Thursday, April 22, 2004
No Way, Corbusier.
No way, Corbusier. The Architects Gang is just not with the program. Why do they keep trying to stuff cages and chicken coops of Modernism down our collective throats. Do they think we are stupid, or what? Don’t they think we know our evolutionary preference is for trees. What are they trying to brain wash us into? Thinking we like cages of concrete and steel? No, I do not want to work in a chicken coop, or live in a concrete and steel cage. I want to live in my own garden under a tree. And I don’t want to have to hear other people’s dogs, or kids. And I don’t want them to have to hear me or mine, either. I want peace, quiet and accessible solitude. I do not want to live in a concrete box. I am not a cabbage you can store in there for future exploitation.
But how can I have accessible solitude when I need to be near a centralized food distribution point(grocery store). So, when are we going to get Fed-Ex-Food? So those who choose can live in less densely populated places, but with access to centralized food distribution. If I can’t go to the tree, I want the tree to come to me, as a seed. Because we can’t do Fed-Ex-Food with fruits and vegetables, they’re just too bulky, and they spoil too fast. We can do Fed-Ex-Food with seeds.
Where’s my fooderator. My Zaby ordered one almost 10 years ago now, I’m sure. You know a fooderator? Like the ones they use on Mars to grow fresh food. Now, there’s a Mars project I could get behind. Fooderators on earth providing home grown fruits and vegetables from dirt cubes received through Fed-Ex-Food. Those little shrink wrapped packets of seeded nutrient rich dirt would arrive at my door. I would rip them open as needed and pop them into the back of a fooderator tray. And shut the door. The fooderator would provide the ideal home for the little dirt-seed packets with solar and artificial light & heat, filtered water and filtered air. And in a few weeks you have fruits and vegetables fresh off the vine, both on Earth and on Mars. Just keep rotating new seed packages into the back of your fooderator, and recycling your waste back to the seed packet makers.
You can’t grow a walnut tree in a fooderator you say. But you may be able to grow a walnut. With a detailed knowledge about the genetic structure and processes of plants we should be able to breed dwarf varieties of many plants foods even with just improved conventional breeding techniques.
And just think what a favor we will doing for the future. The mass distribution of fooderators on Earth will mean not only improving our current health, it will mean the fooderator will be mass tested here, in a place where it does not mean life or extinction, if your fooderator brakes down. Online Medical Care should be looming on the home front too if we really want to send people to Mars. Or do you think they will call 911. Solar power must be improved too. No oil wells on Mars, at least at first.
But fooderator research and development will never get funded by “OUR” government. Know why? Big Agricultural owns “OUR” government and it would be just too disruptive to “THEIR” business, “THEIR” profits, “THEIR” source of “THEIR” wealth and power. Our long term, and even short term, interests mean shit to “OUR” government. Besides Big Oil is running this country, folks, quite literally, and they have no interest in improving any thing for any one now, tomorrow, or ever, particularly solar energy. They only care about their own power and wealth. Period. Not ours, “THEIRS”. Face it.
What have we come to when Big Oil and Big Arms Dealers are running the American people in to death and destruction for the sake of their own personal arms dealing vendettas and for the sake of their personal obscene enrichment? At the end of his term of office, Dick Cheney should give all the money in his blind trust BACK to the taxpayers of the United States from whom it came. In fact, I want to know everything about his trust, assets and transactions, from the day he took office to the day he leaves. How much money did he make? What percent return? What percent war profiteering by Halliburton? I want to know now. Before the election. So he knows now. I don’t care if it influences him as a lame duck. The damage is already done. But I want to know what his minions did when he thought he was home free. And before he tries to get reelected for another four years of taxpayer plundering.
And some final questions for the Art crowd. Did Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in any way slow down or impede the coming of World War 2? Did Modern Art ever improve the lives of the lower castes of 20th century consumer society? Or has it always just benefited the Art Caste, the Art Mafia and the Plutocracy?
