Whenever I leave the city with a backpack only, I’m happy. I like the buses, I like the terminals, I like walking around without knowing where I am, what might be just around the corner. I like imagining myself on a giant map of the world and seeing that I was there, and now I’m here. I like how I feel when I’m away from everything that became routine. I like knowing there’s no one depending on me that I will probably let down. That there’s no group that has expectations of me. That there’s no one missing me when I’m gone and that no one is hurting because of me.
Watching my body come back to life from the injury has been everything. Blood is flowing and my muscles are filling out, back to normal. I’m hitting the bag for 8x 3min rounds at half power and it’s fixing my brain. I should take pictures of myself as I get healthier. Actually, I should have started about 4 weeks ago.
I have a few interesting things to post this week. I wasn’t able to get things into shape to post today because I ran out of time getting ready for the trip I’m now on. Coming up this week:
Duck goes undercover in hiphop clubs in Brooklyn and records conversations with females about what they’re doing there, what they see and pay attention to. One results in Duck being propositioned by a Beyonce look alike who says Duck was a black man in white skin. Mmmmm, saucy.
Duck stops a fight between a drunk person and a sober person on the sidewalk and records the audio, no one gets hurt and Duck gets to proselytize the problem of fighting while intoxicated and convinces the two men to do it right the next day (secretly knowing they won’t want to do it by then).
Duck secretly records a debriefing with police between an inebriated tenant of his building who “accidentally” broke into another unit in the building and shit on that person’s bed. It was the most bizarre thing Duck has encountered in NYC yet. Plus side: An amazingly bizarre and disturbing mystery to try and figure out. Negative side: Duck had to mop human feces off the floor of a common area (because otherwise an elderly, half-blind and crippled woman would have had to do it. Lace up the Rude Boys! (with pictures!)
Defy the idiocy you see around you, You’re right, Carve the future according to your will, Because otherwise you’re going to get fucked in the ass
By a big dumb machine,
That’s programmed to bribe souls,
And ruin people who could have done
Great things instead of living to die for the pleasure of
Distraction instead of purpose,
With their one and only life
Before non-existence, again.
I’m trying to form a coherent description and understanding of the idea of social imagination, and possibly a few of its necessary relationships– to freedom, to politics and movements, and possibly to human well-being, though that’s obviously a rabbit hole.
One interesting thing about this direction is that the idea of social imagination was first explored by someone I’ve read extensively and respect very much, the late, great C. Wright Mills, though I didn’t know this until today. His book “The Power Elite” was a thrill– written in 1956, and still nearly perfectly accurate today. I had to present it and lead a discussion on it in a social theory course I took a few years ago and it comes to mind constantly. (Incidentally, rumor has it that I’m right now writing this post in his old office.)
Anyway, as part of his work on describing reality through sociology, he uses “social imagination” in a way that that I find very congruent with my own struggles to describe and understand processes I see around me as I pass through life.
The sociological imagination is the ability to see things socially and how they interact and influence each other. To have a sociological imagination, a person must be able to pull away from the situation and think from an alternative point of view. It requires to "think ourselves away from our daily routines and look at them anew". To acquire knowledge, it is important to not follow a routine, but rather to break free from the immediacy of personal circumstances and put things into a wider context. The actions of people are much more important than the act itself.
The key concept there is the ability to pull back and look at everything as it really is. This can not happen from within the thing being seen, but necessarily only from outside of it. In our world today it’s hard to do this. Even the smartest people have a hard time taking that step back– or more accurately, realizing there’s a space to step back into–and are thus stuck (doomed? condemned? fooled? merely unfortunate? better off? lucky?) to live as a manufactured actor in the world, performing and behaving as directed and intended by a system with hidden hands controlling many puppets, and operating with a vision of nothing for humankind.
“We also have our social imagination: the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, on our schools. As I write of social imagination, I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that “it is on the day that we can conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide that these are unbearable” (1956, pp. 434-435) (p. 5).”
Written in the same year as Mill’s Power Elite. I had lunch with her yesterday– she’s 95 and it was more of a snack than a lunch, and her aid didn’t let it last more than about 30 minutes. I’m not exactly sure how I managed to get that lunch meeting– she’s one of the most influential educational philosophers of our time. She used to run the Lincoln Center Institute and now has her own: http://www.maxinegreene.org/
She had some very clear ideas about public space, freedom and social imagination, and speaking with her was helpful. I wish I knew who to speak with next.
