to see everything

"I used to watch Jari Litmanen [the Finnish 'shadow striker' of the great Ajax team of the 1990s] a lot," he says. "I enjoyed how he moved and got into space. And he was patient. If you looked at him, he always never looked like he was rushed doing anything. He always used to take his time. Then, when the opportunity came, he found the space to get the ball in the net. The more you do it, the more it works. You need to know where everyone is on the pitch. You need to see everything."

from here

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From here

beyond this situation

"We have to create a scientific culture that recognizes the value of contemplative experience, and we have to create a culture of wisdom or spirituality that recognizes the value of science. We have to hold the two together. If we can’t or don’t, we will slide into one or other extreme—the resurgence of anti-scientific religious fundamentalism based on outmoded belief systems that are not valid and sustainable, or sustainable only in violent, terrible ways, or a scientific reductionism that doesn’t recognize the value of contemplative traditions, including the way that religious traditions have been the home where contemplative traditions have developed and flourished.

To be fair, many elements in religious history have been antagonistic to mysticism and contemplative experience, so it’s not as if reductionistic scientific trends are the only problem for contemplative traditions.

We have to move beyond this situation if we’re going to be a wholesome and healthy culture. The way I see forward is to working within both science and contemplative traditions to create a science that recognizes the importance and value of these traditions, while also transforming these traditions with scientific knowledge. I see this as potentially leading to a new post-religious or secular spirituality. I mean “secular” in the sense of a place where many different traditions can meet and hold something in common for the common good."


from here
pic here

purely physical

"When your job is to have sex with strange men it has to have some effect on your other sexual relationships. For me, however… I’ve been telling myself for the last several months it was purely physical (he fulfills about 90% of the qualities I find attractive); however, that little hand-holding interlude this morning made me realize I’m in love with him."


from here

the big man

dangerous hallucination

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity or organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the conquest of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

From Psychedelics and Religious Experience by Alan Watt (1968)
from here
pic from here

product of physical events

"It is important to recognize that the case I'm building against free will does not depend upon philosophical materialism (the assumption that reality is, at bottom, purely physical). There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events. The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature - and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions. But even if the human mind were made of soul-stuff, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does."

Sam Harris making a good case for the absence of free will and individual agency, from a secular atheist perspective here.

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Contributed by Gav

cautious not to come

“You got to get the hard-on, and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on, and cautious not to come.” 




Drew Bundini Brown, 
(Muhammed Ali's assistant trainer)

that manic dazzle

"As played by the 17-year-old English actress Kate Winslet, Juliet is a shockingly original creation. Humiliating her teachers in a series of very funny scenes, she makes you constantly aware that Juliet is not "cheeking" them or even being rebellious, she is simply a loose canon, recognising no limits. A classically beautiful English rose slowly choking on the thorns of her craziness, Juliet-Kate recalls the young Vivien Leigh - that manic dazzle where madness and glamour meet."



Julie Burchill, Sunday Times 
review of Heavenly Creatures, 12 Feb 95

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From here

will live alone

Until recently, most of us married young and parted only at death. If death came early, we remarried quickly; if late, we moved in with family, or they with us. Now we marry later. We divorce, and stay single for years or decades. We survive our spouses, and do whatever we can to avoid moving in with others — even, perhaps especially, our children. We cycle in and out of different living arrangements: alone, together, together alone […] [T]oday, for the first time in centuries, the majority of all American adults are single. The typical American will spend more of his or her adult life unmarried than married, and for much of this time he or she will live alone.


From here

more uses for dead books

Igloo


From here

i look like an apple

urbanisation through information

Go here for a map of the undersea networks

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David Batchelor's skip for Brighton's HOUSE 2012 visual arts festival, Go here for info

we've localised it

Popular culture versus materialism:

From Altered States dir Ken Russell (1980)

some sissy man

"Lord, I woke up this morning'

With my pork-grinding business in my hand

Said I woke up this mornin'

Pork-grinding business in my hand

Lord, if you can't send me no woman

Please, send me some sissy man"

From Kokomo Arnold, Sissy Man Blues (1934)  

his spells unblemished

I'D BEEN CHASING TRICKY FOR a number of weeks, diving down into the low bars of Bristol. "He don't live here no more," I'd be told. "He went to America". I wasn't going to buy that. He'd been spied by the Magpie girl only last Thursday, slipping in and out of the shadows down by the quay, drawing black lines on his own posters drenched in salty-sea splash, grinning synergy and singing swatches of malodorous song.

The dark wisps of rumor trailed him like tow-ropes and now I was reeling him in. I didn't know what to expect. The phantom was known to move as a group of one. Never took prisoners. You'd never catch him snorting vodka at the bar. You'd never catch him period, I'd been told. A shaman who'd never slept with the Others, he was still pure, his spells unblemished. "Maxinquaye," he would intone, his eyes rolled back into his head, the beads of sweat, jewel-like, rushing upwards over his skin, an eerie light, green and mouldy, circling his feet.

From You Don't Wanna Be Painting Your Face Like That by David Bowie in 

Q magazine 1995

pic: here

separation dissolving

Why people watch football (and why it's nothing to do with questions of right and wrong, morality and ethics). It's about suspended disbelief. The notion that we are part of a tribe with an opponent to overcome. Deep psychic needs met. Unresolved in the civilising process. But temporarily indulged in ritualised settings to confront and ensure safe release of necessarily repressed desire. Torres scores against Barcelona and confirms the triumph of representative figures. Watch the flailing limbs. Hear the inchoate whoops. Observe the collective dance. Physical separation dissolving. Becoming one. Momentary transcendence. Not more than a club. Just a club. Serving a purpose.