MUSEUM FATIGUE

Things to Remember From the COVID Spring #4: Tic-Tac-Toe

March 24, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

When I look back on today from sometime in the future. I don’t want to remember The President’s shameful sideshow, the news of an increasing number of layoffs, and the growing nervousness that the number of deaths will grow. I don’t want to remember how the US National government, dismantled all these years by “small government” Republicans, selfish no-new-tax mutherfuckers, and currently led by a reality TV star, didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. I especially don’t want to remember […]

Categories: COVID Spring • Tags: Care, neighbors

Things to Remember From the COVID Spring #3: The Avengers Can’t Save Us

March 23, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Americans are restless. We are always doing something. Always working. Always busy. Being busy is a virtue. How many jobs have I had where even if there was a pause in the work my boss would admonish me to “look busy.” Moving, hustling, starting up, making shit happen. America is all offense. Hit them before you get hit. Even our defense is offense: build so many weapons that nobody would dare mess with you. Americans invented superheroes—a modern pantheon of […]

Categories: COVID Spring • Tags: Americans, superheroes

Things To Remember From The COVID Spring #2: Masks

March 22, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

When this whole mess is over I want to remember the shortages of masks for medical workers. At the moment when it looks like cases of COVID-19 are going to explode and overwhelm some medical systems, Forbes Magazine has printed directions for volunteers to sew masks for frontline medical workers. A local nurses’ association is organizing an N95 mask donation drive. Last night my spouse spent hours trying to negotiate transnational supply relationships to locate sources of masks even at […]

Categories: COVID Spring • Tags: healthcare, masks

Things to Remember From The COVID Spring #1: Public Relations

March 21, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

I think it is worth remembering that an obsession with public relations and authoritarian information management got us into this mess. The Chinese government silenced the doctors that first identified the Coronavirus and tamped down the free flow of information through censorship and propaganda. The Trump administration spent weeks downplaying Covid-19 as “just another flu” and were “worried about the numbers.” Even now some organizations are obsessed with controlling the message and making sure people don’t speak their minds. This […]

Categories: COVID Spring • Tags: COVID-19, propaganda, public relations

Things to Remember From the COVID Spring

March 21, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

It’s pretty crazy how fast things have changed. Schools closed. Businesses closed. People staying home. Folks getting laid off. The stock market dropping perciptiously. A few months ago the Coronavirus was far off in Wuhan, now it could be anywhere. I’ve been glued to my phone for information about the explosive spread of the virus across the US while life has quickly been transformed. At the same time I have been typing notes in my phone, writing things down and […]

Categories: COVID Spring

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So This is What Living In History Feels Like

March 18, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday I stopped to realize that this moment is a historic moment. We suddenly find ourselves living in one of those times when the taken-for-granted seemingly immutable ways our culture functions are unmasked for the human constructs they are. It’s scary and disorienting. Historically, times like this are often deadly for many people, so we must be observant, curious, vigilant and give care. Times like this are also, however, moments when other possibilities can become imaginable. When I can I […]

Categories: COVID Spring

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Why I Have a Strict Attendance Policy in My College Classroom

February 28, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

In recent months I have been at a number of meetings on campus where negative comments have been made by some about professors who have strict attendance policies in our college classrooms. The comments I have heard suggest that the speakers consider strict attendance policies for our college students as inflexible, unreasonable and, invoking the nuclear option of argumentation, incompatible with this generation of students. Once again, yesterday, comments along these lines were made in a meeting I attended, and […]

Categories: Higher Education • Tags: absences, attendance

…but what About the Sea Turtles?

February 26, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday in this semester’s anthropology senior seminar, Anthropology at the End of Worlds, we had an interesting discussion about the popular predilection of humans to be concerned with “saving animals” as a response to being confronted with the complexities of the climate crisis. In fact, at one point we suggested that the concern with specific species might actually be a feel-good distraction from addressing the more challenging systemic issues that are the foundation of the climate crisis. After all, cute, charismatic species offer […]

Categories: Anthropocene • Tags: "the intrusion of Gaia", David Wallace-Wells, Isabelle Stengers, Peter Brannen

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Experiences All The Way Down

February 24, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Just before nine o’clock last evening, I received an email notification that I book I ordered from Amazon had been delivered to a shipment locker not so far from my home. In what I hope was a self-referential joke on the nature of capital, its name was “Vlad” no less! Since I had just finished my most recent book and was looking forward to adding the new arrival to the pile next to my favorite chair, I decided to head […]

Categories: Consumption, Uncategorized • Tags: Amazon, experiences

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And a Drone Shall Be the Sign

February 22, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

A few weeks back when the COVID-19 Coronavirus really hit the news, I was fascinated to see an outbreak in the news of drone stories coming from China. Over the past few years the drone has become a kind of, pardon the pun, a floating signifier for all that is rational, automated and “unmanned” about modernity in China. Never mind that drones loaded with disinfectant chemicals flying around “fighting the Coronavirus” are of limited value and probably not too good for […]

Categories: Surveillance • Tags: Coronavirus, COVID-19, drones

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