Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Why I believe in a God.




Bertrand Russell wrote a book called, 'Why I Am Not A Christian.'
I believe in God.
The primary reason I Believe in God is because I know that I can't gain anything
by not believing in God.  

Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Joke of the Master Musician. (My reading of the work of Daniel Coffeen).


The spectacle of Music. 
                                

I remember when I joined my first band. I was stoked, playing your guitar is an experience with endless possibility, but with a band, even a shity high school punk band is like nothing else. I remember telling my friend, "I'm in a band now!", and his response was, "you have an album? You play shows? It means nothing unless you actually play shows." His words stuck with me, giving me motivation to make it happen, but also shifting my focus, (the seed of ideology!) ever so slightly, from making something, to making something happen for me. I started to think of being a musician as something I had to do, which is so obvious, right. You are what you do otherwise you could say your anything you want, and it be true, even if you only did it once in your enter life, even if you never really did it at all. But gradually I started to think of it differently. Reading phenomenology I started to question identity on a deeper level. What is my being in the world? What are my becomings? What is the lasting effect of what I do? What sense do I make? And that's it! listening to Daniel Coffeen’s podcast I realized that being a musician isn't making a new sound and twisting you friend’s fuck'n arms off tell they get the tune right. It's the way you hear the world when you are trying to make something of it. It's not just making a guitar do what no one thought it could; it's feeling in your whole BWO! (sounds like profanity!?) the strife of trying to make a guitar do what it can't do, that's what it means to be a guitarist, every guitarist knows this. It’s the struggle with the instrument that transforms your ears, your fingers, even your eye’s, I still remember the way my guitar case smelt when I first bought my electric guitar. It's the same with painting. Most paintings don't look like there subjects, the best are still paintings though. Not painterly! Painting in a painterly way is like playing smells like teen spirit the way it's written in guitar world magazine, which brings me to the problem of the philosophical concept of a world, as presented by Heidegger as a referential totality, which sounds communal and holistic. But when I read Badiou enlisting the art world as a revolutionary force of change it becomes very apparent to me what a referential totality means, a closed system controlled by planners. The curator is king and the museum is her realm. The museum, as it turns out is a reductionist’s space where affect can be isolated from effect leaving the utilitarian hegemony to rain supreme over mood and spirit. No these things are not dichotomous; the curator is not the art world, but art is not separate from the world, the art world is just the name of a certain hierarchy who’s king is the fool of utilitarianism. A beloved stooge of a fake radicalism. The museum is an asylum of fetishes to powerful for the "material" world. So it is with the music store, if I could play Stair Way to Heaven, again, what a ridiculous world that would be!! Instead we will talk about equipment. The thing is that music takes practice but how can you practice something like music! Thank you for the inspiration Daniel Coffeen.
When I play a weak riff am I a weak guitarist? Am I a great guitarist just because I can hear the guitar in the wind? I become a guitarist when I hear the guitar in the rhythm of the snow. What you are becoming is always with you. The master musician is some one who can practice music. No one could practice music!

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

The skeleton of Being.



 Artist Igor Morski often depicts a metaphoric reality. 


When McLuhan says, when you sit in a chair the chair extends your spine, he means that a chair has the same structural function as the bones in your body, to hold you up. Deleuze says the same thing but he explains it as becoming-chair, they both want to highlight the way we are a part of the world around us, they just explain it in different ways. This point is a good one for designers to consider because it relates form and function, to identity and being.

 

Friday, April 18, 2014

For Love of Ideology in General/A Rebellion for the New Millennium.



    Some ones idea of what ideology looks like.


 
Dictionary.com defines ideology as;
1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.
 

 

For many people ideology is a term of contempt, but I don't think this makes much sense at all. 

Ideology and desire are not separate. There is no secret desire which ideology seeks to suppress only desire in conflict with desires. A critique of ideology "as such" is a contradiction, because it negates the Meta level which it assumes ideology 'falsely' comes from. Either ideology comes from lived desires or there is a transcendent source from which it comes. Conversely desire itself could be said to be transcendent because it seeks to actualize the dream, or the virtual possibilities of reality.

