mayhap

"I LOVE Sephora! … That’s how we became friends!"

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:45:24 -0400

“I LOVE Sephora! … That’s how we became friends!””

- Overheard in Park Slope

polowolf: fuk p.e. brah

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:45:51 -0400

polowolf:

fuk p.e. brah

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:42:50 -0400

psychanalystes: Slajov Zizek

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:42:40 -0400

psychanalystes:

Slajov Zizek

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:34:29 -0400

shihlun: 3x3D (2013) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Peter...

Sun, 19 May 2013 16:56:24 -0400

shihlun:

3x3D (2013)

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, and Edgar Pêra

Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe Von Trotta (2013) Opens...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:47:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe Von Trotta (2013)

Opens May 29th at Film Forum in NYC. More here.

Tamara at the Rain Room @MoMA

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:43:20 -0400

Tamara at the Rain Room @MoMA

Tamara at the bus stop (at crown heights)

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:38:39 -0400

Tamara at the bus stop (at crown heights)

jungjoo: Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:36:05 -0400

jungjoo:

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

Photo

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:35:04 -0400

"The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly “clear” view. Avital Ronell..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 22:16:52 -0400

“The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly “clear” view. Avital Ronell recalls the moment in which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, “let me make one thing perfectly clear” and then proceeded to lie. What travels under the sign of “clarity,” and what would be the price of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival of lucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of “clarity” and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does “transparency” keep obscure?”

- Judith Butler in the 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble, taken from the Routledge Classics publication on p. xxi (via yourharbour)

"I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 22:15:22 -0400

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”

- Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Alastair Hannay (via proustitute)

busterness: “This body is not supple for the sake of...

Sun, 12 May 2013 10:48:23 -0400

busterness:

“This body is not supple for the sake of suppleness, a mere demonstration of flexibility. It is a responsive body which works with economy and precision to a purposeful end. It strikes up a tense relationship with matter – a kind of precarious dominance – which, because it is meaningful, is also in a real sense beautiful. Keaton, poised in the rigging of a ship, a spyglass to his eye, tells his whole story: that foot is going to slip, the telescope is going to show him nothing; but in the present balance there is such grace, courage and ingenuity that you know the man to be indomitable.”

—-Walter Kerr, Harpers Bazaar, May 1952

"Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:30:57 -0400

“

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

I talk about gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”

”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction,” The Left Hand of Darkness, 1976

littleacidbug: mayhap: littleacidbug: that commentary linking hyperbole and a half’s latest...

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:48:00 -0400

littleacidbug:

mayhap:

littleacidbug:

that commentary linking hyperbole and a half’s latest update to nietzsche bothers me a bit

idk, no matter how important the issue is, it just strikes me as tacky to write a flimsy segue into politics in the last couple lines of an important, focused post about depression

“Depression is the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture, what happens when magical voluntarism confronts limited opportunities. As psychologist Oliver James put it in his book The Selfish Capitalist, ‘in the entrepreneurial fantasy society,’ we are taught ‘that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background – if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame.’ It’s high time that the blame was placed elsewhere. We need to reverse the privatisation of stress and recognise that mental health is a political issue.” —Mark Fisher, “Why Mental Health Is a Political Issue”

this is a v. valid point, but what you’re doing here isn’t what i was referring to. this is still about depression. the nietzsche post just sort of went “well here’s a very important post about depression but let me tell you what it has to do with this almost completely unrelated political phenomenon”

I was trying to make the other, political point less “completely unrelated.” I was trying to point out how, in our desire to help/pity/save the depressed/oppressed other, we erase them in the process of recreating ourselves as heroes/saviors. It’s also important that, as with the depressed, we never really know the oppressed. Our fantasy of knowing only soothes our ego while absolving us of the responsibility to engage in the difficult and long labor of creating new conditions for life—for ourselves and others. You know?

Allie Broch’s brilliant new Hyperbole and a Half post on...

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:20:00 -0400

Allie Broch’s brilliant new Hyperbole and a Half post on depression seems importantly connected to a similar moment in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science.

Nietzsche writes:

“Our personal and profoundest suffering is incomprehensible and inaccessible to almost everyone….Our ‘benefactors’ are, more than our enemies, people who make our worth and will smaller. When people try to benefit someone in distress, the intellectual frivolity with which those moved by pity assume the role of fate is for the most part outrageous; one simply knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and intricacies that are distress for me or for you. The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by ‘distress’, the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed—all such things that may be involved in distress are no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell. No, the ‘religion of pity’ (or ‘the heart’) commands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when they have helped most quickly.”

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, 338

If we think of this problem of the false ‘benefactor’, but move beyond the individual to think about the hollowness and superficiality of global ‘benefactors’, both of these texts speak directly to the issue of the “white savior complex.”

At the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Nolan said, “Look at...

Thu, 09 May 2013 18:01:36 -0400

At the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Nolan said, “Look at those clouds.”

"The recent efforts to promote lesbian and gay marriage also promote a norm that threatens to render..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 01:30:32 -0400

“The recent efforts to promote lesbian and gay marriage also promote a norm that threatens to render illegitimate and abject those sexual arrangements that do not comply with the marriage norm in either its existing or its revisable form. At the same time, the homophobic objections to lesbian and gay marriage expand out through the culture to affect all queer lives. One critical question thus becomes, how does one oppose the homophobia without embracing the marriage norm as the exclusive or most highly valued social arrangement for queer sexual lives? Similarly, efforts to establish bonds of kinship that are not based on a marriage tie become nearly illegible and unviable when marriage sets the terms for kinship, and kinship itself is collapsed into ‘family.’ The enduring social ties that constitute viable kinship in communities of sexual minorities are threatened with becoming unrecognizable and unviable as long as the marriage bond is the exclusive way in which both sexuality and kinship are organized. A critical relation to this norm involves disarticulating those rights and obligations currently attendant upon marriage so that marriage might remain a symbolic exercise for those who choose to engage in it, but the rights and obligations of kinship may take any number of other forms. What reorganization of sexual norms would be necessary for those who live sexually and affectively outside the marriage bond or in kin relations to the side of marriage either to be legally and culturally recognized for the endurance and importance of their intimate ties or, equally important, to be free of the need for recognition of this kind?”

- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004; p. 5)

"I don’t like this expression ‘First World problems.’ It is false and it is condescending. Yes,..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:28:07 -0400

“I don’t like this expression ‘First World problems.’ It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”

- Teju Cole (via semperes)