6-23-2009
Jason turned me on to this.  Streaming academic lectures.


5-2-2009
"Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit.  And since Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance and therefore left it in full possession of its strength).  That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or the first cracking brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use ofr it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again."
--Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 692.


1-19-2009
"It is quite true that certain things, namely ideas, exercise a mediating function.  But only a twisted and aborted logic can hold that because something is mediated, it cannot, therefore, be immediately experienced.  The reverse is the case.  We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of mediation, we cannot possess it in full force, until we have felt it and sensed it, as much as if it were an odor or a color."
--Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 124.

"Since man succeeds only as he adapts his behavior to the order of nature, his achievements and victories, as they ensue upon resistance and struggle, become the matrix of all esthetic subject-matter; in some sense they constitute the common pattern of all art, the ultimate conditions of form.  Their orders of succession become without express intent the means by which man commemorates and celebrates the most intense and full moments of his experience.  Underneath the rhythm of every art and work of art there lies as a substratum in the depths of the subconscious, the basic relations of a live creature to its environment."
--Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 156.

"Censorship and super-ego are to be located in the same register as that of the law.  It is the concrete discourse, not only insofar as it dominates man and makes all kinds of fulgrations appear, [...] but insofar as it gives man his own world, which we, more or less accurately, call cultural.  It is in this dimension that censorship is located, and you can see in what way it differs from resistance.  Censorship is neither on the level of the subject, nor on that of the individual, but on the level of discourse, insofar as, as such, it consitutes, all by itself, a full universe, and at the same time there is something irreducibly discordant about it, in every one of its parts.  It takes very little at all, being locked up in the toilets, or having a father accused of Lord knows what crime, for the law all of a sudden to appear in its lacerating form."
--Lacan, Seminar 2, p. 130.


1-10-2009



12-7-2008
A New Type of Human Being and Who We Really Are.


11-22-2008
pretty rad.  Mary Heilmann is wonderful.


11-5-2008
BARACKOBAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!


11-2-2008
Basically everything at P.S.1 is good right now.  Especially this.


7-17-2008
M. C. Escher and the Temple of Doom


4-21-2008
The Color of Plants on Other Worlds
plus DJ Jason Orrell spins May 3 in Brooklyn:



3-30-2008
Stan Brakhage's last interview


3-16-2008



3-15-2008
"Thus in a simple physical feeling there are two actual entities concerned.  One of them is the subject of the feeling, and the other is the initial data of the feeling.  A second feeling is also concerned, namely, the objective datum of the simple physical feeling.  This second feeling is the 'objectification' of it's subject for the subject of the simple physical feeling.  The initial datum is objectified as being the subject of the feeling which is the objecive datum: the objectification is the perspective of the initial datum.

    A simple physical feeling is an act of causation.  The actual entity which is the initial datum is the 'cause,' the simple physical feeling is the 'effect,' and the subject entertaining the simple physcial feeling is the actual entity 'conditioned' by the 'effect.'  All complex causal action can be reduced to such primary components.  Therefore simple physical feelings will also be called 'causal' feelings.

    But it is equally true to say that a simple physical feeling is the most primitive type of an act of perception, devoid of consciousness.  The actual entity which is the initial datum is the actual entity perceived, the objective datum is the 'perspective' under which that actual entity is perceived, and the subject of the simple physical feeling is the perceiver.  This is not an example of conscious perception. (...)

    Thus a simple physical feeling is one feeling which feels another feeling.  But the feeling felt has a subject diverse from the subject of the feeling which feels it.  A multiplicity of simple physical feelings entering into the propositional unity of a phase constitutes the first phase in a concrescence of the actual entity which is the common subject of those feelings."
--Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 236.


2-16-2008
"It's not at all that Spinoza conceived love like he conceived digestion, he conceived digestion like love as well."


2-10-2008
Ethics and Second Order Cybernetics

And  here's this, which I have not yet watched but will soon.

1-19-2008
Another good one.

1-13-2008
Magic & Images/Images & Magic, The Brooklyn Rail from July 2006.

1-11-2008
The Met currently has installed, next to Damien Hirst's shark, a large, concave mirror tessellated from small hexagons by Anish Kapoor--a giant inverted compound eye that is worth a look into.

12-24-2007
"The principle I am adopting is that consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness.  It is a special element in the subjective forms of some feelings.  Thus an actual entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of its experience.  Its experience is its complete formal constitution, including its consciousness, if any."
--Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 53.

11-16-2007


11-3-2007
Saw this the other night.  You should too.


11-1-2007