Research and Remedies in Human Behavior

Research and Remedies in Human Behavior: What's new after 5 years?

2010-09-07T09:42:00.003-05:00

Here I am, 5 years or so into writing this blog and what do I have to say for myself? Well, first of all, this blog was an experiment in writing. It always has been and always will be, first and foremost.

Secondly, well, I needed a place to keep notes on my observations of human beings, human behavior, and human nature. So I created this blog. I eventually created many more blogs, but this one always remained a repository of sorts of some of my niftier thoughts & phrases on human behavior.

I like to think of myself as a kind of "amateur" ethologist or "amateur" behavioral economist. I love economics and it took me decades to even begin to understand the simplest concepts in economics and political economy!

So that's it, I come here and write about what I see, hear, feel, touch, taste, etc. Lately, though, I've mostly been blogging about tech-related news, about trends and things online, yada, yada, yada. I need to get back to some longer posts with more juice, more content, more SUBSTANCE. Right now I am in danger of going in the direction of Anti-Substance! (See: The Antiface Strategy & The Curse of Hyper-Solemnity).

In the beginning of the life of this blog, I was mostly writing about The Feldenkrais Method. That's what I was practising, and I must say the couple of years I practised The Feldenkrais Method were awesome.

Fast-forward many years later and I am still young, healthy, and chock-full of enthusiasm and joie-de-vivre. I want to write now more than ever, and I have begun.

I write 750 words every day on this great new website, 750words.com. It's motivating me to write more, it's really refreshing to take the time and patience, effort, attention, etc., to put down 750 words minimum each and every day. It only takes about fifteen minutes, it's a fart, really. I've been going steady for four days now. :)

So anyway I didn't have much to say about human behavior this time, but I hope to write a lot about the Attention and Reputation Economies, about Opportunity Cost, about Risk and Choices on the Lifepath. I want to get down to the bottom of this, of what makes humans humans, and why we do the things we do, say the things we say.

Really I'm interested in contemporary implications of old-world AESTHETICS. I think that now more than ever we are driven by our own AESTHETIC TASTES. When we go online, we're looking for BEAUTIFUL TRUTHS. We want to see what is beautiful, we want to taste the sensations will are eager to have, of something BEAUTIFUL, TRUE, and GOOD. Facebook is a reflection of WHO WE ARE. It shows us how GOOD we are, and we love it. We love that Good Image of ourselves. Facebook and other sites like it help PROMOTE THE CIVIC VIRTUES, mainly because of the transparency of your behaviors online. We are dealing more and more with an instance of PERFECT KNOWLEDGE / PERFECT INFORMATION, in that everyone else can SEE our every MOVE. It is like a game of chess, where there is perfect knowledge by both players on every move played.

I will be writing more about THE ANTIFACE STRATEGY (TM) which is my Trademark dominant strategy. It is a grim trigger strategy which I call 'tis-for-'tisn't. It's what I do everyday as a strategic intermedia artist. My motto is...

"Strategic art, one move at a time. Humanity, please."

So that's it for now. We are driven by AESTHETIC TASTE. We seek The Beautiful, The True, and The Good. People in fact are judged by their Beauty or Non-Beauty, and entire NETWORKS OF PEOPLE are also judged as Beautiful or Ugly. Our Network is our Filter. Filter Failure = an Ugly Truth.

Fiero, Gameful, Kickstarter: Jane McGonigal

2010-08-22T22:50:00.002-05:00

Within an hour of posting the Gameful project on Kickstarter, Jane McGonigal had already been entirely backed for the 2000$ she was asking for. I bet she and her partners had a Fiero moment. This was about 24 hours ago, and now the project has already fetched over 9000$.

What is the project itself, Gameful, which located in San Francisco?

"Q:What is Gameful?
"A: Gameful is an online Secret HQ for gamers and game developers who want to help change the world and make our real lives better. Think of it as a cross between a professional network and a creative brainstorming space. The goal is to make it easy for anyone making or playing world-changing games to find collaborators, mentors, jobs, ideas, and funding. And of course, to discover fun new games to play."

(http://blog.avantgame.com/2010/08/gameful-secret-hq-for-worldchanging.html)
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Video log about Gameful by Strategic Intermedia Artist Marc-Alexandre Gagnon, Mont-Saint-Hilaire, Québec, August 22nd, 2010.

Reference: http://zoetica.posterous.com/gameful-a-secret-hq-for-worldchanging-game-de

The Social Capital, Social Business & Customer Engagement Discourse

2010-08-03T10:54:00.004-05:00

You hear a lot of people talking about Social Capital, Social Business, & Customer Engagement these days. Some are talking about UX or User Experience for your website, others talk about Content Strategy or Content Marketing, Direct Marketing, Social Media Marketing.

When it gets down to it, the discourse is about making your business "Social", about meeting the consumer / customer halfway. It's about listening to your customers, it's about pulling in signals from The World Wide Web, a.k.a. The Social Web, signals that mean something to your business, critical statements for your business interests.

I see a problem here. I'm seeing all these experts talking about how they can make the customer feel better, how they can make the customer trust their brands, how they can make customers participate and engage, but I can't help thinking that it all sounds a little fake. What every business really wants is penetration in the market and a strong brand perception. At the heart of most businesses, there really isn't a care in the world to be found there for how the customer really feels, so long as the consumer / customer is purchasing YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE.

In the end, business itself is not all that "Social". Some service companies, though, are all about the customer, but most of these individuals talking about social data and transactional data, about web analytics, and customer engagement, their interests are clear: They want to boost their business, and this only happens to please their customers as a side-effect.

No, I don't want to hear people talking about customer engagement anymore, unless they say that their goal is to maximize profits and that a strong brand helps achieve this goal. At the end of the fiscal year, if you're going bankrupt, you won't care very much about how happy or unhappy your customers are, when you're deciding whether to file for bankruptcy or not.

So don't pretend you care when you really don't. Some individuals care about people, care about customers, care about doing "Social Business". But companies themselves are not people, they don't have feelings. So if you're the CEO of some marketing company, make it clear that your job is to make money and that you perhaps actually care that your customers are happy, but when you're talking about web analytics & social data, data mining, etc.. when you're talking about algorithms & other strategies to augment customer engagement, and you're talking about it in an almost clinical way.. don't make us believe you care about the actual individuals who purchase your product or service.

What you care about is that the numbers make sense, that the numbers are positive. What you care about is that your brand has a positive image in peoples' minds. What you care about is that you're never going to go bankrupt if you can make the customers happy. But the happiness of the customer is almost never your #1 reason for existence, yet you try to make us believe it is.

Consumers are much smarter than you think. We smell the bologne coming from a hundred miles away. We can tell if you just want to augment TRUST in your brand as a marketing strategy to augment profits for the fiscal year. We smell it and we'll stop listening to your bullshit and stop buying your products or using your services. When all you care about is your "social data", we hear you loud and clear, and we're going to steer away from you.

The honest thing to do is to tell customers that you need their money to survive and that for their money, you're willing to trade something.. You need to be willing to fess up about your real goals and real motives, and trade some time.. Spend some time with us.. NOT just because your direct marketing team told you to. Do it because you don't know who your customers are and you want to get to know them, purely for no other reason than to get to know them. Ask them why they like your brand, ask them about their lives, ask them to tell you their story, and actually listen.

But none of this can be done with behavioral targeting & other number-&-data-crunching. To really go "Social", you have to forget you're a business and just spend time with your customer. You need to find who your strongest advocates are and fly down to go visit them in their towns. You need to share your profits with your customers if you really believe in this going "Social" bullshit.

Don't tell me that Coca-Cola and Nike shoes are about "people". That's just bullshit. The truth of the matter is the "Social Capital" doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the customers. And if you want to cash in on the social capital that belongs to customers.. then you have to be willing to trade something off for it, something of value. That's it, Social Capital doesn't belong to you, and to capitalize on it, you need a convincing trade-off with your customers. Business, in many ways, is "antisocial". And the way these "experts" are talking about manipulating & mining social & transactional data, it really, really is pretty antisocial. You should follow the conversation on Twitter, it will blow your mind away how clinical and antiseptic it all seems!

2010-07-13T00:02:00.001-05:00

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

Antilogo, Antibrand, & Mental Environmentalism:

2010-07-06T14:07:00.003-05:00

I have thought and written a lot, of late, on the subject of information pollution or information noise. A short while back, I began noticing that people were speaking more and more about information noise, of the signal-to-noise ratio in the social information / attention stream, i.e. on Twitter.

Even more recently, I've been interested in the practise of Content Strategy. In essence, I am mainly concerned with the quality of content, and of content with SUBSTANCE.

Right now, however, I am concerned with the practise of Antibranding and Mental Environmentalism. It seems that many social activists are building hate sites which are positioned against big name brands. It appears many are believing more and more in anticapitalistic, anticorporation beliefs.

An example of an Antibrand is the Blackspot Shoe brand. Blackspot is an antilogo, it is open source, and Blackspot Shoes are trying to win part of the Nike shoe market. The difference between a Nike shoe and a Blackspot one, is the Blackspot Shoe is made with hemp and recycled materials. The difference is in the corporation: One promotes social values and is socially responsible, the other is not.

Since people speak of Brand Substance, I wonder if people will ever begin to speak of the Antisubstance of Antibrands. I'm not sure of the viability of the anticapitalistic attitude. I'm especially wary of people going into business with the aim of stealing another corporation's market share. Trying to saturate a market is capitalistic. I don't see how anticapitalists can be using capitalistic means and measures to get their point across. Using capitalism makes one a capitalist.

It seems to be a matter of CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility, and Mental Environmentalism is beginning to take shape as a movement, where individuals and groups want to see the Infostream be cleaned up, as though it were being contaminated from the big corporations, as the environment has been polluted.

