March 2010
50 posts
“
For authorship to remain both theoretically and economically valuable, for it to enact or enable a mode of resistance against the totalizing banality of the common, it must remain scarce, mobile, undefinable, faced as faceless. Paradoxically, then, the cultural privliges of an author’s ostensible ‘infamy’- the capacity or proclivity constantly to transgress social limits, to change and innovate, to insist on not remaining the same-would mark not “infamy” at all, but would function as the very indicators and guarantors of fame. Indeed, how else could someone like William Burroughs- an avant-garde writer and homosexual drug addict who killed his wife- end up in a commercial for Nike sneakers? “Just do it” indeed.
J.T. Nealon
” —J.T. Nealon
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I Am Goodbye
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
I am Goodbye - Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
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Tony Joe White: Polk Salad Annie
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Smells Like Teen Spirit
The Bad Plus
Smells like teen spirit - The Bad Plus (via FF).
This becomes infinitely more interesting than i ever thought it could be.
“All deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous slavish shore”
—H. Melville. (Cf. Nietzsche)
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“A priest, lawyer, and philosopher are to be beheaded by guillotine. The priest is up first. He cries before the crowd: “May God save me, for I am a good man!” He is placed under the blade, and just before it severs his neck, the blade stops, and he is set free. The lawyer is next. He cries before the crowd, “May justice save me, for I am a good man!” He is placed under the blade, and wouldn’t you know it, the blade stops short of his neck, and he is also set free. The philosopher is last, but before he is placed under the blade, he pulls out a small stone lodged in the guillotine’s mechanism. “There,” he says, “That should fix this thing!”
—The price we pay.
“All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
— JFK via eightsixteen
“If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pine woods.”
—R. W. Emerson
“There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.”
—Bill Evan’s liner notes from Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”
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Herbie Handock - Chameleon (Flood version)
“One of my favorite things about studying philosophy at a small liberal arts college: no one will be talking about NCAA basketball this month.”
—thank god.
“January 8th, 2051 - A futuristic-hipster discovers an Angels and Airwaves cd in a failing-dusty-old compact-disc store in the trendiest neighborhood of the trendiest town in America. He stays up all night on his inter-web portal doing research. Very soon this hipster will be held up as the coolest cat in town because he knows all about some half-baked band you’ve never heard of and no one ever cared about. Thus spake Zarathustrizzle.”
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“This is a pattern that I see: an allergy to thought, to complexity [and] nuance - a kind of collapse into an intellectual relativism where opinions become fact… It’s a dangerous thing… there’s a growing hostility to knowledge in this country… Our national progress is being retarded because we have fallen into this discourse by slogan. We have fallen into this relativism where it’s a conversation to stop and say, “Well, that’s your opinion. [This is] my opinion…’ Go back to the Athenian idea of political speech - it was a search for good answers. We’re so far from that today that it’s almost ludicrous… We don’t listen well as a society. When we listen, we listen in feedback loops to people who are likely to say what it is we think is right… We’re in the process, it seems to me, because of this allergy to complexity and nuance, of devaluing the importance of education… I think universities are the last, best hope for pushing back against this because what we do is complexity and nuance.”
—New York University President John Sexton
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“The mob is a monster I never could abide, either in its head, tail, midriff, or members: I detest the whole of it, as a mass of ignorance, presumption, malice, brutality; and, in this term of reprobation, I include, without respect of rank, situation, or quality, all those of both sexes, who affect it’s manners, and court it’s society.”
—T. Smollett
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“Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of one’s little finger”
—D. Hume
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“Unlike former mass extinctions by meteoric disasters, the current mass extinction of species is the product of human behavior. As the unrivaled ruling species atop the food chain, we are drafting the requiem for biodiversity.”
—A. Bandura
“False values and delusive words: these are the worst monsters for mortals; long does calamity sleep and wait in them. But eventually it comes and wakes and eats and devours what built huts upon it. Behold these huts which these priests built! Churches they call their sweet-smelling caves. Oh, that falsified light! That musty air! Here the soul is not allowed to soar to its height. For thus their faith commands: ‘Crawl up the stairs on your knees, ye sinners!’”
—F. Nietzsche
