

This grainy photograph is of an early-twentieth century prison cage, which was rediscovered in 1996 in the backyard of the Angus Barn restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina; no one knows how long it was there. It was once used to transfer inmates between prisons; three to four mules were required to carry the burden. The man inside the prison cage is, I believe, an officer at the Alexander Correctional Center, where the prison cage was sent to be refurbished.

This is cage fighting. The above image comes from an article in the Guardian; the caption reads, “Do violent sports help to channel pent-up aggression?”

I believe that the gentleman on the right is being held in an underhook, and is being punched in the face.

In 2007, Gregor Schneider installed 21 Beach Cells on Bondi Beach, New South Wales. Schneider won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale in 2001. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Schneider said, “This is art in the age of global terrorism.” Art collector John Kaldor believed at the time that the project would be as memorable as Jeff Koons’ Puppy.

This is the panopticon of the Illinois State Penitentiary. Leopold and Loeb were imprisoned here; this is also where serial killer John Wayne Gacy, born not far from actor John Wayne, was executed. It is not to be mistaken for the Joliet Correctional Center, which Bob Dylan references in “Percy’s Song,” which did not make it to the final cut of The Times They Are A-Changing.

Cage is the name Chris Palko uses when he raps. He is also part of the hip-hop group the Weathermen, named after the Weather Underground. In 1969, members of the Weather Underground staged what they referred to as “jailbreaks”; according to a pamphlet excerpted in a November 11, 1969, article of the Harvard Crimson, the intention behind these demonstrations was to “liberate kids from the racist pig lies which are forced on them in the jails known as schools.” Shia LaBeouf has said that he would like to portray Palko in a biopic of the rapper.

This is a parrot cage. According to the website on which this is advertised, “it is well to keep in mind that a cage is also a home.”

This outdoor cage was created by a Sims player and displayed on a Sims message board. On the message board, the outdoor cage was met with great acclaim.

Serial killer Alexander Pichushkin spent the entirety of his trial in a glass cage; it is unclear how much time this guard spent resting against its vent. Pichushkin was nicknamed “the chessboard killer” because he claimed to have killed sixty-three people, and there are sixty-four squares on a chessboard; the connection is not airtight.

John Cage and Marcel Duchamp used to play chess, together and separately. Duchamp, of course, loved chess; he began playing professionally in 1918, and by the 1930s believed that he had reached the height of his abilities, which was well below his aspirations. Duchamp is reported to have been very disappointed in Cage’s abilities as a chess player; according to Sylvère Lotringer, Cage only won one game against Duchamp: the performance Reunion. But Lotringer is using “won” liberally here: it was in an artistic sense that Cage won; in a chess game–sense, no one won.