I agree that 'focus' is ideological because it is directed by desire. This, as you know, is called intentionality, and isn't necessarily subconscious. A stated goal can itself be a distraction from the bigger picture. Intentionality isn't the same as desire, it’s the way desire limits, and sharpens our perceptions and 'involuntary' actions. This is why Buddhists practice detachment. The idea behind meditation is that if you sit long enough with your desires you will eventually realize you don't need to fulfill them. This in turn makes you see things that are not directly related to your desires, but it doesn't dissolve intentionality completely. Surly this is a beneficial practice, not least because it opens you up to new possibilities, and desires, and inspirations. Intentionality makes thought and action possible. This might sound like I’m saying that intentionality traps us in our perceptions, I’m not. We shift our perceptions every time we change which task we are doing, intentionality is what allows us to do this, but meditation can give us whole new intentions.

Deleuze differs from the Buddha in that he encourages us to cultivate our desires. In a thousand plateaus, Deleuze writes about the empty Body without Organs, I think this is the same thing Vajrayana Buddhists call the "the diamond body," a bodily state free of desire. Deleuze instead prescribes a state he calls the Full Body without Organs.
There are two characteristics that define the Full Body without Organs: 1) no one desire is thought to be a stand in for another, as in the sublimated desire, and 2) the desire is self-fulfilling. Deleuze gives us two examples of a full B(w)O; 1) the masochist who enjoys his suffering, (for the perverts), and 2) a lover obsessed with the mere thought of their lover, as in courtly love, (for the prods). Both examples problematize Freud’s notion of sublimation because the object of desire does not require consummation, nor is it a stand in for consummation. The full B(w)O also provide us with a new conception of desire which opens new possibilities for discovery, because these desires open up to a multiplicity of subtle experiences.

Ideology is thought to be a human construct, which means that humans create it out of nothing and then force it fascistically on reality, but ideas don’t come from nowhere much less the human soul, they are part of the natural world, that is not to say they are good, there are good ideas and there are bad ideas.

I recently read an article by Syreeta Mcfadden called ‘Teaching the Camera To See My Skin’, in it, she quotes Godard calling Kodak's film stock racist, because it couldn’t see dark skinned people.Can a film stock have desire or intention? Can it be focused on the wrong thing? Is Anti-ideology fascist? These are questions for an emerging world, where possibilities are not reduced to what has already been done. Ideas are the world of the possible.


Teaching the Camera To See My Skin, by Syreeta Mcfadden:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Gentrification is Localized Inflation.

What do Money Multipliers or Monetary Inflation &OR, "big" Government have to do with Gentrification?
[These are some factors in gentrification that not often brought up in the general disputation.]

1. Gentrification is localized inflation.



2. Gentrification is caused in large part by City Planers.
3. Increases in money in any market, even local markets, results in higher prices over all, and
an appearance of lower quality products to take the place of the products that are no longer
affordable to those excluded by the gentrification process. This could be called the Wall Mart effect.
 4. When rent prices rise beyond the incomes of those unconnected to the inflationary flows, the excluded, (working class people and those on meager food stamp subsidies)  have no choice but to move away.
5. Centralized banking, and government to the degree that it is centralized, contributes to unequal distributions of wealth&power because centralized organizations have a limited capacity to support other structures, both social and infrastructural.
6. Centralized organizations have very little incentive to support organizations that don't increase there power directly. (Big business hasn't bought our democracy, they are simply the kind of social organizations that our system creates, they produce the power; guns, energy, technology, our government needs to serve us in the only way it can).

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Candle light a la' Gram Harman & Rene Descartes.






                                 Gerhard Richter: Kerze (Candle), 1982 © Collection Frieder Burda
                                 Candle is also the cover of Sonic Youths brilliant album
                                  Day Dream Nation. 

 
Gram Harman, a contemporary philosopher that you should know about, says each object has its own essence apart from the some total of interactions it can come into with other objects or people. Harman says interactions reveal something that was already there, it wasn't always there because Harman doesn't believe that 'forms' are eternal like Plato did, its just been there for as long as the object has existed. I considered the nature of the candle in light of Harman's claim.  
 
Candle light will never be replaced by the light bulb nor was it ever merely a utilitarian object, lacking it's current magical quality. There has always been something both terrifying and soothing in the light of a candle. It is no wonder that Rene Descartes discovers the essence of thought & being while playing with candle wax. Or maybe it be better to say that, it is the vary essence of wonder that he did so.
 
 
 

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