But how can I have accessible solitude when I need to be near a centralized food distribution point(grocery store). So, when are we going to get Fed-Ex-Food? So those who choose can live in less densely populated places, but with access to centralized food distribution. If I can’t go to the tree, I want the tree to come to me, as a seed. Because we can’t do Fed-Ex-Food with fruits and vegetables, they’re just too bulky, and they spoil too fast. We can do Fed-Ex-Food with seeds.
Where’s my fooderator. My Zaby ordered one almost 10 years ago now, I’m sure. You know a fooderator? Like the ones they use on Mars to grow fresh food. Now, there’s a Mars project I could get behind. Fooderators on earth providing home grown fruits and vegetables from dirt cubes received through Fed-Ex-Food. Those little shrink wrapped packets of seeded nutrient rich dirt would arrive at my door. I would rip them open as needed and pop them into the back of a fooderator tray. And shut the door. The fooderator would provide the ideal home for the little dirt-seed packets with solar and artificial light & heat, filtered water and filtered air. And in a few weeks you have fruits and vegetables fresh off the vine, both on Earth and on Mars. Just keep rotating new seed packages into the back of your fooderator, and recycling your waste back to the seed packet makers.
You can’t grow a walnut tree in a fooderator you say. But you may be able to grow a walnut. With a detailed knowledge about the genetic structure and processes of plants we should be able to breed dwarf varieties of many plants foods even with just improved conventional breeding techniques.
And just think what a favor we will doing for the future. The mass distribution of fooderators on Earth will mean not only improving our current health, it will mean the fooderator will be mass tested here, in a place where it does not mean life or extinction, if your fooderator brakes down. Online Medical Care should be looming on the home front too if we really want to send people to Mars. Or do you think they will call 911. Solar power must be improved too. No oil wells on Mars, at least at first.
But fooderator research and development will never get funded by “OUR” government. Know why? Big Agricultural owns “OUR” government and it would be just too disruptive to “THEIR” business, “THEIR” profits, “THEIR” source of “THEIR” wealth and power. Our long term, and even short term, interests mean shit to “OUR” government. Besides Big Oil is running this country, folks, quite literally, and they have no interest in improving any thing for any one now, tomorrow, or ever, particularly solar energy. They only care about their own power and wealth. Period. Not ours, “THEIRS”. Face it.
What have we come to when Big Oil and Big Arms Dealers are running the American people in to death and destruction for the sake of their own personal arms dealing vendettas and for the sake of their personal obscene enrichment? At the end of his term of office, Dick Cheney should give all the money in his blind trust BACK to the taxpayers of the United States from whom it came. In fact, I want to know everything about his trust, assets and transactions, from the day he took office to the day he leaves. How much money did he make? What percent return? What percent war profiteering by Halliburton? I want to know now. Before the election. So he knows now. I don’t care if it influences him as a lame duck. The damage is already done. But I want to know what his minions did when he thought he was home free. And before he tries to get reelected for another four years of taxpayer plundering.
And some final questions for the Art crowd. Did Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in any way slow down or impede the coming of World War 2? Did Modern Art ever improve the lives of the lower castes of 20th century consumer society? Or has it always just benefited the Art Caste, the Art Mafia and the Plutocracy?
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
The Art Mafia Sucks.
The Art Mafia sucks. And it looks like it intends to suck itself into extinction. This would be a disaster for us all, and not ironic in the least, because it is the result of the Art caste’s mindless adherence to the philosophy of Modernism which now quite plainly can be seen to ultimately abolish the concept of Art. So, do we even need Art?
Dwell magazine has an item on the Art Basel Miami Beach Show and artist Rodney McMillian’s 'Chair'. I quote: “McMillian found the piece of furniture, which looks as if it had been sat in by several generations of Archie Bunkers, on the streets of Los Angeles and turned it into a still-life meditation on the fate of every object designed to be used day in and day out by humans.” And how did he accomplish this awe inspiring act of art making, and all for under $5,000? By moving a chair from the street into a gallery. Hey, all trash removers, we’ve just been moving the trash in the wrong direction, if we learn to dump our trash into a gallery, we all can become artists. I can see the works now: 'Orange Peel', a meditation on color; 'Barbie', a meditation on longing; 'Weeds', a meditation on discrimination. If this chair is Art, then everything is Art. What happens when everything is Art?
