Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • Julian, California: The Museum of Reality

    Driving up and down the southern California coast between Los Angeles and the Mexican border, every town looked the same. Most everywhere in America it is like this. “Reality” has been reduced to a cloned instantiation from a formula: replicated instances of the same shopping malls, supermarkets, mega-stores, and chain restaurants everywhere you go.

  • On the trail of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek in the American Desert

    OBJECTS IN THIS MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. We understand Baudrillard to be a unique thinker – perhaps one of the half-dozen greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. America is a milestone work of social commentary about the USA by a French author, in the same tradition as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

  • General Patton Memorial Museum

    General Patton Memorial Museum 62-510 Chiriaco Road, Chiriaco Summit, California 92201 “A Military History Museum With Exhibits from World War I through the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars And our Tank Yard with Armored Vehicles from World War II through Vietnam.”

  • Authentic Existence in Heidegger’s “Being and Time”

    In his excellent essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time, my nephew James Shapiro argues (among other things) that Heidegger gives little content to or explanation of what he means by authentic being. Jamie said that he was influenced in formulating this view by one of his philosophy professors at Boston University, Daniel Dahlstrom.

  • On Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, by James Shapiro

    Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is a work primarily concerned with the explication and understanding of the specific brand of existence and consciousness that is unique to man—or perhaps stated more succinctly, what it means to be a human being. This unique human existence Heidegger calls Dasein.

  • Pietro Mussini: A habitat of an interlocked nature, by Franco Torriani

    Pietro Mussini: A habitat of an interlocked nature, by Franco Torriani (published in book form by Edizioni Diabasis, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2010) (English translation by Julian Delens) How far can an artistic practice really produce, and place in a given space and time, place-unrelated objects (in respect to a given place), it’s an underlaying matter…