tricycle

Heart of Europe

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:29:37 GMT

image grabbed off of strange maps

Charting Rosicrucian Europe .. a transcript of a talk by Christopher McIntosh at a conference in Kutna Hora in 2006.
(the site is kind of whacky, but this article is good)

and while we are looking at maps, this interactive map of the spread of swine flu is pretty useful, if not frightening. Here in the heart of europe we remain somewhat isolated from the spread of the flu, for some reason, but I expect it will be on us soon enough, we are surrounded by outbreaks ...

Ayurvedic Protection Against Colds and Flu

Halloween walk

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:11:06 GMT

We went out walking last Saturday and met these friendly witches near the town of Srni in the Šumava forest. Seems that the local hotel? was putting on a halloween walk for kids. Dominik was already spooked by the atmosphere of the dark woods and when we saw the witches he held on pretty bravely. But the skeleton and ghost around the corner was too much and he was crying for quite a while. He finally settled down once back inside the car. Lightweight city kid I guess.

Life is so strange

Meanwhile forever away on the plane of memory and cyberspace, a comment over on facebook triggered memories of Missing Persons. I always liked this band, the shattered mirror in the video, putting together the pieces of a puzzle. And their other hit, Words: Do you hear me, do you care? ...

Watching Missing Persons led to investigating Lady Gaga... the music is forgettable, but the style is very visual, reminded me somehow of Matthew Barney. Funny how she projects this sense of celebrity and cult-like star status to the point that it comes true. Make the dream real. It takes power and a lot of luck to do that. Admittedly she's just a pastiche of a lot of older tropes, but kids today have no idea and she is selling the same old dream of sex once again, yet now it's almost post sexual .. kill your boyfriend and get another, its all just a "love game", materialist to the core .. sad isn't it, the way we became objects

Missing Persons was more original, that early 80s energy of punk still lingering, like in Liquid Sky, for example

when I was 4

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:22:49 GMT

The Christ of Abu Ghraib

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:43:13 GMT

http://www.counterpunch.org/davis06192004.html

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/07/christianity-will-be-victorious-but-only-in-defeat

I'm finishing my book on Girard. As I've read somewhere online Girard is a theologian disguised as a post-modern cultural critic. But as the writer, Chris Fleming, points out, modernism is itself an extension of Christian values, hidden in a secular cloak. Girard seems to agree with Kierkegaard that "the official prevailing proclamation of Christianity is a conspiracy against the Bible." The argument akin to PKD's is touched on: that from 380AD when Christianity is united with the vision of the Roman Empire, the whole pacifist message of Christ becomes perverted. To look at the images from Abu Ghraib is to know that a terrible sickness has come to occupy our minds .. its like a fog that covers over the truth, this media sphere of charged images, a sexuality turned against itself, a thirst for violence that implicates the audience. The Davis article I linked to above is quite insightful on this point.

Yet I read Girard is a friend of the neocons behind Facebook, and it does seem that there is a conservative bent to his message. (One wonders how the people behind faceboook see the world .. what is there goal? Data-mining? And to what end?) Fleming assures the reader that Girard is not longing for a Hobbesian absolutist state. He quotes Girard, "From the moment cultural forms start to dissolve, any attempt to reconstitute them artificially can only result in the most appalling tyranny." Nevertheless I have to wonder at the reasons he emphasizes in the interview linked to above the conflict between Christianity and Islam. Why does he draw a line in the sand? I would think he could see clearly the way Muslims are being scapegoated today. The military industrial complex needs an enemy. Our program is not one of peace.

As to the horrors of the apocalypse, Girard states that no one could do it better than the daily newspaper. For if there is a judgement of God, a punishment for mankind, it is simply that He has abandoned us, He has left us to our own devices. And look how well we are doing on our own.

Zizek on Democracy Now .. again

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:21:09 GMT

"But I see more hope at this moment with you in United States than with Europe. Europe is now, I think, in great decline."

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/15/slovenian_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on_the

"... when things started to move, capitalism always engendered a push toward some kind of democracy. No longer. I claim that what is now emerging in the Far East started—it started in Singapore, this kind of so-called, again, authoritarian capitalism. I think something new is emerging: a capitalism even more dynamic —than our own, but which, even in long term, doesn’t need democracy."

plutocracy

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:40:32 GMT

Good interview with Bill Moyers
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/watch.html
on the lack of interest in Washington to overhaul the financial system and help rein in the massive banking juggernauts. One could say its too late. Goldman Sachs is acting like a country unto itself .. I wonder how long it will be before these huge corporations hire Xe/Blackwater mercenaries to fight little wars for them? Yes I know the banana wars in the 50s could be seen in this way .. so corporate wars have been with us a while already.

