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We have made him. To actually, truly believe in the advertisements that shape our culture—to let them penetrate one’s soul—is to become Jeff Koons. He believed what was said about vacuums and, and so he puts them in hermetically sealed shrines, turning them into the hallowed products their advertisements claim them to be. Koons never stopped being an investor, he just switched to a market that could survive the crash (one of his balloon dogs went for $58.4 million last year). Archaeologists of the future will excavate these dogs and assume we worshipped them, and maybe we do. A god who can be contorted into any shape of our choosing, and once contorted, becomes stainless steel—an idol more rigid and inflexible in its demand we seek sexual fulfillment than the Decalogue ever was. Koons is a Biblical sculptor—he is Aaron, and these are our golden calves. His retroactive justifications are completely absurd. The audio guide compares his Michael Jackson and Bubbles to Michelangelo. We get the pietàs we deserve.
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[gallery] robertogreco:
This image is what got me thinking about Arabic and flags today.Manuscript from the 18th century in the Moroccan style of Arabic calligraphy.
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The truth is that no one so much as herself would have approved of my doing this. Art was the only thing for which she felt very seriously. Had it been possible to her, I should have found the book on my pillow the night she was buried; and could she have opened the grave, no other hand would have been needed.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, explaining his decision to exhume the body of his wife, seven years after her death, to retrieve a collection of his poems he had buried with her. Cool story, bro.
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The dullness comes from this election’s lack of a compelling macro-theme. Yes, there are national refrains: Democrats in state after state call their Republican opponents heartless misogynists; Republicans call their Democratic opponents Obama clones. But there’s no big national issue on which voters feel that they can change the country’s course. It’s not that candidates today are more cynical or homogenized than in midterms past. It’s that the subjects they’re discussing cynically and homogenously don’t matter as much.
There’s a Good Reason These Midterm Elections Seem So Boring - The Atlantic. I have a different explanation for our indifference towards midterm elections: the determination, shared by all our news media, to teach us that the POTUS is the only political figure who matters at all. When Bush 2 was president, the liberal media blamed every bad thing in the world on Bush; since Obama came to the office, the conservative media (especially Fox News) blames every bad thing in the world on him. The great majority of us get our news from sources which act on the assumption that America is functionally an absolute monarchy. So why should anyone care about a non-presidential election?
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The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King (via austinkleon)
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[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18702”]
Edward Wilson, an old master.
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.
— W. H. Auden, “Sext”
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They called it ‘interactive fiction,’ and it was absolutely interactive fiction. You read the text, and you took actions, and your actions influenced the games. And one of these games, Zork III, I played with my friend Chad, in like the sixth grade. We started in sixth grade and we played that game for two years before we solved it. … It was pre-internet. It was vastly pre-internet. We had no answers and no way to get them. … When I talk to the brilliant people in my generation — people doing things, telling stories, making things, they played Infocom games. Neil Gaiman played Infocom games, Terry Pratchett played Infocom games, Felicia Day played Infocom games, and they were all frustrated, and they all spent months trying to get the frickin’ Babel Fish in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And now it’s virtually impossible to write a game that successfully provides challenge and frustration, and that’s a shame. We are going to lose something that makes scientists, that makes doers, that makes hard-minded, witty, clever people, and I worry that those people aren’t being made these days.
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[gallery] 60ansdevadrouille:
Sur le Gange au petit matin à Varanasi (Bénarès)., en période de basses eaux. février 1988.
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Just as the self-esteem movement was not a panacea leading to happy, successful, and well-adapted children, … empathy interventions may not stop problems such as bullying and other forms of aggression and violence, because aggression itself may result from empathy.