September 2011
Fraud
There’s this ritual. It’s called Fraud. What you do is, you list out all your good qualities and all your bad qualities. Then you immediately attribute all your good qualities to other people, and all your bad qualities to yourself. Of your good attributes, those which you have acquired from others, copied from them, in fact, note that almost all of them are vacuous, or secretly...
Werner Herzog on Ecstatic Truth →
The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better. This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.
But in the...
The Race
Imagine that it’s 1969, and NASA is preparing to put men on the moon. But then, suddenly, the Soviets announce that they, too, are going to the moon, and soon. The race is on.
The Soviets have no scientific pretensions: they’re just going to touch down, plant a flag, and zip off into space again. They’re also going to use a more efficient rocket, which will put them on the moon...
There’s a special sort of sadness that accompanies the discovery of a great artist recently deceased—perhaps even a sort of shame, as if one is personally guilty because one’s enjoyment of the dead artist’s work is dependent on our own postmortem discovery—a sadness to do with narrowly missed windows of time and quite distinct from any melancholic pangs occasioned by...
Picture This Date in History →
I’m interested in history. I’m interested in photography. I’m interested in the way photographs frame history, and the way history frames photographs. If you share these interests, this may be for you.
There are many excellent sites that tell you what happened on this date in history. There’s also at least one excellent site about iconic photographs. There are none, as far...
Early morning, it occurs to me, can be approached from two directions. Although one can’t literally travel back in time, there seems to be a difference between morning as approached “from behind”, i.e., as the end of a sleepless night, and “from in front”, i.e., as the end of a night of sleep. As a chronic insomniac, I’m more familiar with one than the other. I...
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Art Thief
I’m looking at a little slice of spacetime (so little). It’s five seconds in Boulder, Colorado, USA, at 7:04 PM on a Monday, and a man is walking down the sidewalk while whistling a tune that I don’t recognize, his hands in his pockets, kicking a pebble in front of him, twice in the span of those five seconds. The slice of spacetime is placed on a little table, and I’m in an art gallery. It’s a...
Week 37
It used to be that I’d post a summary of links I’d been reading and thoughts too short to be their own posts every Sunday. I kept it up for a while, too, but it was more work than I’d thought. I won’t make excuses, only acknowledge the fact.
Amanda at the sauna, 1994, by Nan Goldin. This was part of an exhibition showing Goldin’s Berlin work that I saw at...
Einstein's thought process, et cetera
I’m in love with abstractions, but I’m also deeply suspicious of them. I think there’s a very real danger that they lure us away from things that are realer and more important, or, worse, they infect us and shroud our visions so we no longer see reality, we see only our representations of it. I’ve written about this many times on this blog, and longtime readers may be a bit...
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How much meaning is there in a word?
I have an interest in the fundamentals of language and questions about the nature of meaning. One question that seems easy but really isn’t is this: how much meaning is there in a word? How do you quantify meaning? According to Time, this question was recently tackled by a team of scientists. Except Time won’t tell you what the study was called or who the researchers were, only that it...
“One thing you relentlessly do when you write is solve aesthetic problems. But to...”
– Steven Millhauser.
“A man is bringing a cup of coffee to his face, tilting it to his mouth....”
– Russell Edson, A Historical Breakfast.
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The Unreality Show
The unreality show was an immediate hit. Twelve contestants, one million dollar price, all standard fare. But at the door to the house with all the cameras, each contestant must leave their existence as a real being behind. If you lose, you must live the rest of your life as a fiction. The stakes were high, which provided sufficient drama, of course, but more than that, the viewers were captivated...
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August 2011
Alan Watts on Zen’s appeal to the West....