I understand the analogy but wonder about its viability as well. It's a nice metaphor and makes a nice story to talk about the pollution or contamination of the Information Stream, the Social Stream, etc., but is it viable? I understand the analogy of Noise with other Pollutants, i.e. Information Noise as Noise Pollution in the environment. Usually these metaphors are just that, metaphors, and fail to stand the test of time. Sometimes it's better to call a spade a spade, and not use so many metaphors.

The Antibrand Narrative: It is about being positioned against corporatism, against capitalism, against mass media, the usual anti-everything attitude. I am wary of those who position their « brands » or « antibrands » AGAINST something else. I find it much more interesting when someone develops their own unique position and differentiation without basing it on the antithesis of something else. I will always enjoy uniqueness and a distinctive style or message over a mere antithesis of something else.

Openness in a Closed World: Duties of a Philosopher

2010-06-21T04:46:00.003-05:00

Okay, so I consider myself a philosopher. Being a philosopher doesn't just mean being able to speculate or write thought-provoking stuff. Being a philosopher means knowing the discourse surrounding key concepts, concepts with much currency.

A lot of people are discovering writing as a hobby and are exploring new concepts, writing about consciousness, collective intelligence, emergent properties, open innovation, etc. The problem I have with a lot of this writing is that the concepts have not been adequately thought out.

If you're going to take a stab at philosophy, you might want to study the discourse itself. This is by no means easy. It takes time, it requires one to read excessively to keep up-to-date with the philosophical discourse.

Writing a piece on trending topics does not make one a philosopher. I've always been quick to wonder, and I spend much of my time in contemplative moods. I was born to think through tough philsophical problems. I do this for a living.

One trending topic these days is Transmedia Storytelling, i.e. Transmedia Narrative. I've read a few articles on EmoMapping and Narrative Fractals, and I find it rather obscure and nonsensical. By nonsense, I mean a text that is difficult to read and that doesn't make any overt sense. You don't get it right away and when you read further, you're more likely to be more confused than enlightened.

This is not philosophy. I have a distaste for writers who mix physics and spirituality / superstition / religiosity, or those who mix fiction (stories) into a pseudo-scientific discourse. It's a pet peeve of mine. I wish people would do more research, would study the philosophical discourse a little more, and truly, I wish people would develop their concepts a little more.

Another pet peeve is people who post a link to their latest blog entry onto Twitter, and when you take the bait, you wind up on a blog full of mumbojumbo, you wind up reading a text that doesn't make a point, that doesn't give you anything.

I don't like reading for nothing, or wasting my time reading irrelevant nonsense prose. Much of what I am reading these days is nothing more than word-salad: Someone with a pen and paper decides they are going to change the world with their writing, and the writing sucks.

So I called this blog entry Openness in a Closed World, for really, these people who call themselves open-minded are actually closed-minded. They are the people who tell you that you shouldn't have assumptions, they pass it off as wisdom or experience, knowledge, when really they stole the idea from the Four Agreements book on ancient Toltec Wisdom (which is also a bunch of bullshit).

I don't like anything that comes off as New Age. Philosophy is something else, something very different. You have to read books like Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, and you have to try to understsand them, grasp their knowledge. This is by no means easy.. it takes years, decades.

I'm not even all that much of a philosopher, I'm just an average thinker, but I certainly think through my concepts and develop them as much as I can. I don't like David Bohms' pseudo-spiritual quasi-scientific concept of holomovement. It all brings up an image in my mind of Dr. Timothy Leary high on LSD.

If you're smoking weed and writing crapped out nonsense & ancient Toltec wisdom, I don't want to know about it. Get high & write nonsense on your own time, don't try to pass it off as wisdom or philosophy. Philosophy is for philosophers. The layman shouldn't try to pawn off his mutterings as philosophy. Or if you want you can, but don't tell me it's philosophy or wisdom, tell me it's the mutterings of a fool, and don't talk to me about Sentience.. Use layman's terms and tell me you wrote an interesting blog and I will certainly read it. Just don't tell me it's ground-breaking stuff if it really isn't.

I'm only intolerant when it comes to those who pawn off mad scribblings & sick man's theories as genius work or stuff that is philosophically relevant. You have some more reading to do. Tell me it's just something you wrote, that maybe you had fun writing, and I will read it most certainly. And don't tell me not to have assumptions, New Ager. We all make assumptions about the physical world all the time. It's in our nature to do so. I can't accept being less human, and reading your weed-induced jibberjab is dehumanizing to say the least.

Any thoughts or comments on the matter?

Painting the Horse - Peindre le cheval

2010-06-11T09:54:00.001-05:00

Painting has always given the horse a place of choice. Equine art appeared in prehistoric cave paintings such as those in the Lascaux caves, estimated to be 18,000 years old. This representation of the horse through all the ages still continues in contemporary art today. Soundtrack created by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon.

La peinture a toujours accordé au cheval une place de prédilection. Tout a commencé il y a 18,000 ans sur les murs des grottes de l'Homo Sapiens et bien qu'adaptée à chaque époque, cette représentation du cheval est toujours présente dans l'art actuel.

Linchpins are everywhere (raise the flag!)

2010-06-10T22:59:00.002-05:00

To Like or Not to Like: Advances in Rating & Social Voting Systems

2010-06-03T14:25:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking on and off about the FB Like button for weeks now and a huge flaw just occurred to me. Here it is in plain English. There was already the problem of adding the Like button, right, to your site: i.e. what is it that people are liking? When I Like CNN, am I liking the website, the business, am I liking a set of different features, etc.? That was a problem since the beginning, the way that you classify what it is that people are liking.

I found another problem. What does liking do? What use is FB's huge dataset of things people Like going to do? What I mean to say is that Liking in this manner is extremely NON-SPECIFIC. The problem is a rating problem and a social voting problem that no one has yet solved.

The gist of it is, right now you either Like or you don't Like (not the same as Disliking, not Liking is just not clicking the like button, it's an empty set). Already it would be better if we could vote in terms of Like, Dislike, and Neutral. But even then, people in the field of sentiment analysis will tell you that they encounter problems even with a 3-pronged system of evaluations.

The problem is there is no formal language for encoding people's opinions. What would help FB would be WHAT someone Liked precisely.. What is it about Chum.ly that so-and-so likes, is it the service, is it because they have a friend who works there or a family member who blogs there? Do they merely like the design of the site? or they like the logo?

And when someone Likes something, couldn't we be more specific? Did the web page MOVE them? was it an emotion that led to the Like Behavior? a thought, a belief, an impulse? did the individual have a compulsion to press the Like button merely by virtue of social influence? (In other words, if 5 million people Liked it, I can be influenced to like it based on the sheer number of social votes).

There is nothing to compare between different Likes, they are all the same, you either Like or you do not in fact press the Like button. This is pretty useless information and won't work in the long-run - in my book! - with respect to the goal of "instant personalization".

To truly personalize, you need more information than just a Like. If I Liked the New York Times website, or a specific article.. that information is relatively useless, not completely useless, but relatively so. Did I find the information relevant, timely, useful, interesting, fun, particularly informative? And what did I Like, was it the information conveyed through the text of the article or the design of the site, or an image or a video in the blog I just read?

So we're dealing with the current "ceiling", if you will, of rating systems online, systems of social voting. Digg.com has the same limitations, if you ask me. Thus far, after using Digg for a month or so, it still cannot give me a single useful recommendation, and I fear the same is true of many more recommendation systems online.

What we need is a formal language with which to ENCODE precise information, and extensive information, to go with our individual votes. It should be as clear as possible WHAT I am voting for, and I should have at minimum 3 choices, Yes, No, and Neutral.. but ideally, I would have like 12 or 15, 20 different points on a scale, or a linguistic form for expressing ratings, opinions, for comparison between votes.

What do you think about this? Can we invent a perfect voting system and be a million light-years ahead of everybody else? We need to know WHY PEOPLE LIKE x, y, and z. Or else you're just collecting a bunch of web pages.. with little relevance, I mean concretely.. You've gone through all this trouble to implement a new protocol.. and you never thought to make it a little more precise on the voting side?

The problem is with user intention when the user votes. And then, there's no way currently to encode metadata on social votes like pressing the Like Button.

One tool in particular seems to me to be a storehouse of much potential: Likebutton.me. This site, apparently, can tell you what your friends are liking. I think you can just enter the name of a Facebook user and you can get a list somehow of what they have Liked.

This means that anyone can use the potential of the Like button and Open Graph Protocol for their OWN personalization agendas. But what we need is someone somewhere who aggregates Like votes and adds metadata to the information, like a online system of annotation for Like button clicks that can add extra input, by either interviewing people, or I don't know how. The problem is we need answers to these questions: What are people in effect Liking? What do they like about it? Why do they like it? What is the user intending when he or she votes? What is the voter SAYING? i.e. what does such and such a vote entail as a SIGNAL (in itself)?

On Electronic Frustration & Its Satisfaction

2010-05-22T09:16:00.001-05:00

If we're in need, we might be seen as being in a state of frustration with regard to our needs. In seeking new discoveries online, we then either increase or decrease our electronic frustration, otherwise known as that elusive information need.

The relevance of retrieved information can be said to be the degree to which our information need is satisfied. Since our information need is really a desire to decrease information frustration, we should maybe look at the whole electronic experience in terms of its potential to relieve us of this frustration.

Knowledge discovery is just one of the many ways the electronic experience can be non-frustrating. Another is the passive enjoyment of media files or digital cultural artifacts, sometimes linked, in fact, to a prior discovery experience.

The usefulness of the relief of frustration is evident, and the timeliness of the event even more so, we might say. The point is that in not being frustrated by information or a lack of it, one is in an advantageous position. Satisfaction or satiation is generally an advantageous position to be in.

Information satisfaction can lead to more of the same kind of satisfaction just like frustration can augment in a cascade of frustrating events. From a bioenergetic perspective, such accumulations of tension tend to lead to a tipping point where a peak event occurs that leads to an immediate discharge of the tension load. If we call this discharge of tension or tipping point an orgasm, we can maybe speak of the “Eureka moment” of digital content discovery, and its highly satisfying nature, as a form of electronic orgasm.

