John Waters:
“When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I probably would be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.”
Ryan Gander’s solo exhibition (These wings aren’t for flying) is stunning. I was really taken by this installation (Ftt, Ft, Ftt, Ftt, Ffttt, Ftt, or somewhere between a modern representation of how a contemporary gesture came into being, an illustration of the physicality of an argument, 2010). In searching for it online afterwards, I noticed it has a totally different feel in other rooms (here, in all white).
Tuna Dunn from the poem “How to Succeed in Heartbreak” by Victoria Morgan.
Kim Dorland, Border at Papier Montreal.
“Crayola Cabana” by WIA at Station 16.
From Jessa Crispin on Anthony Bourdain as the Queen of Coins.
I was talking to a bookseller friend about this in the context of James Joyce: when we look at a figure that we admire, we choose the wrong things to emulate. We look at the symptoms, not the source. When we want to be James Joyce, we look at the word trickery, the foulness, the shiny things on the surface. And we think we can just borrow that shit, take it on for ourselves, without also transplanting the source of how he did what he did (his deep feeling for an willingness to listen to women, his life on the margins, his capacity for joy, and so on). It’s why every academic who thinks he’s secretly James Joyce because he wrote a selfishly impenetrable novel is such an asshole. They’re withholding where Joyce is overflowing, they’re clever where Joyce is funny.
Sidenote: I love the adjective “overflowing” to describe a person.
From this interview with Michael Tolkin.
We have suffered catastrophes throughout history. Do you think our current one can be corrected?
So the story goes that Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and biographer, asked Kafka, “Franz, is there hope?” And Kafka answered, “Oh yes, Max, there’s plenty of hope, an infinity of hope — but not for us.” We’re an omnivorous, territorial, and essentially lazy ape that gathers in bands to steal from others, or force them to work for us, and then sing about it and sometimes even feel bad about how bad we are, but still, you know, go on more with the bad than the good. We’re wired for apprehension and hoarding, and we follow the leader. We have religion to mitigate and excuse. We have art for who the fuck knows, really? We’re funny, no question about our sense of humor, especially our gallows humor. We leave loopholes in all our contracts. This is the dystopia now and has been for a long time. The essence of climate denial is to make a bet that the scientists are wrong so there’s no necessity for prudence, just in case the scientists are right. To be prudent might cost money, and if the scientists are wrong, then that money would be wasted. The denial argument is an equation: better to risk the life of the planet than lose money. And we go along with this because it’s too hard to fight peacefully over a long period. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but not in our lifetimes. There’s going to be a massive die off, but in the long run … Consider the animal videos on YouTube, all the little movies showing animal intelligence, animal capacity for love, and animal capacity for joy. This is a new thing — they are evolving ahead of us, they are rejoicing. That dog and goose chasing each other around the rock, that Russian crow sledding on a pitched roof, that cat rescuing the puppy from the ditch, that elephant sitting on the car. They know something. They know we’re on the way out, even if a million more species are killed, in the very long run, soulful life will return to dominion, finding niches and making a shared ecology, without us. And that’s just the way it’s going to be. In the short run, the fuckers are going to have their celebration of blood. In the long run, intelligent bacteria will eat their flesh.
Mail testing at MIT, via Devin Kennedy.
Went through some old books today and found this bit ripped out from Brave New World. On what to want.
“Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond. “Quite apart from God–though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”
“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller replied. “Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”
“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”
“V.P.S.?”
“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort.
I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
From Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City.
John O’Donohue via Maria Popova (and this too, on anam cara).
The Greeks … raised the eye beyond the horizon and recognized the heavenly patterns of the cosmos. There they glimpsed a vision of order which was to become the heart of their understanding of beauty. All the frailty and uncertainty was seen to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all the journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness.
The human soul is hungry for beauty… When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming. Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. For a while the strains of struggle and endurance are relieved and our frailty is illuminated by a different light in which we come to glimpse behind the shudder of appearances and sure form of things. In the experience of beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act. Beauty brings a sense of completion and sureness. Without any of the usual calculation, we can slip into the Beautiful with the same ease as we slip into the seamless embrace of water; something ancient within us already trusts that this embrace will hold us.
….
There is a lovely disarray that comes with attraction. When you find yourself deeply attracted to someone, you gradually begin to lose your grip on the frames that order your life. Indeed, much of your life becomes blurred as that countenance comes into clearer focus. A relentless magnet draws all your thoughts towards it. Wherever you are, you find yourself thinking about the one who has become the horizon of your longing. When you are together, time becomes unmercifully swift. It always ends too soon. No sooner have you parted than you are already imagining your next meeting, counting the hours. The magnetic draw of that presence renders you delightfully helpless. A stranger you never knew until recently has invaded your mind; every fibre of your being longs to be closer.
…
Eros can take many forms. Sometimes it can be slow, subtle and indirect, building quietly without anyone else even suspecting. Sometimes it can come at you.
Eclipsed!
From Andrea Hairston’s review of Kiini Ibura Salaam’s When the World Wounds.
Standing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and facing the selective neglect of black and poor communities, Bone Man tells the young cynic: “Make believe is the only reason I’m here right now.”
After the levies break, Bone Man hangs at the edge of life and death, confused, uncertain, despairing. Yet in his imagination he lives beyond devastation. To heal the children and decolonize the future, Bone Man calls up the spirits of the living and of the ancestors for carnival, for Mardi Gras. Bone Man doesn’t have any answers, and he can’t figure a cure for despair, but he believes in the power of people coming together to make sense out of catastrophe. Bone Man feels that performance is a chance for the devastated to recover and rediscover themselves. Mardi Gras is an embodied understanding of life as a grand cosmic improvisation. Look at all life does with dirt, water, and sunlight. We are bacteria. Making it up as we go along, wounding and healing ourselves, falling over cliffs and reaching out for the stars, life invents passions and possibilities that devastate and surprise. Bone Man knows natural disasters and socially engineered neglect do not define us. He believes in his bones and ghostly spirit that carnival is a communal performance of who we mean to be. Mardi Gras celebrates the potential of the universe to harbor life.
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