a cloud and a vent
i spent 10 hours in a hospital waiting room on wednesday while my father underwent heart surgery. it was an experimental procedure of sorts because it hadn’t been done on the east coast before. the doctor who pioneered the procedure flew in to over-see and a whole group of doctors watched. they video taped it to use as a teaching aid. supposedly in time they’ll be able to perform it in a couple of hours. this time though my father was under anesthesia for over 8 hours. combine that with the pain drugs and he’s having a hard time recovering. anyhow point is i haven’t really been able to focus. been under a bit of a cloud ever since.
the procedure was successful evidently. no complications. time will tell whether it actually worked to stop his heart ablations. that’s all that can be said on that score. i’m confident that once the pain subsides a little he’ll be o.k.
as for hospitals…
my god. what awful places. spending any length of time in a hospital (as a visitor, never mind as a patient) is like setting off a psychic bunker-buster in your skull. the grandaddy of all human fears permeates every surface no matter how clinically decorated, no matter how thoroughly disinfected. stainless steal and glossy white tile are no match for its corrosion. pain and worry hang in a cloud beneath the fluorescent lights like heavy, sour, incense smoke. everywhere you look there are strange apparatuses which you feel sure are of medieval origin only gussied up with plastic coatings and blinking lights. “surely those should have no contact with a human body!” you find yourself thinking.
the population of staff are necessarily cool and aloof. you can see them engaged in their own merry making in the halls, breaking off into cliques in the cafeteria, bored or annoyed like everyone is in their own workplace. walking among the throngs of men and women in scrubs gives you the feeling of being in a foreign city where you don’t know the language and are always somewhat lost. in the back of your mind you know that one wrong turn and you’ll find yourself in a bad neighborhood; a neighborhood in which even an accidental glance at a denizen would cause instant heartbreak.
the waiting rooms are like bus station terminals. the people… well what can you say about the people?
vent
they are like people everywhere, by and large ugly and infuriating. for every anxious but civilized person flipping quietly through a magazine, immersed in their own private worry, there are 20 who help yet again to lower your opinion of humanity. loud, hideous, obnoxious, people who make themselves heard and seen in a place where by all rights, if they had any dignity or sense, they’d do their best to become invisible. the bursts of asinine sounds which escape them manages to irritate even more than the constant chatter of television ads which are so completely out of place. i suppose they serve a purpose now that i think about it. i mean they do distract you from your anxiety long enough for you to fantasize about strangling them, about them being whisked away to the strangulation unit leaving the people who know how to behave in peace.
/vent
all in all a rotten place to spend time in any capacity. my father’s still there and my thoughts are with him so blogging is, well, you know.
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preposterous bullshite or potential breakthrough?
what’s missing from this picture? yes, that’s right, the huge ground-cloud from some good ol’ fashioned newtonian friendly thrust. roger shawyer, managing director of the u.k.‘s satellite propulsion research (spr ltd.), has been trying for a few years now to side step the need for such massive raw thrust with tests on a prototype of what could possibly be the worlds first true reactionless drive, called the emdrive. the prototype has been greeted with much
skepticism, reactionless drives essentially being akin to that historical mainstay of quackery- perpetual motion machines. shawyer is not your average backyard junk-heap inventor and though the emdrive completely violates newton’s third law the math of the emdrive’s microwave propulsion is evidently o.k. and the prototype is actually producing thrust. pretty interesting. for more detail on the science check out the stories at eureka and the engineer. what do you think? path to anti-grav volkswagens or more poundage on the dookie pile?
pictures of spring
shunga (??), translated literally as picture of spring, are the category of Japanese ukiyo-e prints dealing with the explicitly erotic. shunga were produced between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century by the “floating world” painters (essentially all the painters of the period, including the masters, since shunga sold so well). Japanese shunga prints were bought for several reasons. One was certainly for the fun of viewing sexually stimulating erotic images. But they served also for the sexual education of young men and women. interesting. here are some links for your viewing pleasure: greg kucera gallery (via), princesstiara’s page, sumisho gallery, ukiyoe gallery, akantiek, degener, and things japanese. obviously nsfw.
slaves to scale
scale. isn’t it a bitch? always a human at human scale with human scale perceptions. sheesh. at some point in our distant history i suppose our scale must have proven beneficial. you know, big enough to slay a dragon, small enough to live in the belly of a whale if the need arose. or to put it another way- tall enough to see over the high grasses and spot predators, short enough to dwell comfortably in a cave. it seems to me though at some point the story of human history turned into a struggle against our human scale. too big to be able to sustain a population of 8 trillion or see the quark-gluon interaction inside a proton, but too small to poke out a hurricane’s eye or see wether we’ve got any neighbors in the universe so we can wave to them from our front porches. scale’s a bitch i tell you.
it seems to me that scale is really everything. we are a certain size in proportion to everything else. our perception of that everything else- the world, the universe- and even of ourselves has been shaped in large part by our scale. why for example did we believe so many seemingly odd, hysterical, and bizarre things and for so long? well, because we couldn’t see things clearly enough to make sensible observations. right?
