what ships are for

". . .nihilistic pessimism and rationalistic optimism fail in their effort to juggle away the bitter truth of sacrifice: they also eliminate all reasons for wanting it. Someone told a young invalid who wept because she had to leave her home, her occupations, and her whole past life, "Get cured. The rest has no importance." "But if nothing has any importance," she answered, "what good is it to get cured?"

She was right. In order for this world to have any importance, in order for our undertaking to have a meaning and to be worthy of sacrifices, we must affirm the concrete and particular thickness of this world and the individual reality of our projects and ourselves. This is what democratic societies understand. . . "

-Simone De Beauvoir


I think I'll be taking a couple dance classes this fall. . along with the chemistry, computer programming. . . maybe physics. Maybe technical writing or rhetoric. It's funny how much of life is about figuring out which cliffs we respectively need to jump off of.

jam for thought

Or is it. . . better than jam?


note for my dear paranoid parent friends: mild profanity in some images.

Perhaps this is rather silly of me, but I never really considered--until Darrin made that comment--culture jam as art. As far as wholesale acceptance of herd mentality. . . well. . . that's quite a larger topic.

But I was thinking about the comment, and did a bit of poking about for images of culture jam. Certainly some of them qualify as art, and I think some of the ones I came up with that I've included here may likely not have been intended as culture jam at all.

What I'm trying to do is consider the potentially powerful use of images as a tool to goad people into thinking more, and perhaps in certain directions, about their world.

Here are my favorites from the search--images I found particularly effective, artistic, interesting, or powerful.



Deurbanization


Nike


London, after (global warming)


When we grow up




Playfulness can go a long way too. . . consider:

Live in Russia (instead of playing games)


Speeding (what's your excuse)


Clear Speech


Democracy


Abstinence


P.S. Looks like these images are cut off. The idea in most cases gets across, but if anyone knows how to fix the html and wants to give me a hand, it would still be much much appreciated. Thanks all for putting up with my learning curve.

In "when we grow up", the foot in the foreground belongs to an elderly woman.

un control

This summer, presuming it doesn't land in my holding-yard of unfinished projects, I'm learning to shoot. It's been on the "at some point" list, and the opportunity has come up.

So that interested parties don't freak, it should be understood that I don't feel any particular personal lack of control about this. . . it's simply the matter of understanding violence, and understanding the tools of violence.

Which are implicitly not in control--implicitly deserving of caution, of understanding, of competence. That's the attempt. That's my attempt.

Groundhog Day's Blog

Let the "enlightened elites" strive to change the situation of the child, the illiterate, the primitive crushed beneath his superstitions; that is one of their most urgent tasks; but in this very effort they must respect a freedom which, like theirs, is absolute.

They are always opposed, for example, to the extension of universal suffrage by adducing the incompetence of the masses, of women, of the natives in the colonies; but this forgetting that man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. If infinite knowledge were necessary (even supposing that it were conceivable), then the colonial administrator himself would not have the right to freedom; he is much further from perfect knowledge than the most backward savage is from him.

Believing De Beauvoir

We object to the inquisitors who want to create faith and virtue from without; we object to all forms of fascism which seek to fashion the happiness of man from without; and also the paternalism which thinks that it has done something for man by prohibiting him from certain possibilities of temptation, whereas what is necessary is to give him reasons for resisting it. . .

Let the "enlightened elites" strive to change the situation of the child, the illiterate, the primitive crushed beneath his superstitions; that is one of their most urgent tasks; but in this very effort they must respect a freedom which, like theirs, is absolute.

They are always opposed, for example, to the extension of universal suffrage by adducing the incompetence of the masses, of women, of the natives in the colonies; but this forgetting that man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. If infinite knowledge were necessary (even supposing that it were conceivable), then the colonial administrator himself would not have the right to freedom; he is much further from perfect knowledge than the most backward savage is from him.