I am speaking of course of web-based experiences. We surf the web because it satisfies a need. It is our favorite pastime because it relieves us of built-up tensions and frustration. Discovery is just one of many forms of satisfaction online. Definitely, though, there is an optimum or flow experience that we are seeking, akin to what athletes sometimes call being “in the zone”. It might be important, also, to seek to leave this “e-ComfortZone” at times and seek some stranger experiences online because our capacity to be satiated in our information needs by the experiences risks decreasing over time. It may be important, therefore, to seek new experiences, what we might call encounters of a (digital) third kind.

In conclusion, if we speak of relevance as how well an information need is served, we speak of information needs and their satisfaction and therefore also of information frustration. Information overload and other forms of information pollution are all forms of information frustration. Irrelevant search results and time wasted online or on computers, are forms of electronic or digital frustration. If the relief of frustration is our main information need, then discovery and relevant information are both digital foods to satisfy our digital appetites. The Eureka moment, being an experience of “having found it”, i.e. the information food, is balanced by an Anti-Eureka moment: the experience of “having lost it”, or information frustration. We cannot always win and so are never satisfied once and for all. Hence, we return every day to our computing devices and to all those web-based experiences we so love, seeking the Holy Grail of Electronic Relevance and Discovery, & other like satisfactions.

Attention Economics, Social Media & Information Pollution / Overload

2010-05-10T08:25:00.006-05:00

It is true that social media and the use of social software is taking up more and more of our time. When it comes to our Attention, we have a scarce resource. Our attention is being pulled in every direction. Also, the 'noise' levels in these digital channels is always attaining new heights. How can we filter the data streams to extract only what is most relevant? And what about information pollution, how can we effectively deal with that very real phenomenon?

Spam or unwarranted publicities are disruptive. They take our attention away from what is essential, an awareness and attention which is already suffering from scarcity. We now know that multitasking usually produces second-rate results in our efficiency and other qualities of performance. The truth is that unsolicited advertising is a 'negative externality', that is, as by-product of the production product, it imposes a burden onto the consumer. It becomes more and more difficult to navigate through our many data streams, noise and pollution being all too pervasive. So what is a possible solution?

We know that we don't want to stop using social media or stop visiting social networking portals. We enjoy that, it gives us much by way of worldly pleasures. We are a gregarious lot, us humans, the more being almost always the merrier. What do we do when a certain latency exists almost implicitly in our fabulous 'real-time' communication systems? What do we do towards the sustainability of our competitive advantage as businesspersons?

It turns out that spending too much time and investing too much energy and our scarce attention-resource on social interactions can lead to a 'social interaction overload'. Similarly to an 'information overload', this stops us dead in our tracks, is disruptive and can lead to decision paralysis. The truth is we need information to make decisions, and when there is too much information, or too much noise, i.e. information pollution, we can literally be paralyzed in our very decision-making process. We begin to lose track and sight of potential options and outcomes. Our vision becomes fuzzy. The same occurs when we receive too many social solicitations. There is always a limit to our attention, and we can suffer from attention stress, such as workplace interruptions by our becoming-ubiquitous language media / communication media.

So what do we do? what CAN we do to effectively treat this problem? Well, since we are dealing with a digital ecosystem, one might want to look at the field of Environmental Management for ideas. Information pollution is as detrimental to society as environmental pollutants are for the ecosystems in which we live. One wants to take an 'ecological' approach to the treatment of the problem of information pollution, because, as I said, we're dealing with a 'digital ecosystem', as well as a 'knowledge ecosystem', etc.

With that being said, I must add that this quickly becomes an ethical question. We have accepted being bombarded from all sides and at all times with advertising, publicity, marketing strategies. We have been passively accepting these forms of attention stresses for the entirety of our lives as adults and earlier still when we were children. It's not too late to put our foot down. What happens, you see, is that there is another form of information pollution, which has to do with the QUALITY OF INFORMATION. If too much noise in a digital channel is a pollutant in the communication lifecycle, then also when the quality of the information - also conceptualized as a form of noise - leaves to be desired, we have a case of information pollution. That is to say, one noise is in unwanted information being mixed in with relevant information that we desire (to fulfill our great information needs) and the other is just the fact that much information is of POOR QUALITY.

What we want is high quality information at the right time, in the right format, and we want only the most relevant information that's out there. Services exist that can help us with this, but I believe we won't make much headway in this arena unless we begin to look at this as being in essence, AN ECOLOGICAL PROBLEM IN THE KNOWLEDGE ECOSYSTEM.

I shared my thoughts, now you share yours by way of your comments which are always important to me.

Personalization & the Adaptive Web

2010-05-08T08:36:00.008-05:00

Articles on the Open Graph:
Does Facebook Really Want a Semantic Web?
5 Ways Facebook’s Open Graph Will Impact E-commerce
Sticky content
Behavioral targeting

Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi S. Baron

2010-04-29T12:30:00.006-05:00

I am presently in the middle of reading the book Always On by Naomi S. Baron. I was so enthused about it that I couldn't wait until I actually finished the book to talk a little about its subject matter.

Basically, this book is what happens when a linguist decides to write about communication technologies. Period. It's that simple. I have found the quality of the writing of exquisite academic authoritativeness. The book begins by describing the "domestication of technology", which I found to be a clever way of articulating a rather subtle series of a multidude of events, from the ARPANET to the present-day status of "Update-o-mania", if I can call it that. (I'm not an academic, I have the freedom of putting my foot in my mouth.)

I found the writing extremely erudite. Ms. Baron describes a profile as a "personal information form", which is precisely what it is, except that I've never seen nor heard anyone put it in exactly that way. It goes with what I said about the use of the terms "the domestication of communication technologies".

The author, Naomi S. Baron, also does something which is spectacular for me: She uses the term "electronic language media", which is what typewriters & landline telephones were before computers and mobile devices arrived which are also more of the same. I think that this has something to do with the author being an authority in the realm of linguistics. It just follows suit that a linguist would take such great care in their writing, in choosing the right words, in curating the work with meticulous concern for correct and efficient / precise articulations.

Other keyphrases I enjoyed: our "communication landscape", the "volume of social interactions" (i.e. as in the "volume knob / control"), and she speaks of a "language application", i.e. email and IM are language applications.

This book, though, really studies very closely the human social use of these various communication technologies or language media. The scientificity of the research is unquestionable and of the highest professionalism and integrity.

Reading this book, though, has sparked much thought in my mind. Since Ms. Naomi S. Baron essentially breaks all telecommunications & computer-mediated communications into various parts, with the cutting-edge logic of a linguist, I began thinking that linguists should be hired to take us out of our quagmire and into the true Semantic Web.

I began thinking about semantics, about meaning. When I use a Google Alert, I am receiving the latest searches that were made using a given "keyword". So in essence if the multitude is searching for information about the iPad and the multitude is also creating content on the subject of the iPad, then the keyword "iPad" will pop up in my alerts, and show great volumes of current usage. This means that a relevant key term right now is the "iPad". But this doesn't tell me anything about iPads other than they are being talked about. In and of itself, this information is useless to me. I know people are talking about iPads, they have been for over a month and they will be for quite some time, just like I expect people to talk and write about the mobile web or interactive agencies.

We have to find a way to search for more than the mere topic being mentioned. We need to know if the text which in a documentary fashion makes use of the term "iPad" is saying something good, bad, or neutral about "iPads". That's one example of taking it to the next level. The actual keyphrases we are looking for are NOT the ones mentioning Apple & Cisco, but the sentences and sentence-fragments AROUND the use of those key terms.

I should be able at this point to do a plain English / natural language textual search for more than just common TAGS. Tags are only denoting subject matter or other topical fields when what I want to know is what people are thinking, not what words they are using. We have to be able to get INSIDE the various articulations that people are making, to get deep into the MECHANICS of verbal behavior or expression. I want to search through an index of COLORS OF SPEECH, I want to be able to search audio using a given particular sound whose usage I want to see represented. I'm talking about AFFINITIES between words, concepts, sentiments, thoughts, actions. I want to take the TAGCLOUD to the next level, and develop a mechanism for presenting dynamic & moving / changing tagclouds in real-time so that I could essentially be READING TAGCLOUDS dynamically as they move within the confines of the screen.

Other keyphrases that I find show individuals possessed with genius: It comes from the website for Airborne Mobile, Inc. In the section called "Our Story", they used the terms "revenue generating legacy products" and "mobile products and business models", i.e. "the next big mobile product". I just liked the sound of those words.. i.e. "new product initiatives". I really get a sense of their great credibility at Airborne Mobile, Inc.

Other than that, there's not much going on with me. I read and write and surf the web a lot to satisfy my unquenchable information needs / appetite. Jeffrey Bussgang has just written a book called Mastering The VC Game which "tells the backstory of Twitter from the perspective of founder Jack Dorsey" (from TechCrunch.com).

Building a Great Recommender System:

2010-04-17T13:11:00.001-05:00

I work through a hundred or so PDFs only to find a little more than a paragraph of truly relevant text. By relevant text, I mean that the paragraph or so is tied significantly to the research that I am doing, that these findings are extremely useful for me, whether it is for inspiration in my artistic practise, or otherwise.

To get a collection of a hundred reasonably interesting PDFs takes hours and hours of searching online. Altogether, to get a useful phrase, it takes countless hours of work. Could this process be automated?

I wonder if one could get a bot to do what I do when I search for, download, and read PDFs for relevant material. It would definitely liberate hundreds of hours that I spend doing organic searches.

Much of the material I find is almost a paraphrase of so many other documents. It's interesting, though, to see how much intellectual labor it takes to get just a little squirt of yummy juice. It's strange that I would do this much work and not get paid anything other than the joy of finding something relevant to my Empire of Dirt (stole a line from Trent Reznor).

Anyway, I was just wondering if there was a way to automate these processes, through collabroative filtering, social bookmarking.. if you took Delicious.com as a database of TAGGED social bookmarks.. could you, somehow, break down the information into sizeable bits, and at least give me a couple dozen paragraphs from which to choose my top three.. then my top three, ad nauseam, and the web application or algorithm uses my clicking behaviors to break it down some more..??

