Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) by director Walter Ruttmann

We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

From the Life of the Marionettes, Ingmar Bergman (1980)

Carlo Nangeroni, Elementi in movimento, 1972
Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.

The rise of Barcelona to prominence among the cities of Europe has been “in part based on its steady amassing of symbolic capital and its accumulation of marks of distinction” from its architectural heritage to its Catalan history. These unique qualities are a source of rents for the tourist industry, which brings homogenizing commodification in its wake, so that “The later phases of waterfront development look like every other in the western world: the stupefying congestion of the traffic leads to pressures to put boulevards through parts of the old city, multinational stores replace local shops … and Barcelona loses some of its marks of distinction.”

Tom Slee, What's Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy

by Shuji Terayama / 寺山修司
From the book: われに五月を