Eternally Yours

A radical confusion between art and action is at the heart of this. What we consider unacceptable in human behaviour, we consider unacceptable in art, forgetting that art exists precisely to say the otherwise unsayable.

You know what this means, don't you. It means that art, the practice of art of any kind, is a necessary human function, as if given us precisely to do something with that which would otherwise remain outside of life, perhaps kill us, drive us to kill someone else, or any of the thousand other terrible things people do when experience overwhelms the spirit and the mind.

Or, in those people you don't like very much, cause the inter-psychologic splitting by which some are capable of sealing off, as it were, the feeling part. Actually, it's not so much that you don't like them, as it is a matter of finding next to no response. We are the instruments that play each other—and if you don't have resonance, I'm not going to attune to you. Be drawn in. No melody.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I guess what I am talking about is why we creative malcontents tend to hang with our own kind. Read Ernest Becker's Denial of Death. His explanation divides people into two camps (I always like two camps) those who spend their lives in the successful denial of their upcoming death—and those who wade through the various manifestations of death that are part and parcel of being alive. Being human.

The animal, Rilke writes in the Eighth Duino Elegy, has its death behind it, and leaps forward for all eternity, as if a running spring (depending on which translation you read) and while of course this is the most enviable freedom we can imagine, it is also not Ours. That option was already lost. When we were born human—a member of the only species aware of its own, personal upcoming death.

I think a whole lot of the big, unnecessary, fruitless stink manufactured by persons, in this life, is for lack of having a way to do art. Or courage for the struggle.

Something like that.

Just The Ticket

I have no idea what this post said. Only that it was badly done, not worth rewriting, and I took it down.

Which drives the google-bot crazy.

So here you are, GB: this post doesn't exist anymore.

Into Your Heart It Will Creep

“Why the fuck would the Pope want to kill Lennon? The Pope didn't fucking kill anybody, the CIA killed Lennon, you can't be half-werewolf, that makes no fucking sense, and they aren't aliens, they're Republicans, and they killed Hunter Thompson because he was the only one with solid evidence about the cloning plan and was going to tell the media before he got too old to regularly check the grave site for signs of DNA extraction, thus maintaining the stalemate that was keeping Ted Kennedy alive.”

Perfect.


link: kuro5hin

Yow!

And she seems like such a nice person:

“To you and me, Shelly, a link is just a link. To a guy, however, a link is something special, a part of himself. The most, um, important part of himself.”

“Mags, are you telling me that guys equate links with their dicks?”

“Shelley, to a woman, a link is a way of connecting and being connected. To hearing and being heard. But not so for a guy. Guys see links as power, and therefore something precious, and to be protected. They hold on to their links as tightly, and as lovingly, as a thirsty drunk holds onto a bottle.”

At that moment I had a mental image, of a male weblogger I know, carefully adding a link to his post, bright, feral grin on his face, manic glaze to his eyes. But instead of typing into a keyboard he was . . . oh, that's disgusting!

Never mind that it's funny. Which I suspect is far more a blow to the ego than the, um, link thing.

Dicks are nothing to laugh at.

She stopped wiping the counter and leaned closer to me, lowering her voice. “The power-link guys have a word for men who link just to link,” she whispered. “They call them linkless.”

The more I thought on Mags’ words, though, the more I could see the truth in them. Much that has confused me about this environment is explained if one considers for a moment that some men think of links as some form of virtual penis.

Sites such as Technorati become the internet version of a locker room, where the guys can hang around, comparing themselves to each other. Those that come up short look at their better endowed brothers with both envy and admiration; sucking up in order to increase their own stature.

When we women ask the power-linkers why they don't link to us more, what we're talking about is communication, and wanting a fair shot of being heard; but what the guys hear is a woman asking for a little link love. Hey lady, do you have what it takes? More important, are you willing to give what it takes?

Oops. Not funny anymore. I mean, Shelley is, her writing is . . . but in truth, my case of heartsick is permanent. Not for myself, but for all whom I hold dear.

More truth? Okay: I just can't get it through my head there is a gender comfortable with, even finding preferable, the exchange of money for sex.

Talk about aloneness. Who will be my boon companion?

If I am a woman, whom, then shall I love?

