Friday, April 27, 2007

Loretta Lux Photography

www.jonathanyuen.com

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Zak Smith's illustrations of Gravity's rainbow

On hyphens

“If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” ~(Oxford University Press style manual).

'Work' in literature

The workday proves dull not only to the Computer Programmer, but to the novelist. When there's war to attend to, and heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to write fiction, with the nine-to-five? Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn't mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life.
...
Contemporary readers like the Marketing Consultant should shudder to the core at [Bartleby's] display of existential freedom.

Christopher Hitchens' new book

From God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Book lists



Yet another, this time from a whole book of lists.

Monday, April 23, 2007

The slacker as rebel

Tennis again, wondering if Allen Ginsberg is not more important than Alan Greenspan:

Perhaps that makes you the true misfit -- one who does not even recognize it and would disavow it if asked. When asked to consider the useful social role he plays, the philosophical rebel prefers not to. Or has something happened to the currency of the idea itself of the rebel of conscience, the revolutionary of the soul, the transcendence seeker? ... [The philosophical rebel] alone has the courage to say, "I have no clue what this shit is." ... he does not jump when the Man says jump -- he scarcely moves; he hardly hears the Man; he can hardly even see him; he has to squint. It's his constitution to be cautious and to ask the relevant question Why? ... Could it be that the voice of what you want is God's voice? Could it be that what you want is what God wants? Could it be that you are eating and sleeping and fucking for God? And if that is God's voice then what is this other voice that would hobble the hipster and tie him down, would frighten him into a frightful day job he half believes in and half detests? That must be the voice of the devil!

On porn

Cary Tennis at Salon.com:

In the lizard mind where all things are writ backward on the mirror in God's pink lipstick, I am you and you are me. We become what we behold, as Blake said. What we see is what we are. If you are naked I am naked. We are porous in the sensorium of sex. We are not impervious; we cannot look at it without tingling. It hijacks our sex. So if we do not like porn it may be because porn is too powerful. We don't care to lose our freedom to this thing, to have our sex run off one way while we who were children once gape in astonishment and wonder and frightful surprise at the size, the perfection, the wetness, the hairlessness, the lips, the machines.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Contemporary Indian Cinema...

...at MoMA.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

The Wired 40

Annual list of the most innovative companies in the world. Infosys at no 14.

Fixing the world

Know these attempts:
The Whole Earth Catalog

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory - as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Worldchanging
‘[Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century] might well be the most complete, compelling articulation of the possible look and feel and actual operation of a sustainable society ever written.’

Cho / Oldboy



The doings of Cho Seung-Hui have brought the 2005 Korean film Oldboy into public discourse.

And so it goes...



Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (11 Nov 1922 - 11 Apr 2007)

Listen to the title character in his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

Helvetica



It’s 50 years since the introduction of Helvetica, which has been called the official typeface of the 20th century.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Easter

midnight
pigs, ducks, chicken and cattle shrieked and tore the sky into two.
blood flood the kitchen floor
women smelled of grease and garlic
bottles are emptied
bowels are cleared

morning air, stayed like a drunkard's breath
christ is up in the air
sermons are given and doors closed
churchyard quite and strewn with color rags

at home, food, laughter and howls started
family feuds are renewed for the coming year
then people strayed out
ducked the police on the streets.

Happy Easter was a Drunken Roar.