“Once I have started, then I can be quite fast. In other words, I write fast but I have huge blank periods. It’s a bit like the story of the great Chinese artist—the emperor asked him to draw a crab, and the artist answered, I need ten years, a great house, and twenty servants. The ten years went by, and the emperor asked him for the drawing of the crab. I need another two years, he said. Then he asked for a further week. And finally he picked up his pen and drew the crab in a moment, with a single, rapid gesture.”
Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy
“….. Reality shows operate as these sort of gateway drugs to accepting the police state. Meditative, easy to digest shows suggest that being constantly documented is not just acceptable, but it’s to be desired…. “
“No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance. Only the recognition of damsel, horse or fly and the assumption if damsel, horse or fly; and so with dreams and beyond, for what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.”
-Peake, Titus Groan, pg. 96
“Let’s drop by Rouen; Duchamp’s grave is there.” I called Teeny Duchamp, who told me to “take a taxi to the grave after getting off the train.” I was still young then, and so I hauled a heavy Portapak to his family grave. The grounds were so huge I didn’t know where to go. His epitaph reads, “It’s always been the others who died.”
spiral center
All of these northwest-oriented faults in the Portland region are pressure release points that react to the larger movements of the plates below us.
“This fault probably formed in response to this broader clockwise rotation,” Streig said. “There’s a pivot point somewhere in Eastern Oregon, close to the border of Oregon and Washington. And all of the Pacific Northwest is essentially rotating clockwise around that pivot point.”
“The baasii ceremony is an important part of Lao culture and few Lao would consider undertaking a long journey or important endeavor without holding one. The faithful sit around a small table on which a variety of offerings are displayed – bananas, sticky rice, biscuits, money, and rice whiskey. An elder or a shaman recites the blessing, while everyone touches the offerings or, if they can’t reach, the elbow of someone touching the offerings.
The elder or the shaman ties a piece of string around the wrist. In Lao tradition, the soul consists of many guardian spirits that occasionally wander away from their owner. These must be called back and bound to the body to ensure a person is properly protected before any important undertaking. Once the elder has finished other participants continue tying loops of string. Yet more string is produced and finally everyone ties string around each other’s wrists, whispering good wishes all the while. It is believed that the string must be worn for at least three full days to ensure the desired effect.”
Excerpt (from https://exweb.gearjunkie.com/top-expeditions-1970-2020-6-gasherbrum-ivs-shining-wall/)
“Out of fuel, they couldn’t melt snow for water and had no food left, either. McDonald describes how a hallucinating Schauer believed that there was a third member of the team, determined to kill them by pushing them into the void. The Austrian climber later recalled that he saw himself transformed into a raven, looking at his own corpse from above. Kurtyka himself went in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he focused on his imminent death, which he accepted with dignity and calm.
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Halfway down, hallucinations overtook them both: Kurtyka also felt, rather than saw, the ghostly third man on the team. It required nearly a miracle of human endurance to reach a food cache that they had left at 7,100m during the acclimatization phase. When they finally stumbled into Base Camp, they just collapsed.”
‘In common with mystery religions, there were secret teachings, and not all texts were intended to be read by uninitiated people. The text appears to have been written for a higher level of initiate who was part of the way through since it states, “Now behold! I will reveal to you my mysteries, since you are my fellow brethren, and you shall know them all”,[2] but tantalizingly, the next five lines are missing and followed by “I told all of them about my mysteries”.[3] Some speculation has considered the possibility that the missing five lines were always missing and had never originally existed, their absence itself being a teaching of the text.’
It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up — living smaller, staying closer, having less — especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.
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LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.”
Excerpts (from https://www.fastcompany.com/3062246/an-exclusive-look-at-airbnbs-first-foray-into-urban-planning)
Direct-to-consumer brands fill podcast ad breaks with promises of the one true electric toothbrush and meals that arrive in the mail, selling us on the relief of forgoing choice altogether. The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.
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Meanwhile, International Airbnb Style continues to reproduce, sometimes by outright appropriation. Zoé de Las Cases and Benjamin Dewé, a French interior designer couple, were shocked when they discovered that Airbnb had replicated the design of an apartment that they listed on the platform for a meeting room in the company’s San Francisco corporate office, down to a trio of faux-industrial pendant lights, a twee chalkboard, and a floating shelf full of almost identical art objects (in 2012 Airbnb itself had rented Las Cases and Dewé’s space to host a party). The couple sued Airbnb in late 2015. “They are branding their company with our life,” Dewé told BuzzFeed. In making the replica rooms, company designers would “reproduce the exact sofa, as close as they could to the exact chair,” recalls Lisa Bottom, a design director at Gensler, the architecture firm that designed the office in 2014.
Bottom says the meeting rooms were the brainchild of Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, the RISD graduates. Gensler arranged the company’s meeting rooms around an atrium so that, “when you looked up through the atrium space, it was like looking at little snapshots of various cities,” Bottom says. All places, in one place. Imagine traveling across continents in a pilgrimage to the headquarters of the company that helps you open your house to strangers only to find yourself — at home.
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Schwarzmann critiqued the lack of locality in generic places, but Haid’s company suggests a different, paradoxical definition of locality: desirable places should be both specific enough to be interesting and generic enough to be as convenient as possible, consumed quickly and easily — equal parts authentic and expendable. In his 1992 book Non-Places, Marc Augé, the French anthropologist, wrote that with the emergence of such identity-less space, “people are always, and never, at home.”
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Yet the AirSpace aesthetic that Airbnb has contributed to, and the geography it creates, limits experiences of difference in the service of comforting a particular demographic (“the vanilla tourist”) falsely defined as the norm. It is a “hallucination of the normal,” as Koolhaas writes. This is the harmful illusion that so much technology, and technological culture, perpetuates: if you do not fit within its predefined structures as an effective user, you must be doing something wrong.
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Kanyi Maqubela, the Roam investor, sees meaning in the generic from an unexpected source. “If you go to Catholic church in most parts of the world, the mass is going to feel like the mass. There is still a sense of unity,” he says. “We’re starting to enter the world where these private companies have some of that magic to them, the notion of feeling at home across time zones in any country.”
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We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”
The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds.
Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”