When I asked her for advice on how to drill down deeper into the subject she said: “Use your imagination”, and winked.
11 hour sleep and I’m in two minds at once, the liminal condition of being between two modes of experience simultaneously. I floated up to the work setting and passed on the coffee stop in favor of preserving the state. I will be hungry in about 40 minutes.
It’s about 55 degrees and odd.
But I feel OK.
WAIT. Before I go. There’s a word in there you probably didn’t know. It’s the word “liminal”, and I bet some of you will find it apropos depending on what you have going on.
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes, as defined in neurological psychology (a "liminal state") and in the anthropological theories of ritual by such writers asArnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. As developed by van Gennep (and later Turner), the term is used to “refer to in-between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes”. Although initially developed as a means to analyze the middle stage in ritual passages, it is “now considered by some to be a master concept in the social and political sciences writ large”. In this sense, it is very useful when studying “events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures.”
I would say that right now the US and the entire international monetary system is in a liminal state, though I doubt anyone has characterized it as such.
Boot inclusion accidental. Created at 126th and Broadway.
I spent the day at a museum downtown again in meetings about a major project and it went well. Getting there was a pleasure, the weather was so excellent, man. Check it out:
No lunch included this time so I had to eat down there as I began to get dead after about 4 hours arguing with curatorial staff.
It’s interesting to enter other fields, other disciplines, as a transient. That’s the only way I’ve found to make sense of the world for myself so far, since I first left the deep woods. A semi-pro athlete, a soldier, a business owner, a teacher, a detective, a student, a professor. They’re all pieces, and there are many more I need to know and understand as I put myself together fully for the rest of my life.
I know nothing about collection curation but somehow was in there trying to contribute to a growing plan that involves me in a very limited way.
I always feel out of place, as anyone probably would, but then always realize that most fields are about the same basic things. Communication, foresight, understanding challenges and what solutions exist and what the best alternatives are to what’s not feasible. Confidence and telling people when you’re right and that they can trust you.
I got on well with the director of education, an old gay dude with suspenders and a slightly southern accent. He seemed to have read some education philosophy and that makes just about anyone cool by me.
I think education is everything.
I don’t include schools or classrooms in my definition of education.
I was ready to bolt after an hour but it stretched on. I think things ended up pretty well. I’m unsure what they mean for my work right now, but I’m happy to be involved. We’re trying to save culture from being destroyed by an oppressive tyrannical regime. One of my favorite reasons to get up in the morning.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to not have an enemy. To not have something that fills me with an inexpressible and unsurpassably violent hatred that motivates most of my waking minutes, motivates the actual cells in my body to keep my system pumped and ready. It’s the only reason I’m still alive. The times I’ve been in love are the only times I don’t depend on it fully for purpose.
If I believed in having a “calling”, that would be it: a destroyer of enemies. If I didn’t have something to destroy, I think I might just cease to exist. May that day come so that there may only be peace for all thoughtful beings. If there were only peace I’d like it, and I’d like non-existence for myself just the same because I wouldn’t belong in a peaceful place. I belong in war and chaos where I can bite down and exert and not worry about what breaks around me.
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When the planning session was finally over, my appetite became huge and dangerous. When in training mode, which I’m in, eating is really important for staying alert. Many calories go to repairing the body, so you need more to fuel the brain, and a few hours without food gives me an attitude problem that’s just plain embarrassing. I get terse and short tempered and juvenile.
So once free, I dove into the nearest place I could find. I found it was empty and comfortable.
Weirdo Vegg-o place.
Any restaurant that has a table like this is already getting the go-ahead light from me. The fact it was totally empty save for one dude waaaay down made it too enticing: I had to sit at the head.
Menu.
Um, what the fuck is this shit.
Vegan? No?
Oh, just… hippy dippy.
OK whatever, I’m on the verge of death, bring me food.
Weirdo soupo and cappucinno sandwicho combo.
Whatevs. Too hungry. Went for it.
I inhaled the soup and bread and felt like I had just eaten a bowl of air. Goddamn. The main course better be heavier or I’m dead.
What the fuck is this shit.
I’m hungry.
I ordered a sandwich.
Jesus.
I ate it in about half a bite, paid my 13 bucks (!) and ditched and got a hamburger nearby.
NYC and its fruity tootie little nuevo foodo wastes. No wonder the chicks are so skinny and dudes are all braindead and limp.
