Monday, July 13, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Catherine Sullivan
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Thank you for returning my wallet kind stranger!
Miraculous! Thank you.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The face of Brad
The best stuff is in the latter half.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
The Cycle
Hole head, Internalization of Dogma portion of the cycle.
How everything flows.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Demis Roussos, Aexhaltation, Phaedrus. He was sad beyond sad but did it anyway.
D's remarks: "okay, take a little Devendra Banhart, shake with some Joe Cocker pit stains and Roger Whitaker seaspray aura, and puree till nice and smoooooth"
I haven't heard much interesting from Banhart but appreciate Joe Cocker's twitchy soulishness, and look forward to a new world in the morning with Roger Whitaker. Matter of fact I would have melted had they played that at the inauguration.
My new term-Aexhaltation: an act of relating to the greater human whole upon finding an aesthetic object which provides a renewed relationship with culture allowing a release of what, in the observer, is being witheld in its perceived absence. Edits pending.
Back to Roussos: House of the Rising Sun. Chariots of Fire. Vangelis. TWA flight 847, 1985
There's a darkness in Roussos' face beyond theatrics related to the character of Phaedrus (the wolf) in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here's a passage, essentially describing the death of Phaedrus (warning, spoiler!):
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
It is what he was saying months before in the classroom in Montana, a message Plato and every dialectician since him had missed, since they all sought to define the Good in its intellectual relation to things. But what he sees now is how far he has come from that. He is doing the same bad things himself. His original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the process of battling against the dialecticians he has made statements, and each statement has been a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been building around Quality. Any attempt to develop an organized reason around an undefined quality defeats its own purpose. The organization of the reason itself defeats the quality. Everything he has been doing has been a fool's mission to begin with.
On the third day he turns a corner at an intersection of unknown streets and his vision blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the sidewalk, people moving around him as if he were not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly drives his thoughts to remember the way back to the apartment. They are slowing down. Slowing down. This is about the time he and Chris try to find the sellers of bunk beds for the children to sleep in. After that he does not leave the apartment.
He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way back. And now there is no way forward either.
For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.
He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.
But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You've got to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him forward. "You've got to cross it by yourself." It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.
"No one else can cross it for you," it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. "You've got to cross it by yourself."
He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even "he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.
And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Almost there
Chez Pazienza of The Huffington Post gives us One last look back before the inauguration. I was particularly moved by his take on this hellspawn:
"CNN's Nancy Grace is the most loathsome, feckless troll to currently, unfathomably have a forum on national television. She's a vile, unscrupulous monster who peddles morbid prurience like a five-dollar streetwalker and whose brand of rank solipsism is matched only by her near-sociopathic disregard for the lives she's ruined and exploited and by her apparent contempt for the tenets of responsible journalism (to say nothing of basic human decency). "
Wallbuilders
I rented this from Netflix thinking it would detail philosophical struggles around the First Amendment. Turns out it was a series of battlefield folktales narrated by a stern, geeky figure with Blagojevich hair. Now, I couldn't watch the whole thing, but the thesis seemed to be that God deflected a baker's fuck-ton of musket balls from our founding fathers in order that they could build a Christian nation.
Shame on me for not paying attention to the absurd title and clumsy cover layout. Wallbuilders is actually the subtitle.
Anyway, I wrote a comment rant:
"Netflix, how about moving this out of your documentary slot and into a brand new category: "Christian Perspectives." Works, no?
I believe the addition of this category will allow Netflix subscribers greater accuracy in choosing documentary films corresponding to their interests- to effectively discriminate between films intended to promote creative discourse on religion and government and those intended to…"
Of course this was the result of editing and re-editing, removing phrases like "revisionist fucktards", etc. in order to make it sound more reasonable, but having reached this last anemic editorial iteration, I lost interest.
Lustfaust
More Lustfaust can be found here and here. Also check out Mirrorworldmusic which I had incorrectly believed was entirely manufactured for the project. Turns out it's real, some of the artists at MWM happen to be collaborators (apologies and thanks for the correction, Murray).