The realpolitik is so strong that it makes politics into a mockery. People are apathetic and have little belief in the political process. And Obama, in a sense, is expendable. As crazy Qaddafi reminded us recently, who assassinated JFK?? In the book on Rene Girard I've been reading there's a discussion on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. After Caesar was killed and Brutus turns to the crowd, there is a cheer, "Let him be Caesar!" ... an endless recycling of sacrificial kings. If Obama falls, we will see this social violence once again, an old story played out for the sleeping masses. The real leaders I suppose are rarely at the podiums, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan ... Life in a plutocracy feels strangely medieval, like the Florence of Dante replacing the world. It's a funny place, the world that needs perpetual revolution to be free. But only when the sleepers awaken will we have a chance to reclaim democracy ... and only then if our best instincts prevail. What is the endgame of civilisation? Power or Freedom? I would opt for the greatest good for the greatest number, universal human rights, a working wage, and saving the ecosystem of the planet. Is it too much to ask?

Heads and Torsos

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:12:39 GMT

Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rilke

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96apr/rilke/rilke.htm

Rilke died after pricking his finger on a thorn
for me it symbolizes the frailty of the poetic impulse

today

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:59:36 GMT

We decided not to move to a castle today
that it would be a dead end and make us poor
maybe we are stupid

So we stay in this lovely town
maybe have another kid
I keep teaching English forever

I told Domik that he will be all alone one day
"Okay", he said

Sturm und Drang

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:05:44 GMT

There is a retrospective of the work of Georg Baselitz in Prague just now.

It is said that the Germans are the best painters. The massive art scene in Berlin can attest to the need to make art in German culture. Perhaps it is the strong romantic yearning, melded with angst, like the figures in Baselitz'z early work, romantic heroes in disarray, their organs spilling out, walking through a land of bleeding trees. Wounded dreamers. Baselitz is emblematic of the way art is tied to nationality.

The Czech Republic lies in the shadow of Germany. Baselitz in Prague is like a heavyweight slumming in the provinces. This is the land between Bavaria and Saxony. Its very difficult not to be influenced by the Germans here, though they are resented, of course. I've been told that Czechs have turned to conceptual art as an escape from German dominance in painting. But there are many painters here as well, a few good ones.

Early on he started turning everything upside down. One of those simple strategic moves that only one artist can do, upside down=Baselitz. Baselitz quickly vaulted to the upper ranks, a place where he could paint anything and be exhibited. The artist must be a Brut, to transgress, yet in a leisurely controlled way on the canvas, and Baselitz provided plenty of madness. The artist as mirror, but of a kind of cliche, the stereotype of the suffering German psyche. In the documentary by Schwerfel, Baselitz speaks of how we must kill the fathers, that the Germans kill their fathers faster than the French, and so on. This is the smoke and mirrors genius dance that Baselitz has perfected. And yet all art is still mimesis. Baselitz is like Nolde on steroids.

Watching Baselitz speak in the documentary, one can feel his energy, as if he made some Faustian bargain. He is an art celebrity, maybe one of the last. I saw a few images from Jonathan Meese, for example, in a catalogue, he is often linked to Baselitz, but it is entirely imitative, and absurd. Are we destined to live in an age of copies of copies, ideas recycled until they fade into nothing? The Neue Wilde are the Alte Wilde now. Baselitz blithely exhibits alongside Meese, he has retrospectives around the globe these days it seems. It's (almost) all about the money at this point. But of course its the smell of money and prestige which allows him to be Baselitz. Whats the point of being an artist without being famous? Yet Meese and his generation must scream ever louder, and that quickly becomes tiresome, while Baselitz, like an old wizard, effortlessly produces these compelling images, combining hints of naive figuration with complex abstract compositional elements. It is all about ambiguity with an air of provocation. And that's all that it is ... all that painting can be today.

short interview with Baselitz

images from his latest retrospective

image gallery

big guv'ment problem

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:59:10 GMT

Reading over comments on an article on Huffington about the failing middle class I realized the push-pull of the big government/little government debate. Conservatives have long railed against government and many Republican politicians promise to reduce the size and responsibility of government. I always felt that made little sense .. why should I vote for someone who promises to make his own job irrelevant? Pay me for doing less work, hooray!!