for example george santayana had this to say about our grandaddies “the ancients”-
The ancients saw and imagined everything on the human scale. For them the terms of thought were obvious and unquestioned: either gross physical objects, with their observable habits, or else the categories and the passions of the human mind, as grammar or poetry might distinguish them. As for the unknown, they conceived it mythologically, by projecting into nature and enlarging to a divine scale these same human terms, and peopling the infinite with optical images, verbal powers, and invisible images, verbal powers, and invisible persons. What wonder if they felt at home, and thought they had discerned the true fact of reality, by inspection in the foreground and by divination beyond? A man had but to open his eyes, and whet a little his natural understanding, and when once a few childish cobwebs or tears had been wiped away, the truth of things would luminously appear. If there was ever a conflict of dogmas under such circumstances, it could be only incidentally, when some confusion or diseased doubt had arisen by chance, or at the instigation of some wicked demon. That difficulty once solved, or that temptation vanquished, the philosopher could settle down again contentedly in the conscious possession of the truth.
makes sense to me.
isn’t it true that many leaps in scientific knowledge coincided with leaps in our ability to see further outside (or inside) ourselves? whether it be seeing things smaller or things further away or greater masses of things from a better vantage point?
imagine if primates had the ability from day one to focus their vision down to microscopic scales and outward to cosmic scales… we would have figured a lot of things out more quickly wouldn’t we? sure. but then again imagine dipping in to kiss your mate only to see eyelashes crawling with mites (or worse going to mount them and seeing…) then looking away in disgust only to see a sun exploding… primates would have gone bat-shit in a week and torn their eyes out. so perhaps it’s not such a good idea. things were and are as they were and are because they couldn’t be any other way. fine. any other way and nothing would be as it was, would it?
lewis carroll penned this tidbit, part of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded-
a scientific friend of mine, who has made several balloon-voyages, assures me he has visited a planet so small that he could walk right round it in twenty minutes! There had been a great battle, just before his visit, which had ended rather oddly: the vanquished army ran away at full speed, and in a very few minutes found themselves face-to-face with the victorious army, who were marching home again, and who were so frightened at finding themselves between two armies, that they surrendered at once! Of course that lost them the battle, though, as a matter of fact, they had killed all the soldiers on the other side.
or alternately from the same story-
What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?
About six inches to the mile.’
Only six inches!?
We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!
Have you used it much?
It has never been spread out, yet, the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.
anyhow microscopy and telescopy helped us get outside (and inside) ourselves, helped us get some context. but it’s never enough is it? we still cant find a grand unifying principle can we? we can’t find a way to stop shaq in the paint. we still have to travel 22 hours or something for a nice vacation on the other side of the world. and anyhow, though the knowledge these things brought us have fundamentally changed our perceptions in the grande sense in the particulars we still act like big dumb apes most of the time.
they say the fear of the unknown is the worst and whoever “they” are they are probably right, but isn’t there still a healthy shiver down the spine for things we
do know thanks to microscopy and telescopy which we’d rather not think about. microscopy especially has brought to light some very unsettling images hasn’t it? things that even now we are grateful to be blind to…
which brings me to the point of this malignant post. finally!
bellow you will find a few such images. ones that our battle with scale have brought to light. they’re quite beautiful in most cases, aesthetically at least. once you know what they actually are it’s hard to suppress a little “eeek.” with that in mind i’ll save the explanations of each until the end so you can soak them up a bit first…
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beautiful huh? yeah in the abstract. they depict as follows-
1. snail’s teeth
2. the surface of a human tongue
3. a spider’s exoskeleton
4. an eggshell
5. a bee’s eye
6. human skin
7. eyelashes
8. blood vessels
9. spongy bone
10. a heart valve
the thumbnail. carotid artery
all the images are from phaidon’s gorgeous little volume unseen by the naked eye, heaven and earth.
hope you enjoyed the pretty pictures if not the meandering slabs of seemingly pointless text which lead to them… i know i didn’t exactly make a point. truth is i spent a coupe hours searching out some content on the subject of our perception, it’s limitations due to scale, philosophy dealing with the idea, etc, but came up empty. couldn’t even figure out what words to string together in a search query to find any critical thought on the subject. ah well. i just have this sneaky feeling that no matter how deep we magnify or how far we manage to look outward we’ll never find “the end.”
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the blazing post or pretend this isn’t a linkdump
i have taken a casual meandering trip through the internets this morning and come upon many points of interest in my travels. what follows will encompass, in dizzying lack of appropriate depth or detail, all but two of the following subjects (with many more added besides): medieval women, margaret cavendish, tom stoppard, the 4th demension, egyptian rope stretchers, oscar the grouch, the squaring of the circle, pythagorean number symbolism, galileo’s moon drawings, the metaphysical and cavalier poets, samuel smith’s nut brown ale, kepler’s fourth law, map of mars by percival lowell, brunelleschi’s peepshow, the great vowel shift, courtly love, poisons and antidotes in the middle ages, the platonic solids, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Phaal by Edgar Allan Poe. the list could continue but why bother? let’s get on with it…
alright my travels began with a visit to the luminariam. nice place. a one stop shop for medieval, renaissance, and 17 century english literature, augmented with bits of music and art of each period to “complement one’s rational experience.” very fine site. make sure you don’t miss their own on premises link collections for further resources on each of the three periods. some samples from these include:
medieval- lots to explore including the bit on the lives of medieval women mentioned above, the great vowel shift during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, an interesting paleography primer, the medieval science page, and the medieval games page, some groovy armor and courtly love, love, love. etc.
renaissance- check out crime and law as well as crime and punishment in elizabethan england, syphilis and the shepherd of atlantis, the first book of natural magik by Giambattista della Porta, some bits about the black death / plague, redefining the sacred, and um… huswifery.