Of course, McMillian’s action is nothing new. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp tried to exhibit a urinal he titled 'Fountain', now an icon of Modern art. Only everyone seems to have missed the real message of this kind of “art”. The point is NOT that these actions turn trash into an Art treasure. The point is that Modern art is what the Art Mafia chooses to bless as art. Modern art is all about the authority of an elite making up the rules as they go. The Art caste has sucked itself into meaninglessness, irrelevance and slavery to wealth by pursing this narcissistic philosophy of self-expression. They have prostrated themselves to the ultimately authoritarian lie of Modernism, that self expression in art is the road to freedom. It’s not. It’s the road to political slavery.
Modernist art practice is narcissistic. Art is not about exhibitionism or self exposure, that is art therapy for the individual psyche and has its place in personal growth and can be of value to others in their quest for personal growth. But personal growth is NOT the primary purpose of Art. ART IS NOT ABOUT SELF EXPRESSION. Only a narcissist or a tyrant would hope any one would think that. A narcissist because it’s always about them, and a tyrant because if it’s always about you it won’t ever really be about us.
So what is the primary purpose of Art? It is, what it has always been. The primary purpose of Art is to express SHARED values. It is about forming and communicating common values, not exposing individual personality or individual values, individual expression is only a footnote. The Art Mafia has cease to do be concerned with expressing common values. Why?
Modernism despises narrative and glorifies irony. Narrative is the primary vehicle for expressing shared values. Narrative is the nexus for collective action. Without the narrative of shared values people are isolated individuals. People without shared values, without narrative, are easier to manipulate, they have no center but their own expression of self, they cannot be rallied to a common cause, because there is no common cause, no common narrative around which to rally. Modernism works to disenfranchise people’s voice by silencing narrative. It isolates individuals in a cool ironic stance that allows them to watch the world but not participate in it for fear of being ridiculed by the authoritarian task masters of Modernist Irony. It divides individuals into unconnected units who care only for themselves and their own pleasure and have no sense of the larger community of which they are a part. Denigrating narrative and glorifying irony is a political tactic to manipulate people into a more vulnerable isolation in a consumer economy.
Artists have isolated themselves on islands of incomprehensibility, all for the sake of stroking their own egos. They are artists, they know more and better, that’s why people don’t get their work, it’s just too far above the common head to be heard. It hasn’t occurred to them they actually may be incomprehensible, as esoteric as other self-involved crackpots, because they have bought into an authoritarian Modernist system that works to isolate artists from other people, and which eventually will silence both artist and other people.
McMillian’s 'Chair' is not a meditation on anything. It is an old chair moved into a gallery, that is now priced for under $5,000 because some credulous dupe believes in the authoritarian scam called Modernism that abolished the enunciation of shared values in the interest of more easily manipulating people by isolating them with ironic distance. It’s not ART, it’s a scam.
What happens when everything is Art? What happens when every thing any individual does is art? We don’t need artists. And when there is no need for artists, there is no need for Art either. Then there are no common voices, there are only individual cries of anguish that go unheeded in a world made insensitive to pain by irony. So, why do we even need Art? To to speak in our shared voice. Without a shared voice we are defenseless against the tyranny of the powerful. We need Art to speak to and for all of us. We need Art to speak to each other. We need Art to empower us against the onslaughts of the greedy, selfish, and heartless. Art is not about you, or me, it’s about us. ART tries to speak to as many people as possible. Artists don’t just talk to each other and their patrons, artists speak to as many people as possible. Hacks, flatterers and flunkies, just speak to their patrons.