Headed back up and to work.
Aesthetics class.
Wasn’t in the mood at the start, but I got into it and liked it. We talked about… well, dang. Still usure how to share course information but it’s coming, don’t worry. I’m doing a good job of keeping track of everything and notes, I just need to organize its presentation for you, which I promise I’ll do later this week. We’ve met twice so far so you’re not far behind.
OK, I’m out.
Onwards unafraid, my friends.
Stare back right in the eyeballs and say FUCK YOU when it’s right and we’ll stand together, I promise.
I’m going to use that as a phrase to describe all pitiful things, now.
“I lost my wallet last night.”
“Dang, sad eggs dude.”
I went out last night, Saturday, and had a good time. We did a very typical New York thing: drinks at one place, reserved dinner at another place, “Where should we go next? OH, I know a great wine bar nearby, let’s go there” kind of evening.
I’m glad I showered first.
So, trallomp, tralloo. It was a good group– a music producer, a hedge fund manger (the only good one I know, fwiw), two stage actresses–one super hot–and two women who are on contract at the UN, one French, one…not. The hedge fund guy’s wife joined after dinner and it was great to catch up.
The restaurant was good and I recommend it. It’s called Crema. The style is “Nuevo Latino”, but all the reviews just call it “gourmet Mexican”. The chef is named Julieta Ballestero and I guess she’s well known. Here’s a write up about what she’s trying to do with Crema, and her picture. If you’ve never had gourmet Mexican, try it out, it’s definitely interesting.
The food was good, but the portions… meh. There was some filet mignon, and some raw tuna and ostrich meat which was good, and other things. It was all held together by good sauces.
There was the obligatory big, mostly empty dish. I think that’s a requirement at any place wanting to be considered “gourmet”. I guess I was waiting for it after the first few courses, which were like, a few bites each.
I mean, it was good.
See that clump of white on the left side? Looks like mashed potatoes? Yeah, that’s not mashed potatoes. Not at all. It was a shocker. Any time you bite down and you’re expecting potatoes and it turns out to be anything else, you have a moment of deep confusion.
OK, any guesses?
Frozen, pureed apple/lemon mixture.
Yeah, it was weird. That’s raw tuna on the right. I assumed you don’t eat the flower on the plate.
It was all pretty good, but… hundred bucks. That will never be worth it to me no matter how wealthy I am or become. I’d say maximum a couple times per year and only for really special occasions.
From there we went to a wine bar. I’m not a big wine fan and I find the “connoisseurs” to be entertaining embarrassments to themselves. Harsh? Yes, I know. I’ve just lost half of you and the other half are rolling your eyes. BUT, it’s true. It’s a bullshit industry. Firstly, you know this on intuition after tasting as many wines as you have, but you’re influenced by groups that want you to literally buy into it. Secondly, it’s proven. So relax, there’s no argument to be had. Yes, it’s all been debunked many times now: even wine tasting experts can’t tell $12 bottles from $80 half the time. Don’t bother challenging me on this one, save your time. Its extremely well studied. This is probably the best explanation.
“In blind taste tests, long-time smokers can’t tell their brand from any of the competitors and wine connoisseurs have a hard time telling $200 bottles from $20 ones. When presented microwaved food from the frozen food section in the setting of a fine restaurant, most people never notice. Taste is subjective, which is another way of saying you are not so smart when it comes to choosing one product over another. All things equal, you refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family. Presentation is everything.
The thing about wine in particular is that the industry itself knows it’s full of shit and they depend so strongly on dumb sheepish people to make their BS fortunes. Here’s an actual research paper from the The Journal of Wine Economics describing it, and here’s the abstract from it:
“Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.” (Source.)
OK. Stopping. Now. Not that big a deal, Duck. Just move along.
So we go to this wine bar and…
I had a great time. The wine was really easy to drink. I’m not a drinker generally, though when I get in the right mood I can drink a couple bottles as if they were gatorade. In the past year that’s happened maybe twice– where I swill directly from the wine bottle and finish entire bottles within minutes.
I know that’s not a good way of preventing myself from exploding into a ball of molten lava ore.
But, for various reasons, it was satisfying.
After the first bar, then tequila martinis at Crema, and all the bottles of wine at the wine bar, we were all quite buzzed. It was fine. The actresses were fun to talk to though they were super flirty and obnoxious. The hot one, half Indian, was starting to cause me great inner pain by constantly grabbing my arm and touching my back. I used my old line:
“Hey this shit’s expensive, don’t touch unless you buy.”
