personal universals

The Multitudinous Self
: There is an individual, here, a kaleidoscope of personality & identity.

Relativism, Right On
: Like little bumper cars, we are.

We Serve Each Other
: Who I am to you, I pledge, is first a source for Love. I am your neighbor and I want to help alleviate your sadness the way that you alleviate mine.

A Distrust of History, both Past and Future & That Judgement, especially, is False
: What I am to you, second, is a filtering and functioning device for a data set that includes observations, poetry & jokes, as many memes as I can cram in, & relayance of things I've picked up from other people, as I remember them.
Take for granted, whatever you learn from others, that they, too, represent a filtering and functioning device for their individual data sets. You might do well to assume that being a source for Love is not necessarily at the top of any agency's agenda, though everyone deserves some level of trust, right?

Mutual Awe of the Mystery & Acknowledgment of the Absurd
: I'm talkin' on the grand scale of things, and, c'mon, we all have to. Nothing really matters. Relax.

Intentions can plot a Course but cannot determine a Destination
: Know it, and revel in it. Live for the unexpected.

Without Consensus, we have a Development, but not a Solution
: And Logic holds that concensus is most common in smaller groups. Large groups, in fact, don't get Solutions, only the Results of Causality.

Boom boom!

the Cy Twombly House is blemish-free BTW

Future Worker Girl and I detected these three abberations at the Dan Flavin building during a recent visit to the Menil Collection:





Fire extinguisher on the floor, large rust-pattern on auxillary door, & a chink in the sheetrock exposing the head of a drywall screw near one of the sculptures.

How To Build An Owl

1. Decide you must
2. Develop deep respect for feather bone and claw
3. Place your trembling thumb where the heart will be:
for one hundred hours watch so you will know where to put the first feather.
4. Stay awake forever,
When the bird takes shape
gently pry open its beak
and whisper into it: "mouse"
5. Let it go

-- Kathleen Lynch

live long live dirty

Somebody estimated that 90 percent of the Earth's biomass lives underground, in the form of bacteria. Pound for pound, nine times more life lives in the dirt than up here where we typically think of life as living. Bacteria have been found in oil resevoirs four miles below the Earth's surface. You pick the most inhospitable places you can imagine--the 650 degree waters boiling out of vents at the bottom of the ocean--265 times more pressure than what we live with--and there are bacteria there.

This picture shows you what can happen when a bacteria that thrives in our armpits and crotches everyday gets under the skin and settles a colony.

Here's a nice S. J. Gould article on the ubiquity of bacteria.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html

infinite potential

There is one simple Divinity found in all things, everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.
Giordano Bruno, from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?
Gilles Deleuze, from Essays Critical and Clinical

one more idea

Solar cells shaped like blades of grass
instead of sheets of ice.

Because the shape of grass is a Nature-perfected topography for gathering sunlight. Ice couldn't be more opposite. Yet solar panels look like big sheets of black ice.

seeking truth

hecho poético
"poetic fact"

sentipensante
"thinking with the heart"

While thinking with the mind will lead one to Understanding, thinking with the heart leads one to Fearlessness.

Anti-Art can't also be Art

ArtInfo interview, 17 February 2006

João Ribas: You’ve been very critical of that line of British art, particularly its overemphasis on very sophisticated or conceptual things.

Billy Childish: Well, I don’t think it is sophisticated at all. The problem is it’s pseudo-sophisticated and it’s actually even pseudo-conceptual. There isn’t any concept other than calling something that isn’t art, art. Which Duchamp already did. And if anti-art is art, then what is anti-art?

[These artists] don’t understand [that people] already know that things look interesting. Anything you look at closely or in isolation is interesting and has a story. You don’t need artists to tell you that. It’s condescending, and adolescent, and glib and useless.

The problem with an art of ideas is that it’s highly limited. It’s showing intellect with very little intellect. So I have art without ideas. Which means you just use nature. Everything that’s there is available. Art is ruined by having too much art in it.

six artistic necessities

Gilbert Sorrentino listed his "artistic necessities" in his 1983 writing "Genetic Coding":

an obsessive concern with formal structure
a dislike of the replication of experience
a love of digression and embroidery
a great pleasure in false or ambiguous information
a desire to invent problems that only the invention of new forms can solve
a joy in making mountains out of molehills

Meta-Musicology

Plato felt the best harmony was one that "imitates the utterances and accents of a brave man engaged in warfare."

In "The Politics," Aristotle wrote: "Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited . . . when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them."

In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini instituted Iran's first ban against Western music, declaring, "Music dulls the mind because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs. It destroys our youth who become poisoned by it."

Malcolm McLaren said "Punk was just another way to sell trousers."

M.O.I. vs. M.I.C.

Dave-E says the Military Industrial Complex and the Meritocracy of Ideas do not have to form a dichotomy, implying that both concepts can co-exist, and contradicting his position from the evening before.

I don't know what these big ideas mean, so I've looked them up.

Former Vice-President Al Gore used the phrase, "Meritocracy of Ideas," in a media conference address in 2005.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/06/D8D2IU703.html
If the concept has philosophical precedents (which I'm sure it does), I don't know 'em by name.
In his speech, Gore laments a decay in American public discourse, including mainstream news and opinion, and the high cost of individual contribution to public discourse, in contrast to the situation at the time of the founding of the United States.
America, Gore argues, was founded as a marketplace of ideas, open to every individual and governed by "an unspoken duty to search for general agreement." The Meritocracy of Ideas [capitalized in the transcript] is the process by which the fate of ideas is decided. Good ideas succeed, bad ideas fade, "regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them." Apparently, this is no longer so.
I'm not sure I can buy Gore's pessimistic view of history--or, rather, pessimistic view of the present--but I like the concept of a meritocracy of ideas, and believe this system not only exists, but has existed in some form or other since long before the advent of Democracy, being a by-and-large natural process. In fact, Democracy, I suppose, is a one of those winning Ideas.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned, famously, of the growing Military Industrial Complex in his 1961 Farewell Address:
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Now we may call him "President and Great Prophet Dwight D. Eisenhower."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-industrial_complex

Perhaps Industry and the Military are mutually dependent, and as natural as any Meritocracy of Ideas. Which leads us to cry, How dare the Gods grant us the wonder of the engineering mind, but at such cost!
Or perhaps an alternative. For instance, perhaps Peace yet lacks the merit to supercede War in this great meme-eological evolution. Or maybe Peace IS the winning Idea, but our lives are too little to notice the change of epochs!