Dwell magazine has an item on the Art Basel Miami Beach Show and artist Rodney McMillian’s 'Chair'. I quote: “McMillian found the piece of furniture, which looks as if it had been sat in by several generations of Archie Bunkers, on the streets of Los Angeles and turned it into a still-life meditation on the fate of every object designed to be used day in and day out by humans.” And how did he accomplish this awe inspiring act of art making, and all for under $5,000? By moving a chair from the street into a gallery. Hey, all trash removers, we’ve just been moving the trash in the wrong direction, if we learn to dump our trash into a gallery, we all can become artists. I can see the works now: 'Orange Peel', a meditation on color; 'Barbie', a meditation on longing; 'Weeds', a meditation on discrimination. If this chair is Art, then everything is Art. What happens when everything is Art?
Of course, McMillian’s action is nothing new. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp tried to exhibit a urinal he titled 'Fountain', now an icon of Modern art. Only everyone seems to have missed the real message of this kind of “art”. The point is NOT that these actions turn trash into an Art treasure. The point is that Modern art is what the Art Mafia chooses to bless as art. Modern art is all about the authority of an elite making up the rules as they go. The Art caste has sucked itself into meaninglessness, irrelevance and slavery to wealth by pursing this narcissistic philosophy of self-expression. They have prostrated themselves to the ultimately authoritarian lie of Modernism, that self expression in art is the road to freedom. It’s not. It’s the road to political slavery.
Modernist art practice is narcissistic. Art is not about exhibitionism or self exposure, that is art therapy for the individual psyche and has its place in personal growth and can be of value to others in their quest for personal growth. But personal growth is NOT the primary purpose of Art. ART IS NOT ABOUT SELF EXPRESSION. Only a narcissist or a tyrant would hope any one would think that. A narcissist because it’s always about them, and a tyrant because if it’s always about you it won’t ever really be about us.
So what is the primary purpose of Art? It is, what it has always been. The primary purpose of Art is to express SHARED values. It is about forming and communicating common values, not exposing individual personality or individual values, individual expression is only a footnote. The Art Mafia has cease to do be concerned with expressing common values. Why?
Modernism despises narrative and glorifies irony. Narrative is the primary vehicle for expressing shared values. Narrative is the nexus for collective action. Without the narrative of shared values people are isolated individuals. People without shared values, without narrative, are easier to manipulate, they have no center but their own expression of self, they cannot be rallied to a common cause, because there is no common cause, no common narrative around which to rally. Modernism works to disenfranchise people’s voice by silencing narrative. It isolates individuals in a cool ironic stance that allows them to watch the world but not participate in it for fear of being ridiculed by the authoritarian task masters of Modernist Irony. It divides individuals into unconnected units who care only for themselves and their own pleasure and have no sense of the larger community of which they are a part. Denigrating narrative and glorifying irony is a political tactic to manipulate people into a more vulnerable isolation in a consumer economy.
Artists have isolated themselves on islands of incomprehensibility, all for the sake of stroking their own egos. They are artists, they know more and better, that’s why people don’t get their work, it’s just too far above the common head to be heard. It hasn’t occurred to them they actually may be incomprehensible, as esoteric as other self-involved crackpots, because they have bought into an authoritarian Modernist system that works to isolate artists from other people, and which eventually will silence both artist and other people.
McMillian’s 'Chair' is not a meditation on anything. It is an old chair moved into a gallery, that is now priced for under $5,000 because some credulous dupe believes in the authoritarian scam called Modernism that abolished the enunciation of shared values in the interest of more easily manipulating people by isolating them with ironic distance. It’s not ART, it’s a scam.
