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Sunday, July 31, 2011
Friday, July 08, 2011
Friday, June 03, 2011
Top Ten Ideas in the History of Philosophy (according to me)
Top Ten Ideas in the History of Philosophy
1. Human beings make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing - Karl Marx
2. The starting point of any ethical system should be suffering - Jeremy Bentham
3. Disbelief in God does not mean Evil does not exist - Alan Badiou
4. The problem with pragmatism is that it is inherently tautological - Max Horkheimer
5. Gender is not biologically determined; it is socially performed - Judith Butler
6. Art's purpose is to break the spell cast by the commodity fetish - Theodore Adorno
7. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a documentation of barbarism - Walter Benjamin
8. Know Thyself - Socrates (via Plato?)
9. Philosophy's job is not finished until its utopian promise is fulfilled - Herbert Marcuse
10. There is nothing outside the text - Jacques Derrida
*Note: many of these are not direct quotes, but paraphrases.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Aphorism du Jour
I would rather make the old new than pretend that the new isn't already old by the time it makes itself known as new.
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Top Ten Worst Ideas in the History of Philosophy
1. I will take your silence as assent (Plato)
2. That which is useful, is inherently good (Bentham)
3. Doing and Being have nothing to do with one another (Agamben)
4. We live in the best of all possible worlds (Liebniz)
5. Everything is Permitted (Sartre)
6. Do what thou wilt (Crowley)
7. The truth is in ideal forms (Plato)
8. There is no place for the poet in the Republic (Plato)
9. The king is god’s representative on earth (any number of court philosophers)
10. Nothing is true but that which is willed (Stirner) Tweet
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Scenes from a War: Episode 2
Hold on to your eyeballs!
Rockets fire out of a mini-tank. Cheap generic drug export and import. Infra-red cameras on the missiles. Lives on auto-destruct. The Canadarm takes lasers, whose application has been mostly medical in spite of how they were envisioned in Star Wars, and uses them as a guidance system rather than for their destructive potential. But mostly to zap poppy milk into arms.
In that case, people will need to be programmed. Conditioned. Boundaries must be surveyed, enforced, guarded. Negative and Positive reinforcement.
Luckily, we can Youtube videos to propagate the fields of flander. Slander through spillage. Pushing through blood and so modulate exactly what you hear. Shock filters, Bomb-deafness, snow-blindness. Leverage opportunism. Blood spatter, drops on sand.
Information jamming. Future shock non-sequitor global village, local pillage. Trophies of the battlefield, the dessicate surface of earth, war of the worlds. Dan Ackroyd with a bazooka, firing indiscriminately and aufhebung-ing Destructive explosions.
What this war needs is a snappy jingle. Don’t die for my Libyan beans. And Don’t forget the button-happy tact-island. Enjoy the slaughter. It’s going to happen anyway, so you might as well. Either that, or you have to. Those boots in your closet scare the shit out of me, but not enough to stop me from being able to mock-up a pie graph, a pig’s head on a stick, tea in a human skull.
I will be polite to you before I stick this bayonette through your midsection. Mad max out the Robinsonade.
Mel Gibson called and tried to order some more crazy for a kickstart. Gossip for him is like Red Bull: he does it to stay awake and alert. His breath killed a small village in Africa. But I had to tell him, we were fresh out of crazy. Seriously, the person who walked in the store before you called bought the last little bottle of crazy. It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? The next battle will be broadcast live on a channel that projects its visions directly on the eyeball.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Scenes from a War: Bowdlerized Popcult
Scenes from a War: Episode 1
Conan the barbarians knock on the gate with battering-rams. Cablecars and dastardly painters come for the moving parts. Oops I peeled my monitor off its frame. Fires from torches lick the sky above the gates, pointed tree trunks, maybe birch, accident waiting to happen there eh? And the persistant orgy of yells and grumbling on the other side sounds like a flag. Moanmar Khaddafi and Charlie Sheen were cooking up smores as everyone else geared up for the imminent battle. The marshmallows melted, and they were dripping down Sheen’s chin. And then Emilio Estevez climbed the gate with a pulley system, after which they hoisted up an enormous batch of boiling orange pekoe tea to pour on their enemy.
The women and children disappeared that night, and lookouts confirmed that the enemy was throwing them on a big bonfire right outside our front door. We loaded the slings with rubble and disgusting, rotting garbage. And some flaming olive oil. Emilio came back to my Bill-Pullman porter kiosk, and I hurriedly pasted my monitor back on the wall.
He asked me what on earth I was doing. My back is on the wall, I pointed out. Emilio looked at the painting at the opposite side of my room, and there I was, my back painted, me walking away from the painter. We need reinforcements, he said, and I dotted the eyes and crossed the tees on mutually assured destruction. But he said we don’t have to; they will just drink themselves silly and leave in the morning. I didn’t want to risk it, but he insisted, at which point, Gary Busey came in, and got out of his fat suit. He was naked, and had a gorgeous woman’s body.
I’m not taking appointments right now Gary. Retirement and carpet bombing is what I expect pleasantly. That’s all. Oh yeah, and Kelly Clarkson’s favourite CD, which I bought on the internet. We could always just fall on them, Khaddafi said. Death by fat. Gout had to be the co-conspirator. Maybe it would be more suitable to just cut his Achilles tendon and pee on the wound. Then Canada’s boyfriend came out with a piece of felt tied together with a round of raw rope. Undone, there were several sizes of shurikens, some dipped in adder venom. That’s just so you can say that you died like Cleopatra for all of a few seconds before you die when we kill you.
I swear at that moment, Kim Basinger flew in on flying dragon, you know, neverending story-style, and asked for whoever is in charge in our camp. Apparently, she’s an ambassador of the enemy. If there were ever an EILF, you know, an enemy I’d like to f#@&, there it was.
