Saturday, August 30, 2014

Steeple

"Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I know a window from which one can see across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest 'prints' which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome."

"It was always to the steeple that one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with them."  
- From Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Bacall

"It was quite a terrifying experience for me," Bacall told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1994. "I was this kid and I was scared to death of all these pros around me. ... My head would shake and my hands would shake, and I discovered if I kept my head down and looked up, my head would not shake, so I started to do that when I could, when it was appropriate in a scene."

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/15/340632455/in-acting-and-in-life-lauren-bacall-loved-the-idea-of-adventure

Friday, June 6, 2014

"I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, non-religious man, bureaucracy, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine."  -- Zizek

Sunday, December 1, 2013

"It's a facsimile of life for those who hold fast to it..."

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

This GOP debt ceiling/default debacle makes me think of a man (esp. Speaker Boehner) beholding the sight of his own anus.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

"We are going to fail and within those failures, that's where the flavor lies." 

Thursday, June 27, 2013

"I felt like I gave the world a piece of me that I didn't know about." 
-- CL Smooth on the making of "T.R.O.Y.".


Tuesday, March 26, 2013

“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in it’s complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies —not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.”

Franz Kafka

Friday, February 22, 2013

You mean Jared?  You know I had an eerily similar thought not that long ago.  The last commercial where they honor him for like 10 years of weight loss he looks like a marrionette (sp) whose only purpose is having lost weight. (NB -- what is the moment where he was larger than he once was but  smaller than he will become).

> what's up man?  i think the new pioneers should do a story on jerry the subway guy.  his weight loss story has been so commodified that every time he appears in ads now it seems like his personhood has been stripped away.  like he is spot the budweiser dog now.
>

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TJ64ZWy6B-I
Twice we have been wrapped up in some kind of national drama and a catastrophe has come in from out of our collective blind spot, swept away the import of the previous discourse, and laid bare a "true" problem.  In the case of the 2012 election, Superstorm Sandy displaced the petty bickering between the two candidates, illustrating that the ongoing cataclysmic global warming is more important than any domestic squabbles.  Secondly, all the b.s. around the "fiscal cliff" (December 2012) was pushed into the background by the Newtown elementary school shooting, demonstrating the need for adequate gun control laws in the U.S.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

You Don’t Know Jack: Kerouac Biographer Joyce Johnson and ‘The Voice Is All’ - The Daily Beast:
Finally, after years of suppressing his French-Canadian lineage in his writing, Kerouac experimented with writing openly about his Franco-American heritage in the blunt, plainspoken joual of his youth. This experiment in his native language, which occurred shortly before he sat down to write On the Road,gave his writing a certain intimacy. “It was a very direct first-person voice,” said Johnson, “frank and open—not the self-conscious literary voice he was using before. It was a voice that would lure an ardent legion of Kerouac disciples for decades to come, with unremitting lines that build momentum like freight trains:

'55


Friday, August 10, 2012

"Of this image of time, Deleuze retains (in L'image-temps) the continuity of "sheets of past" with the "peaks [pointes] of present," implying the cone is a vortical continuum; each sheet is a disk but also a winding stair continuing up and around in the "next" one, according to the Bergsonian formula of the flux, "interpenetration without succession."

Peter Canning, from Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, p.80.

Monday, July 16, 2012

"What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another." (Dialogues, p. 40)

Monday, June 25, 2012

May '68

"What counts is what amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something else."

Two Regimes of Madness, p. 233-234.

Friday, June 22, 2012

"Intensity is itself differential, by itself a difference."

DR, p. 222.

Friday, June 8, 2012

"The collective assemblage is always like a murmur [rumeur] from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice."

ATP, p.84.
"It is almost as if every expressing subject contained others, each of which speaks a diverse language, the one in the other."

Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p.371.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

"The only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted."

ATP, p.7.

Friday, June 1, 2012

"Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital."

ATP, p.7.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Food Palate Map

I think the palate is perfect example of an intensive surface.  The palate is composed of five main assemblages (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami).  All food is but a combination of these five attributes in the same way that a sound is a combination of frequencies.  The palate has sensitivities to certain tastes and sends this information up to the brain where it is translated emotionally (e.g. "Mmm, this pretzel is good and salty" or "This coffee is impotably bitter.").
One could write an essay on the stylistic consistency of the sounds that DJ Premier digs for samples and loops.  On one hand, it seems impossible that one might find a sample in a song such as the following, but once you hear the movement in the samples that he is going for (another example would be Above the Clouds), the sounds achieve consistency in the Deleuzian sense:
http://www.whosampled.com/sample/view/11515/Gang%20Starr%20feat.%20M.O.P.-1/2%20%26%201/2_Jimmy%20Webb-Gymnast%27s%20Ballet%20%28Fingerpainting%29/

Friday, April 6, 2012

www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/04/06/books/20120406-BEATS-12.html

Humility

"The earth trembles and quakes with laughter at the arrogance of a ground that, in the span of an instant, can suffer obliteration."

Flaxman (2012), p.152.