Essentially, I would just need someone to track my behavior, the searches I pump into Google & Bing & other search engines.. then Track my downloads.. then at home, I do a triage, I choose the BEST PDFS from the batch I data-captured..

Then I have to print abstracts sometimes cause I need a physical reminder, I use the physical texts to narrow down my search trms for future queries.. Everything on my desktop is neatly classified by Topics. say "Mobile 2.0" is one topic, "Cloud Computing" another, but it gets much more specific..

Printed media goes into my file-folder system, I keep cue-cards of all major search terms, plus web addresses, people & places to follow, great sources & data / information resources..

I end up scrolling through like a thousand pages a day of relatively relevant stuff to find moderately relevant stuff, to enventually, always another day, find something truly significant.

I already use Delicious.com and many other resources online to try to facilitate the process I go through every day to satisfy my INFORMATION NEEDS. Still, it takes many hours a day that I want to liberate for other more productive activities.

Don't you worry, I will build the perfect Recommender System.. I am tentatively calling it the "EXPRESS CHUNKOLATOR"! :)

Location-Based Services, Proximity-Based Notification & actuation, Real-Time Locating Systems, Geosocial Networking, & Telecommunication Convergence

2010-03-23T13:30:00.001-05:00

Anyone want to add to this list of current fascinations? I've begun making lists of keywords, not necessarily of popular keywords such as words used in search queries, but more like stuff that is current, phenomena we'll say that are in their infancy.

I wanted to write a blog about the above themes, but haven't been able to put them all together. I am a sound designer so I have a huge investment in all things related to the words Ambient or Ambience.. So as soon as "Ambient Intelligence" and "Ambient Computing" appeared as researchable terms, I came across them.. Same thing with Ambient Media & Systems, terms like that..

I'm interested these days by the rise of the Mobile Web and Mobile Social Networks.. everything mobile intrigues me, maybe because I'm seeing it from the perspective of an outsider, NOT having my own mobile phone..

It's as though the web got really, really big, the horizon was far, far away, it was a Brave New World.. then it's the Mobile Web all of a sudden and people are using Proximity Tools to check out what's going on around them, people are using smartphones & related technologies to walk around in an Augmented Reality.. I mean we've gone way beyond just Google Maps.. there's a huge telecommunication convergence going on.. and soon Geosocial Networking will be a thing of the past, or a "household term", at the very least.

I was thinking and our information needs have changed. Now we want answers in Real-Time and we want answers about Local things, events, products & services, etc. It's not enough to be moving in a "wireless communication ambience", but we want to see EVERY BIT OF CONTENT that fits into that wireless com. ambience..

I like it because the Mobile Web is very much about the Here and Now. It's more and more about how much the apples are going for at the supermarket, rather than about what's going on in Poland (say, for Americans with no Polish ancestry, Poland would be an "exotic" far away place..)

Proximity-based notification = you get a ping every time soda pop goes on sale at the supermarket or jockey shorts go on sale at Wal-Mart..

Proximity-based actuation = your mobile phone unlocks the front door when you begin to walk up the steps leading to your apartment.

People are less concerned about the RANKING of their website with regards to Google's PageRank algorithm.. Now we can about our "social ranking", we are looking for "social votes" by way of collaborative filtering or social bookmarking.. We are really experiencing something beautiful and mind-altering when you sit down and think of it.. groundbreaking genius, I call it..

Two makeshift terms to think of: "mobile computing proxemics" & "augmented social empathy"..

It is largely about RELEVANCE.. you'll see that RELEVANCE is going to be a key word for a long time now..

Jonah Cartier: Philosophy at the Extremes

2010-03-16T18:30:00.002-05:00

What is Extreme Philosophy? Answers by Jonah Cartier.

2010-03-16T13:55:00.002-05:00

From the Archives: Primitive Madonna and Child.

2010-03-16T10:02:00.000-05:00

Extreme Philosophy with Jonah Cartier

2010-03-16T00:17:00.002-05:00

The Buzby Symphony

2010-03-08T15:51:00.002-05:00

Marc-Alexandre Gagnon @ Chum.ly

2010-01-27T20:03:00.000-05:00

Dear readers, I am taking a short break from posting in my four blogs at blogger.com, for I am participating in a new blog experience at Chum.ly. Chum.ly is giving me a more intimate experience and is better serving my goals as a blogger, for the moment anyway. I would be sad to lose readers, so here's the link at Chum.ly where you can FIND ME AND FOLLOW ME.

Chers lecteurs, je dois prendre une petite pause quant à mes quatre blogues sur blogger.com, car je suis en train de vraiment avoir un très grand plaisir à écrire des blogues sur le nouveau site de Chum.ly. Je vais retourner içi de temps en temps, mais S.V.P. VENEZ ME SUIVRE À CHUM.LY!

Dashboard Economics: What do we mean by Social Software & Social Media?

2010-01-22T14:53:00.004-05:00

So much hype is being created around the term "Social Media". A year ago, I was the only one really blogging extensively on the topic. Now on Twitter alone, the conversations abound re: the topic of Social Media.

Twitter is in fact a form of Social Media, but let's be wary about what we mean by the term itself. Social Media is perhaps better described as "Participatory Media", in which case it is a form of "many-to-many media", making it possible for anyone in any given network to receive text, images, audio, video, etc.

We also speak of "Web Portals" and in the case of Facebook and Youtube, I think that the term Web Portal is a better description of what it in fact is. Participatory media are social media: Its value and power derives from the active participation of a mass of people (See: Wikipedia / Participatory Media).

In reality, we are speaking about INFORMATION. Information is the hidden culprit. Our computers process, send, and receive information, the web is made up of information technologies and information infrastructures, information networks, etc. We are dealing here with a new kind of economy, Information Economics and even a new form of economy we can call the Network Economy. That is to say that we are using these platforms to send and receive information, streams of data. Information is valuable, in fact, the World Wide Web is entirely made up of information, data, etc., software and hardware, and the World Wide Web is possibly the most priceless commodity in the entire history of civilization. One cannot put a price on the World Wide Web.

I see the Internet as the physical network of wires, modems, and computers, as well as software, applications, etc., and the World Wide Web is the internet of interlinked webpages, numbering I believe somewhere in the billions, if the trillion watermark has not yet been reached! Our consciousness is somewhere in between, when we are on the Web. The Web experience, in fact, is the first form of Augmented Reality, which existed long before Google Goggles and other Augmented Reality paraphernalia came on the market.

Information goods are valuable, but information is likely to be both non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so doesn't that make it a PUBLIC GOOD? (See: Wikipedia / Information economics.)

That's all I wanted to say, really. I wanted to begin a discourse on Social Media that went further than just touting the marvels of New Media, Social Media, Social Software. In a way, the Operating System may eventually be a form of social software and social software may someday be considered a public utility / public good. Wait until our governments begin adopting social media in the name of a better, new-and-improved democracy we might want to call "Governance 2.0", or else "eGovernance 1.0".. can't wait to participate in the Beta version of Parliament 1.0! hehehe

So that's it, through social media, now, one can share info, one can contribute to the ubiquitous Activity Stream, participate in social bookmarking, social cataloging, social libraries, one can shop for social online storage, play in virtual worlds, write in internet forums, enter into text chat rooms, use Instant Messaging of one form or the other.. these are all tools for online communication, or the online sharing of data or information. Meanwhile, are people becoming less and less "IT-literate"? is our youth going to college and studying computer programming and like things?

Interaction, interactivity. Virtual presence, telepresence. So many nifty new concepts, but do we understand them properly?

I'm merely calling on individuals to take up the discourse and go digging further, deeper into these concepts. Everyone is at par, we are all equal with regards to information technology. There are some individuals better equipped for intervening directly on software or hardware, but everyone is a stakeholder in this new information / telecommunication / network economy. It is always good to ask oneself questions like the ones I've been asking. You never know when it will make a categorical, qualitative difference to be able to state something intelligent about Social Media or not be able to. It can turn a Guru into a Buffoonish Harlequin, and turn a Stranger into a Resource and a Friend. I try my best at being a Human Resource and a friend.

While we're at it, keep a close watch at what the people at The Mundaneum are doing. I am presently re-reading Paul Otlet's "Traité de Documentation". What a brilliant book! This man singlehandedly created a new sphere of discourse, Bibliology, or Books-About-Books. And the Traité is in essence the very first Book-About-the-Book.

-Alex

Nostalgie des Temps Modernes

2010-01-15T00:55:00.003-05:00

Paysage sonore: de Medici au Vieux Québec, dit "The Madeleine of Bluejays".

This video montage is a diaporama of images that I found scattered all over the web. I chose pictures of Florence, of the Medici family, and of the Renaissance because this family was very influential and played a significant role in sparking the Renaissance in Florence, Italy. I finish the diaporama with images of Old Québec, the capitol of the Province of Québec, in Canada, which recently celebrated the 400th year since its founding.

Also, I am a Québécois artist and if you think of it, a city that is 400 years old, that pretty much means that it too was a brainchild of the Renaissance, founded by European settlers and colonizers.

The idea of a "Nostalgia of Modern Times" is a play on words, playing with the concept of "Modern Antiquity" and postmodern, postcolonial time. The images are meant to accompany the audio montage which is a work of ambient sound design made by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon, itself called "Nostalgie des Temps Modernes".

Marc-Alexandre Gagnon (c) 2010

What can I do about the struggle in Haïti?

2010-01-14T12:53:00.003-05:00

Well, I made a few simple images to express that the Haïtian population was in my heart and my thoughts. I have been living with a Haïtian family in Québec for almost a year. They have been real lifesavers for me. They made the difference between health and happiness and what, without their aid, would have been outright homelessness and probably death for me. There's not much that I can do, though, to help those in strife in Haïti.