She loved it and watching the game in progress made me sigh internally, constantly.
No, I’m not going to play. Yes I’m sure taking you home would be hot, yes you’re very fine. No I’m not going to do it.
Great and now you think I’m hiding something, either a secret wife, or a little dick.
The sighs continued until…
… they came.
Who? Why, you already know. The “let’s get laid” douchey fucktards who seem to always show up eventually in this town. The fact that some chicks (though probably a very… particular variety of chicks) even give them the time of day is one of those mysteries I’ll never understand. Anyway, when it happened was when I needed to take my exit to preserve a fun night by ending it.
It was dark and I didn’t want to use flash, of course, so it’s grainy and iPhoney.
But it was quite something. What happened was, at about the same time, or least within the same hour, we were suddenly surrounded by these guys all dressed almost exactly the same in stripy patterned collar shirts, untucked, top bottons undone, fitted jeans and queer little pussy bootie shoes, each guy carrying the same facial expressions and using the same voice and talking about the same things, all for the sake of the… you know.
Now, I’m not a go out to bars in big groups type, it’s just not my thing. I prefer metal shows or if I’m going out with a chick, just us is great. If I’m hanging out with people I haven’t seen in a while, I like it, but that’s like a few times a year at most. But the people I was with last night, the actresses and whatnot, well, this is their thing. They’re out all the time, at least every weekend. I talked about it with them all at length and it was informative. But most interesting was their reaction to the douchey fucktards that had infiltrated the wine bar: once I pointed them out, they were surprised. “Holy shit, they really do all look the same… they’re actually all wearing the same things and holding their heads in the same ways, even holding their drinks in the same ways. WEIRD. And their demeanors are so… gross!”
So it was good because at least I confirmed I wasn’t crazy, but bad because… how the hell could they not have noticed this EVERY OTHER TIME THEY GO OUT. Guys are dumb, but girls can be, really, supremely naive and dumb.
Hopefully shedding light on a piece of overlooked reality wasn’t too disruptive to their evening plans… which is what I was thinking as I made my solo exit despite being given shit for leaving early. “I gotta go, I’ll see you guys soon. Try to count how many douchey fucktards you see tonight and we’ll make a graph.” The half-Indian actress chick followed me out and gave me her number and I didn’t give her mine and she thought that was shitty but I could tell she liked it.
My negativity turned out to not harm me much, which isn’t always the case. She’s cool and all, I’m just into my dark state these days and don’t want to meet new people. There’s one person I’m hoping will give herself to me a few times before The Big Change, and I’m strongly against seeing more than one person at the same time, so we’ll see how much this comes back to hurt me if I don’t get her after all.
Happy Monday. I’m away all day long and won’t be home until 10p or so, all work that I’m happily involved with. All part of The Story that’s coming your way soon.
Quite a few mails from the consumer culture rant so I’ve turned commenting on for that post, now in second draft form, so check it out again. It should read better and more clearly now. I encourage you to disagree or critique my position (or support it). Please feel free and comfortable doing so. Just remember this isn’t a formal argument, just thoughts, so take from it–or don’t. Consider it a provocation only.
My post for this morning is actually a response in that thread, so head there for the word.
Have a great weekend and I will too– a mini project will be getting the course materials up in a non-boring way.
Another Perfect Hangover. I think that’s a Motorhead song. It also applies to me this morning.
“Perfect” here is not used in the positive, “I like headaches and feeling ill” sense. It’s perfect in the sense that this is what a hangover is supposed to be like after last night, a beautiful circumstance.
After a long day I headed home and grabbed a giant bowl of yesterday’s nourishment (see previous post) and set to work on a bit of article cleanup for another journal piece I finished with my project partner. Afterwards, I tried to get more familiar with acrylic paints and experienced an incredible disaster. The outcome was a good learning moment: I recognize that using anything besides Electric Orange™ is completely beyond my abilities. Anyway, in the middle of that work (now known as“The Disaster” because my countertop is newly and accidentally multicolored), I received a phone call from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years.
There was no particular reason for the gap in correspondence with him, I have many good friendships like that, and my very best friends (save for one) are people I speak with very infrequently. So his call was a surprise, and despite my hands being covered in paint, I answered it quickly.
