Drew Tewksbury: Multimedia Journalist » Book Reviews

Violence by Slavoj Žižek

Drew Tewksbury — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:24:27 +0000

In the desolate landscape of philosophy, at the turn of the millennium, one name stands alone: Slavoj Žižek. The cult of personality surrounding the Slovenian philosopher, sociologist, and movie buff, is nearly a halo of intellectualist hype. He is the eccentric rock star of modern philosophy; his presentations are not just mundane academic speeches, but unrivaled performances—a whirlwind of wild gesticulations, myriad pop-culture references, and a subtle foaming at the mouth. His unmatched persona and ability to humanize complex theories about contemporary culture have even landed him on the big and small screens in his extremely entertaining dissection of film, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, and his 2005 documentary, Žižek! His ideas come from a mixed cauldron—Lacanian psychoanalysis, postmodernism, new leftist ideologies, post-Marxism—and now, in Violence, his latest book from Picador’s “Big Ideas/Small Books” series, Žižek takes on the perceptions and the perversions of our notion of violence. He delineates three kinds: subjective (crime), objective (racism/ hate speech), and systemic (the obliteration of economic and political structures)—and investigates the way the media and our culture depict violence. When discussing Time Magazine’s unremarkable article about the four million killed in the Congo, he writes: “The Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradian ‘heart of darkness.’ No one dares to confront it head on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese.”

Žižek’s polemical book flails delightfully through a colorful litany of scholars, historical and contemporary events, and everyday examples ranging from bar-room jokes to waiting in line at Starbucks, proving that Žižek’s vivacity and rapid-fire delivery loses nothing in the transition from live presentation to the page.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Flaunt Magazine, Issue 98 2008

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Dirty Found Magazine

Drew Tewksbury — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 20:27:08 +0000

Dirty Found Magazine

By Drew Tewksbury

Freud was never really interested in dreams.

Instead he was more interested in the way people described their dreams, hoping that somewhere within the coded language of fantasies and fear, he could trace the arc of the human mind. In DIRTY FOUND magazine, however, the arc of desire is explored not through dreams but through found high-school notes, Polaroid crotch shots and twisted grocery lists all assembled into an anthology of anthropornography.

Creator Jason Bitner started the magazine in 2004 as the sordid counterpart to FOUND Magazine, which chronicles more innocuous—yet, no less culturally relevant—discoveries by ephemera collectors across the world. With the third issue to be released in April, DIRTY FOUND #3 depicts the human animal at its most vulnerable; sprawling naked on flannel bedspreads or lifting tank tops on a Lake Havasu houseboat.

“I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, really sheltered,” Bitner says. “It was a typical Mid-west upbringing and when you’re a kid, you don’t really know what’s happening in your town; all the affairs that are going on and all the drama that’s behind people’s doors.”

DIRTY FOUND reveals the sick secrets hiding inside duplexes and behind carports, through Bitner’s assiduous sorting of finds that people send to him. Yet, his first peek into the suburban soap operas in his town occurred during his first job at a local recycling center.

“People would bring in all stuff and mixed in were notes and photos,” Bitner explains. “I didn’t know who they were, but I realized that our town was a lot more complicated than I ever thought. That first experience of going through other people’s stuff was the first glimpse of what was really happening.”

The medium of choice in the magazine is the Polaroid. As the golden hue catches the naked woman’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, these torn photos steal the liminal moments before and after the steamy action. Terry Richardson couldn’t have done it better.

“There’s the magic of watching images appear out of nothing,” Bitner explains, “but I imagine Polaroids were used to document all sorts of acts that people didn’t want to bring to the local photo shop. It’s the same reason that so many people had their own darkrooms back in the day.”

Without negatives, the Polaroid is the camera of passion, driven by the impulse and honesty to the body, equally examining desire and the need to be an object of desire.
But make no mistake, most of these finds are not hot. And at each flip of the page, we encounter everything from granny panties (actually on grannies) to the lonely guy sitting on dorm furniture.

Eschewing the stylized imaginary scenes of pornography, we read the forbidden landscape of real bodies. Deliberating on a fading tattoo. Investigating a c-section scar. Soaking in their skin as maps not only of who they are, but also where they have been.
The Alf poster peering down on the big lady tied to the bedposts, or the wood paneled walls behind the shy woman in the red negligee depict interiors of foreign lands of Wisconsin or Montana. In every clever fold of a nasty note discovered in a high-schooler’s desk, a layer is uncovered in our recollection of adolescence.

The beautifully erratic page layout, falling somewhere between a scrapbook and a bulletin board, augments the vague sense of recognition of these folky fragments of collective memory.

“I think we’re the only magazine out there that doesn’t use any fonts,” Bitner says of the carefully placed of handwritten notes comprising the magazine’s text. Art Director Arthur Jones provides the canvass for the finds in the form of vintage textiles, bathroom floors, and even fishnet stockings.

Jones and Bitner begin the “DIRTY FOUND Outreach Program” on April 13th at Union Pool in Brooklyn, where they will field questions about the dirtiest finds, entertain audience discoveries, and present a nasty PowerPoint presentation celebrating that uncannily awkward sense that maybe one of these perverted pictures could possibly be you.

Punk ’77 by James Stark

Drew Tewksbury — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 20:07:51 +0000

Punk ’77

Review by Drew Tewksbury, Flaunt Magazine, February 2007

Long before T-shirts emblazoned with the sequined likenesses of Johnny Rottens appeared in Hot Topic stores, punk was as a reaction to the commodified rock-’n'-roll culture of which, ironically, it is now a part. In 1977, punk was anything but mall fodder, or at least that’s what James Stark’s book Punk’77 wants us to believe. Juxtaposing black-and-white photos with personal testimonies. Punk ’77 is a lot like a yearbook, an open-faced memoir that lifts the safety-pinned tartan skirt on a San Francisco punk scene struggling with its identity at the convergence of aging hippies, lamé disco suits, and teen ennui. Stark’s photographs illuminate the architecture of a developing scene in which torn denim, exposed clavicles, and padlocked chokers were de rigueur. Images of a young Debbie Harry, looking coy behind oversized sunglasses inside a dark, dilapidated club, Darby Crash, on stage, clenching a fist and holding a snarling note, and Joey Ramone’s kneecaps peeking through ripped jeans, act as details of a larger picture of artistic revolt against an emerging empire of consumer culture. In the spirit of prototypic street photographers Mary Ellen Mark, Diane Arbus, and Weegee, these punk images show adolescence as that fleeting time of malleable identity and experimentation. “Hopefully”, Stark writes “Punk ’77 will give some insight as to why and how people create an identify for themselves and their time.”