I know that the news media are focusing mostly on the damage in Port-Au-Prince, when there are much poorer communities at every extremity of Haïti which have no electricity, no running water, no food, and no help either, it would seem. I believe that engineers and other natural helpers can aid in rebuilding this nation and help ensure that justice reigns there. We should possibly be optimistic about building a strong Haïti and one which will be strong and successful permanently.

I don't like seeing people in rich countries find themselves suddenly bereaved when a few days ago they didn't give a crap about Haïti. I even heard a man mumbling about the Haïtian population, a veritable bigot, saying "they are all on welfare". What an outrage! And this in our own home, living under the care of true humanitarians, and¨of Haïtian origin!

In Québec, someone receiving assistance from the government, in the form of "welfare", is about 5 times richer than the average worker in Haïti. In Québec, he can live a happy life and not go without food or shelter or much else that he may need or not need. 54% of the population there is living in a state of EXTREME POVERTY. And unfortunately, they may be the last to be saved or helped. Many will perish before being granted any relief efforts or aid.

I don't believe in "born-again" compassion, of suddenly "feeling for" a people or nation only when a disaster occurs. But at any rate, I know of one truly great and reliable, just organization which you can donate to to help those suffering in Haïti. It is called CECI, the Center for International Studies and Cooperation.

What would Marshall McLuhan think of the State of Social Media in 2010?

2010-01-11T15:43:00.004-05:00

I merely leave you with the following question: What would Marshall McLuhan have thought of Social Media in 2010? McLuhan died in December, 1980. He basically never really got to see the Internet or World Wide Web, at least not like what we've seen in the last 30 years. McLuhan did, however, basically singlehandely produce a field on his own, of media studies, media ecology, etc. He might have asked: In Social Media in 2010, WHAT IS IT THAT WE ARE NOT SEEING? He definitely would have asked about what we DON'T see, about what we DON'T "notice". He would have look at Social Media and asked what it was an EXTENSION for, also what had become OBSOLETE in the wake of its advancement. I suppose that Marshall McLuhan would have been pleased to see the state of the "Global Village" in 2010, for there really is a global village, especially since the advent of social networking utilities and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Blogger, & Cie.

Try maybe asking yourself this question: What AREN'T we NOTICING here? Let me know what answers you DO come up with. I think that a collaborative study of Social Media would be the best way to go about truly grasping and understanding it. We could all be doing this THROUGH / VIA Social Media itself! A collaborative project, on the subject of WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA? What is NETWORK ECONOMY, what are SOCIAL GAMES? what is SOCIAL SOFTWARE? what is FEDERATION-AS-SERVICE? where is the Web 2.0 going? We need to ask ourselves these questions! It is our responsibility, especially towards the growing number of young persons flocking towards these technologies. We of a slightly older generation need to be able to answer some of these fundamental questions to our young ones, our children, nephews and nieces, etc.

I take it upon myself, I give MYSELF the obligation to UNDERSTAND MEDIA... but I am also an artist and I look favorable in Marshall McLuhan's critical philosophy! I would be the one retrieving the archetype from the cliché, and expounding new clichés, is that what he said? I have to admit, I never studied Media Studies at the graduate or post-graduate level. :(

What is Social Media? Web 2.0? What is OpenID?

2009-12-27T15:10:00.003-05:00

So what is all this talk about Social Media, Social Bookmarking, Web 2.0, OpenSocial, etc.? What is happening to our beloved World Wide Web? What can we expect will occur RE: the World Wide Web in the year, 2010? First, let me give a definition for OpenID which I found on the www.wikipedia.org.

"OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for authenticating users which can be used for access control, allowing users to log on to different services with the same digital identity where these services trust the authentication body. OpenID replaces the common login process that uses a login-name and a password, by allowing a user to log in once and gain access to the resources of multiple software systems."

-taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID

Here we have it. OpenID is part of the new wave of products & services related to social media, social software, and web applications. OpenID is a way to unite a hundred different free email accounts and web portal accounts, profiles, etc., into a singular OpenID address. It is safe, websites offering OpenID services are trusted and true. What else can we expect from the Web this new year, 2010?

Well, we can expect one thing: COMPETITION, COMPETITION, COMPETITION!!! Microsoft (Windows Live) and Google are going to have much competition, as well as remaining competitors one for the other. Yahoo is going to take the lead as it already has in terms of social media. I find that Yahoo has the most intuitive and useful methods of what we can call "Unified Communication" which is one of the avenues and arenas where a thing like OpenID and OpenSocial will really count. A short definition of Unified Communication, from the aforementioned Wikimedia Foundation website (of their Wikipedia project, i.e. www.wikipedia.org).

"Unified communications (UC) is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, IP telephony, video conferencing, call control and speech recognition with non real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax). UC is not a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types."

-taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_communications

So what can we expect from the Web in the year, 2010? More of the same, but also much, much that will have changed. You will see the rapid, the extremely rapid rise of competitors for websites and/or services such as www.youtube.com, www.myspace.com, www.facebook.com, & Cie., and they will be FIERCE COMPETITION. New sites in the same GENRE as Youtube and Facebook and company but with OpenID built into the service will perhaps even REPLACE the present WEB PORTALS and SOCIAL MEDIA SERVICES / SOCIAL NETWORKING UTILITIES / WEBSITES.

This sounds crazy to you perhaps. I also wouldn't have believed such a thing a few months ago. Now that I have seen how fast things can advance in a single week, I can note with near-certainty that websites such as pibb.com are here and are here to stay. You will see pibb.com put youtubers and facebookers to shame, if merely by its early adoption of OpenID protocols & standards.

Yes, you are reading me correctly: NEWCOMERS EQUIPPED WITH EARLY ADOPTION OF OpenID standards, amongst others, will OUTPERFORM the old well-oiled machines run by Huge Machines such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. Yahoo seems to be the ONLY one that has gone far enough to secure a strong foothold in the web market of 2010, for they were visionary enough to begin adopting new standards immediately.

The fact that certain investors wanted to purchase / take over Yahoo, well, it did a great thing for Yahoo. But, anyway, all I really wanted to say was that in January alone, January, 2010, you will see the apparition of sites such as pibb.com and OpenID sites such as www.myopenid.com in the local media as they skyrocket into the stratosphere or neo-noosphere. They will be like instant readymade New Age Giants. You will wonder where the fug they came from all readymade like that and gigantic. It's because things are changing, things have already changed fast.

Huge companies are going to crash. It has been written. It is because of the impossible costs in dollars $$$ and in energy of reorganizing. Big machines like the Republican Party cannot re-engineer themselves all that effortlessly. It takes a lot of vision, it takes pure genius, if we are honest. It takes a lot of crazy job cuts, it takes a record launch to simmer it down. The business world in 2010 is going to be different. You will see a LOT of activity in areas you haven't had much activity of late. You'll see things occur that economists would have thought impossible, like readymade brands that are super strong brands.

It's all in the preparation. There is a whole class of people that have been waiting for decades for this exact change in history. It is unfortunate for those who haven't already cashed in. For those of us who HAVE cashed in, it's going to be an easy ride from here on in. But if you haven't totally reorganized, you're finished. Coca-Cola, finished. McDonalds, finished. Only eBay and Amazon.com will subsist through this new turn, the OpenSocial Revolution, Webs 2.0, 3.0, 4.0.

I think I've said enough. I will write more soon. Take care and be sure to enjoy the new web, it is our most beautiful creation. Soon graffiti and moral unrighteousness will cease to manifest themselves. The war against Evil has torn down the Babels of the Great Axis, from the core.

Feldenkrais is a Funny Thing!

2009-12-22T20:51:00.004-05:00

I started this blog a few years ago now, I suppose. I began by writing about the Feldenkrais Method because that's what I was practising every week. The Feldenkrais Method is still an important part, is an integral part of my everyday life, though I am no longer practising Awareness Through Movement with a Feldenkrais Method Practitioner. It has found itself, has moved itself into every aspect of my life, however.

I began this blog to publish my thoughts and sentiments on humanity, on human things, on everyday things. I wanted to keep it from being too overtly theoretical. I have had my excesses of theory, I am after all naturally speculative.

I like contemplative moods. I love poetry. I love to dwell on certain thoughts. My mind is always occupied with something or other that I feel very passionate about.

I am an artist. I began painting about 28 years ago when I was a little boy. I am the son of a professional painter who himself was a painter's son. I have had many little epiphanies about everyday life, about everyday things. I believe that my thoughts can have a great value, and their greatest value always comes in sharing them.

I lived for a very long time in the shadows and in the dark. I suffered for a very long time with paranoid schizophrenia and have had repeated bouts of clinical depression / major depression. I also abused pills, alcohol, and hard drugs for more than half of my life.

The fact that I have suffered much is relatively unimportant to me at this point, but it does make for a deeper understanding of certain aspects of human psychology. I don't think that one needs to experience the darker side of things to grasp or appreciate the lighter side of things. To me that is tantamount to supersitious opinions and beliefs, it is magical thinking. I don't see much that is necessary in life, except maybe thinking that things are so.

When one's mind is occupied, when one's occupation is to fill one's mind with wonder and splendid things. Objects of the mind catered by mental acts.

I fell into phenomenology and continental existentialism as though by accident. I don't find much that is accidental, either. If things aren't necessary, how can they not be accidental? Things aren't just "things are". There is no deeper substance than the ephemeral, transparent thought about "nothing much".

But back to my blog. It was something that was helping me get through a tough period in my life. I was sharing my thoughts for the first time with a larger audience. I have had no feedback in all those years, but that doesn't stop me. I know that readers lurk behind the shadows, in the nooks & crannies, behind the curtains, waiting to read a little bit of what this man has to say. I have had many successes as an artist, have had solo shows, have exhibited with my peers. I am recognized by some of my peers. By others, I am a charlatan. So be it. May they be the better for thinking that. I am the better for not caring two squirts of you know who.