What happens when everything is Art? What happens when every thing any individual does is art? We don’t need artists. And when there is no need for artists, there is no need for Art either. Then there are no common voices, there are only individual cries of anguish that go unheeded in a world made insensitive to pain by irony. So, why do we even need Art? To to speak in our shared voice. Without a shared voice we are defenseless against the tyranny of the powerful. We need Art to speak to and for all of us. We need Art to speak to each other. We need Art to empower us against the onslaughts of the greedy, selfish, and heartless. Art is not about you, or me, it’s about us. ART tries to speak to as many people as possible. Artists don’t just talk to each other and their patrons, artists speak to as many people as possible. Hacks, flatterers and flunkies, just speak to their patrons.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
No, There Is No Santa Klaus God.
No, there is no Santa Klaus god. There is no white headed, stern faced, old man waiting for us in the sky to spank or caress us. That is a bogey man tale for mental children who are not emotionally mature enough to accept the reality of the indifference of the ground of being to our fate. We now have an inkling of how vast and complex the cosmos is, and how insignificant we really are. We are not the center of the universe, we are not even fringe detail, we are not even as substantial as dust motes. We are barely flashes of a spark of being. There is no god-human out there, who hangs on our every breathe. How childish to think the ground of being cares if we wear dreadlocks, forelocks, turbans or veils. The ground of being is not a member of the fashion police. We are the fashion police, and in our own interest to wield power over others, to be top of the heap.
Moses was wrong, no one has a “special relationship” with the ground of being, we are all of equal insignificance to the ground of being, and of maximum significance to ourselves. Buddha was wrong, life is what you make of it, we can work to see the limits of our own cultural boxes, but there is no escape hatch from existence. Confucius was wrong, the family is not a good model for adult social organizations. Plato was wrong, abstractions are only useful lies, and no one is ever going to know best. Christ was wrong, look bullies in the eye because no one is coming to save us but ourselves. Mohammed was wrong, evolution is continuing, no one of us is ever going to have the last word.
Institutional religion is not central to a spiritual life. Institutional religion, like all institutions, can be a tool for concerted action. But a spiritual life is lived through every day actions with fellow creatures. Adult spiritual life is not dependent on any particular belief or behavior. Adult spiritual life is dependent on individual choice about how we treat others, with or without respect for their unique existence.
Moses was wrong, no one has a “special relationship” with the ground of being, we are all of equal insignificance to the ground of being, and of maximum significance to ourselves. Buddha was wrong, life is what you make of it, we can work to see the limits of our own cultural boxes, but there is no escape hatch from existence. Confucius was wrong, the family is not a good model for adult social organizations. Plato was wrong, abstractions are only useful lies, and no one is ever going to know best. Christ was wrong, look bullies in the eye because no one is coming to save us but ourselves. Mohammed was wrong, evolution is continuing, no one of us is ever going to have the last word.
Institutional religion is not central to a spiritual life. Institutional religion, like all institutions, can be a tool for concerted action. But a spiritual life is lived through every day actions with fellow creatures. Adult spiritual life is not dependent on any particular belief or behavior. Adult spiritual life is dependent on individual choice about how we treat others, with or without respect for their unique existence.
Monday, April 19, 2004
We've Been WalkerBushed By Mistake.
We’ve been WalkerBushed by mistake. The U.S. Supreme Court made a mistake, which they should own up to individually and collectively. George Walker Bush was not elected president, he was anointed “President” of the United States by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The first prerequisite of a good judge is humility, a quality never known to exist in any American judge up to now. I don't know why I think that suddenly it should be exhibited by the almighty justices of the almighty U.S. Supreme Court at this moment in history. But it should. They all know their election ruling was totally out of keeping with their previous rulings on states rights. This is no secret. They made a blatant politically motivated judgment, not a legally motivated one. They think history will forget. It won’t. They will be judged not by their best ruling but by their worse. It will color their histories, individually and collectively. It will not be a footnote, it will be a wound to the whole Court’s reputation and credibility. This ruling will be the deciding issue in their reputations. Because when it came to the most important legal event in their careers they stopped being judges and started being partisan political hacks. The votes of the U.S. Supreme Court elected George Walker Bush president, not the votes of the American people. Those U.S. Supreme Court justices will have to live with the knowledge that history will show that they themselves, in a time of media manufactured hysteria, lost their heads and abandoned their most cherished principles about the rule of law and turned this country from a democracy to an oligarchy. George Walker Bush stole the presidency with his political connections. The U.S. Supreme Court was a coconspirator. It is time for those judges to apologize. They owe the American people an apology. They owe the whole world an apology. When are we going to get that apology. I think we should turn a little Japanese here. I want them to stand up before a joint session of Congress and apologize to us for giving away the presidency for the sake of their own political preferences. Then I want them to resign.