She told us she was there to talk peace terms. I said that we hadn’t even got a chance to cut anyone’s head off yet, and it’s not fair to end a war until you get to do what you enjoy most at least once, and have people say “Well, we were at war.” Not much to say to that.
Her dragon-thing took off, turned around, screeched and all that, and then took off. After that we heard a terrible whir as a bunch of glops of gravel and pebbles and sand were pitched into our eyes. And it burned. But she did warn me.
Charlie Sheen smiled crookedly. It’s time to get serious, he said. He waved his arm, and out of the corners of the room sprang an enormous army of porcupines to wander out on the battlefield. There, the enemy could fall, in disorientation caused by the lobbing of clothes drenched in whale sperm, rolled up into a ball and lit on fire, into their midst, on the many spines of the porcupines scrambling to get in and out of the way.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Stephen Harper & John Baird tete-a-tete (ouch)
Stephen Harper: Man, skyscrapers built by oil money make me horny. C'mon John, bend over!
John Baird: What's that prodding my... Oh you're kidding me right? I've been screwed so hard by the huge rise in small plane crashes since I've been transport minister, you're going to have to come with something bigger than that!
TweetWednesday, January 26, 2011
An Ode to Patton Oswalt
- An Ode to Patton Oswalt
Saw you on your junket binge,
The Conan episode.
Frankly, Conan trying to be a ninja was preferable.
(and if you say it right, preferable
Does rhyme with episode)
You must be tired from all
That hard promo work, because
You weren’t off the wall funny.
Sunny days, but nothing you said
Made me laugh, your jokes were lead
Pipes with nothing in them…
I mean not even dangerous.
Your glib references to modernist poets
Failed to make me so wet
You know, down there.
Mr. vomit on the plane story
Did not even make sense, see?
I mean he’s on an airplane.
He must be good at something
Besides vomit and being strange.
Christopher Peet is funnier than you by far
Don’t know who he is? You sleep under the same stars
(ahem, dirty man, not like that). Don’t worry, the czar
Of guffaws might leave a tooth under your pillow.
So leave your door ajar.
I should have hit my own pillow sooner.
Your segment was a waste of time;
I could have found more amusement
Playing with a radio tuner.
But I still love you.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Black Swan: Tchaikovsky meets Aronovsky
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
Artist Spotlight: Christopher Peet
Christopher Peet is a hardworking, local Toronto artist who has recently finished a painting entitled "Songs in the Tree of Life." While his previous work tended towards watercolours with a special emphasis on architectural detail, this painting explores universal themes in a surrealistic manner. He also teaches art, and he has contributed political cartoons to many Canadian newspapers and magazines.
Although the surrealistic influence is new, this painting still shows his meticulous rendering of the built world, with a wood-paneled dwelling dominating the top right third of the painting. Its blue eaves and window edges "rhyme" with the blue of the sky. The two dormers stick out of the house's face at improbable angles, the one in the background seeming subject to the pull of the arc of the brick structure. This structure itself suggests a bridge, with the water underneath likewise at a surprising angle to the bridge. This water is painted as if the viewer is looking into a well. The water is implied skillfully through the presence of ripples, but ultimately left transparent, so the viewer can see a small clutch of narwhales.
To the right of the painting, the bricks lose their cohesiveness in a furious fire that evokes creation and destruction simultaneously. Creation is suggested through the connotative association of bricks to the ovens in which the materials of earth are transformed into bricks by human labour. All the elements are represented. A herd of land animals gathers at the apex of the brick bridge; narwhales swim in the pebble-bedded well water; and two butterflies dominate the air in the upper left third of the painting. The tree, emerging out of the clouds in the sky, is an organism of the earth; half of the tree in reality -- the root system -- hides underground.
The herd of animals on the bridge are painted in a more ambiguous manner than the incredible detail of other areas of the painting. When I spoke with the artist, he said he painted pairs of animals – giraffes, elephants, seals, deer, and bears – to represent in partial form the story of Noah's Ark, which puns on the arc-like curve of many of the lines of the painting. Putting the focus on the butterflies effectively challenges the tradition of centering the focus of the painting, and emphasizes the notion of transformation.
The "tree of life" ironically has no leaves, and its Kabbalistic and Edenic connotations tease out the both biblical and materialist resonances of the painting in a refreshingly complex way. At the right side of the painting, the artist's hand is painted, in the act of reaching for the house. This implies both the human influence over the material world: our active re-shaping of the world around us, as well as the longing for home and shelter. Below the hand and above the house are planetary bodies; the red one evokes mars and earth respectively.
The point of view of the painting is not grounded in one point around which the perspective is arranged; it is deployed in a diffuse, if not fragmentary manner. That earth's various manifestations are visible to the viewer at the same time as the earth itself, as if from space, presents us with a surreal assemblage. In this dream-like scene, we are granted the privilege of seeing things we could never see juxtaposed in real life.
I see some modernist echoes in this painting as well. The tree in the sky is reminiscent of Magritte's floating Castle, which itself perhaps referred to Kafka's novel of the same name. And the transformation of earth into building materials and elements is evocative of Diego Rivera's murals at the Detroit Institute of Art.
"Songs in the Tree of Life" is being sold for $8000. Its size is 24 x 24", and it is acrylic on canvas. You can get a high-quality print for $500 or $600 depending on whether you want it printed on canvas or paper (canvas is the more expensive), and there are extra charges up to $125 depending on how you want it framed and stretched (regular: $100, gallery-style: $125). You can visit him on the web here: http://www.christopherpeet.com/index.html. Tweet