17th Century- crap i’m tired… i’ll leave the 17th century to you.
anyhow the luminariam led me to do a little reading on margaret cavendish... wow, what a character. as the almighty wiki puts it: She was a poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright and, some say, an efficient and tireless self-publicist. She took the step - unprecedented for a Duchess -of publishing her work under her own name which infringed the then prevailing ideas of propriety. Samuel Pepys called her “mad, conceited and ridiculous”. Whatever the quality of her work, she was the only woman in contemporary England to have published more than one book.”
you think Samuel Pepys would take the trouble to call her mad and ridiculous just because she broke the rules of propriety? i don’t think so. then why? how about because the better portion of her work dealt with natural philosophy and “as a philosopher she rejected the Aristotelianism of the 17th century, with its picture of nature as a great machine, as well as the views of Thomas Hobbes, Descartes, Boyle and members of the Royal Society of London.” yeah that’s more like it. in fact it’s pretty hilarious for a couple of reasons. 1- though she wrote about atoms, matter and motion, butterflies, fleas, magnifying glasses, distant worlds, and infinity she was not educated in the sciences and 2- though she wrote and published a slew of poems, plays, philosophies, orations, and discourses she admitted that she could not spell and thought it was “against nature for a woman to spell right”; and as for grammar, she confessed that she was unable to understand it, but that the little she did know was enough to make her “renounce it.” haha. she rules.
the thing is the writings, especially the huge poem cycle on “atomes” are spectacularly bad. just stop for a second and imagine it: think somewhat flowery, rhyming, romantic poetry, line after line of it, all on the subject of atoms. “The bignesse of Atomes, A World made by Atomes, Of Aiery Atomes” etc. fairly insane i must say. she was included in a book a while back called in search of the worlds worst writers and the author put it this way: “She did not just restrict herself to bad verse; no, she wrote bad plays, bad prose and even bad philosophy. Although unhampered by the trappings of an education, she was much given to scientific speculation and concocted several intriguing theories, including one which claimed that some people lived longer because their atoms were packed closer together.” yup. good stuff.
also of interest as concerns cavendish is the fact that she is evidently in the (crowded) running for the distinction of having written first science fiction novel. in her case it was the description of a new world, called the blazing world . as one commenter explains, “It’s a wonderfully peculiar work: part fantasy, part feminist utopia, part scientific compendium. During Cavendish’s lifetime, the book was seen as another manifestation of her profound oddness, and its critical reception has not been much better (‘evidence of schizophrenia’; ‘absolutely unreadable’) until the last decade.” more recently she’s been celebrated as a feminist role model of sorts. (for more on the gender aspect see here) all in all pretty fascinating stuff from a pretty interesting character.
anyhow… searching out more on “mad marge” happened to lead me to this page called “celestial themes in art” which turned out to itself be part of a larger offering called geometry in art and architecture seems that it’s a site meant to accompany a course at dartmouth. it is chock full of compact bursts of info on interesting subjects many of which i mentioned in the first paragraph. take a look through, it’s bound to send you off on some fun time destroying tangents (like these eclectic video lectures).
likewise there is exploring the cosmos which is hosted by u.c. irvine. this one seems to be the accompanying info to support a lecture series. it is packed with great illustrations and offers many links to transcripts of important related texts from throughout history. potentially a sink hole as well. you’re almost guaranteed to find some nugget for further investigation (like what galileo saw for instance).
lastly i want to point you toward the bbc’s history pages if you haven’t been there already. all sorts of goodies. make sure to check out the interactive content.
there is a section of games to pass the time like:
death in rome “Be a Roman sleuth - use your detective skills to unravel the events behind a mysterious death.”
muck and brass “you will have to imagine you are running a city at the height of the Industrial Revolution, and make choices regarding the welfare of your workforce and the prosperity of your business. How ready is your conscience for the realities of Victorian Britain?
the pyramid challenge “As the vizier, or head of state, you are about to undertake the most important project of your career - the building of the king’s pyramid.”
viking quest “takes you back to AD 793. Can you build a ship, cross the seas, loot a monastery and return home to claim your prize?”
wheew…
o.k. that’s it for me signing off. hope you enjoy.
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Why China Is Not a Communist Country
This post is the text of an e-mail I sent this evening to bartcop, one of the best liberal websites, a no-bull broadside of satire and vitriol by a self-proclaimed ‘okie with an iq of 65’ who says he could destroy the republicans if he were running the democrats’ campaigns (and i agree). the topic was the folly of george w. bush running up a deficit by borrowing from communist china; but see, although china is a dictatorship, the matter of it still being a communist state is another matter. here’s what i said to bart:
This used to confuse the hell out of me: the statement, by people who, I knew, knew what they were talking about, that “the extreme left and the extreme right meet.” How could this be? Took me years to get it, but follow me here. Extreme Left (Communism) can become Extreme Right (Fascism) because these extremes *agree* about more than they disagree about.