I have two pseudonyms, otherwise known as "nomdeplumes". They are: Jonas-Thanatos the Engineer, and Jonah Cartier. Jonas-Thanatos the Engineer, or JTE, is the guitarist and cofounder of the band AIV, and he is the Engineer @ the Pillars of Design Sound Laboratories, which is what it says it is, a Sound Recording Laboratory, or set thereof. The main PoD SoundLab is a mobile SoundLab operated by JTE himself, otherwise known as "the Engineer". Jonah Cartier is an old penname I used when I was known in the Academic circuits as an Independent Scholar. I have since begun using my real name, the name I have always used as myself and as a professional painter, which is my real vocation.

But when you've just turned 32 and you spent 28 years already as a painter (I was also trained as a house-painter and entrepreneur), your perspective on life in general changes. It deepens. I studied Computer-Assisted Sound Design at Trebas Institute, in its Montréal branch. I like to think that I truly learned to "mix" colors at Trebas. Little did I know I was entering a whole new universe and industry.

But the music industry was in a veritable shambles for the better part of a decade. I like to think that it sprang back from the dark backward and abysm of time with the rise to fame of none other than Lady Gaga herself, and her team @ the Haus of Gaga. Things started looking brighter after her first album.

Now things are A.O.K., or so it seems. I still believe in World Peace. It's always a Day Away. Good things, the best of things, are always just a moment away. Whenever you think the situation is hopeless, when you feel tremendous pain, are griefstricken, and feel helpless, powerless, destroyed, hark, and take heart in the knowledge that good things, the very greatest thing ever is just around the corner. You don't have to make it through another eternity in this kind of mindboggling, horrifying pain and suffering, grief and loss.. you only have to make it one more moment. Once that moment has passed, the pain too shall pass. Take heart in this knowledge. If all that this Research and Remedies in Human Behavior "Experiment" did was help one person realize that he or she always had the option to sit and wait and do nothing.. and they were saved from doing the irreparable, the unthinkable, the inconceivable and committing the heinous acts which are always irreversible, which is their greatest transgression, irreversibility.. then it will have been a tremendous success, this experiment.

Except it isn't just an experiment. I'm going to be doing this for a great many years, decades. And you are lucky, you've just caught wind of me when I was just beginning. We may share many a wonderful moment yet. You just watch how we mingle together, how we move together, and dance, in our joint pursuit of happiness. 2010 is going to be a great year. Believe me. A great year, perhaps the greatest. Many will be saved from irreparable damage. Many will take heart in the knowledge, a small thing perhaps, and indeed a smallish thing.. in the belief that maybe if we make it one teeny little bit further, if we just had half the mind to muster up the patience to wait just a little bit longer.. and give this world a fighting chance.

For humans are beautiful creatures, even when they manifest themselves in their ugliest disguises. There is truth and truth is of the heart, and truth of the heart is found in a heart of resolve.. and resolve, if it isn't infinite, what is? Wait, this grief is not eternal.. the resolve is or isn't but the grief is never truly interminable. This truth I know. Just cause. Believe me. Or don't and suffer. I truly don't care. I have no readers or listeners yet. But I will. You will too. We are in this together.

Okay, I'll care a little if you care too. Okay? is it a deal? I'll care just a little, I'll give a half squirt of you know what. Thank you. We have perhaps cooperated in some small way. Wow, perhaps the world is a little bit of a better place. Maybe. Who knows? who is the final judge here? I am. Shut up. No, Thank you. Thank you. No thank you.

Roger, I'm out of here.

The Little Picture: Civilian Pictorial Services (CPS)

2009-12-14T15:00:00.001-05:00

Introducing "Pilgrim Bronze" by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

2009-11-27T12:14:00.001-05:00

"Russian Democracy: Through Afghan Eyes"

2009-11-25T10:56:00.002-05:00

This video is mainly a work of ambient sound design. The sample featured in it is the Russian national anthem (or so the sound file said that it was so). The portrait is of a young afghan girl which featured on the cover of National Geographic many years ago. Y'all will maybe remember her bright green eyes and the look of horror in her face. In fact, I was so move by that picture, I think we all were in the early 1990s, but I was so moved I have been painting "copies", if you will, of that very magazine cover. The image in this video is one of my portraits of the young afghan girl with the bright green eyes and profound quality or element of mystery in, of, about her gaze.

The term "Russian Democracy" in the title is a direct reference to Guns n Roses' new album, "Chinese Democracy", which came out about a year ago. You must purchase this album and listen to it very carefully. And if you get a chance, find a copy of the album "Nixon in China" by an American composer called Adams (I forget his first name at the moment). The spin I put on the title, to give it a bit of my own a lil'-bit--a-sumthin'-sumthin', was to take the Afghan girl out of her tomb in American history and revive her, and make her have to sit and listen to the Russian national anthem all the way through, with the Drums of War playing in the background.

That is what this little piece of ambient sound design history is: Russian Democracy Seen Through (those little) Afghan Eyes. Try to imagine that it was something you caught by shortwave or ham radio, or on the AM dial early one morning when the sun was rising above the dunes somewhere in that part of the earth.

The young afghan girl didn't deserve to be gawked at by Americans. I myself am somewhat ashamed of being so moved by the likeness on the cover page of National Geographic. Especially after Canada's involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Don't forget, to this day, I believe the Harper Administration still denies that we are fighting a war in Afghanistan and in Iraq, while Canadian soldiers are being wheelbarrowed back into their country, dead as a doorknob.

I think that the doorknob here is the disgrace that we are doing to human dignity. Surely hearing the drums beats & electroshocks of war mingled with Russian fundamentalism, patriotism, and all the other conquerors that have passed through Afghanistan over the millennia.. surely for a small child, it is devastating.

We tend to think more about our own guilty conscience, our own emotions, our own difficulties, we forget that the young ones are living through it too. A child that is "not-of-adult-age" is alive and present-to-the-world and perhaps much more than you and I are. It's not like they only begin experiencing things 20 years from now. That's the problem in our world, with children it's that we don't treat them like living human beings. We treat them as instruments, weights to be utilized. We use children to boost our egos, to boost our self-love.

I didn't live through war, not in a direct or immediate way. Unlike that young afghan child, that little girl, I did not live through that war the same way she did. No way! But then at the same time, when I was the age that she was in the National Geographic picture (cover picture), I was living through the end of the Cold War. So I too had issues with the Russian State.

Thirty years later, I sometimes call myself "the Black Stalin". I am French Roman Catholic in breed, ergo Caucasian, so the Black in "the Black Stalin" is meant as a dark & dismal Stalin, like a tenebrous Stalin, maybe Stalin in hell experiencing the despair that he caused millions.

How the hell would I know? I who have never even set foot in hell! No wonder!

I must go, so please do not treat individuals as things. And give props where props are due. And tell a friend the difference that they make in your life RIGHT NOW. And hug someone close to you. Yeah, even you men, you adult males, esp. the macho ones, give your dad a big hug, squeeze him in your arms. It might make him cry, but be sure to cry alongside him! He was there too since your birth.

And for those for whom none of this is true: I don't believe in hope. Hope doesn't make the miry waters disappear. Hope increases despair. Anyway, all I know is that I made this video and that it is of prime quality. I have no budget. I use what I have access to. In that way, it almost is as though I were transported to Afghanistan in the early 1990s with this video; Maybe in a dreamy kind of way, I can see myself working as a radio operator, or doing geospatial operations, geospatial intelligence, or more particularly, radio-ops, which is the second video I uploaded today (see: radhopradiis_no.25 , by AIV).

Al, A++, AmI, Laval, Québec (c) 2009-2010

Me and My Guitar Weep Tenderly For Yo Mama

2009-11-24T15:52:00.003-05:00

The Age of Discipline by Jonah Cartier

2009-11-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

The Age of Discipline

Friday, May 18th, 2007

21h00

1. The graphomotor function has transformed itself. It has let itself be fabricated into full-blown Discipline, but not the “Discipline and Punish” kind. It is the fruit reaped from thousands of years of history. It is the History of Technical Skill becoming solid and concrete as a sort of Moving Tablature.
2. Discipline has a Number and Order. It is statistical perfection. It is the driving force, the motive force behind the Work of Art. The New Age of Discipline commences.
3. Formulation of Drives and Motivations in Tabular Form. Recreation of the exact replica of the exact simulacrum. The very virtuality of Dreamconscious Forms and Shapes driven forward by the Integrating Intentional Field. A Hard Mathematics.

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

20h16

4. A kind of pretext is being set up for abstract mathematical symbolism to be used in a purely random way. The Age of Discipline is the long-awaited installation of Pure Technical Knowledge. You’ve always known what to do and how to do it. Now you have the chance to prove the only truth in existence: I am right and you are wrong.
5. All human beings believe in themselves to some extent. If they had to choose themselves over you, they will choose themselves all across the line. Humans are selfish and egocentric.
6. The Age of Discipline is a new chance at an old bargain: Adaptation. Are you a fast enough thinker? Can you outphilosophize me? The Age of Discipline is a furious age of addiction to speed. It is an age of Vigilance which is beyond Fear. It is an age of destroying old mind-sets and replacing them.

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

20h06

7. The object refuses to be instrumentalized. It becomes splattered onto the canvas in a shred of edges, a veritable maelstrom of jagged, rugged geometric formions, the biogenetic or biotic code beginning to show its fasciae. No one is ever fully wrong. There is an incremental scale, a gradus, on which points, called nodes or notes, are scattered general meanings. The point is made, and scattered paradigmatically. The only loser is the winner; i.e. the only winner is the loser.
8. It is the strategy of the Oscillating Mind-Set, set in the grammar and phraseology of Limitless Unconditioned Reflex. We are but passengers on the Train of Vigilance.
9. To study the self-effacing Knowledge of Formions is itself Unconditioned. The only way to remand the stolen testimonial genius is to become him in self-effacing Métis-warrior status, compelled always to reconsider a peaceful alternative. The jagged edge of silence is The Color Wheel.

