“It’s OK to be seen without your make up on, America. People will still want to fuck you, you’re rich.”
(via dailyshow/mark twain controversy)
Jan 132011
Jan 082011
Yes, indeedy, one of the most subjective media by definition, but here in my humble view are some of the best of our generation, meeting the minimal criteria of being any or all of the following:
- fucking brilliant
- independent / non-formulaic / non-hollywood-puerile-shite
- sublime acting
- superb cinematography / lighting / sets
- numinous story / theme
- gorgeous score
- honest irreverent fun
Film is the medium of the mythos of our time – often deep and sublime but like all art, sometimes shallow shit. Nevertheless, it seems when synchronicity happens in the making of a film, like alchemy, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the individual talents that make up a production. And without further ado, here’s a few worth the mention
Dec 182010
On his way back to Earth, having just walked on the moon, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced a radical transformation in perspective and thus consciousness. As he approached our planet from beyond it’s sphere of influence, “he was filled with an inner conviction as certain as any mathematical equation he’d ever solved. He knew that the beautiful blue world to which he was returning is part of a living system, harmonious and whole—and that we all participate, as he expressed it later, ‘in a universe of consciousness.’”
Namit Arora suggests that: Perceptions of culture, history, and identity are necessarily subjective and selective. There’s no impartial and omniscient chronicler of events, no ‘scientific’ history. Facts are one thing, their interpretation another.[1]
Accepting this idea, really screws things up however, as it implies everything learned in school and early adulthood, about oneself and the world, might have been through the skewed collective lens of a society that could not possibly see beyond it’s own ideological identity. Hence imperialism and the notion it is right to educate ourselves, and the people of lands we “influence” to fit our model (particularly if those lands happen to be rich in spice, oil, tantalum or any other resource that “feeds” us.) We know what’s best for them and we reign by virtue of superior technology. Thus only the technology and commensurate resource has changed since the earliest times. We continue to globally garner what we believe we have a right and a need for, not to mention the moral authority to impose over (human resources, land, mineral and water rights, along with incumbent environmental and human rights degradation – you know the story by now.)
You might ask who is this “we” you are talking about? Continue reading »
Dec 072010
So he rolls up our long ragged redwood road and
is doing a 7 point turn at the top of our driveway in a shiny
PG&E survey truck. They’d trimmed a schwag load of branches
around the power lines and left them in our turnaround several
weeks ago, so I walk straight out to the guy in my slippers and 4
day stubble, all lazer eyed ready to burn and he just looks up at
me from his fat truck seat and says with a jovial expression “You
really like your privacy don’t you” and wins me at once with his
quizzical disposition -
Continue reading »
Jul 132010
by Ben Lerner
For the distances collapsed.
For the figure
failed to humanize
the scale. For the work,
the work did nothing but invite us
to relate it to
the wall.
For I was a shopper in a dark
aisle.
[oh, this is good, read on, read on ...] Continue reading »
May 182010
Earth's dynamic fluid systems - not to be underestimated
Deepwater Horizon.
The Earth and all life functions as a continuously evolving, fluid, dynamic system that we barely begin to understand in it’s complexly interwoven entirety. Sucking out the oil and burning it off in a fashion marginally more evolved than the discovery of fire itself – e.g. the archaic combustion engine, proliferating to this day by the obtuse laws of corporate swaggery – is still just burning stuff based on nature’s de-structuring forces for near-sighted profit. This as distinct from the con-structive spiralic forces of natural growth systems and the plethora of quelled yet more visionary and progressive, life affirming technologies.
At what actual cost?
Apr 032010
This is v2.0 – gender specific!
Something catches your eye starting out of the forest below. A lone figure it appears, coming towards you now, up the winding path towards the brow of the hill where you are standing, wolf hounds at your side. Judging by the weathered gait, it appears to be a rather tall old man, leaning into his path resolutely, as though into the wind for a hundred years. There’s something curious about his demeanor and before your eyes, the distance between you is covered in a space of time that is somehow unsettling. The old man stands in front of you suddenly and lifts his head from the ground for the first time, fixing you with a beguiling gaze. Continue reading »
Mar 202010
Google Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin disparaging the commercialization of search engines said. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They had a vision of allowing unfettered access to the sum of all human knowledge on line.
However Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently explained in an interview with Charlie Rose, “now we are an advertising company!” Today 99% of Google’s revenue comes from the ads it strews on websites across the internet. Google has become the internet’s largest and most determined info-polluter – effectively killing the dream of a commercial-free internet.
This should cause us to consider the long-term cultural consequences of relying on an advertising company to organize the world’s information. For the first time in human history, a single company both controls our access and corrupts that same information through advertising. Continue reading »
Mar 122010
Listen up!
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Non resistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed from its imprisonment in form. Inner nonresistance to form – whatever is or happens – is a denial of the absolute reality of form. Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously. The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival, and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality. Continue reading »
Feb 242010
Inside this temple are mountains and rivers
there are forests of oak, mountain lions and moss
Seismic shifts and lightening bolts are inside
enervating every silent thought
All the dancing impulses of nature are here
laughter, grief, hunger swirling
in the winds and time
There is ecstatic music, echoing through these chambers
and starlight – all the infinite stars
Ruminations of the cosmos are within
the poet
says
inside this temple, is the one I love
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