These are a few of my least favorite things...

This are those things that I has few likes for, truth being that I hate it.

"We are a nation of consumers, and that's okay."

Thanks Discover Card commercial, thanks for that timeless tidbit of wisdom. Cunts.

So a few weeks ago some politicians were rescued from Columbia with some fancy sort of switcheroo tactics. One of the family members said it was a miracle, a switcheroo is not a fucking miracle. I thought a miracle was something that can't be understood without a supernatural explanation. Cunts.

This homeless woman got on the bus today, she was dripping with sweat and clearly exhausted. This happens during rush hour and so the bus is standing room only, also this is in Arizona so it's the sort of heat that can actually kill you. When most places have heat waves it's uncomfortable, in AZ it can actually be dangerous. As I said, this is rush hour and full, so every block the doors are opening for passengers who are exiting, and taking the cool air with them, while the boarding passengers bring in the heat and their own foul stink. This is a middle aged woman that gets on, the posted signs and rider propriety would normally say that if she's not elderly, then you don't have to offer your seat. One of the sitting passengers did offer his seat, twice. She rejected him both times. Ten minutes later she collapsed, some passengers helped her up and she collapsed again. Another passenger offered her water, she rejected it. She got off the bus at the next stop and took a seat on the bench, in the sun. Cunt.

This woman isn't only a danger to herself, she's a danger to human compassion. Here's a full bus, between forty and fifty people, that will store this little scene in their memory banks. Next time there's an opportunity to offer assistance in some form, they're going to wonder whether or not it'll be accepted. It's embarrassing when people reject that sort of base compassion.

St Hubert

St Hubert, before he was a saint, was a wealthy Netherlander and a hunter. He came upon a stag with a crucifix glowing from its forehead, through this Christ spoke and commanded him into a life of asceticism. As a hermit he became the patron saint of hunters. So the legend goes, what else can be said.

Forcheville undermines Swann from Odette's dressing room

This image has nothing to do with this post. Swann In Love was not written for early 20th century French citizens, it was written for all time. I also think it's supposed be adapted into a play and set in our contemporary world. I haven't googled yet to see if this exists, it must. I know there's a period film from the 80's. I'm going to type this out first before I burst my own bubble. It's just some rearranged text converted into dialogue, I don't know anything about how to properly arrange theatrical notes. I hope that, through this, you'll be able to see how fucking fantastic it would be for this story to exist as a contemporary play.

Swann, who has been seeing Odette, had a falling out with the Verdurins and is no longer welcome at their salon, where Odette spends most of her evenings. (the salon may become a bar, and the Verdurins its owners...) Forcheville (whose twat name will have already been addressed) is a new addition to the Verdurin scene, he and Odette have developed a mutual interest in Swann's absence. (Those whom I know personally may recognize why this story currently appeals to me)

Swann sits mumbling to himself in front of his laptop.

Swann: Yet it's not really anger... that I feel when I see how she longs to run away and scratch around in that lair of cacophony. It's disappointment, not of course for myself, but for her; I'm disappointed to find that, after living for more than six months in daily contact with me, she hasn't yet reached the stage of understanding that there are evenings when anyone with the least delicacy of feeling should be willing to forgo a pleasure when asked to do so. She ought to have the sense to say 'I won't go' if only from policy, since it is by her answer that the quality of her heart will be judged once and for all.

Swann begins to type out an email which he reads aloud

I swear to you, that in asking you not to go I should hope for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening and I shall feel trapped myself if, after all, you tell me you're not going. But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you too. A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I was about to pass judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your night out has no bearing on the point. What I must know is...

Forcheville begins to read the rest of the email mockingly, with Swann at first, from Odette's computer in her dressing room.

Forcheville: ...whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forgoing even minor pleasures. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but perfectible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against the glass wall, always mistaking it for water.

Odette: You shouldn't be reading that.

Forcheville: He shouldn't be writing it! How can you tolerate a message like this?

Odette takes Forcheville's place at the computer and finishes reading the message aloud. Unlike Forcheville, she reads it with sympathy and concern.

Odette: Do you realize that your answer will have the effect-- I won't say of making me cease loving you immediatly, of course, but making you less attractive in my eyes when I realize that you are not a person, that you are beneath everything in the world and incapable of raising yourself one inch higher. Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you as a matter of little or no importance to give up this night out in the hope that you would go on none the less. But, having decided to make such an issue of it, to draw such drastic consequences from your reply, I consider it more honorable to give you due warning.

Forcheville: You needn't pay any heed to those words that were just written, you have enough familiarity with the ways of men. You can conclude that that wouldn't have been written unless he was in love, and that since he is in love, it's unnecessary to obey it at all, as he'll only be more in love later on. We're late, we should go.

Odette types a quick reply.

Odette: If I go on reading this, I'll never get there in time for the Overture.

No Zen on Mountaintops!