In the other direction, big government can quickly become unwieldy and bureaucratic. I cant recall the percentage of the economy that the government occupies, but I believe its pretty significant. Despite all the republican promises of smaller government, they all kept inflating it. If government would do its job and protect the rights of citizens (not counting corporations), provide for the health of society and put tight controls on the expansion of power in the private sector, then I'm for a big government. But when all we have is a bloated pig of a government fat on the teat of corporate power, sold off to the highest bidder which operates as a servant to big business, then I find I side with those conservative anti-guv'ment types.

So the problem is not so simple and the arguments for and against big government play out across the political spectrum. Corporate thinking is so widespread that it has infiltrated the mindset in Washington. It did so long ago .. Nixon era stuff. The irony of the 60s and California Dreaming (yikes John Phillips) is that Reagan rode the wave of fear of civil unrest all the way to the White House and turned our country into a corporate state. The hippies gave us Reagan, strange but true, and now twenty years later, we continue to wallow around in his nightmare, all our presidents since have been similar. Reagan has become the center, and this is why we are doomed. Like many leftists, I liked Ron Paul's message on the economy during the last election, I agree that the Fed should be under much tighter scrutiny, perhaps even dismantled, but his other ideas frightened me. You start burning down one section of the state, and the fire can easily spread.

mimetic desire and interdividuality

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:34:46 GMT

I'm reading a book on René Girard .. pretty fascinating --- mimesis as the basis of the psyche, literature as hermeneutics, and the social role of violence, etc

We went to the zoo today. Animals are people too, and people are animals .. those penguins had personalities, and the tigers are trapped, like living tiger skin rugs on display, musculature removed from its purpose, but I digress ...

A few interesting tidbits from the book on Girard ...

In the theory of mimesis "it is not merely the case that we are subject to others' influence; it is, somewhat more radically, that others come to dwell inside us. Indeed Girard has even gone so far as to depict the 'self' as a convergence point in an indeterminate field of mimetic desire, of the 'interdividual relation' which is constituted at base by the interactions with others. 'Individuality then, strictly speaking, doesnt exist - its is always already interdividuality."

Girard criticizes the modern stress on individuality as a "romantic lie" which deceives us into thinking we have some kind of autonomous identity :), or rather that our individuality is somehow the pinnacle of our being. He also criticizes the modern stress on the 'egalitarian ideal' which runs counter to the romantic lie of the "unique" individual.

" ... despite this valorization of equality during modernity - or rather because of it - life quickly became a task centred upon 'distinguishing oneself', especially among the middle classes. This project became increasingly common in a world where social hierarchies had become eroded and each person was progressively subject to a kind of romantic individualism which was predicated on the disavowal of any kind of mediation, external or otherwise."

"When all the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man's own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbound career seems open to his ambition and he will readily persuade himself that he is borne to no common destinies. But this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. The same equality that allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes renders all the citizens less able to realize them; it circumscribes their powers on every side, while it gives freer scope to their desires. Not only are they themselves powerless, but they are met at every step by immense obstacles, which they did not first perceive. They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition; the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position." .. from Tocquevilles Democracy in America

or as Girard says, "the effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone inevitably into the same ditch."

I'm not sure where Girard is leading with his critique of romantic individualist modernity, but it's an evocative theory .. does he long for a feudal past, a hierarchy of intellectual jesuit priests, knights and slaves?

It would seem that the powerful cabal at the apex of the pyramid of contemporary power have solved the problem of rivalry by eliminating social mobility for the 99% rest of us. In this way, it could be said, our society is increasingly neofeudal and we are cyberserfs flooding our brainpans with images and information like some kind of opiate jelly. Like me working for over an hour on this entry which will spindle off below the fold into the darkness within the next 24 hours, goodbye, like sparks flickering into the black ink of night ...

Obama the socialist .. hahaha

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:20:19 GMT

I may be organizing a few English language classes at a new culture/education center being organized by a friend. (sarcasm)I'm so excited.(/sarcasm)

Anyway we had a meeting yesterday and when the multi-millionaire owner of the building found out I'm an American, he started complaining about Obama. He said something ridiculous about Obama being a socialist, that some Americans are saying that. I was polite to him of course; I dont care much about his uninformed opinion. But I told my friend that it's nonsense. I told him that the Americans who say Obama is a socialist are idiots. And he agreed with me but blathered something about how I have to understand how it was before the revolution and how awful socialists are ... well okay fine but it has nothing to do with Obama.

