"Ripped from the Headlines"

Emer Rooney, 33, on the last day of a visit from Ireland, took pictures of the scene. She said that despite the shooting, she had never felt unsafe in New York, noting the presence of “all the police officers.” She cited the shooting, in fact, as one of the more exciting moments of her trip — right up there, she said, with recovering lost luggage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and getting tickets to “Wicked.”


James Barron, ["In Holiday Crush, a Fatal Shootout in Times Sq.", The New York Times, December 11, 2009]

Adorno: Perennial Fashion-Jazz

"Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows."


Theodor W. Adorno [Perennial Fashion-Jazz, 1953]