He writes for the LA Times full-time these days, though he works out of an office in Virginia. When we communicated more frequently a few years ago, he was writing for what seemed like a dozen places at once, perhaps especially Wired Magazine which I used to check out just to see his column.
Over the phone we caught up and described our life events and changes and observations and had the usual nice reconnection that occurs between close but independent friends. The conversation turned to contemporary life, and it was clear, to me at least, that it was going to be a long, great night.
After arriving at consensus, we both ran out and grabbed bottles of Johnny Walker Black, came back, and switched to video Skype. I was surprised at his suit, but I shouldn’t have been. I remember my days of suits without any fondness at all, and as I let him know that, he reminded me of the pleasure of not having to figure out what to wear in the morning. I agreed, though we decided Devo suits would be a step up.
We spoke and drank continuously until about 4am. I recorded most of it, though it won’t be shared anywhere. By 2am we were laughing so loudly my was voice getting hoarse. But our laughs weren’t reactions to jokes or funny stories, rather they were reactions to the occasional clarity of the absurdity of the world’s circumstance. Though the conversation began with American politics, it went everywhere else fast.
Consumer “culture” was probably the mainstay argument we worked on. We rediscovered the root of “culture” as “cultivate,” as in, to “cultivate the land” (agriculture, remember?) allowing for best possible harvest. So what’s the best harvest for people, the best fruits of the cultivation of human powers?
Now, reapply “consumer” to the phrase: “consumer culture”. We live in a world where people try to cultivate themselves by getting attention and approval from the least cultivated, least conscious, least developed and especially the least wise of our civilization. In our world, people build a sense of “self” through appealing–or not–to the fucked new psychology of an entire civilization that has grown downwards, devolving to live from the reptilian part of their brain– the shallow, impulsive, conforming, ignorant and reactive part of the brain that has caused every problem mankind has ever caused for itself.
And now that’s basically the rule.
Tyrannical capitalism and money worship is classic “hoarder mentality” in the anthropological and psychotherapy sense, and results from human feelings of insecurity or inadequacy and manifests in irrational accumulation of unneeded things. The behavior is born of the fear-induced attempt to compare one’s survival success chances to others in order to feel better, to feel OK, and is carried out by so many despite the lack of correlation to actual survival success or even success as defined by those now famous indexes of “fulfillment” or “happiness”. It has retarded our entire civilization, taking us back a thousand years in the last 50 years, and leading where unexamined, unthinking lives will always lead: to war and collective murder.
The ancient Greeks called the unreflective person “Halfman”– people who exist as beings with half of their potential consciousness not only undeveloped, but missing. These people are unfree in the truest sense: they are controlled by their impulses, rather than being in control of them, and being free of them. They walk around slaves to conformity, ignorance and impulsivity, slaves of a “self” that doesn’t grow, and is uncreated. My only problem with them is when they interfere with the freedom of other people, and especially when they work to create a circumstance that encourages the very unfreedom of people, an attempt to make them more like themselves and into a state in which they can be better controlled.
How does one know when another person is missing half of their consciousness? Talk to them and see what comes out most frequently, see how they describe their world, how they spend most of their living time. If working, what are they doing and why? If playing, is it leading to a higher developed and more fulfilling state? Or merely the most distracted. We come down hard on drug abusers because they waste their lives in semi-conscious hazes and dazes and become human wastes. But what about the people who do the same without the use of drugs? People who live in order to bedistracted from living, valuing “playtime” above every other human endeavor, unable to conceive of anything more fulfilling than permanent recess in which to spend their limited time alive, and who throw their most productive years into whatever provides the greater and most powerful distractions–toys?–along the way and to be played with for a couple decades of infirmity before death.
So, what’s wrong with that? I guess my answer is another question: what’s the point of that?
In addition to the fact that our world is completely full of suffering people, people dying of unfair diseases and of unfair circumstances being created by the unwise, by the unreflective, by the distracted and undeveloped “halfmen”, it now also conditions people to desire distraction and strive for incompleteness of consciousness. It conditions people to hold the “Halfman” state as the ideal. At our current rate, we’ll get there soon enough, and it will bring with it the end of the human era– an era full of fearful monkeys in suits trying to protect themselves by surrounding their lives with objects and people of artificial value– desperate attempts to feel OK. Make no mistake about it: consumerism and consumer culture is drug culture. They achieve the same things within individuals.
We were so drunk by the time we reached “the problem of distracted life as a way of living” that I think I nodded off at the computer.
