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Jim Merricks recommends stories worth reading on QUOTE.fm. Sign up to follow Jim’s recommendations.

Jim Merricks

Jim Merricks

Jim is from Leeds, UK. You can find Jim’s tweets at and website at www.smultronsamhallet.com.

Critical geographer. Rugby boffin. Scifi fanboy.

Jim Merricks
In the instant case these parasitical mutants of society, the masters of exploitation and experts of deception, the epitome of greed has bolstered their arrogant delusions of being untouchable to the point that they have rendered themselves completely vulnerable to the very court system that they rely upon to execute leverage against their victims. Watch as the veil is pulled back exposing the bitterly ugly evil that is this Copyright Troll.
Estimated reading time: 2 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks owned

    November 15, 2012
Jim Merricks
Contemporary Art faces a potentially terminal crisis. Contemporary Art has sold itself as a non-specific, expanding, universal non-genre, much as neo-liberalism passed itself off as the natural state of things. The realisation that Contemporary Art is in fact a time-limited historical period, that can end, is a radical moment. But it's an idea that's gathering momentum.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Kulendran Thomas. Between occupy and the new aesthetic, it would seem art is struggling to find a new temporality for itself.

    May 14, 2012
Jim Merricks
The truth is that consumer products are ‘new’ for a very brief moment when they are first removed from the packaging, but spend the great majority of their useful lives as ‘used’ products in the process of decay. Many welcome the breaking-in of products like a leather wallet or a pair of jeans as this wear can be aesthetically-pleasing. The Japanese have a term for this, “Wabi-sabi”. Wabi-sabi can be used to describe the aesthetically pleasing wear of an object as it decays over time.
Estimated reading time: 2 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Here's to wabi-sabi and the elegant ageing of consumer products.

    April 12, 2012
  2. Markus Reuter

    Markus Reuter Here is a blog post about wbai-sabi by me: bettertastethansorry.com/2011/03/wabi-sabi/ And the docu within the blog post is really really good.

    April 12, 2012
  3. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Great post!

    I like wabi-sabi, but struggle a little bit sometimes with the fetishisation of the rustic aesthetic. On one hand, you have the furniture of Kaare Klint. Klint scratched, scarred and sanded his pieces to give it them an aged look. This fake-antique has an atemporal appeal but is completely disingenuous; the furniture was always expensive and has spent little time outside galleries. On the other hand, there's hagi ware bowls. These were made imperfectly but with a very particular function in mind: tea ceremonies. For some reason we take comfort in holding a warm, oddly shaped ceramic bowl. Hagi ware feels genuine, perhaps because our human hands are similarly scratched and marred. www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=isch&q=hagi%20ware&biw=1096&bih=806

    April 13, 2012
Jim Merricks
Van Driel has produced an enthusiastic, amusing and eye-opening exploration of a topic which remains disappointingly taboo. Given the lack of previous exploratory literature about masturbation, it becomes the seminal text on the subject almost by default - but it deserves to hold that baton firmly on its own strengths.
Estimated reading time: 3 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Jokes man, jokes.

    April 11, 2012
Jim Merricks
One thing the historical record makes abundantly clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Yasha Levine. Lovely.

    April 9, 2012
Jim Merricks
For “The Wall Street Journal” reviewer, Brian Anderson, Commonwealth is a dark, evil book. For Francis Fukuyama, it is dangerous. Their fear has very good reasons. We urgently need evil and dangerous books.
Estimated reading time: 11 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Gigi Roggero on Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth.

    April 1, 2012
Jim Merricks
Co-publishing with postgrad students requires extra care given assymetries of power and privilege. As a rule of thumb, my policy is *always* ask the postgrad student to be first author if the material is dervived from their thesis project, no matter how much the paper is transformed and re-worked from its original material. No ifs and buts. Let they who did the legwork and they who have most to gain be named first. End of story.
Estimated reading time: 2 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Ah, words of wisdom from Robin Kearns!

    March 29, 2012
Jim Merricks
Margaret Thatcher, as played by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, explains what she would do as prime minister: "Crush the working class, crush the scum, the yobs." At least that is a scene from a pirated version of the film in Russia, which has been inadvertently reviewed by one of the country's top film critics without realising that some rather pointed changes to the script had been made. The pirated Russian translation of the film, voiced over in a monotone by one man, depicts Thatcher as a bloodthirsty, Hitler-admiring leader, whose fondest desire is to destroy the working class.
Estimated reading time: 2 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Too funny.

    March 19, 2012
Jim Merricks
We are indeed living in an interesting age when it is socially accepted, even prestigious, to fake an authentic experience. We have come a long way from frowning at the Italian pavilion at Epcot center with all its fake kitsch. Today’s simulacra are tasteful and only kitsch as an ironic statement. Very postmodern.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Neuvofaux.

    March 17, 2012
Jim Merricks
I’m starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?
Estimated reading time: 13 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Ethan Zuckerman on the Kony 2012 campaign.

    March 14, 2012
Jim Merricks
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Estimated reading time: 1 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks Banksy on advertising and culture jamming.

    March 6, 2012
Jim Merricks
"The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures." This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing. But it's historically bound up with more pressing worries about the fate of one's own civilisation
Estimated reading time: 9 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks On ruin porn. I read an interesting article recently about the art spaces flourishing in Detroit. There is something liminal about decay that hints and social and political renewal.

    February 29, 2012
Jim Merricks
In the dash to digital dazzle, something odd happened. We left open the door to the future and here got up and left. Here doesn’t live here anymore. Here is derived from Old English her “in this place, where one puts himself.” So what happens when you are not actually in this place where you put yourself? What happens is that as here goes there, you can lose your place.
Estimated reading time: 7 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks The dissolving dialectic of self/place. This article doesn't over-romanticise either, which is refreshing.

    February 24, 2012
Jim Merricks
If memory serves, globalization was sold as an opportunity to export the First World economy and conditions, not import a Third World standard for workers.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
  1. Jim Merricks

    Jim Merricks A reductionist statement and one that itself reflects bad politics. But this is something we are increasingly going to hear from both extremes of the political left and right.

    February 24, 2012
Jim Merricks
A year ago, Tahrir Square was filled with hundreds of thousands of people chanting, "The army and the people are one hand!" They waved banners and Egyptian flags and hoisted their children on top of military tanks in praise of an army that sided with them by letting Mubarak fall. But today, many Egyptians see the military as an impediment to a better world.
Estimated reading time: 8 min
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