Saturday 29 November, 2008

The difference between the sprout and the bean

Merry Opportunity

What are these days called holiday and birthday?

The queries bespeak us with answers in volumes so high we intendedly cannot hear ourselves:

* Is it a religiously-sanctified day of spirituality, a wrapping of ledger books, or someone's birthday party?
* Is it a history rewritten to benefit the equal exchange of objects amongst the bland?
* Is it a choice to select how Power may speak for, of, or as us?
* Is it a time for renewal, cycling, or leaps?
* Is it a day of peace during the war of all against all for a piece of the shrinking action?
* Is it a big sale, an everyday sale, or a no-sale?
* Is it a day of candles - mourning or exalting - that illuminates or polarizes darkness?
* Does it come too often, too little, not at all, in hollow form, or even at all?

Is it all these - is it none of these? Yes. And no. And neither by itself....

It is a day like any other... that we want to be like no other.
It is a call for celebration over celibation.
It is a call for giving beyond sacrifice, duty, and exchange.
It is a call for adorning the world rather than its symbols.
It is a day of rebirth over slow death.
It is the call of the wild that has not been bred away, beaten, and subdued.
It is a day for some in the species to stand upright and face what we implicitly desire.
It is a day wherein we glimpse at what wonders we might become, and - where the clock is challenged as barrier to making them real.
It is a day wherein we declare war against zero-sum social relations - for it to even exist.
It is a day that beckons all the rest.
It is a day without Monday appointments and deposit deadlines; it calls to us with the end of the weekday as we know it.
It is a day that seeks to become rather than to merely be.
It is a day wherein we try to reach farther than we normally allow ourselves.
It is us seeking more than the us of quantities - measured in partialities and limited to days amongst lifetimes.
It is nowhere, nobody, and nothing implying us as the ultimate birthday and gift - to everywhere, everyone, and everything.
"Birth" and "holy" days are at once an expression aimed at the mundane and a call to go beyond spectacularly-new levels of that same mundanity.
It is Santas freely dispersing commodities at stores as "gifts".
It is the inclusion of so many holydays that no one day may contain them.
It is the creating and entering the "promised land" today rather than waiting for its bus.
It is pouring the gravy of exuberance on all you would meet rather than the gravity of returning to the production and consumption of non-festive chores.
It's wrapping up a self-reflexive world for unholy strangers.
It is giving back a sold tomorrow as impossible and a re-presented past as passed-by.
It is a chance to be born again as we want to be - with everyone as loving family.
Its presence embraces the full dismantling of anything that would squander the wonder of playing with toes and stars.
It us all of us calling through some of us.

These days are opportunities to permanently, resolutely, and consequentially step outside of and beyond that which confines us to controlled bliss and marvel, and to the "us" that finds them with daze and colonized content. It is us calling to a fuller us. It is the universe speaking through us to cast off salutes to the dead and become the living.

http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/Merry-Opportunity/Merry-Opportunity.htm

Friday 28 November, 2008

Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)

Some sunny day-hay baby
When everything seems okay, baby
Youll wake up and find out youre alone
Cause Ill be gone
Gone, gone, gone really gone
Gone, ga-gone, cause you done me wrong

Everyone that you meet baby
As you walk down the street baby
Will ask you why youre walkin all alone
Why youre on your own
Just say Im gone
Gone, gone, gone
Gone, ga-gone, cause you done me wrong

If you change your way baby
You might get me to stay baby
Ya better hurry up if ya dont wanna be alone
Or Ill be gone
Gone, gone, gone
Really gone
Gone, Ga-gone
Cause you done me wrong


Some sunny day-hay baby
When everything seems okay, baby
Youll wake up and find out youre alone
Cause Ill be gone
Gone, gone, gone really gone
Gone, ga-gone, cause you done me wrong


- Robert Plant & Alison Krauss -

Thursday 27 November, 2008

i think i'm dumb

my heart is broke but i got some glue.

-nirvana-

Monday 17 November, 2008

Capital y cultura - Eduardo Ramírez

¿Cómo afectará la crisis económica a la cultura?

¿La respuesta es ese simplista: al haber menos dinero, muchos proyectos naufragarán, se reducirán los presupuestos gubernamentales y decaerán los patrocinios privados?

La historia nos ha demostrado que la cultura es una herramienta central en las crisis.

Para reactivar la economía, después de la Gran Depresión, Roosevelt echó a andar el programa Federal Art Project, como parte de una estrategia para generar empleos.

A través de encargos de murales y esculturas para espacios públicos se lograron generar cinco mil empleos para artistas y producir más de 225 mil obras de arte norteamericano.

Recordemos también los proyectos sociales en los que se asignó a fotógrafos recorrer el país y registrar la vida rural norteamericana de los cuales Walker Evans es sólo un ejemplo.

No sólo se reactivó la economía al generar empleos para los artistas, sino que se afianzó el nacionalismo norteamericano a través de la simbolización que la cultura provee.

La caída de los precios del petróleo y la crisis financiera de los ochenta trajo, ante el abandono del gobierno de su patrocinio, hizo que la iniciativa privada viera a la cultura como una forma de inversión.

El auge de las colecciones y museos privados, el uso de la cultura para posicionar ciertas ciudades en el circuito financiero global, la conformación del actual circuito internacional del arte, incluso, son resultado de esta crisis.

Los colectivos artísticos y los espacios independientes que surgieron en México en los noventa son reacción a la crisis política del 94 y el error de diciembre.

La función simbólica de la cultura la vuelve un instrumento vital para la cohesión social en épocas de crisis. Y susceptible a ser usada como propaganda ideológica que justifica cualquier exceso con tal de salir de ella, llámese fascismo, socialismo o librescomercios.

Quien no vea que la producción cultural es central en época de crisis, está ciego. Pero peor ceguera será pensar que esto implica una redistribución del capital, sea económico o cultural.



http://www.milenio.com/node/103337

Thursday 13 November, 2008

The Quote of the Day

La psicoanalisis è il mestiere di lascivi razionalisti che riducono a cause sessuali tutto quello che esiste, salvo il loro mestiere.

Karl Kraus