intellectual properties

QOTD: M.I.A. on Gaga

“People say we’re similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic.”

—M.I.A. to the NME on April 7, on Lady Gaga.

– Interview Magazine, June 2010

i’m not much into M.I.A.’s music either, but this perfectly sums up why i’m not into Gaga. her costumes? fantastic (but i’m giving a lot of credit to her costume designers there too). her music? horrible, to the point that it annoys me so much that i can’t bear the thought of listening to it just to see the performance art.

lots of other good quotes in there too, such as the opening one:

“I find the new Justin Bieber video more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I’ve made.”

—M.I.A. to NME.com on May 12, responding to the furor over the video for her new song “Born Free,” which was yanked from YouTube.

(fame) puts you there where things are hollow

ELLIS: But people can create their own kind of fame with tech now. You can set up websites devoted to yourself. You can very easily live out that visual fantasy of yourself as famous. What may be different is that with such a culture of immediate gratification, the desire to actually move your ass, become talented at something, and then try to succeed at something like acting or singing or dancing is no longer necessary. Sometimes you watch those elimination rounds on shows like American Idol and wonder, “Do people really think this about themselves?”

BOLLEN: It’s gotten to the point that embarrassing yourself has overstepped talent. Talent is far less interesting or consumable than public spectacle.

ELLIS: Do we judge that human craving for attention? For fame? Doesn’t that need seem human in a way? “I’m here. I exist. Look at me.” There’s something weird about people putting that need down or judging it. I don’t know. I feel too contradictory when I discuss this. One side of me thinks, “This is ridiculous.” And then the other side says, “No, it’s also human.” I guess I just don’t know if I’m really that interested in complaining about the culture anymore.”

– full interview with Bret Easton Ellis @ Interview Magazine, regarding his new book, and the LA culture he has become famous for writing dispassionately about:

Sentimentality has no place in Ellis’s worlds—so much so that it is a wonder when any character thinks in the past tense at all. But now, 25 years after Less Than Zero launched his career, Ellis has made another shocking departure by going back to where he started. In June, Ellis releases Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his debut, which drops in on Clay, Blair, Julian, and other Less Than Zero denizens who, now in their forties, are haunting and haunted by the post-glamour, post-shock, post-moral, post-purpose Hollywood scene. Clay is now a screenwriter. Upon returning to Los Angeles from New York to work on a film, he slowly falls back into old ways—parties, drugs, sex—as the plot teems with more-graphic Ellisian tropes like murder, ghosts, dismemberment, and paranoia. For anyone assuming that the author has created something of an upbeat 90210 reunion, the opening pages clarify the difference between Hollywood’s favorite export and the actual on-the-ground circumstance: “The movie was begging for our sympathy,” says Clay, referring to the 1987 film version of Less Than Zero, “whereas the book didn’t give a shit.”

be kind; the universe owes you nothing

“When you recognize yourself feeling contempt for a human being, stop.

When you recognize yourself judging or ridiculing a human being, stop.

When you recognize yourself boiling human matters down to black and white, consider the gray areas.

Stay away from people who do the above things. Seriously. I avoid serially snarky people like the god-damn plague. Yes, there’s always room for a bit of viciousness and sarcasm in humor, and I can accept that. What I can not abide by an individual who cannot open their mouth without some sort of judgmental remark coming out of it. All the more when they shrink up/blow up when that sort of treatment is reversed upon them.

One more thing: the universe entitles you to nothing. You are not entitled to happiness, prosperity, wealth, anything at all. Any suffering you feel, or have felt does not mean you get any more of a break in life than anyone else. You are not owed a damn thing in this world. Do not ever act as if you are. Avoid people who do.

That being said: be kind. The only time you will catch a break is from someone who goes out of their way to be kind to you. Do so yourself, regardless of the above fact. This isn’t about fate or karma or any such mystical claptrap. It is about knowing you are, as much as you can, doing the right thing.”

–http://ask.metafilter.com/157204/Shiny-happy-people-speak-out#2253229, via google reader

QOTD: monkeys vs robots, wrt truth/logic

“That clear response, shorn of the ambiguities of presumption or prudence, would be the one given by a computer or a calculator and would be the only one that their inflexible, honest natures, that of the computer and the machine, would have allowed themselves, but we are dealing here with human beings, and human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.”

– Jose Saramago, Seeing

QOTD

God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that.

–from an amazing letter written by the mother of a gay child published in a Vermont newspaper, which i highly encourage you to read (@titaniumdreads)

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QOTD

This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

–George Bernard Shaw

QOTD

“…because the secret difference between winners and losers is a cool certainty that feels meant and a doubt that loses before it even begins….because the secret of lightness and speed is joy.”

–B. Hockey J., in yet another post that makes being a parent seem glorious.

castles in the air

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

–Henry David Thoreau

QOTD: Earth Day, 2010

“Mother Nature bats last.”

QOTD

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” - Oscar Wilde