The absurd power of a word taken out of context. And the way seemingly educated people can fall for such absurd sound bites is a mystery to me. I mean here is a crafty multi-millionaire Czech guy who is all for privatization and despises anything that smells like ideology .. you'd think he wouldn't fall for such simplistic reporting. But say the word socialist and he has a knee-jerk reaction. They fail to see their own ideology which is basically a self-centered embrace of free-market capitalism ...

In the Czech Republic we live in a social democracy where there is public health care and a generally poor, but egalitarian society. Its already much more socialistic here than in the USA. Basically many people like this rich guy resent having to pay taxes to support the system. And mainly such an opinion stems from the historical context, a mistrust of politics and ideology, especially from the failed utopian left .. they recall the police oppression and general culture of fear and shudder at any talk which echoes the old propaganda. And I understand, but I have to say they are living in the past. Would they dismantle their social democracy in order to banish the ghosts of the past? And what would that lead to?

Its the kind of issue where I find my Czech friends' attitudes towards politics to be naive, and they find my comments to be simplistic .. and we're probably both right to some extent. For example I criticized Thatcher once while sitting with a group of Czechs and one of them gave me a dirty look. Dont criticize the iron lady, he said. Its difficult to have a dialogue here, in a way, which is funny considering how much they like to chit-chat. Because we are coming from different backgrounds.

Issues are never black and white though - the issue of Russian influence for example. The Russian population in Prague is booming and the economic/political muscle from Moscow has an influence. People whisper about Paroubek and Klaus both being double-agents, working for the Russian oligarchs, and I imagine it could be true. The Czech Republic has always been a small borderland country caught between super powers. These days the magnets tug both from Moscow and Brussels, and from Beijing and DC as well. The anti-EU contingent seems to be gaining strength, but I fear that would leave us more in the Russian sphere of influence. My friends who hate the word socialism are mostly afraid of Russia, and for good reason I suppose. In a worst case scenario, if the banking system collapses, Europe could be divided up once again along old ethnic lines, throwing the Czechs in with the Slavs again. Who knows ...

So what lessons have I learned. Well I guess I should refrain from criticising the iron lady in mixed company, but I draw the line when people suggest Obama is a socialist. Good article on that here.

Democracy Now

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:09:37 GMT

this is floating around, everyone has seen it already ... basically these people have a vision of America in their heads which is like Mayberry with every body being kindly and looking somewhat like them, nice honest policemen, sometimes bumbling, but shucks thats alright. While all the time the noose of financial banking has been tightening a bit more every year, maximizing profits-over-people has left them disenfranchised, and then the wheels fell off last year, or at least started screeching on the tracks. But the simple country folk are still trapped in a shiny media machine with Britney Spears libido rush and Fox News follie on one side, and their fundamentalist cliched version of Christ on the other, that and crystal meth creeping into the blood stream, and its all just hyper-intensified, like Mayberry by way of David Lynch where Aunt Bea is a mound of hormone fed beef and Andy is a cynical politician, using his good looks and high-falutin' way with words to stay in office. Doing the dance like Obama, not much difference really, but these simple red-staters can't see that, they are all frothing at the mouth over the wrong injustice, like some creationists screaming their whole lives away over the Scopes Monkey Trial. Just let it go, try to accept the new reality where Andy Griffiths has turned black, no one on TV looks like you, and if they do, its just a manufactured Hannah Montana clean sexy suburban preteen wet dream of a toothpaste commercial. Hold on to that if it gives you comfort, but your America is gone.

---------------------------------------------------

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/17/philosopher_grace_lee_boggs_and_sociologist

"In Detroit, in particular, we—people are beginning to say the only way to survive is by taking care of one another, by recreating our relationships to one another, that we have created a society, over the last period, in particular, where each of us is pursuing self-interest. We have devolved as human beings."

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/18/grace_lee_boggs_on_the_limits

So we have devolved as human beings, but we have to learn again how to take care of one another and rebuild a society based on human need. I not know if me can do that.

Ještěd

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:20:34 GMT

Ještěd is the amazing radio transmitter/hotel which sits on a mountain over Liberec in North Bohemia near the Giant Mountains. Its a total Kubrickian space, very future retro 2001 space odyssey. For anyone wanting to play out some kind of James Bond one night stand sexual hijink, this is the place. Or you could just meditate on the aesthetics until you start floating around the room, believing you're in a zero gravity moon base.