Disagreement: Communists are against great private wealth, for central state control of the economy, and against religion. Fascists are for great private wealth, for corporate control of the economy, and use religion to make their rule seem legitimate. In its essence, fascism is feudalism expanded to include new social structures (used to be owning land made you a baron, but owning Microsoft is just as good; used to be, being bound to the baron’s land made you a serf, but being bound to servitude in a Saipan garment factory is just as bad).
Agreement: both Extreme Left and Right believe that there should be only one ruling Party (theirs), that violence against their political opponents is acceptable, that democracy should exist only insofar as propaganda purposes require, and that the ruling elite (themselves) deserves special privileges.
Thus an extremist can go from one extreme to the other without ever ceasing to be an extremist. Mussolini started as a Marxist, then founded Fascism and got in bed with the wealthy landowners and the Church. But he never changed his mind about anything in the previous paragraph, did he? Napoleon did much the same thing, starting out as an officer of the French Revolution and in the end making himself an emperor and his relatives kings.
And so it is with the Chinese. Deng Xiaoping saw what happened to the Soviets, and gradually steered China toward its present condition (as an article said, “The Chinese seem to have cracked the code of Western Capitalism.”) China is now a de facto fascist state, with its ‘iron rice bowl’ of social welfare broken and replaced by “It’s glorious to get rich” entrepreneurialism, a one-party government communist now only in name. Where the State once owned the industries, now the industries own the State, and the State pays lip service to its Communist past. They still persecute religions, though; that’s one part of the Marxist ideology that evidently still works in the eyes of the ruling elite. Remember Falun Gong? They stomped it like a roach.
Incidentally, my brother-in-law lives in Japan and says Japan is a communist country, from a social welfare standpoint, and it’s a hell of a lot more livable than China (or here, for that matter, nowadays; he isn’t much inclined to come back).
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graphis annual ‘59 part 3
finally got around to scanning some more images so here we present part 3 (see parts1 & 2) of our graphis from years past showcase. this batch is taken mostly from the book jackets and magazine covers sections of the 1958 annual with a few album covers, posters, and even t.v. graphics of the day thrown in. i didn’t include any of the animation plates (sorry ward) because the printing on those pages were off register. this will be the last group from the ‘59 annual. next time we’ll shift to the ‘57. and so without further ado…
a belated delurker day post + questions for regulars
the 21st was suggested as “delurker day” by some fellow bloggers and though i missed it i, like every other blogger, am interested to know who all the quiet readers are and what their take on the nonist is. essentially “delurker day” is meant to be a day when the quiet ones lift the veil and say… well anything, introduce themselves, comment on the site, or just let their presence be known. as matt from tattered coat puts it: To a blogger, a comment is like a tip — it shows that what has been written is provocative or intriguing enough to elicit a response. For most of us, that interaction with our readers is what makes blogging worthwhile… So, if you are a lurker, please delurk for a moment. so yes, by all means quiet ones, say hello. don’t be shy. meanwhile…
i am mulling over the idea of updating my woefully out of date expression engine software to the newest version. in that the new version offers many additional possibilities i thought this might be a good time to poll our members, friends, and regular readers on their experiences here at the site. i’m curious to know:
what do you like about the sites functionality and presentation?
alternately what would you like to see changed?
what do you make use of and what is dead weight for you?
for instance the soundtrack, blogroll etc. what sidebar content do you make use of?
how many of you view the site via rss feed?
would anyone make use of a forum, just to shoot the shit and post non-front page material if i added one?
are there any member specific functions you’d like to see implemented?
is there anything else you’d like to see added to the site? anything you’re missing?
is there anything that particularly annoys you about the architecture or presentation?
is there anything which does not render correctly or does not work on your browser?
etc.
essentially this might be a good opportunity to refine the site and i’d like any feedback you might have, possitive or critical, to help me along with my many choices. please take a minute to enlighten me.
and as always to everyone who visits and comments and puts in their two cents here at the nonist- thanks.
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kaspar vs. the professor of logic
just watched herzog’s every man for himself and god against all or as it’s known here the enigma of kaspar hauser. fine little flick about a fascinating historical footnote the real life kaspar hauser. if you’re not familiar with his story i recommend you check out wild child of europe or the fortean times article on hauser called a new theory. it’s an interesting story though i don’t plan to recount it here. just wanted to share a bit from the film i found amusing.
just to set the stage let me sum up kaspar quickly- he was a teenager who showed up on the street in Nuremberg in 1828 holding an anonymously written note. he couldn’t say much and could hardly stand. it turned out he had been locked in a dungeon of some sort his entire life and had never seen another human. as a somewhat unique example of the “feral child” (in that he didn’t adapt to animal culture but was completely without culture of any kind) he became a bit of a sensation both in society and in the tabloids. a few years later he was murdered, dying as mysteriously as he’d arrived.
here’s an illustration of kaspar as he is said to have looked on his arrival in nuremberg along side an image of bruno s. (a whole other story there) as kaspar in the film.
anyhow the encounter which amused me in the film came about half way through when kaspar is visited by a professor of logic. they sit at a table and the professor, intent on figuring out this “feral child’s” capacity for logical reasoning, poses a question (all paraphrased):
————————————————————————————————
professor: lets say there are two villages. in one of the villages all of the inhabitants constantly lie. they lie about everything, always. it is a village of liars. the second village is a village of truthtellers. all of the inhabitants always tell the truth. always. now lets say there are roads leading out of each of these villages and that the roads meet at a fork.