Hard To Be A Woman

Cary wrote in Salon,

Fathers have been getting drunk and leaving town for centuries when their babies are born: In spite of our storied propensity for engendering life, we do not always welcome it when it arrives, we kind of wish it would go away, we want to be left to our tools and our greasy hands and our shade trees, our violent metal and brief explosions, our gray primer and rust, our certainty of objects. The birth of a child means more life, more crying, more questions, more hunger, more lying and walking away, more required courses, more questions we cannot answer, more tests, more tedium, more teachers, more classroom sitting, more desolate afternoons, more diapers and howling, more unbridgeable gulf, more rules, more discipline, more silence. We do not like life in a lot of ways. For some of us men we like a few books, we like a little racquetball, we like maybe a sauna and some swimming, we like a long drive down a leafy road in a good truck, but we did not sign on for the entire program and it tires us out, frankly, and after the truck is parked we just want to lie down and go to sleep, and it is like this day after day for many of us men, which is why we father kids and go off into the woods, never to speak of it again until it comes up by a careless word or two in the supermarket, and there we are again, saddled with ourselves, bending under the incomprehensible load of what we have done—given life to a child who now looks out at the world and says, I don't know, man, what you're all so fucked up about, rage fiercely. Just wait, we say. Just wait.

Zo wrote to Tom, But why? What does it all mean?

Tom wrote to Zo,

All men struggle with issues of unresolved narcissism. Becoming a father is a crisis (and a particularly good example, by the way, of the Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis,’ which is composed of ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.) Becoming a father offers men their best possible shot at working through and moving beyond their earlier narcissism. Some men experience fatherhood as a fabulous opportunity to finally grow up, and they do. In rising lovingly to the demands of being a good father, they are largely successful in shedding their multiple layers of narcissism. These men actually grow up.

A lot of other men go in exactly the opposite direction, regarding fatherhood as an intrusion, another demand in a life full of demands; and so they adopt either an attitude of indifference or outright hostility toward their children. Narcissistic issues in these fathers get worse, more entrenched; and often they are the great abandoners in life, either by actually physically abandoning their children—or, if they are so bold as to stay around, they abandon their children through complete, merciless indifference. The more primitive ones act out their rage fiercely and directly on their families in the form of physical and emotional abuse.

Zo wrote to Patricia, Why? Why is that? . . . Is it just that we keep going, because someone has to?

Patricia replied,

I think they imagine that women never tire, never feel the same desolation, never ask the same questions, never prefer isolation to the clutter and confusion of family life. They go on with their much higher incomes, their privileges, their self-indulgence, their presumptions, their prerogatives, to live as they please, for themselves, little imagining the hole they have left in another's life, or the loneliness, desperation or poverty, born as a direct consequence of their undue privilege.

Titled in memory of Virginia Tammy Wynette Pugh, Stand By Your Man, 1969.

Scoble on Literature

Yeah, I wish I had slowed down a bit before posting the book idea, but then, you know that you're getting me. Raw. Flawed. Impulsive.

This has been sitting in my Drafts folder since at least March. Oh, it's well worth writing about. This type of thinking, this type of guy.

I bash ahead. There are pros and cons to this approach. Pros? You get stuff done. Cons? You mess up in public and things are half baked. You look stupid. Uninformed. Unprepared.

It's simply that . . . well, keep reading . . .

See, in the old world you only got to read the book, you never got to see the mess.

I am quite sure the culture is dead, and I am living in a dream . . .

Life is messy, and my blogging is too. The more I write out in public, the more I realize a good blog lets you see the mess. Lets you see behind the scenes. Gets you involved in building things.

Damn, time's up—and it's just as I feared.

Ever had the wind knocked out of you?

If you wanna read perfection, then this isn't the place for you. Go read Shakespeare.

It's exactly like that.

No Whimper Either

In Einstein's general theory of relativity, the foundation of modern cosmology, space is dynamic. It can expand, shrink and curve without being embedded in a higher-dimensional space.

This is critically important to keep in mind.

If there is no fixed context ... what criteria are left, I ask you, except the moral?


link: Scientific American

Deep

Rabbitblog , that fount of all wisdom, says:

The more you face the bag lady life, the better it starts to look. Oh sure, it's deeply uncool, but what truly good thing isn't?

Of course, this tips a clue to the secret of genuine, unshakable coolness. The kind you couldn't be rid of if you wanted. The cool on the other side of uncoolness.

