November 2011
WatchSo, there’s a storm raging outside and I’m sitting here trying to figure out how video works. Since I can’t go outside, pretty much the only thing to point the camera at is myself. I have, apparently, become a video blogger. (Don’t worry: this will not be a regular thing.) For the moment, I’ve rechristened my camera the awkwardness machine. I’ve also learned...
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Disappearances →
(a thing that I wrote)
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance,...”
– T. S. Eliot on tradition. Some artists embrace tradition; to others, it is a straitjacket. But to Eliot, it’s neither: new works of art must find their place in tradition, but tradition must also find its place around the new. The new must conform to the old, and the old to the new; the future...
Why?
We spend our entire lives trying to figure out how to deal with consciousness. For this reason, the problem of consciousness is one of the most important and most interesting philosophical and scientific problems. The problem is staring us in the face at every moment: it’s simultaneously banal and incredibly profound. Unlike most scientific questions, however, there is a very intuitive sense that...
Egypt, A Tragedy in Two Acts
Act I
Conservatives: Tits? Immorality! GTFO!
Act II
Progressives: Tits? The conservatives will be like, “Tits? GTFO!” and look at us with disapproving eyes. Since we disapprove of that, we kindly suggest you GTFO.
Note to self: this is what radical activism looks like. Doing something (taking a bus seat/posting nudes of yourself online) that we (privileged Westerners/privileged...
A Hunger Artist, by Franz Kafka (1922) →
During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see...
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Serena Maneesh — Sapphire Eyes (2005)
I...
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I’ll be much briefer. Laura Brown responds to my post about attribution on the web:
tl;dr. This is tumblr, not a scholarly journal or even a platform for mediocre art blogs. It’s something different entirely whose users aim at a different goal. There seems to be a lack of understanding here of how internet culture and specifically tumblr culture functions. flickr and tumblr are apples and...
alloy-d asked: Having read so much about him on your blog, I've recently gotten into Murakami. I'm nearing the end of _Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman_, and I'm planning on getting one of his full-length novels next. I'm primarily considering _Hard-boiled Wonderland_, _Sputnik Sweetheart_, and _1Q84_. Of course, I plan on reading them all, but is there one in particular that you would recommend...
Ideas for Art Projects I Will Never Get to Do....
A series of landscapes showing places rumored to be haunted. The photographs will be taken in a deadpan style in broad daylight. There will be no people, and nothing whatsoever to indicate the nature of the rumors. The exhibition will consist of two identical rooms. The rooms will be sound-isolated from each other. (No sounds coming from room A will be heard from room B, and vice versa.) The...
Nihilism, After a Fashion
What are you going to do with your life? That’s the question, isn’t it.
I have lots of potential. I know this, because it is what I have always been told, and because I have actualized some of this potential, and it was good. But potential isn’t all that great.
I think inside every humble man rests a man of ambition. In some, he has been beaten into a pulp. Certainly, I have an...