kaspar:...
professor: now lets say you come across a man standing at this fork in the road and you want to figure out which village he came from. what question do you ask?
kaspar:...
professor: it’s a thorny problem. if you ask “are you from the village of truthtellers” a man from either village would answer “yes.” one because he always tells the truth and one because he always lies. in fact there is a single question you could ask that would reveal which village the man came from. one single question only which could accomplish that.
kaspar:...
professor: if you can’t figure it out i’ll tell you, you would ask the man this- “if you came from the other village would you answer ‘no’ if i were to ask you whether you came from the liars village?”
kaspar:...
professor: you see by means of a double negative the liar is forced to tell the truth!
kaspar: i know another question.
professor: but that is the one and only question that would enable you to ascertain the man’s true origin. there is no other question.
kaspar: well, i know another question.
professor: ok, fine what question would you ask the man?
kaspar: i should ask the man whether he was a tree-frog.
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haha. needless to say the professor of logic found this question unacceptable. in the commentary herzog said that though most of the movie was based on hauser’s diary and other accounts there was no factual basis for this particular encounter. herzog wrote it and just stuck it in there.
anyway that’s it, just thought it was amusing.
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margaret cho is a very bad witch
Margaret cho rules, okay? At least, I think she does and whosoever doesn’t is wrong. So let it be written, so let it be done. However…
This’ll be a short post, as I’m convalescscing today. Props to Margaret Cho, see. She’s funny as hell and hates president bush and all the other people one should hate. For evidence I submit her blog: exhibit a.
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But this is about the 90-minute stand-up show that was on the cable the other night (sundance channel, i’m pretty sure). Cho is doing this one bit where she examines the pitfalls of thinking you gotta diet at all costs, because women have to be twigs. So once she was on some diet where she ate nothing but persimmons, and was out driving in her car when she realized she was, and I quote, “going to shit!!!” right away. no twenty minute warning, no time to look for a barnes & noble. i roared with laughter while she painted a long, sordid description of driving in a pile of one’s own offal. har har har!
What i didn’t realize (yet) was that this seemingly innocent comedy show was in fact some sort of dark magic. I got up this morning, tired but functioning, dressed, ate my brekky and fixed lunch, fed the critters, and drove off to work feeling bloated. and half way from the parking garage to the office, i shat myself. ooohhhhhhh…. two blocks is a long way to walk when you’re, ahem, encumbered. first stop, the restroom, and the damage was severe. i knew i couldn’t do my best work under these conditions, so i went downstairs and told my boss i couldn’t stay, because something just hit me like a ton of bricks, not good, bye. and i duckwalked back to the garage and drove home. after further intestinal storms, i slept until 2:45 in the afternoon.
what i want to know is this: why, margaret cho? why you gotta use the power of television to throw some unholy shit whammy curse on unsuspecting viewers? is this some sort of weird science experiment? are you in league with supernatural forces, just beginning to exercise a control no mortal can resist? or did you just do it to win a bet? i have to go now. something feels funny.
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living every day as if it were your last
Popular sentiment holds that for the maximum whoosh!!! zip!!! bang!!! of unbridled happiness you ought to live every day like it’s your last. “you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, so live every day like it’s your last!” bellow the smarties. yeah, swell. There is only one problem with that advice, if the day you are living as if it were your last turns out to not in fact be your last… Well then that unbridled happiness you were shooting for will likely get somewhat dampened by a little thing called repercussions.
Seriously. If today were your last, your honest to goodness sure as shit last, what kinds of things would you do? I know that unless you are a freakishly lucky (or on the flip side a particularly empty and twisted) individual you would most likely not go into work. that is unless you went in specifically for the pleasure of shooting off your mouth and instructing certain personages to take and shove particular things. you’d become all over confident and blustery “ha ha! It’s over for me! No more fear!” in such a state you’d surely say things that were you to continue living you’d regret.
If you aren’t the angry vengeful type, but rather the whiney bloodless type, you might go into work anyway to flaunt your ultimate un-toppable woe.
Coworker: “man I can’t believe it’s only 1 o’clock, this day sure is dragging, I’m sooo stressed, I need a vacation!”
you: “oh yeah? Well I’m dead as of tomorrow. Yeah that’s right! Finished, kaput, over, worm food. today is my last day. You think your stressed?! How’s dead for a vacation?”
you’d go around the office from desk to desk greedily trumping every other sad sack story, awash in the phony emotional solidarity only familiar strangers can provide. Not very dignified to tell the truth and when you turned up at work the next morning still alive those coworkers who nodded and offered the 3 second workplace sad-face of empathy would turn on you, quick-like. No fun that.
if you were like most people you’d probably just blow off work all together thinking “today’s my last! Alea iacta est! Carpe Cerevisi!” and when it turned out not to be your last? no big deal really. you missed a day of work. So what? Sure. sure. until you awoke the next morning thinking “today’s my last! Alea iacta est! Carpe Cerevisi!” and blew off work again to drink ol’ english in your underwear on the fire escape. et-cetera. after a few years of this you might start feeling a bit worse for wear. I hear food scrounged from dumpsters can result in some serious heartburn.
