Jul 05 2009
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Juliet Stroud, “Snookles” (1986). Via ZappVid3
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Fascinating! A Turkish reality show pits representatives of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Judaism against one another in an attempt to convert atheist participants. Those who convert will receive an all-expenses-paid pilgrimage to Mecca, Rome, Jerusalem or Tibet as a prize. I especially liked this part: “Contestants will be judged by a panel of eight theologians and religious experts prior to going on the show to make sure their lack of faith is genuine.”
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Chicago's "CeaseFire" program uses social interventions to lessen gun violence
The program sends “reformed” shooters into the community to defuse violent situations and accustom potential shooters to other ways of resolving conflict, while simultaneously working with trusted, local opnion leaders (e.g., clergy) to spread the message that violent actions are unacceptable — not just wrong, but also foolish (“uncool”).
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“ I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first… While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, I thought, Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, Wow, it is easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances and no one would know — no one would ever know. Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities — oh, dear God — I knew, I had instantly an understanding, for that fleeting moment, why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances, just make it all go away, get some normalcy back in life.
— Sarah Palin, recalling the experience of learning that the baby she was carrying (Trig Palin, born April 2008) would be born with Down syndrome while speaking at the annual Vanderburgh County Right to Life banquet in Evansville, Illinois, on April 16, 2009. Quoted in Todd S. Purdum, “It Came from Wasilla,” Vanity Fair (August 2009); you can watch the speech at Conservatives4Palin.com.
Jul 04 2009
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“ Dead power is everywhere among us — in the forest, chopping down the songs; at night in the industrial landscape, wasting and stiffening the new life; in the streets of the city, throwing away the day. We wanted something different for our people: not to find ourselves an old, reactionary republic, full of ghost-fears, the fears of death and the fears of birth. We want something else.
— Muriel Rukeyser, from The Life of Poetry (NY: A.A. Wyn, 1949), p. 87. Seen here.
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"Peeling Onions," by Adrienne Rich
Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
There’s not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.
Crying was labour, once
when I’d good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.
A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain —
yet all that stayed
stuff in my lungs like smog.
These old tears in the chopping-bowl.
First published in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (NY: Harper & Row, 1963).
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“vacation cowboy” (via BoringPostcards). From a set of found photos from the mid-1960s. More information here.
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Element Of Crime, “Surabaya-Johnny” (composed by Kurt Weill, text by Bertholt Brecht, from the musical Happy End, first performed in Berlin, 1929). Live recording from Crime Pays (Polydor, 1990). (via justforfun73)
Jun 23 2009
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Foucault on curiosity
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity — the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would be better left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today — philosophical activity, I mean — if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The “essay” — which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication — is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis,” askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure (NY: Viking, 1990; first published in French in 1984), pp. 8f. 
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Iggy Pop crowdsurfing during a 1970 performance of “TV Eye” with the Stooges, at the Cincinnati Pop Festival. This is a screen capture from this video.
Jun 22 2009
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Four minutes of sheer sweaty insanity. MC5 performing “Kick Out The Jams” live in Detroit, 1970. You can see some kind of freeway in the background. Watch the outro clip for “Detroit Tube Works” at the end (via discoscrudos)