So now, we’ve been walkerbushed by Bush’s oligarchy, that small group ruling only in their own selfish interest. The Bush oligarchy has decimated environmental management policies when the evidence of global climate change is on every weather forecast and all for the sake of their own selfish monetary interests. Hey, they all have second, third and fourth homes to escape to. The Bush oligarchy has sent other people’s daughters off to die in a war prompted by a Bush family vendetta while the Bush daughters stay home and party. The Bush oligarchy has decimated our political rights in the name of capturing a man who they themselves purposely didn’t pursue in Afghanistan, because they wanted to leave that festering wound so they’d have an excuse to make money pursing a war in Iraq. Halliburton-Cheney and the Carlisle Group have made a bloody fortune. My grandmother lived through more than five wars. She said some one always makes money off war. We know who they are. Just look at the books. Or are they a matter of national security in order to protect the guilty and greedy. Who took what? Act now, avoid the rush, start the investigation into war profiteering before it all disappears. Stop being walkerbushed by mistake.
The first prerequisite of a good judge is humility, a quality never known to exist in any American judge up to now. I don't know why I think that suddenly it should be exhibited by the almighty justices of the almighty U.S. Supreme Court at this moment in history. But it should. They all know their election ruling was totally out of keeping with their previous rulings on states rights. This is no secret. They made a blatant politically motivated judgment, not a legally motivated one. They think history will forget. It won’t. They will be judged not by their best ruling but by their worse. It will color their histories, individually and collectively. It will not be a footnote, it will be a wound to the whole Court’s reputation and credibility. This ruling will be the deciding issue in their reputations. Because when it came to the most important legal event in their careers they stopped being judges and started being partisan political hacks. The votes of the U.S. Supreme Court elected George Walker Bush president, not the votes of the American people. Those U.S. Supreme Court justices will have to live with the knowledge that history will show that they themselves, in a time of media manufactured hysteria, lost their heads and abandoned their most cherished principles about the rule of law and turned this country from a democracy to an oligarchy. George Walker Bush stole the presidency with his political connections. The U.S. Supreme Court was a coconspirator. It is time for those judges to apologize. They owe the American people an apology. They owe the whole world an apology. When are we going to get that apology. I think we should turn a little Japanese here. I want them to stand up before a joint session of Congress and apologize to us for giving away the presidency for the sake of their own political preferences. Then I want them to resign.
So now, we’ve been walkerbushed by Bush’s oligarchy, that small group ruling only in their own selfish interest. The Bush oligarchy has decimated environmental management policies when the evidence of global climate change is on every weather forecast and all for the sake of their own selfish monetary interests. Hey, they all have second, third and fourth homes to escape to. The Bush oligarchy has sent other people’s daughters off to die in a war prompted by a Bush family vendetta while the Bush daughters stay home and party. The Bush oligarchy has decimated our political rights in the name of capturing a man who they themselves purposely didn’t pursue in Afghanistan, because they wanted to leave that festering wound so they’d have an excuse to make money pursing a war in Iraq. Halliburton-Cheney and the Carlisle Group have made a bloody fortune. My grandmother lived through more than five wars. She said some one always makes money off war. We know who they are. Just look at the books. Or are they a matter of national security in order to protect the guilty and greedy. Who took what? Act now, avoid the rush, start the investigation into war profiteering before it all disappears. Stop being walkerbushed by mistake.
