The Gutter Art Critic

                November 1989. Prague. The Berlin Wall came down just a few short weeks prior and a few hundred students are marching from the top of Vysehrad hill toward Wenceslas Square. At some point the group is seen to diverge from its set path. The theory is that a plain clothes secret police officer had ingratiated himself in the front of the group and with the explicit order to lead the students into a narrow corridor where the police, suited up in riot gear, was waiting. Blindsighted, the students marched, believing that in a just a few hours they will be home in their beds after making their voices heard. What followed was a televised spectacle of violence as the riot police in white helmets corralled the crowd into a narrow pedestrian underpassage where each protester could be individually beaten in a kind of a medieval gauntlet. Busted heads and knocked out teeth. Dubbed the Velvet Revolution, the 1989 uprising against the oppressive government was anything but. It was pe

While we may have been wrong and unnecessarily hopeful about Bernie Sanders the presidential candidate, there is perhaps one ‘good’ outcome from the fiasco that has become the Sanders presidential campaign, The Myth of Bernie . Long story short, the myth suggests that it is better to be a failed presidential candidate (with its mythical and fantasmatic core preserved) than a failed president. The unfulfilled potential of the candidate cannot be taken in the same light as the unfulfilled promises of an acting president. We may now forever sit and debate ‘what would’ve been’ had Sanders won. The mythmaking process was kicked off properly in 2016 on the heels of the Democratic National Convention when Bernie Sanders was effectively pushed out by the Democratic party to make way for Hillary Clinton (herself a mythologized figure inside the Clinton supporter camp). The recent events saw a replay of 2016, though the Sanders campaign was, from the very beginning, already much weaker than it

Why is the US so in love with its military? Following the first Democratic debate, the name Tulsi Gabbard became the most searched keyword on Google.   Why?   The first obvious answer is that she is new, doesn’t appear to be in the pockets of some elite corporation, yet, and did really well rebuffing her opponents’ ridiculous claims about Afghanistan, the Taliban and 9/11.   She was also smart or savvy enough to appear on Joe Rogan a few weeks ago, garnering millions of views..   So why is it that despite all this attention she also appears to have no answers to the issues of class, income inequality, the wealth gap, student debt and the massive credit debt, among other pressing mainstream issues like the environment, race and gender issues, and so on.   Her answer seem to be a rather flat, ‘I’m military, I know what it’s like to be in the military, protracted wars are silly, send everybody home.’   Granted, the trillions the US spends on proxy wars is precisely one of the bigg

The zombie apocalypse is already here and it’s happening, though not as fast as the movies tell us. Something is afoot, but nobody seems to know precisely what.   Social and news media warn us of impending disaster, financial, ecological, environmental, from space.   During the 20 th century, science supplanted religion in doom-saying and prosyletizing of the end of days.   According to mainstream scientific research, we will have entered a point of no return on climate change by 2050.   Prognoses of mass extinction events are a matter of when, not if.   No longer do we rely on dates painstakingly teased out of the Bible, but on algorithms in tech and finance to tell us how to adjust our attitudes to global catastrophe, how to prepare for widespread networks failure and disintegration of all that currently is.   It’s easier to get behind numbers than to rely on notions of faith.   Y2K was averted and these days most don’t really remember the event itself or the lead-up to it.   In