From Lima to Liberec

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:51:30 GMT

http://lsiabala-almanzur.blogspot.com/2009/05/cuando-rugendas-visito-lima.html

I saw a painting by Johann Mauritz Rugendas in Liberec from the Augsburg collection last weekend of the Tapadas limenas, the fashion of the upper class women of Lima, Peru from the mid 16th century to the mid 19th century when they would go about with their heads covered, viewing the world through a small gap in the cloth.

More on the tapadas here

Rugendas documented the slave trade and the conditions throughout South America and the Caribbean in the first half of the 19th century.

Two google books: I and II

Sadomaso for European collectors??? Though the images are somewhat fetishistic, like Christ on the Pillar, its clear that Rugendas meant the images to be used for the abolitionist cause, as documentation of the cruelties being inflicted. His life story looks interesting, what little I can glean of it online.

http://www.johann-moritz-rugendas.com/

http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?pid=S0717-71942007000100001&script=sci_arttext&tlng=pt

http://www.marine-niemeyer.com/autographs/28291_e.php

A novel by Cesar Aira, based on Rugendas's journey to Argentina in 1837, looks pretty cool, not sure how close to life it is though ... very much in the vein of Herzog, lofty German romanticism thrust into the wild jungles of the New World, as well as the physiognomic theories of Alexander Humboldt, about which I know next to nothing

the king is pregnant

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:42:10 GMT

I'm listening now to the audiobook for Ursula LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" which I read when I was a teenager but thought I would revisit. I like Leguin's approach as an anthropology of the future. The idea of a genderless culture is interesting. "the king is pregnant" I was struck by this quote:

The main character is speaking to a "foreteller of Handarra", a wise sage:

“The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. But also if it were proven that there is a God there would be no religion. . . What is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”
“That we shall die.”
“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, and we already know the answer. . . The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next”

more links:

http://www.sfra.org/Coyote/CoyoteHome.htm

http://sunandshield.blogspot.com/2008/02/religion-in-le-guins-left-hand-of.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/the-left-hand-of-darkness/

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html

http://www.lislegaard.com/works.php?id=58
http://www.lislegaard.com/texts.php

photoblog update

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:12:30 GMT

I've also finally updated Domik's photoblog after two months

http://www.photoblog.com/domik

and Magda has this lovely batik on silk for sale at her etsy shop

recent painting

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:33:27 GMT

Elmo was stunned when he saw the new painting. He gives great feedback though, I need him in the studio more often.

South of the Yellow River

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:42:04 GMT

Oracle Turtle Bones

Yin (Anyang) capital of Shang Dynasty in Henan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVspsny9Dqk

Based on Fengshen Yanyi (The Creation of the Gods) and the mythical? struggle between Daji, favorite concubine of the emperor/evil fox spirit with Jiang Ziya

I dont know much about Chinese Mythology ...

Binding of Isaac

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:02:32 GMT

I listened to The Road (Cormac McCarthy) audiobook this weekend. Yes its post apocalyptic and full of dark despair, but ultimately its about fatherhood, love and memory. I found myself thinking not only about my relationship with my son, but also that with my father. I was moved to tears a few times ... The book asks very frightening questions, the ultimate one recalls the Abraham/Isaac story: Would you be able to kill your child, in order to save them from a fate "worse than death"? Its a terrible wager, and a thought I pray I never have to seriously contemplate. Like the father in the story I believe I would not be able to cross that line.

The story of Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac is disturbing to me. A weird psychoviolent Christian myth, the remnants of blood sacrifice. Like Job it shows a self-absorbed God who is obsessed with testing his subjects. Something strange about the power balance. But then again God sacrificed his only son for the world, this mirrors Abraham. Why should we have to sacrifice that which we hold dearest? It only breaks us over the wheel of the Church and community ...