Hymne Acathiste by AIV (c) 2009-2010

2009-11-18T15:39:00.001-05:00

Research Notes

2009-11-15T13:59:00.000-05:00

Research Notes:
I borrow this phrase from Deleuze talking about Leibniz’s monad. <>

Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Proust, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Deleuze, Heidegger, Marx, Philosophy, the Bible, stories from the Bible, Jewish Law, deterritorialization, stratification, reterritorialization, what I call localization and delocalization.

From Deleuze and Guattari’s territorialization/deterritorialization/reterritorialization trinity, I have simplified it to localization and delocalization.

***Deleuze and Guattari:
“The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them. The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their causes and conditions are no less distinct for that (for example, those who joined Mohammed at Medina had a choice between a nomadic or bedouin pledge, and a pledge of hegira or emigration).
Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. The nomos came to designate the law, but that was originally because it was distribution, a mode of distribution. It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into shares, in a space without borders or enclosure. The nomos is the consistency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law or the polis, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around a city (“either nomos or polis”). Therefore, and this is the third point, there is a significant difference between the spaces: sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he who does not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.”
—p.380-381, ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The prose of the first five books of the Bible, or, the prose of Exodus is itself nomadic. It begins with a water point, …name points, images, signs, plateaus, planes, figures, numbers,

***Derrida:
“Let us start, since we are already there, from the problematic of the sign and of writing. The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, “thing” here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. Whether we are concerned with the verbal or the written sign, with the monetary sign, or with electoral delegation and political representation, the circulation of signs defers the moment in which we can encounter the thing itself, make it ours, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, intuit its presence.”—Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in ‘Margins of Philosophy’, p.9

***Kierkegaard:
“What is meant by a sign? A sign is the denied immediacy or the second being that is different from the first being. This is not to say that the sign is not immediately something but that it is a sign, and it is not immediately that which it is as a sign or as a sign is not the immediate that it is. A navigation mark is a sign. Immediately it certainly is something, a post, a lamp, etc., but a sign it is not immediately; that it is a sign is something different from what it immediately is. —Even if it were not so, that there is someone whohas made this or that into a sign and there is no agreement with anyone that this is supposed to be a sign, if I see something striking and call it a sign, this involved a term based on reflection. The striking thing is the immediate, but my regarding it as a sign (which is a reflection, something I in a certain sense take from myself) indeed expresses that I think that it is supposed to mean something. But that it is supposed to mean something is its being something different from what it immediately is. Consequently, I do not deny its immediacy in regarding it as a sign, although I do not know definitely either that it is a sign or what it is supposed to mean.
A sign of contradiction is a sign that intrinsically contains a contradiction in itself. There is no contradiction in its being immediately this or that and also a sign, for there must certainly be an immediate entity for it to be a sign; a literal nothing is not a sign either. A sign of contradiction, however, is a sign that contains a contradiction in its composition. To justify the name of “sign,” there must be something by which it draws attention to itself or to the contradiction. But the contradictory parts must not annul each other in such a way that the sign comes to mean nothing or in such a way that it becomes the opposite of a sign, an unconditional concealment. —A communication that is the unity of jest and earnestness is thus a sign of contradiction. It is no direct communication; it is impossible for the recipient to say directly which is which, simply because the one communicating does not directly communicate either jest or earnestness. Therefore the earnestness in this communication lies in another place, or somewhere else, lies in making the recipient self-active—from the purely dialectical point of view, the highest earnestness with regard to communication. But such a communication must secure for itself a something by which it draws attention to itself, by which it occasions and invites a heeding of the communication; and on the other hand the combination of jest and earnestness must not be lunacy either, because then there is no communication; whereas, if jest or earnestness completely dominates, it is direct communication.”—Soren Kierkegaard, p. 124-125, Practise in Christianity

“You, my only confidant, the only being I deem worthy to be my ally and my enemy, always similar to yourself in dissimilarity; always incomprehensible, always an enigma! You whom I love with all the sympathy of my soul, in whose image I form myself, why do you not make your appearance?”—p.327, ‘Either/Or, Part I’, Kierkegaard

“To tell a story in such a way that the point is not lost is, I believe, right up my alley—also, in such a way that it is not divulged prematurely. It is my delight to keep the listeners to my story in suspenso by means of minor actions of an episodic nature to ascertain how they want it to turn out, and then in the course of the telling to fool them. My art is to use amphibolies so that the listeners understand one thing from what is said and then suddenly perceive that the words can be interpreted another way. If one really wants to have a chance to make investigations of a particular kind, one must always deliver a speech. In a conversation, the person in question can be more evasive, can, through questions and answers, better conceal the impression the words are making.”—p.370, ‘Either/Or, Part I’, Kierkegaard

***Michel Foucault:

***Jorge Luis Borges:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto: Das Kapital: the commodity,
Ferdinand de Saussure,

For Lana:
If thou at all take thy neighbour’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down:
Exodus: 22: 26
[the universe ends at dawn…]

The school of Modernism as a Mysticism
Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Benjamin, and Jewish mysticism
The Bible and Deleuze
Deleuze and the Bible:

QUOTES:
“The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present.”—Derrida, p.9, ‘Margins of Philosophy’, chp. ‘Différance’
“A sign is the denied immediacy or the second being that is different from the first being.”—Kierkegaard, p.124, ‘Practise in Christianity’
“A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.”—Deleuze and Guattari, p.380, ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’

from CANTO LXXXI
--------------------------
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made graces,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered,”

Ecclesiastes 2: 18-26
“Yea, I hated all my labour
which I had taken under the
sun: because I should leave it
unto the man that shall be after
me.
And who knoweth whether
he shall be a wise man or a
fool? yet shall he have rule over
all my labour wherein I have la-
boured, and wherein I have
shewed myself wise under the
sun. This is also vanity.
Therefore I went about to
cause my heart to despair of all
the labour which I took under
the sun.
For there is a man whose
labour is in wisdom, and in
knowledge, and in equity; yet to
a man that hath not laboured
therein shall he leave it for his
portion. This is also vanity and a
great evil.
For what hath man of all
his labour, and of the vexation
of his heart, wherein he hath la-
boured under the sun?
For all his days are sorr-
rows, and his travail grief; yea,
his heart taketh not rest in the
night. This is also vanity.
There is nothing better for
a man, than that he should eat
and drink, and that he should
make his soul enjoy good in his
labour. This also I saw, that it
was from the hand of God.
For who can eat, or who
else can hasten hereunto, more
than I?
For God giveth to a man
that is good in his sight wisdom,
and knowledge, and joy: but to
the sinner he giveth travail, to
gather and to heap up, that he
may give to him that is good be-
fore God. This also is vanity and
vexation of spirit.”

I
Exodus:
…

Minimalism: Beckett and disintegration:
Three Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable…
Molloy, p.166-167
“Certain questions of a theological nature preoccupied me strangely. As for example.
1.What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam’s rib, but from a tumour in the fat of his leg (arse?)?
2.Did the serpent crawl, or as Comestor affirms, walk upright?
3.Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert?
4.How much longer are we to hang waiting for the antichrist?
5.Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex?
6.What is one to think of the Irish oath sworn by the natives with the right hand on the relics of the saints and the left on the virile member?
7.Does nature observe the sabbath?
8.Is it true that the devils do not feel the pains of hell?
9.The algebraic theology of Craig. What is one to think of this?
10.Is it true that the infant Saint-Roch refused such on Wednesdays and Fridays?
11.What is one to think of the excommunication of vermin in the sixteenth century?
12.Is one to approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his testicles, crucified himself?
13.What was God doing with himself before the creation?
14.Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run?
15.Is it true that Judas’ torments are suspended on Saturdays?
16.What if the mass for the dead were read over the living?”

“…And my night is not the sky’s. Naturally black is black the whole world over. But how is it my little space is not visited by the luminaries I sometimes see shining afar and how is it the moon where Cain toils bowed beneath his burden never sheds its light on my face? In a word there seems to be the light of the outer world, of those who know the sun and moon emerge at such an hour and at such another plunge again below the surface, and who rely on this, and who know that clouds are always to be expected but sooner or later always pass away, and mine. But mine too has its alternations, I will not deny it, its dusks and dawns, but that is what I say, for I too must have lived, once, out there, and there is no recovering from that.”—p.221, Three Novels, Malone Dies

Beckett’s Three Novels are in a strange abstract fuzz, a distort construct from which emerge little snippets of thematic-sense-figures, little numerological pastiches, eschatological, the telos/nomos, or better yet, the aggregate, assemblage… from the chaos comes strings, unravelling twine, story parts, figures, people, corpses, questions, meanders, returns, Day, Night, constellations… it is the abstract math of modernism… It is minimalist primarily because it uses a backward logic. It reverses the narrative, makes it disjointed, and half the structure is effaced. Then comes ironic-sarcastic-blaspheming overtones making darkened pirouettes. It is a Tonal Cinema. It has a semiotic, but it not a language. Beckett does not create a language of absurd [il]logical sequences, nor of image, of concept, nor does he create a vortex proper. It is more an absence, a darkness, from which slither sound-configurations, affect constructs, narrative-fragments, discursivities. Yet within the chaos there is a form, a 4-dimensional form. The book becomes a mediator between the writer and the reader, between Beckett and me, in a form of indirect communication, in the styles much professed by Soren Kierkegaard. Beckett makes me think of Soren Kierkegaard.

Beckett forms constellations, but not ones standing still; they are in perpetual movement. We see the gears of the novel, the mechanisms that make it be what it is. It is a phenomenological ontology in many parts, we are trapped within a dark enclosure, the mind perhaps, and we see the association of ideas, or whatever you want to call the processes of the mind. Beckett is a dishevelled Proust, a discombobulated study into the wasting of time, into the very act of writing, of historicizing, of giving material existence to thought, caught in the larger mechanism of writer-publisher-agent-etc., connected to the fabrication and extension of culture, in the programming of literary history, in the breaking down of forms, generating lines of prose that perambulate through the thickets and hedgerows of the paper pages. It is cosmical-comical. It is a sort of confession. “The thing to avoid, I don’t know why, is the spirit of system.” [p.292, Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’].