No amount of describing would do justice to the feeling of relief from reconnecting with someone I share a solidarity with. We’re so surrounded by intelligent people who are also completely unthinking— not just unwise, but people who don’t actually value or seek wisdom in life. It’s creating so many problems everywhere now that ignoring it or considering it a normalized aspect of modern life is unethical and also dangerous. Power is so concentrated now that the world can change for the worse, or even be destroyed, overnight, and there will be nothing anyone can do about it. The circumstance is like a child accidentally holding a gun, undeveloped and unaware, yet more powerful in the moment than even the strongest adult. This circumstance is a byproduct-absurdity of the way things have gone because of the way things have gone because of the kind of person our system has inadvertently and recursively created.
I crashed at 4am in my clothes and barely made it to my first meeting of the day. As I write this, I can’t help but notice the evidence of how taken I was by the call– I smell of whiskey and unwashed clothes… my hands…
The course last night was good, I’ll be recording and posting just about all of it, so stay tuned.
Last night’s nourishment– a very loosely defined routine that is working out well.
vitamins
protein
(enable quicktime and double click the image to watch… I don’t have a quicktime player installed, but will if I put more video up.)
I’m basically just combing all ingredients, no specific amounts, with some salt and water and boiling for 2-3 hours. The result is surprisingly good. The natural broth that develops tastes excellent. I still can’t believe it. Also, you can really feel the vitamins. It makes your brain fast and your dick hard. Though the latter results in great pain and frustration at the lack of acceptable solutions, it’s still great. Despite the late meal and overwhelming desire to ram into things cock-first, I was able to sleep before midnight and had incredibly lucid dreams about the sea.
I leave on a quick trip west the weekend after next and will have to arrange something ahead of time with Aesthetics class. If this turns out to be too much an annoyance to the instructor, I completely understand and will have to either drop or audit. But I hope (and bet) it will work out.
Keep your frame and consider what your highest possible evolved state on earth would be. What would the maximally developed “you” be like?
A perfect state is a growth state, always. If that isn’t happening, if things are preventing you from growing, you need to cut and run, or you will die while alive.
The apartment is quickly turning back to Bushido Dojo, emptying out, growing larger, growing peaceful. I woke up early and spent some time looking around while the coffee brewed and the eggs fried. Big spaces get better wafts of cookery, especially in the winter when it’s warm inside and cold and dreary out. Also I like knowing I can open something really big in the living room. Like if I wanted to make a kite, or a gyrocopter. For when it’s time to officially:
…apparently by using welding torches.
Before heading out into the cold morning rain, I reviewed my notes in preparation for Aesthetics tonight. I’m not sure what to expect in a course of this kind. I’m a little anxious about it, but looking forward to seeing what this kind of study is like.
I’ve never taken an art or art history or art philosophy course before. I’ve never really read anything on it, either, a major gap in my education. I had to get special permission to register, and that happened in person with the professor. I just went in and explained I was interested in the “aesthetics of human learning”. I don’t know what I really mean by that, but as I explained the disjoined pieces that might be part of what I mean by that, I could tell he was at least interested in where it could go, once I am able to articulate. He added me to the course and said: “Just make sure you come to class prepared. We read things very carefully.”
I’m going to put all of the coursework and my essays up here, so follow along if you like. Who knows where it could lead. Here’s one of the pieces we’re reading for tonight.
“The attraction of unself-conscious design stems from more than the hypocritical desire to cloak aesthetic preferences in claims of necessity in order to surreptitiously have one’s way. It is symptomatic of a desire to overcome the limitations of what philosopher Charles Taylor has identified as our culture of authenticity—a culture that so prizes the living of authentically individual lives that the exercise of choice and self-expression are all that are left as ultimate goods.6 The apex of such a culture is to live the life of the “artist,” and most architecture students indeed cite the desire to exercise artistic creativity as the primary reason they enter architecture school (the opportunity to make the world a better place runs a distant second.)7 (…) Architectural neo-modernism is tailor-made for the culture of authenticity, for not only does it eschew ontologies, in its employ one could never be accused of pandering to popular taste.”
I’ll create a new page for all of this stuff soon. Heck, maybe I can turn this into an online course for you guys.
Think about experience; how we understand the acting self; how we represent life in time and space; how we judge value in material, political, and cultural life; what we choose as our controlling purposes; and how we shape and situate our efforts in life and for what aim.