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig spends a lot of pages in, what he calls, intellectual high ground, the mountaintops. It's necessary for him to fully articulate his philosophy of quality, but he eventually admits that while the high ground, above the timberline, is interesting and valuable, it does very little good for those of us living in the valley.

Maybe it's a misunderstanding on my part of Zen, but I'm not sure how much I can agree with the ideals of detachment and existing in the moment. A trans-temporal awareness may be precisely what gives us our personhood. If we were looking for instruction on how to prevent regret, or personal suffering and the like, we'd be better to look to the animals than the Zen monks. I was just watching this goofy news segment about a dog that had it's leg shot off. A week later it's bouncing around on three legs, happy as can be. No nightmares about the fanatic gunman, no concerns that, with this new disability, he'll be unable to live out his goals. The dog will be inconvenienced for the rest of it's life, but it won't suffer.

Maybe all of those things that Buddhism would have you abandon are what make you a person.

The Darkening of the Light

This is a scan of, what was, a very hopeful I'ching reading. It didn't seem to work out, but I'm still very interested in the use of these devices; I don't think they have any supernatural properties, but they have the use of advocating a perspective that you might not have access to otherwise. People ask one another for advice, or alternate interpretations of a situation, all the time, but, unless you're bumping elbows with Confucius, what are the chances of getting a wiser, more timeless perspective? I usually throw the coins for the novelty, but I'd be just as satisfied with a random flutter of the pages to find my fortune.

Specifically with Ming I, the advice was a sort of quiet perseverance. The image is of the superior man, who finds himself surrounded by a darkness with which he cannot compete, is to conceal his remaining light and wait for dawn. As advice goes, that's as good as anyone can hope for, and it didn't make any empty promises like the cookies.

Iscariot and Odette

I'm still on a political kick. I was reading, or listening, somewhere that high school kids are protesting bottled water by satirically selling bottled air. The idea of course is that water is free and the plastic is bad for the environment. It's so interesting to me how fashionable it's become to be green, and of course it's even more prudent than it is fashionable and that's a good thing. But... but, but, but, what if way back in 2000, the election would have gone the other way, and rather than Bush being the object of our dissatisfaction, half the country would have resented Gore. He likely would have shown better leadership following 9/11. However, except for the most creative conspiracy theorists among us, we wouldn't have been able to imagine quite as bleak a conflict as that which we currently face, so he wouldn't have scored any points. He certainly wouldn't have been able to generate the celebrity necessary to get us fired up about the environment. And Nader wasn't going to do it. I think we can say, with confidence, that green wouldn't be part of mainstream fashion if it weren't for, or in revolt of, George W. Bush.

We can imagine a relatively similar scenario surrounding the 2004 election. Had Kerry won, we could still be decades from the first real chance of an American president with a vagina or African heritage. The extreme to which Bush operates paves the way for his alternative.

Whenever I come into contact with an idea from a book or instructor, I sort of feel like I discovered that idea fair and square, I get to reference it all I like without citing anyone other than the maybe the original scientist or researcher, if it's that sort of fact. However, if an idea is introduced to me from an adjacent student, it feels like cheating if I don't include them in the chain of reference. I don't know why that is, it doesn't make any sense. Sometimes I almost feel like I'm supposed to reject the idea all together, but some are just to damned solid, and that is the case of this alternate interpretation of Judas Iscariot. Certainly for the biblical narrative to unfold properly, Judas is necessary; and because his actions were carried out in a universe whose overseer is both omnipotent and omniscient, we couldn't be to far off the mark to suggest that Judas was just the right tool for the job. Furthermore, Judas, who is spending eternity in Hell, made a much more dramatic sacrifice than Christ; if his soul wasn't enough, they got his reputation too. What sacrifice did Jesus really make? People have died worse deaths, and after he finished bleeding out, he beamed up to Heaven; there's an entire movement of people that can't wait for that...

I'm off topic. What's really important is that Bush is bad, but bad things have implications about their opposites. Like Judas, Bush's badness has made things possible. Bush's bad policy has made America (most of us? some of us?) much more aware of how far we can fall. It's like dualism, everything is dualism for me lately, I think I'm on to something, there's dualism in everything, everything.

And, unrelated, Odette is the subject of this block quote that I can't stop reading:

"Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when- in this moment of deprivation- the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of the world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively."

The Marble Veneer of the Roman Empire

Part of the objunc process is, by the use of scans and printing, to allow the images to evolve and develop over multiple generations. This gives them the opportunity to retain aspects I like, and abandon those I'm no longer interested in. This is a second generation, birthed of this earlier post.

I expect that I will continue to complain about politics and other Americans, I suppose that, as soon as possible, I should acknowledge that I am completely aware that political art is played out, cliche, and so five years ago.

Remember the first anti-Bush art piece you saw and how dangerous it seemed at the time. Now things are so bad that it's obvious and cliche to bitch about it on the page. The art establishment censored itself. LOL

Any time I see red, white and blue used in a composition, it makes me cringe. Thank you artist, I get it, Bush sucks, Americans dropped the ball. I'm not entirely sure what that means; to be so aware of the problems that we've created and, still, be so impotent to find solutions, it's really very frightening to me.

