December 2011
1 post
Surfing on entropy
I consistently come back to this 1995 Wired interview with Brian Eno:
“Has computer science influenced you any?
Cybernetician Stafford Beer had a great phrase that I lived by for years: Instead of trying to specify the system in full detail, specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go. He was talking about heuristics, as opposed...
November 2011
7 posts
“If what’s always distinguished bad writing — flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc. — is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then (Bret) Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary...
On pain and architecture →
During a lecture of his seventh seminar in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis of 1959, Lacan made a brief “digression” into the myth of Daphne. The nymph’s petrification presented the psychoanalyst with an example of human behavior in moments of inescapable, mortifying pain. In an agonizing gesture, the human body instantly freezes, inanimates itself from within into a monument of stone, erect and...
Dave Eggers on Criticism
“I think criticism, more often than not, completely misses the point, yes. The critical impulse, demonstrated by the tone of many of your own questions, is to suspect, doubt, tear at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course is completely the wrong thing to do to art. I used to tear books apart, and tear art exhibits apart - I was an art and book critic for a few...
October 2011
9 posts
“There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with...”
– Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” Negotiations, 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1995): 8-9. (via machinic)
September 2011
10 posts
Blog Review: The Glaze →
“The aesthetic of these paintings is the product of someone who does not find pleasant respite in the conceptual discourses around anything, who finds the social ornament today rather reprehensible, or at the least insufficient, and in need of remediation through different, unmade experience that exceeds it. This withdrawal is intensified and exacerbated by the hostility towards...
2 tags
Watchunbuiltroads:
HELP SUPPORT JULIUS CAESAR GALLERY! This is one of my absolute favorite spaces in Chicago. They’ve operated for three years without public funding of any kind. Spread the word! PS: I’m in this video!
7 tags
August 2011
6 posts
July 2011
4 posts
revelation at 11:22
discomobions:
they all had blue eyes.
#rene magritte #georgia o’keefe
June 2011
7 posts
May 2011
11 posts
“I don’t know what I want to say, but, to try to say something, I think I want to try to think. I want to try to see what I think. I think trying is a big part of it, I think thinking is a big part of it, and I think wanting is a big part of it, but saying it is difficult, and I find saying trying and nearly always wanting. I want what I want to say to go without saying.” ...