Ok, enough about work. What else might you do if you determined to live today like it were your last? Massive doses of ecstasy, crack, or heroin? a cocktail of all three chased with a bucket of white lightening? a bit of comparison shopping for say, oh i don’t know, cryonics labs? X-treme sports thrill seeking? x-tremely filthy unsafe and unseemly debauchery? gratuitous violence? a bit o’ murder? some rape? a nice assassination? massive binge eating? enjoy an evening of lung crushing chain smoking? dinner and a movie? streak through the city streets? uncontrollable weeping? streak through the city streets while weeping uncontrollably? suicide bombing? some solemn “making of amends?” some pissed off insult hurling? cozy up with a nice short book? a long impassioned bout of deity bargaining? some seriously bitter expletive laced deity cursing? a long impassioned bout of deity bargaining followed immediately by some seriously bitter expletive laced deity cursing? take a massive dump in the middle of the street? pick out a nice outfit and shine your shoes? silent desperation? paperwork?
sounds pretty awful all-in-all. most of it would get old if you happened to do the overwhelmingly probable thing statistically, which is continue living. (damned extended, though finite, life-span gettin’ in the way of our passionate seizing of the day!) not to mention that fact that if you lived every day the way you’ll most likely be actually living on your last day you’d find it pretty uncomfortable i think- all those needles and i.v. drips and pill cups and bed pans really get in the way of the naked, full penetration, acid enhanced, bungie jumping.
perhaps “living every day as if it were your last” isn’t such a sensible life plan? after all it’s just a prettied-up way of saying “desperate” and desperate people, like many drug addicts or any number of criminal types tend to get locked in very unfriendly places called jails. screw that. society is not kind to the desperate and hence fearless. “but jaime, why are you being so literal? it’s a poetic sentiment!” alright. fine it’s a poetic sentiment. perhaps a better one would be “live every day like it’s your first.” innocent, not yet bitter and jaded and damaged, simple, open, not yet indoctrinated, curious! “but jaime on your first day you are completely helpless! that would be an awful way to live every day.” i thought you said it was all poetics? make up your mind damn it.
anyhow i’m not really qualified to dole out wisdom of any sort on this subject. why? well, long ago i misheard the popular sentiment of “live your life as if every day were your last.” it was a small error really, perhaps an ambulance or fire truck was going by at the time, but what i heard was: “live every day as if it were the last.”
the rest is somewhat repetitive history.
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stop and start
i’ve meant to post this link for a while but kept forgetting: clips from eastern europe’s masters of stop motion animation. some very nice stuff. old, odd, purty, and interstin’. quote: While these shows are enjoyed by children, the themes are often quite adult… similar to the plays of Shakespeare which are rife with violence and sexual depravity but presented in an intelligent artistic fashion. One of the things that make these traditional puppet shows so fascinating is the old-world craftsmanship… techniques handed down generation after generation using handmade tools. etc, etc. for some more goodies check out stopmotionshorts (click the now showing and archive links) as well as the internet archive.
masks
“If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play ? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber ?... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage ? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.” -Erasmus
our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking
in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with surfaces.
-carolyn kizer
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face….
-dylan thomas
i have the eyes of a dead pig.
-marlon brando
I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
sits on my lips and defecates.
-Anne Sexton
imagine a blank helpless sort of face, rather like a rose just before you drench it with ddt.
-john cary
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger…. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.
-James Baldwin
A mask of gold hides all deformities.
-thomas dekker
the clothe the fiery thought
in simple words succeeds.
for still the craft of genius is
to mask a king in weeds.
-emerson
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
I wanted a man’s face looking into the jaws and throat of life
With something proud on his face, so proud no smash of the jaws,
No gulp of the throat leaves the face in the end
With anything else than the old proud look:
Even to the finish, dumped in the dust,
Lost among the used-up cinders,
This face, men would say, is a flash,
Is laid on bones taken from the ribs of the earth,
Ready for the hammers of changing, changing years,
Ready for the sleeping, sleeping years of silence.
Ready for the dust and fire and wind.
I wanted this face and I saw it today in an Aztec mask.
A cry out of storm and dark, a red yell and a purple prayer,
A beaten shape of ashes
waiting the sunrise or night,
something or nothing,
proud-mouthed,
proud-eyed gambler.
-Carl Sandburg
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.
-Bertolt Brecht
lift not the festal mask! -enough to know,
no scene of mortal life but teems with mortal woe.
-scott
Search for nothing any more, nothing
except truth.
Be very still, and try and get at the truth.
And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I?
-d.h.laurence
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
-W. Somerset Maugham
...To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.
-wallace stevens
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
-paul laurence dunbar
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
I found me in a great surging space,
At either end a door,
And I said: “What is this giddying place,
With no firm-fixéd floor,
That I knew not of before?”
“It is Life,” said a mask-clad face.