A good interpretation of the Abraham/Isaac bond here (scroll down). The moral of the lesson perhaps is more direct .. “Thou shalt not kill!” (even for God?). From the article:

The reason that Caravaggio and Rembrandt could show us the ambiguous role of the face is that Abraham’s situation is not at all exceptional. In fact, it powerfully portrays a modern or postmodern predicament: our ambiguous relation to our own children. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1995) has put it very well: in a real sense we can kill our children [i.e., their uniqueness] in many different ways, and all of us, men and women, are like Abraham holding the knife over those who are dear to us. How do we do this? And what does Levinas mean when he says, “Care for the death of the other is the beginning of the acknowledgement of the other”? (Levinas in Rötzer 1995: 65)

This is troubling, the relationship of the individual to society and the role of the parent in suppressing (killing) the uniqueness of the child. Perhaps its a cop-out on my part, but as a parent I feel that we can only do so much. Holding the spark of new life in the child is a great and frightful responsibility, the urge to protect that life from the "evil" in the world. But the force of reality, of society is stronger still. Nature calls, time flows, there is no way to hold back the unknowable future. We wander in the fog of unknowing, we are powerless, and the world beats on us relentlessly like the sea. What will be, will be, and as a parent I can at most hope to instill in my child an awareness of his own human dignity and uniqueness, and the eternal dance against the forces which would degrade him.

I am a father, the little patriarch in a family circle .. what is my relationship to power, the wider patriarchy, and how do I communicate that to my son? Mostly inadvertently, in my actions and doubts, subconscious reactions beyond my control. The chain of neurosis/enlightenment is passed down. I am what I am, and so is he. I'm sorry, but thats how it is ... blame Abraham.

existential crisis

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:29:26 GMT

When will all my powers show who I am inside?

value of money

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:49:48 GMT

Money and value are both abstractions. Abstractions which are unfortunately very difficult to ignore. The issue of selling something revolves around how much you can get someone to pay for it. A sucker is born every minute, they say, and so we become a society of suckers. Its all about manipulation. Such a beautiful life, manipulating and being manipulated.

So the cost of living keeps going up because the inherent value of money keeps going down. Is it just because the population keeps growing, stressing the ultimate value of money? Or is it due to speculation?

I've been looking at Leon Golub's work a lot lately, but that's a different topic. See his work here.
Good interview with him here:

http://www.feldmangallery.com/media/golub/general%20press/2000_golub_border%20crossings_Enright.pdf

So in 1956 he got $4,500 from a friend and went and lived in Italy for a year. What?!
A few years later he got $12,000 from another patron/gallery and went and lived in Paris for like 5 years.

Now I know he was earning other monies through sales, etc, but hey where have those days gone?
He also mentions the GI Bill and education, which is a related issue. When education becomes unaffordable, you get a society of morons.

Another example: Mark Rothko

Seagrams offered Rothko $35,000 in 1958 for murals for the Four Seasons restaurant. The equivalent, according to the documentary, of $2.5 million dollars today. What?! The difference between 1959 and 2009 in this regard is staggering.

Here is some of his work. I prefer the mythic period, as with Golub. Later Rothko is too reductive, yet showing the importance of scale.

Rothko's work was caught up in the "tragic notion of the image", death and mortality resonating behind monolithic forms. Such lovely decoration for a restaurant ... and he cancelled the commission and sold the work to other collectors. Killed himself in 1970 because he knew it was over. Art was dead and so was Rothko.

And money and value? What are they?

Equal Rights and Forgiveness

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:00:25 GMT

I finally watched the whole Peter Tosh documentary last night. His message and personality were very strong. With his childhood in Trenchtown, the whiteness of the Christian message, and the violence he experienced, its no wonder he learned in school to "edu hate". He was a fighter, on stage wearing a keffiyeh and holding a guitar fashioned to look like an AK-47, he was playing a dangerous game, linking the fight against colonial oppression in Africa with Palestine in a Fanon-style third world violent reactionary stance. Although romantic and macho, I think this way is treacherous. He was the stepping razor, dangerous, and so it goes. Violence begets violence. Tosh saw the world too strongly through the prism of race.

I got turned on to Peter Tosh when I participated in the anti-apartheid demonstrations of the mid-80s. On the album Equal Rights, Tosh drew a line with the song "African". "No matter where you come from, as long as you're a black man, you are an African." I used to sing along, a skinny white kid from the suburbs in Kentucky. This was a club of blackness to which I could never be a member. I romanticized the oppression and fight for justice in a way. I was protected, privileged, naive. But Tosh was also being simplistic, dividing the world into the black and the white, the humble, righteous black man and the colonialist white devil. His was a restless heart, he could never have found his peace.