I have nothing yet to say on the origins of this cool. Maybe one word: The Sixties. (Okay, picky: two.)

But for now, I can say no more. As George said to Ringo.

Or was it Paul to John.

Keeping A List. So Watch It, Punk

Siracusa writes, “I think Apple has an insultingly low opinion of users' ability to understand nested boolean logic. They may not know what it's called, but the concept is intuitively understood. Even my mother has already asked me how to create a Mail rule that requires nested boolean logic.

WTF is up with this? Your mother is the feeblest, weakest mind you can think of?

Try Dad—he's probably on AOL, dials up at 33.6K, and doesn't know what cache is. Am I right?

Another Rummy Tidbit

I love Don. He is a walking illustration of soooo many varieties of Wrong. What is this Wrong of which she speaks? Causing the suffering and death of others, for no damn good reason at all. Blind stupidity? That'll do.

Many senior administration officials were frustrated by the Department of Defense's repeated disinclination to play by the rules, arriving at meetings unprepared, refusing to discuss or advance issues, and working through back channels. One NSC staffer complained he spent half his time ‘cleaning up DoD's messes, much of the time actually at the Pentagon, trying to soothe military leadership who had been snubbed or burned by Rummy and his guys.’

I'm surprised Don's lasted as long as he has. But then, like, Bush would trouble himself to perceive? Naw, they're a mind-blind bunch, and there is a terrible irony in these banding together of broken men, who only know the world as object-for-self. So they do have some creepy sense of one another. Feh. You can have 'em. Broken.

The acrimony between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and other agencies has become legend. According to one individual who served on the Bush 43 NSC staff, they were ‘just out of control, an endless nightmare.’ Another NSC staffer from George W. Bush's first term said that ‘OSD was nuts ... We would say they were out of their fucking minds both from a policy perspective and from a process perspective. In effect, [Rumsfeld] said, I don't give a shit what the NSC staff says, I am going to do whatever I feel is in my right to do as the chain of command to the president. He was like his own venture capitalist. He liked to dabble in different areas and throw things here and throw things there ... We would characterize Rumsfeld as Secretary Strangelove.’

Talk To Me

The ideas of personal identity and free will we inherit from Christianity have often been questioned, but they continue to mould the way we think, and any view of human life from which they are altogether absent remains unfamiliar and troubling.

It must be me. Everything I read lately talks about the devastating effects of my former marriage. Or the Bush administration. But really— for simple if eternally depressing reasons—both.

When the law is silent or meaningless, it usually means that society is conflicted or confused—and at such times, mere power wins.
 —Lenny Bruce

Doesn't mean I won't, in either case, make a memorable stink. My little contribution to social change.

Something About Art

Heaven?

Mr. Kushner's plays are strict creatures of the theater in ways that many of his predecessors—and most of his contemporaries—are not. He is our foremost playwright of the imagination. I mean this partly in the sense that he can send characters darting off to Heaven or Antarctica without seeming foolish, but mostly in the sense that, on the stage, his plays demand that we engage our own imaginations.

Toooo exhausting. Shopping tomorrow. Nordstrom. Big sale. Imagination?

Hon-eeey, how do you turn off this computer thing?



link: arts journal

This Is My Desire

Cheap to Audiophile with Simple Hacks
Posted by CowboyNeal around 10 ish
from the soldering-frenzy dept.

petertrog writes 'The IEEE has a story showing how you can turn a cheap DVD player into something that sounds a whole lot more exotic. All you need is a small budget, a soldering iron and a desire to void your warranty.'

Can you be a hacker-in-spirit? To the hack born? Cuz I'm tellin you, I felt such a rise with that last sentence. Yes! This is me! Whatever is on the other side of voiding your warranty—my blood runs faster at the thought. It's like magnetic.

Drawn to ruin things. Yet to sometimes wildly succeed.

And this talent is good for?

Pays off how?


Oops. Beginning to sound like hateful ex. Can't have that.

This Reeks

I have noticed that the behaviour of not showing the selected folder in a search initiated from icon-view varies with the folder. It seems to be consistent in behaving correctly in some folders and incorrectly in others. For example search properly shows and selects the current folder when I search in the application folder but not in any subfolder of my home directory.

This reeks.

I hereby wish to announce that the Sixties are Over, and in addition, would someone to take me out behind the barn and shoot me. Thank you so much.