-thomas hardy
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gorilla balls or hawk eyes?
just got around to reading the short walton ford piece in men’s vogue. i was sure i’d done a full feature post on ford before, since i love his work, but a quick search proved me wrong. i don’t intend to write a lengthy post now though just wanted to pass on a quote from the magazine i found kind of funny. first off if your not familiar with his work (links: art21, paul kasmin, paul kasmin2, artnet, artnet2, artseen) the artist he’s most often compared to is james audubon for obvious stylistic and thematic similarities. the article mentions this, it’s obligatory, and adds: ford’s accomplishment has been hard to measure. there is just nothing to compare it to: watercolorists have never worked on the scale that he does. they compare his mastery of this most difficult medium to sargent, winslow homer, and georgia o’keefe. fine, but let’s get back to audubon…
concerning the comparison the article has this to say: his works are almost always compared to audubon’s, a comparison ford has encouraged by including the figure of the artist in several works, face down in the snow dwarfed by an escaping eagle, silhouetted by fire and painting furiously beside a heap of slaughtered birds. that sounds like someone slightly tired of the comparison to me. it’s artistic provocation like “duck amuck” in which bugs bunny (as animator) erases daffy duck’s bill mid-sentence, changes the background on him, gives him a flower head, and whatever else. in terms of nitty gritty comparison of skill the article comes down squarely in favor of ford saying by the time he entered art school in 1978 he was already a better draftsman. the question of course is what does ford himself have to say about it?
which leads me to the quote:
here’s audubon, he’s painted his entire life. he gets to the quadruped project after he’s finished painting every bird in north america. he’s an old man. he should be a master. he should be rembrandt painting self-portraits. but he’s painting a hog-nosed skunk, and he can’t figure out how to foreshorten- at all. he still can’t take the animal’s face and convincingly make it go back in space from the tip of its nose to the ears. it looks cobbled together out of three different heads. and the background looks like the way kids draw hills: zoop, zoop, zoop, zoop! here in america, he told people that he studied with david. but he wouldn’t say that when he was in europe, becuase i’m pretty sure he knew he’s get busted. ford imitates a european, but gives him an accent that’s pure georgia bulldog ‘boy, you couldn’t shine the pimples on dah-veed’s ass.’ -walton ford.
haha. usually when an artists says this kind of thing about another artist it’s seen as an attack, sour grapes, good ol’ fashioned assholishness, etc. might leave you thinking “man, this guy’s got gorilla balls on him!” might even give you the idea he’s an arrogant prick. who knows? maybe he is. but i would say rather that he just has hawk eyes. he sees the truth of the matter and isn’t afraid to just say it. i have to imagine it would be irritating to be forever compared to an artist who was less talented but remains far more recognized and celebrated none the less. i think ford’s work is truly exceptional where as audubon’s is mainly pretty. course that’s just my opinion, though ford seems to be in agreement.
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set in infinitely pliable stone
here is something which bothers me. a simple thing really, though it is perhaps the initial miscalculation which compounds itself, moving outward over time, into the infinite array of hypocrisies, contradictions, paradoxes, and cases of near perfect paramnesia we feel assaulted with at this late date in human history. this bothersome crux of things might be summed up with three words organized into two sentence fragments-
“jesus says…” and “god says…”
why?
what do these fragments mean?
what do they say?
what can they sum up?
as i said, it’s simple really. any statement which begins in either of those two ways is making a strikingly huge and generally dangerous omission. putting aside the core question of belief in these two entities (or two aspects of a single entity depending on your outlook) saying “jesus says…” or “god says…” leaves out the important fact that whatever comes next is actually a reiteration of something which another ordinary, mortal, flawed, and fallible
person said. in many cases that person also happens to have lived over 2000 years ago. simply put believers have the annoying habit of completely discounting the middle-man. that middle-man being not only the group of people which set their holy books to paper but the innumerable theologians, scholars, popes, and politicians who interpreted the meaning of these books and effectively handed down the notions which are faithfully regurgitated as “the word of god.”
this is a troublesome fact.
neither the old nor the new testament were found etched into a mountainside by lightening. neither were found in dried up river basins carved by the once flowing waters. neither arrived in the core of a fiery meteor. these holy books were written by people. people with earthy concerns. people with desires and ambitions and prejudices. people who got boners and diarrhea. people who (i must assume) would be considered now, in the year 2005, to have a 4th grade education in many ways. people who also happened to hold beliefs about the physical world so outlandish that even the most well churched and least schooled child would likely scoff at them. so why should the fruit of their political struggles and will to power be held up to this day as “the word of god?” i certainly don’t know.
add to this another troublesome fact, that the interpretation of these words, arrived at by still more flawed persons, inform the popular understanding of these texts. do believers not realize that their conception of notions like the devil, hell, sin, creation, et al, were arrived at and propagated much later? don’t they understand that much of it was codified in a time when the church and the ruling elite were one and the same? these were not altruistic innocents who interpreted the bible for the shared benefit of mankind! these were wealthy politicians who sought to consolidate their own power against the threat of other factions. don’t they understand that the face of evil evolves each year to conveniently resemble the face of their earthly enemies? don’t they understand that not only do they regurgitate ideas set forth by troubled men like st. thomas aquinas but that they overwhelmingly embrace notions put forth by
poets like dante and milton? poets! they (in tandem with the gruesome images on stained glass and in oils) may have helped the average man visualize hell and sin (the horror film pleasure of the middle ages) but they also just happened placed their own personal enemies there. why can’t believers see this? these texts are not “the words of god” they are the purposeful words of men.
these are books which likely began as a compilations of aural tradition. they were set down by multiple authors, and were, in their particular sections, likely aimed at different audiences, meant to sure up support for different factions. these are books which underwent change over time with additions and subtractions. these are books that have been interpreted to mean different things in different times. these are books which have been reverse engineered continuously to provide support for the specific concerns of each new age. in point of fact these books have proved to be nothing if not pliable and elastic. so each time someone draws from their pages to illustrate an absolute immutable truth, saying, “jesus said…” or “god said…” they are ignoring this one overriding truth- the old testament and the new testament do not reflect what any god said, they reflect what generations of people have wanted him to say. i’ll have to assume the same is true for all the holy texts i’m not familiar with.
