Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I mentioned recently that whenever I come back to the US (I'm writing from Chicago), I enjoy immersing myself in this country's rich cultural history. This, for example:

My friends imagined that I was joking, that I was being my usual haughty, hi-culture, Europhile self. How can I get the message across? No matter how often I attempt to explain this, no one believes me: I am essentially a lo-culture kind of guy. Or, rather, I deny the legitimacy of the distinction. I do not believe that there is anything more earnest in Ernstkultur than in Unterhaltung. I believe, quite the contrary, that culture bubbles up from the depths, and that its genius is equally distributed across all places and times. And I have no patience, either, for these incessant reminders that Brahms incorporated Slavonic folk dances into his music, or that Copland was influenced by jazz; to those who bring this up I can only reply: don't waste my time, then, but give me Slavonic folk dances, and give me jazz.

What gives the appearance of some monopoly on genius to the sort of cultural output that is housed in museums and Lincoln Plaza and so on is just this: that brainless one-percenters are spending huge amounts of money to put their names on these monuments, and the brainless bourgeoisie makes pilgrimages to them, spending medium sums of money to have a brush with cultural objects that supposedly edify by their simple proximity. The illusion that genius is stored up in sites of high culture is sustained by capital and by the laziness and gullibility of culture's consumers: all the season-ticket holders, all the dupes of the museums' advertising departments, for their part driven ever further, under the compulsion of capital, to make the Ottoman sultan's throne, or medieval armor, or Greco-Bactrian statuary, look like so many things to buy– passing them off as a special class of objects, museum objects, that you can buy in a way just by going and standing in front of them.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get back to Eefin and Hambone. I remarked to a friend (who, again, thought I was joking), that what we are witnessing here (and in general are always witnessing on Hee Haw, the show that perhaps more than any other shaped my earliest thoughts about what culture is and how it works) is a performance of musical virtuosity that unites feigned cretinism with real genius (i.e., not the kind that's only sustained by capital).

More here.

Yaminay Nasir Chaudhri of the Tentative Collective in Creativetime Reports:

This November, the Tentative Collective’s project Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema began gathering cell phone videos from migrants living in Karachi. Produced in response to the question, “Home: What did you do last Sunday—anything fun?” the videos provide snapshots into migrant life in Pakistan’s largest city. When a substantial number of videos has been compiled, we will ask the community to help set up a series of free screenings in various parts of Karachi, using our rickshaw-powered projector to feature every video made by neighborhood residents…

The first communities we are working with are comprised of migrants from Bangladesh and Burma (including many of the persecuted Rohingya minority) and rural Pashtun migrants from the northern areas of Pakistan. Embedded within the Bengali/Burmese community are muhajirs (literally, “migrants”): Urdu-speaking Muslims who arrived from India after partition in 1947, and their descendants. Though the inception of Pakistan was based on the self-governance of a Muslim majority, inclusivity for Muslim migrants, and a space for minorities, the reality of Pakistan is riddled with ethnic and class complexities that divide the land into isolated zones and enclaves. This division extends to the public space surrounding these enclaves—whether they are irregular communities like the ones we are working in, or highly formalized, planned spaces.

More here. And here is one of the videos: