intellectual properties

it’s complicated / sandpaper

“I’m afraid I’m in love with you,” said Dick, “and that’s not the best thing that could happen.”

Again the names–they lurched together as if the taxi had swung them. Her breasts crushed flat against him, her mouth was all new and warm, owned in common. They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sought each other. They were both in the grey gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast…

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

But for Dick that portion of the road was short; the turning came before they reached the hotel. “There’s nothing to do about it,” he said, with a feeling of panic. “I’m in love with you but that doesn’t change what I said last night.”

“That doesn’t matter now. I just wanted to make you love me — if you love me everything’s all right.”

“Unfortunately I do. But Nicole mustn’t know–she mustn’t suspect even faintly. Nicole and I have got to go on together. In a way that’s more important than just wanting to go on.”

“Kiss me once more.”

He kissed her, but momentarily had left her.

“Nicole mustn’t suffer– she loves me and I love her–you understand that.”

She did understand–it was the sort of thing she understood well, not hurting people. She knew the Divers loved each other because it had been her primary assumption. She had thought however that it was a rather cooled relation, and actually rather like the love of herself and her mother. When people have so much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity?

“And I mean love,” he said, guessing her thoughts. “Active love – it’s more complicated than I can tell you.”

–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tender_Is_the_Night

.::.

[+]

“When I tell her I feel like the other woman, she laughs, that’s just learned sexist bullshit. We are all in charge of our own bodies and what we decide to do with them. We are all our own.

I believed it when she said it, like she’d opened up a new valve that had been stuck. I felt unconfined and open-minded and totally confused. Intellectually, non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally, it felt like sandpaper across my eyelids.”

[Zoe Whittall]

.::.

magic and mimesis

“Magic, like science, is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object.”

– The Concept of Enlightenment

Horkheimer and Adorno,   The Dialectic of Enlightenment . a text, i daresay, everyone should at least sincerely attempt to read.

2 cultural anecdotes for post-Sandy election week:

This quote from a young black youth to George McGovern in 1972 is heartbreaking, as I think a lot of people feel the same way now as this election between Obama and Romney comes to a head:

“This election is going to break your heart. People aren’t as decent as you think they are. They don’t like black people; they’re resentful of the kids and they want to forget about the poor. They don’t care about peace and human rights and the Constitution. Every guy is just trying to make it for himself”.

McGovern lost that election to Nixon.

A lot of people say 1972 was the high water mark for America. I really hope that on Tuesday, we can prove that quote wrong and show we have – through it all – made some progress.

.::.

on unions and workers rights: Steel Worker Eddie Sandlowski from Steel Works Local 65, South Chicago, 1973:

“The CIO – now that didn’t stand for pensions and vacations – that stood for a vision of social justice and people’s dignity,” Sandlowski explained to an interviewer…..The interviewer shot back, “You’re a romantic.” But Eddie knew where he stood. “Fuck you. It’s romantics and fighters who change the world.”

(from Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which i recommend reading if you are interested in Union politics, the dirty tricks of the Nixon administration, and/or cultural/social/political movements of the 1970s, including a lot of awesome music and movie anecdotes.)

happy-?

i just watched this movie, Happy.
http://www.thehappymovie.com/

it’s pop psych, mostly, and a little cheesy. and some of the tragic moments are also really hard to take. and some of the segments maaay go on a little too long. but overall: thoughtful.

if you’re reading this, i am wishing you would watch it, and want to know what you think.

and i don’t just mean what you think about the movie. i mean i want to know what you think about your happiness.

partly this is because i feel a little disconnected right now, being in a new city and submerged in content, which is isolating. but mostly because i think this is something we all really think about.

this was the first movie i’ve watched since August, since i’ve been so focused on other things. i’m a little burnt out today. which is why i watched a movie about happiness. so i can’t respond for myself right now. but i will write more about this from my own end soon.

in defense of darkness

…this is not the only instance wherein the opposite extremes operate equally in favour of the sublime, which in all things abhors mediocrity.”

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
The Sublime and Beautiful (Edmund Burke).

QOTD: Jodorowsky on being creators

on the memetic/mimetic art theme, the current issue of Interview Mag (the one with a totally unrecognizable Katy Perry as the cover) has an interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean surrealist filmmaker who made the infamous art film “Holy Mountain” in 1973.  it’s really too bad it’s not online to share the whole thing because he is such an inspiration for right now. choice quote (emphasis added):

“I think in life there are very few creators.   There are a million imitators, but what is a person who imitates?  It’s just a superficial reproduction of things.  I am seeing today a multiplication of superficial work.  Photos, photos, photos, myself, myself, myself…. but a lack of humanity now.  You have all the communication, but what will you say?  I have Twitter, but I never say what I do or what I eat.  I am transpersonal.  I think art needs to be transpersonal. It needs to break from our individual limits.  It needs to go outside our common, collective humanity.  We are in MoMA right now, which is paradise. We are wit the spirits of art.  But outside, you have reality, which is very dangerous.  It’s in pain.  Nobody’s happy.  Not just economically, but also emotionally and creatively.  They have lost the meaning of politics, of religion, of health.  Today, medicine is an industry.  Everything’s industrial.  But I say the night makes the day.  After a night, it is the day, and not the reversal.  Not after the day is the night.  It is a positive message.  Everything that  happens in your life is for the good.  I don’t believe in political revolution.  I believe in poetical revolution.  That’s what I believe.  So where do we put the power?  In the consciousness.  Everything we do should be to open the mind of a person.”

i love this because it is the same mix of perceptions that i have, that while it contains what are superficially pessimistic realist statements (“Nobody’s happy”), this recognition of the darkness of the world feeds the belief that if we tune ourselves properly it will lead to light.

+obviously a screening of Holy Mountain is in our near future if anyone wants in.

examined life worth living/learning how to die

The unexamined life is not worth living. –Plato

as a slight follow-up to the last post in which i freaked out a little (and that’s the edited version), i also acknowledge that part of my problem right now is that i don’t have anything to focus on. or, maybe, more accurately, i’m not good at focusing on things. i am not focused.  this only makes anxiety worse. you run in circles.

anyway, i felt a little blogger-remorse this morning after publishing that last night, as i’m pretty sure some of you think i’m loopy and it’s slightly embarassing. the thing is, i am. and so are you, i’m betting.  pretty much everyone i know is.  a few people have asked me before, about this blog, “how can you share so much? don’t you feel exposed?” and the answer is yes.  i felt really exposed this morning. people don’t like to hear you talk about mortality or morality.

so tonight while hunting around to watch something good while i still recover from back pain (not going to the gym after work really makes time slow down), i started watching Examined Life, a documentary starring some of our best and most passionate modern philosophers/thinkers (Cornel West, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, etc).  the minutes of Cornel West talking made me feel better about everything.

+ Avital Ronell for the phrase “emergency supplies of meaning”

and ”if we’re not anxious, if we’re ok with things, we’re not trying to explore or figure anything out. so anxiety is the mood par excellence of ethicity, i think.”

+Peter Singer talking your the moral obligation to do no harm

+Michael Hardt talking about types of revolution and democracy

while some think this film is too pop-philosophy and shallow and unbecoming to serious thinkers, including apparently some who were in the film, i loved it. modern philosophers talking might not be everyone’s cup of entertainment but it sure is mine.  i could honestly quote the whole thing. i paused it like a 100 times to look things up/take notes.

the full movie is available on youtube here (1:28:22).

back to the top: hearing philosophers talk about defining “meaning” in life and ideas of  morality/moral relativism makes me feel sane inside my personal insanity.

CICERO says “that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.” The reason of which is, because study and contemplation do in some sort withdraw from us our soul, and employ it separately from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a resemblance of death; or else, because all the wisdom and reasoning in the world do in the end conclude in this point, to teach us not to fear to die. –Michel de Montaigne

stand up democracy and good use of internet

you may or may not have noticed, depending on how you read this blog, that this site was blacked out on Wednesday in protest to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) . there has been much debate about intellectual property rights and copyright infringement and what constitutes fair use and what is piracy. it’s a complex subject. but most people i know thought that it was the wrong tool trying to fix the wrong problem, and ill-defined at that.  and if there’s one thing americans love as much as TV it’s the Internet! and so there was a digital uprising as well as a flood of phone calls to Congress, enough to overload their systems.  and hey, look at that: it worked!

i’m not going to go on and out about it but to say YES! WIN! and that if you are angry, feel disenfranchised, don’t like the way something is going, DO SOMETHING.  a movement is only people moving.

semi-sequitur:  There is a great docu about music and the internet you should watch: PausePressPlay.

everything is its own reward

(click for full size)

–Paul Madonna. this book is unbelievably beautiful. many thx again to Vera for the gift.

bright hot morning

Later she was homeward bound at last in broad daylight, with the pigeons already breaking over Saint-Sulpice.  All of them began to laugh spontaneously because they knew it was still last night while the people in the streets had the delusion that it was bright hot morning.

–Tender is the Night