omitting the human element in the prevailing conception of our gods… whether we outright invented them or not to pretend we have had no hand in his evolution… the conceit that the words written by men with all too earthly concerns must be taken as divine… the conceit that the prevailing notions built up from generation of terrified, petty, power hungry human to generation is somehow eternal and has passed year to year unaltered down to us… well that is why being told “what jesus or god said” bothers me. what if i disagree? i’m as flawed and self interested a member of the human race as any other mouthpiece of god we’ve had in recorded history. why shouldn’t i trust my own conception of god? i’m obviously as qualified as anyone else.
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the tale of bobo-roshi
so, i felt guilty after rebuffing jaime on the bobo-roshi matter. the main computer is up again, more or less, and though i’ve been working whaaay too much overtime lately, i owes the nonists a post. so, bearing in mind that it’s been years and years, i will recount, to the best of my recall, the tale of bobo-roshi. first off: if you google the name, most of the hits seem to revolve around a satanist who uses the moniker, and may be the same guy who enjoys encouraging suicide on the internet. this is not the original bobo-roshi…
janwillem van de wetering is dutch; the w’s are spoken as v’s, just so you know. he’s about the same age as ringo starr, and somehow or other decided to go to japan in ‘58 at the age of 18 to join a zen monastery, where he remained for a year and a half. he was a odd fit, a gaijin and rather old for a neophyte; most of the other monks were sent there by their families as boys of ten or so. the ‘abbot’ or head dude of a zen monastery is the roshi (master). van de wetering was surprised when a jesuit priest came to visit the roshi, but the jesuit and the roshi were friends, and zen and the jesuits had a lot in common. like jesuits, the zen monks rose earlier than roosters and meditated, and spent much of the day working around the monastery while thinking deep thoughts about getting beyond deep thought. as everybody now knows, zen uses nonsensical koans as an intellectual catapult to a place if insight and instinct beyond intellect. the roshi gives you a koan and periodically you go in and try to answer it. if you’re wrong he gives you a whack with a slapstick and you go back to the problem. you’re stuck there until you solve the koan, and when you do, the roshi gives you a new one to work on. eventually, he decides you’ve learned enough. maybe you’ll go start your own monastery.
in my book the essence of the zen understanding is the answer, “mu!” basically a nonsense answer, but it’s a way of saying, “i see! it’s the question that’s the problem! we should never have asked that question in the first place! it only leads to confusion! it only makes you crazy!” how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? mu! free will or destiny? mu! pascal’s wager? mu!
van de wetering was shocked to hear the other monks (remember, they were mostly younger than he) whispering among themselves about somebody called bobo-roshi. in english, it translated as “master fuck.” bobo-roshi, they told him, was the roshi of another monastery, and obviously they wouldn’t say that to his face; and that wasn’t his real name. i forget; let’s call him joe.
joe the monk was a very conscientious, hard-working zen monk. he worked and he read and he meditated and he read and he worked and he meditated. years went by, and he just couldn’t get his koan. everybody agreed he was an admirable man, a top-drawer monk, but he stayed stuck on his first koan. he would go see the roshi, and emerge disappointed, and go back to work. other monks progressed, and left, and he was by far the oldest monk in the place, a grown-ass man, but still stuck on his first koan. a failure.
so one day he went to the roshi and said, “i am sorry, i’ve failed. i know i am a disappointment to you. i must leave.” he changed into regular clothes, packed his things, and walked into the city, at loose ends. he had some money, but he didn’t know what to do with himself.
so joe the ex-monk wandered about, had something to eat, looked at the shops, and somewhere along the way concluded that there was one thing he might as well investigate, now that there was nobody to tell him not to. joe encountered a prostitute, went up to her place, plunked down his money, and lost his virginity. at the moment of ejaculation, a light went on in his head (or maybe a better analogy is an engine roaring to life when the carburetor gets unclogged?) he threw his clothes on and ran back to the monastery. the roshi was waiting at the gate.
after that, things went smoothly for him. he grasped his koans with great speed, progressed rapidly, and was now roshi in his own monastery. hearing this story, janwillem asked his fellow teenage monks, “so if he’s so good, why don’t you study under him?” horrified, they replied, “Oh, no! he’s too strict!”
van de wetering reports that when he left, he was required to see the roshi first, and feared the roshi would be angry at him. but the roshi said: “you are like a sword that has been tempered in a fire. no matter what you do now, you will cut to the core.”
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for the old new jacks
came across this the other day and thought any of the older hip hop fans out there would get a kick out of it- the new jack hip hop awards. evidently it was a reaction against the grammys, a sort of online people’s choice for hip hop. it covers 91-98. i read through 93 and was brought back in time. it’s kind of sad to be reminded of the quality the genre once offered but it’s pretty funny too (phat and whack used without even the suggestion of a smirk). anhyow in that this does not exactly make for a juicy post i thought i’d add dreamchimney’s small yo mtv raps video archive as well as james shabazz’s excellent back in the days and a time before crack both of which are well worth the dough. sigh.