February 2012
1 post
I Started A New Blog
It’s called Rubber Band Pistol. I’m going to try to ruthlessly chronicle everything I read, watch, or listen to throughout the day.
http://rubberbandpistol.tumblr.com/
December 2011
16 posts
LITTLE.i.: David Foster Wallace on seeing Blue... →
littlei:
[…] seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date — 30 March 1986, a Wednesday night — and what the whole group of us MFA Program students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and…
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
I am large,
I...”
– Whitman, Song of Myself
On Social Networking, The Internet
“It is not only our material environment that is transformed by our machinery. We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity—all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and our world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate...
An Interview with Gideon Rosen →
“I can imagine that to the extent to which one is gripped by the problem of nihilism is pretty closely connected by the extent to which one dwells on one’s own death. There the recipe is: dwell less on death.”
CONVERSATION: Infinite Stupidity, Or the Retweet →
“A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And...
The School of Life →
A series of life-affirming talks by cultural mavericks.
“Except for order, moderation, and constancy, I believe that all things are...”
– Montaigne, The Essays
1
There is a gold light in certain old paintings That represents a diffusion of sunlight. It is like happiness, when we are happy. It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,
And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
Share in its charity equally with the cross.
2
Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. With so much to look forward to he looked back. We think he...
Touch of Evil: Cinematic Villainy from the Year's... →
“A video gallery of cinematic villainy, inspired by nefarious icons and featuring the best performers from the year in film.”
CONVERSATION : The Evolved Self-Management System →
“I’m now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can “give permission” to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn’t have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they...
Art and the Limits of Neuroscience →
“Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.”
November 2011
9 posts
Anonymous asked: After reading Haruki Murakami do you consider yourself a romantic?
Watching People Watching People Watching →
“My favorite reaction videos — the subspecies that strikes me as the purest expression of the form — are the ones like that “Star Wars” clip: people reacting, in videos on screens, to other videos that they’re watching on screens. It seems, in its potentially infinite regression, to contain the fundamental experience of the Internet. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the person in the reaction...
The Umbrella Man →
October 2011
7 posts
Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl...
“One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.
Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,”...
2 tags
“From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often...”
– Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
September 2011
11 posts
“When postmodern idea-surfing allows one to keep talking, texting, or tweeting,...”
– -PoMo: Everybody’s Doing It
“King Solomon was known for his great wisdom and he also fancied himself a poet,...”
– Christopher Owens of Girls, interviewed by Pitchfork. (via shakyresolve)
2 tags
The Cycle of Revenge
“Opposites attract — the awful violence of 9/11 is justified by Al Qaeda as an act of revenge that in turn justifies the violence of America’s and Bush’s revenge. My point is that revenge is an inevitably destructive motive for action. When we act out of revenge, revenge is what we will receive in return. The wheel of violence and counterviolence spins without end and leads inevitably to...
“After the best book, the most beautiful woman, or the finest desert you’ve...”
– -Jean Baudrillard, stolen from a beautiful girl
August 2011
13 posts
“I like walking because it is slow and I suspect that the mind, like the feet,...”
– Rebecca Solnit, A Walk to Remember
WatchThis is life. This is art, people.
“Certainly, the internet is the most postmodern thing on the planet. The...”
– Edward Docx, Postmodernism is Dead
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich →
“Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.”
-Warren Buffett
A Theory of Everything (Sort Of) →
“So let’s review: We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people...
“For the fact is that right now the economy desperately needs a short-run fix....”
– Krugman, The Hijacked Crisis