from here
Thursday, June 21, 2012
we are participants
"In the long run, we’re in an age of experience: not audience. We don’t ‘watch’ TV or ‘consume’ media anymore: we are participants and TV users, not ‘watchers’. The old guard don’t get it, but we are turning a corner and leaving old TV behind."
From here
into a rhythm
Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth interviews Chloe Sevigny:
GORDON: I want to ask you a broad question: When I am playing music, there comes this feeling of just losing your body in space. Almost like you’re upside down and you don’t even know it. Do you get that feeling when you’re acting?
SEVIGNY: I do. You can’t really remember what happened afterwards. The problem comes when you don’t get to have that. You feel like you’ve failed. So I’ve learned that you can’t have these expectations that you’re going to find that state—but I do have it pretty often. You get into a rhythm. I’ve worked with directors who have very little money so we only have two or three takes. In that situation, I know I just need to go for it. Hopefully the performances don’t go over the top. When I have a bigger part, like Nicki on Big Love or Lana inBoys Don’t Cry, a juicier role, it’s easier to get there. When you’re doing little tidbits, you don’t have as much room. But small roles can be comfortable, too. Like my part in Zodiac[2007]. I was terrified of all the actors who were big stars. And I had this tiny role.
from here
pic from here
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
concrete social realities
"[T]he ‘inner-turn’ drives us away from concerns with the material; so much so that being preoccupied with worldly matters is somehow portrayed as tawdry or shallow. It’s no accident that we see the wealthy and celebrities drawn to this very capitalist form of religion: most of the world realizes that material concerns do matter. I don’t believe that we find ourselves and meaning via an inner journey. I’m not even sure I know what it means. While of course there is course for introspection and self-examination, this, I argue, has to be in a context of concrete social realities."
From here An interview with the writer of Dispirited, an attack on "Spiritual but not Religious" thought.
Sometimes intelligent atheists (as opposed to the mindless group-thinkers of the half-educated leftish metropolitan mass) make telling points about spirituality that need making. This book directs its critique at the 'New Age' Mind-Body-Spirit mulch that passes for serious inner enquiry, though it also looks towards Theravada Buddhism, with its absence of overt diety-worship, for a common ground in belief between traditional systems of thought and modern post-religious ideas. It's a trend in modern discourse towards establishing a firmer ground for truth than the post-modern relativism that so many so-called intellectuals have gotten lost in: with their ridiculous contradictions, often projecting exotic notions onto traditional societies (especially when they are suicide bombing us) while simultaneously thinking their systems of thought are rooted in ignorance. But traditional thought is complex and has always contained a range of perspectives that shows up narrow 'modern', atheistic thought for its limited provincialism.
Modern atheism's rise is a product of the rise of scientific enquiry, itself a faith-based system of thought holding a set of mystical beliefs: that the universe appeared out of nothing, that human consciousness is an accident of evolutionary processes that has somehow created a mind risen above the very processes that created it, and become capable of reversing or resisting negative selfish aspects of those processes (perpetuating a Christian notion of original sin overturned by an enlightened interior turn). Science's rise to cultural dominance in advanced technological societies is entirely due to its role in serving technological advance, and with it the production of consumer goods, the essential driver of capitalist enterprise and the dominance of markets and their economic logic. Leftist atheists owe their current dominance of public discourse to capitalism and serve its most iniquitous machinations through their denial of the true root of human benevolence.
As Theravada Buddhism, and the Vedanta, its philosophical progenitor holds, human consciousness is not a uniquely established phenomenon that separates the human body out from the rest of the universe, but the ubiquitous and all-encompassing universal consciousness manifesting in an organism that has evolved as part of an interdependent and interactive totality. It is the fact of its immersion in the world that means the human body, rooted as it is in the environment, both social and 'natural', cannot escape its responsibilities to others and to the world - however that arises. The 'inner turn' in the true sense is not a turn away from the world, the conditions we all live in and the relations between us. But is a turn towards a greater reality - and therefore greater source of love and knowledge - than modern atheist thought can perceive. The capacity to care is greater when intelligent analysis and activity is rooted in a direct perception of the reality that we are, at root, a conscious singularity with only apparent separateness.
From here An interview with the writer of Dispirited, an attack on "Spiritual but not Religious" thought.
Sometimes intelligent atheists (as opposed to the mindless group-thinkers of the half-educated leftish metropolitan mass) make telling points about spirituality that need making. This book directs its critique at the 'New Age' Mind-Body-Spirit mulch that passes for serious inner enquiry, though it also looks towards Theravada Buddhism, with its absence of overt diety-worship, for a common ground in belief between traditional systems of thought and modern post-religious ideas. It's a trend in modern discourse towards establishing a firmer ground for truth than the post-modern relativism that so many so-called intellectuals have gotten lost in: with their ridiculous contradictions, often projecting exotic notions onto traditional societies (especially when they are suicide bombing us) while simultaneously thinking their systems of thought are rooted in ignorance. But traditional thought is complex and has always contained a range of perspectives that shows up narrow 'modern', atheistic thought for its limited provincialism.
Modern atheism's rise is a product of the rise of scientific enquiry, itself a faith-based system of thought holding a set of mystical beliefs: that the universe appeared out of nothing, that human consciousness is an accident of evolutionary processes that has somehow created a mind risen above the very processes that created it, and become capable of reversing or resisting negative selfish aspects of those processes (perpetuating a Christian notion of original sin overturned by an enlightened interior turn). Science's rise to cultural dominance in advanced technological societies is entirely due to its role in serving technological advance, and with it the production of consumer goods, the essential driver of capitalist enterprise and the dominance of markets and their economic logic. Leftist atheists owe their current dominance of public discourse to capitalism and serve its most iniquitous machinations through their denial of the true root of human benevolence.
As Theravada Buddhism, and the Vedanta, its philosophical progenitor holds, human consciousness is not a uniquely established phenomenon that separates the human body out from the rest of the universe, but the ubiquitous and all-encompassing universal consciousness manifesting in an organism that has evolved as part of an interdependent and interactive totality. It is the fact of its immersion in the world that means the human body, rooted as it is in the environment, both social and 'natural', cannot escape its responsibilities to others and to the world - however that arises. The 'inner turn' in the true sense is not a turn away from the world, the conditions we all live in and the relations between us. But is a turn towards a greater reality - and therefore greater source of love and knowledge - than modern atheist thought can perceive. The capacity to care is greater when intelligent analysis and activity is rooted in a direct perception of the reality that we are, at root, a conscious singularity with only apparent separateness.
materialist realism
“Capitalist
realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or the
quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more
like a pervasive atmosphere,
conditioning
not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work
and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining
thought and action.” from Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative?
Used
as a term to describe the saturation of public discourse with the
idea that capitalism is the natural economic system and not one among
other possible forms of production, capitalist realism is compared to
the Socialist Realism of Soviet Union under Stalin, where all art and
culture was coerced into a systemic promotion of a certain kind of
materialist reality.
But
we need more. We need an analysis of how materialist realism is
dominant in public discourse. Promoted widely by all the main
establishment cultural institutions (note especially the BBC's
popular science programmes) this realism can be juxtaposed to spiritual realism, a view of the world based on understanding the
essential nature of human consciousness and its relation to society
and culture.
pic from here
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