This article on African forgiveness and reconciliation by Antjie Krog contains some answers. (Its two pages, notice the little arrow in the lower right corner)

“How can it be?” he asked furiously, “I interview this black woman, living in a shack in appalling conditions, illiterate, dirt poor, I ask her: ‘what did forgiveness and ten years of democracy brought you?’ She said: ‘freedom and peace.’ I said: ‘but here you are, see how you live, you have nothing, a few yards from here, look at that mansion and the rich whites there.’ And you know what she said? She looked at me and said: ‘ten years cannot put right what three hundred years made wrong.’ This is what she said. I can’t believe it. Is she mad? Is she stupid?”

He looked at me accusingly as if I know some secret evil way that forces poor black people to give smart answers. When he mentioned that another radio team was lining up to interview that same woman again I was suddenly wondering by myself: if the fourth or fifth white pushes a microphone into my face and asks with undisguised disgust: how can you talk about forgiveness if you still have nothing and the whites still have everything... sooner or later I would definitely say: ‘You know, I am ashamed. I made a big mistake. It was so stupid to forgive. Come to think of it, I actually hate whites.’

One great irony of the end of the age of oil is that the transcendence we could have gained from global awareness will be setback again to tribal, nationalist, racial divisions. If we are even capable of such a transcendence. I'm a great believer in the simplistic slogan, "Think globally. Act locally.", but I know its idealistic. Considering the way society often sinks to a lowest common denominator of opinion and action, its pretty hard to expect such awareness. Another irony is that,with the rise of the security apparatus, we are all less free now than when "Equal Rights" came out in 1977. Trenchtowns and secret prisons are spreading under what Agamben calls the "state of exception".

Can we learn to forgive our oppressors?

disaster utopias

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:07:26 GMT

A few quotes from the New York Times book review of Rebecca Solnit's new book "A Paradise Built in Hell" on the transformative power of disaster.

She criticizes Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine,” for portraying civilians as merely frightened and disoriented during times of crisis, rather than invigorated and capable. She notes that the British intellectual Timothy Garton Ash fed stereotypes after Katrina, saying that the storm’s “big lesson is that the crust of civilization on which we tread is always wafer thin.” Ms. Solnit’s optimistic book advances just the opposite worldview.

Crises force us to wake up and actually see the world. Therefore the best way to grow is to force oneself into unfamiliar threatening territory. There are those (like me) who are content like rabbits in cages to live dull lives based on illusionary security. Nothing much happens. Its easy to fall into a rut, most of us do I think. Disasters, although traumatic, force us to break out of our routines, and can lead to something stronger.

The provocative image that stuck with me from “A Paradise Built in Hell” is this one: When the electrical power failed after the 1989 Bay area earthquake and after Hurricane Katrina, the light pollution that usually blotted out the night sky vanished. All the stars came out.

“You can think of the current social order,” she writes, “as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/excerpt-paradise-built-in-hell.html?ref=books

I came across similar ideas recently in Allan Stoekl's "Bataille's Peak". Bataille posits an economy of excess which negates the ideas of scarcity which are tied to the official ideology of private property and the engine of profit which drives our society. We are squeezed ever tighter to produce profits, and yet what is being created with the surplus?

From Allen Mozek's For the Birds:

What is productivity if it is the means and also the goal of a capitalism mechanism? We must ask ourselves if productivity is just another myth. Our common understanding is that “when one considers the totality of productive wealth on the surface of the globe, it is evident that the products of this wealth can be employed for productive ends only insofar as the living organism that is economic mankind can increase its equipment.” But we “…forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions.” The fate of all profit is waste, and our ignorance of this fact, according to Bataille, is that “…it causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood. It deprives us of the choice of an exudation that might suit us. Above all, it consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions.”

We are tied to a chain of destruction we believe to be natural. And perhaps it is, as even stars burn themselves out and explode in supernovae. So too mankind has the potential to destroy itself. We have to be open, not to the apocalypse, which is only a myth, albeit a powerful one, but to the traumatic rupture, always coming, it seems, some time in the (near) future. Open to the tragic which binds us together. "The tragic is unthinkable, but it is incumbent on us to think it."

"I love the ignorance concerning the future." - Nietzsche

Bröselmaschine atd

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:12:53 GMT

all kinds of obscure hippie German stuff appearing on youtube
admittedly Bröselmaschine were very Anglophile here, with sitars
the whole album is on youtube

long-limbed hairy German guys, do they still make them this way?

click around on this channel

or some exmagma, really tall guys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnQDc1OEoHQ