I'm listening to the first hour of the Diane Rehm Show's, Friday News Roundup for July 4th. It's even more bleak than I thought. There was concern about the attention span of young people, the inability of the public to penetrate the surface of issues in an analytic or substantive way, the difference between access to information and actual possession of information with regard to the internet, and general civic awareness. I'll go into it later, it was a lot to digest.

They did sort of mention the Roman practice of building with this revolutionary new material, concrete. It was a quick mention for them, but I think it's a really interesting analogy. They built in a way that was similar to the monumental buildings and temples of the Greeks, except the marble was only a veneer. For instance, The Pantheon, is all surface; the internal structure is concrete and cheap brick. The marble is a disguise, an attractive surface hiding the vulgar guts of the place. Why do things as well as the Greeks, when we can pretend with half the effort?

I don't know if the guests realized how apt an analogy it was.

Independence, Indie-pendence, and Interdependence

In addition to Independence Day, the 4th of July is a day when I'm reminded of my inability to reconnect with those whom I've lost touch, either by accident or revolt. It's not just an inability, it's by no means a deficiency; it feels more deliberate, but maybe the result of an imbalance between my enthusiasm and my anxiety.

I think independence has an additional sinister side that's rarely recognized. Independence, freedom, asserts itself as being out of bounds to another's will, this must also imply a rejection of consequences, or at least the option. By declaring independence, rather than interdependence, we may be a benevolent philanthropist, throwing checks and change in whichever direction we see fit, or we may be a violent criminal who rejects his sentence because he can, thus never being afforded the solitary opportunity to reflect on those crimes.

What have we become in our nations independence? We're a wandering giant who defines the bad guy as whoever makes us angry at the moment, and we refuse to be compromised with consequences because we don't have to. In our independence we've only grown to be hated the world over. "Hulk smash Nagasaki! Hulk smash Baghdad!"

Declare Indie-pendence! Don't let them do that to you! I'm tired of young people and hipster style. Style is not just empty, it's worse than that. Style is designed and manufactured to conceal people's emptiness. Style is how lazy people feign quality, and they're so great in number that it perverts the culture. Why bother to play an instrument or learn about music when you can just look like you're in a band? Why read the book, why go to class? Fucking people. And they do this thing where they don't discriminate between fashion and social conscience; if you look in their closets, you'll see recycling and liberal politics hung up between their skinny jeans and American Apparel deep V-neck. I suppose it's probably just the case of the subculture from a half decade ago becoming the main stream of today, so, declare your indie-pendence.

Interdependence. Specifically between the scientist and the poet. Several days ago, while I was wandering the sidewalks, I came upon a fireworks display. I guess they were testing for today, it was such a serendipitous event. I had mostly just been walking with my head down when I heard the crashing, I was happy to find that my path would be within view of the cannons. Just as I was approaching they began the grand finale, and I got to stand and watch, through a fence, as the cannoneers danced around with their flares.

All the while, I had been thinking about the same things that have been ruining my walks for months, these heated arguments between my scientist and my poet, each of them trying to convince me that their explanation for all my troubles contained the lesson to be learned- since their individual arguments are so drastically in contrast to one another, to accept one is to reject the other.

As I stood there beneath the fireworks display I could see the poet jumping and pointing, he could hardly contain himself, crying out, "See! See!" And admittedly, if I didn't have qualms about the use of language referring to supernatural phenomenon, I might describe it as having the qualities of something magic. No sooner had I began to see the poet in a new light, but the wind changed, and I caught the scent of the black powder used to launch these lights into the sky. Then I began to notice all around me, there were remnants of cardboard casings that the fireworks would have originally been contained in. The poet had deceived me. It might be magic, if it weren't so clearly rational. Every spark, every combustion, every radiant color, each and every aspect of a fireworks display is absolute in its rationality and scientific explanation. My poet was trying to steal my scientist's thunder. What a dick.

I don't know, but I will in a while.

The owls in this image have been with me for close to two years, patiently waiting on a hard drive for their eventual day in the light. The owls are part of a friends collection, and only represent a small fraction of what she has. Although I've become intensely suspect of all things charming or kitschy in recent months, I can still appreciate these owls.

I only chose to include them in this composition as a snap judgment and because they were convenient, but that's the point. Part of the goal of objuncs is that they remain open for interpretations. I'm interested in those snap judgment decisions as a physical result of my subconscious at work. There's a pre-intellectual process that's always in action, always filtering the massive amount of static stimulus in the world from whatever it is you're actually looking for, or should be.

After printing out those patient owls, for whatever reason, it reminded me of Shen Zhou's Poet On A Mountaintop, which I included in a more graphic version. And, so there it is: patience is wisdom, and that's where Zen comes from.