THE UNNAMABLE:
1. It begins in a sort of confusion or inability to remember something exactly
2. He’s in the darkness and Malone is there passing motionless
3. He cries, or is it liquefied brain? Rhetoric, clockwork of Malone, discourse
4. A first sound
5. This place began when he began, each made for one another
6.

***Proust:
“I would ask myself what time it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now further off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again.”—p.1-2, Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

“Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?”—p.60, Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

Try to see literature as being like music with its forms [architecture is frozen music]. And not only forms but modes, tonalities, configurations. Harmonic content. Irony is one type of harmonic structure, a specific structuring of certain elements, just as allegory as its own elements. What are the possible elements in a literary text? What is in a text? The Biblical writings are said to be some of the most complex. Writing the stories was as much a manner of putting words to paper as it was a method of numerical calculation. Such is the Hebrew language. When a text receives musicality, it expands dimensionally. It has a new space in which to operate, more space, if that even can be said [if that can even be said, if that can be even said, if that can be said even]. Many modern writers have achieved musicality of prose through variations in form, to cubic structures, volumes instead of mere lines. Philosophers use concepts and build them up into pyramids. Axiom, proposition, etc. culminating into a grandiose ideational system, empirical or transcendental depending on your [concept of] taste.

Lazarus was a cave-painter. He was a historical materialist tracing the ahistoricality of immateriality. He was a nomad whose spaces punctuated the distance of the land of milk and honey and himself. Spaces punctuating [Proust], “A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own.”—p.380, ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, Deleuze/Guattari. Burroughs: “The screens are three-dimensional visual sections punctuated by flashing lights.”

The history we have learned when we were in school is the history of
power. The big battles, the big empires. The bottom line is that the
people who make the noise get the attention. But Jewish history is not
the history of power. It's the history of ideas. It's subtle history, below
the surface, behind the events.

Separation: Cain and Abel, Cain becomes a wanderer, Ishmael, Abraham’s son with the Pharoah’s daughter Hagar, decides not to take up Abraham’s mission and goes, and eventually becomes father of the Arab nation. Isaac, when Sarah is 90 and Abraham 99, is given birth to supernaturally. He is to continue Abraham’s mission, and will be given the Land of Israel…

The wheels of a wagon travelling on a dirt path—or even on a stone road after a long enough period of time—make a groove or a rut. Patterns, patterns in history… learning from the patterns in history… Isaac does as his father did, goes to the land of the Philistines where they tried to take Abraham’s wife Sarah. The Philistines do the same to Isaac, try to take his wife Rebecca.

The first part of a work of art or an essay is the hardest. As you go along, you gain momentum and it gets easier and easier. Lana is a descendant of Bethsheba, I am a descendant of Esau, whose descendants give rise to the Roman Empire which eventually gives rise to France… the Gauls, must research the split of France from the Roman Empire… Julius Caesar brought Gaul under his control during the Gallic Wars [58-51 BC]… so the French are half-breeds, Gauls and Romans, then the French who come to North America interbreed with the Native Indians, making the Métis…

ENCLOSURE:

ENTRY:
gher-1
DEFINITION:
To grasp, enclose; with derivatives meaning “enclosure.” Oldest form *her-,
becoming *gher- in centum languages.
Derivatives include orchard, kindergarten, courteous, choir, and choral.
1. Suffixed zero-grade form *gh-dh-. a. gird1, girt1, from Old English gyrdan, to
gird, from Germanic *gurdjan; b. girdle, from Old English gyrdel, girdle; c. girth,
from Old Norse gjördh, girdle, girth. 2. Suffixed o-grade form *ghor-to- or (in
Germanic) *ghor-dho-, an enclosure. a. (i) yard2; orchard, from Old English geard,
enclosure, garden, yard; (ii) garth; Asgard, from Old Norse gardhr, enclosure,
garden, yard; (iii) kindergarten, from Old High German garto, garden; (iv) garden,
jardinière, from Old North French gart, garden; (v) hangar, from Old French
hangard, shelter, possibly from Germanic *haimgardaz (*haimaz, home; see
tkei-); vi Germanic compound *midja-gardaz (see medhyo-). (i)–(vi) all from
Germanic *gardaz; b. horticulture, ortolan, from Latin hortus, garden. 3. Prefixed
and suffixed zero-grade form *ko(m)-gh-ti- (*ko(m)-, collective prefix, “together”;
see kom). cohort, cortege, court, courteous, courtesan, courtesy, courtier, curtilage,
curtsy, from Latin cohors (stem cohort-), enclosed yard, company of soldiers,
multitude. 4. Perhaps suffixed o-grade form *ghor-o-. carol, choir, choral, chorale,
choric, chorister, chorus, hora; choragus, Terpsichore, from Greek khoros, dancing
ground (? perhaps originally a special enclosure for dancing), dance, dramatic
chorus. (Pokorny 4. her- 442, herdh- 444.)

sardonic jokes

ABOUT FACE:
Alright, I’ll agree with you, you can still do a lot with pure abstraction in painting; abstract art has gone from a slow mechanical ripping from the figurative, has been through millions of shades and configurations, from Constructivism to Abstract Expressionism,
but today we need to do more than that. We have re-entered the figurative. We need to make landscapes, portraits, still lifes come out of he chaos of abstraction, morphing the abstract and the figurative. I say that we paint dialogues, ones that culminate into huge battles, and you paint the conceptual symphony as you would paint Troy in a Historical painting. Make it conceptual and triumphant. Take some of the Romanticism that lived on through Surrealism, Absurdism, and make it live through the concept. Conceptual art changed what art could be. Art need not be material, it could now be merely an idea, so in a sense conceptual art is a transcendental art, it transcends materiality. Idea/Material, Dream/Reality, Art/Nature, Abstraction/Figuration. Surrealism played with the Dream/Reality spectrum.

The human mind has a great capacity for distinguishing faces. One can find a face in anything. If you took a Rothko and looked at it up close, you could discern in the canvas thousands of little faces if you wanted to. I want to own a Rothko so I can project things onto it.

Start with a face…

NOMADISM:
I want to look at Jewish mysticism through the lens of a camera. I want to take a snapshot of each moment in the mystic’s life and show how the images connect, see what series comes out of it. We want to look at early Jewish history, the history of Exodus specifically, and extricate patterns.

Find where Derrida or Deleuze or Benjamin talks about the perpetual deferral of the Promised Land in the Bible. I think it was Derrida, but I can’t remember where.

COLONIALIZATION:
Napoleon didn’t even dream of the kind of power you can have in a capitalist world such as we have today. Today we are still colonizing, but not in the standard fashion. If you take the pattern of colonialization, say France in the 15th century and compare it to America today, you’d find great similarities. Where France was sending people to create colonies abroad, America today has a different kind of colony, it has the franchise and the trademark. The shape is the same. A colony and a shipment of Pepsi-cola bottles. Both are aggregates, collectivities. Both are filled with individualities who will disseminate into the new land. The mother country in the case of colonialization, receives the benefits of those living in the colony. Pepsi-cola gets money from the distribution of its product. We can say that the real change from feudalism to capitalism has been that the capitalism is a material feudalism instead of a territorial feudalism. The connection is with the product instead of the land. The franchise is even closer to the colony because it takes a small piece of land. With franchises and products, commodities, you can ‘settle’ into a new territory and control part of its economy, or influence it, and some political scientists such as Marx say that economy is the foundation of a country. America must have read her Marx, for she quickly learned how to control economies. Naturally, if we follow Marxist thought further, capitalism will become socialism and will become communism. Well, we do have aspects of socialism in our capitalist democracies, but that’s not the object of this section.

ALLEGORICAL DEDUCTION: THE CUT:
The essay is a cut, not a discursive formation which is many statements using the same word within a short period of time where the similar element or everything crowds around the word. This new method sets up an allegory to be able to interpret the thing—allegory as an analytical tool can put everything into perspective. In this case you have many unrelated things, be they narratives or histories or works of art, and the allegory you set up cuts through them all, connecting all the parts that are also parts of allegory. Say you take fashion, the color red, revolution, and a movie, all have elements that belong to allegory, all are allegorical in a way, in their own histories - they each have a history and an interpretation, and the material reality versus the interpretation makes an allegory - each historical part is metaphorized into a meaning, is represented. Realism is still a form of allegory, pure description where each part is a representation or sign of what happened - the thing that happens and its expression in words -
Synchrony to me is studying, say, those aspects of works of art that are integral to all works of art, for example, medium, time, place, etc..

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA: Deleuze / Foucault - constellation, dispersion, assembly
symptoms as constellations, aggregates… positive and negative symptoms, see symptoms as signs (the semiology of schizophrenia)

-Everything can be analyzed philosophically as constellation, parallel and perpendicular lines, as system or semiotic, using all the terms of modern philosophy to understand the thing studied - divisibility, extension, parts, series, whole, intensities, dynamics, degrees, substance, modes, appearance, reality, actuality, contiguity, time, space, reason, imagination, memory, sensation, idea, impression, emotion, passion, nature, relation, difference, general, particular, universal, absolute, transcendental, empirical, singularity, abstraction - subject, object, knowledge, religion, concept, existence, liberty, will, being, phenomena, noumena, repetition, conjunction, disjunction, judgment, hypothesis, unity, system, architectonic, number, difference in kind, in degree, determinate, indeterminate, possible, contingent, compossibility, proportion, perspective, line, figure, volume, temperature, velocity, speed, divergence, convergence - logic, ethic, aesthetic, metaphysic, teleology, ontology, phenomenology -

diachronic adj. - Linguistics etc. concerned with the historical development of a subject (esp. a language).
synchronic adj. - describing a subject (esp. a language) as it exists at one point in time.
———— ———— ———— ———— ———— ————
Hibou Snowflake: homage à Riopelle

Many years ago, I saw your painting.
It was Vent Traversier and it shocked me.
I had never dreamed it was possible
To take painting to those most sublime heights.

The painting would not sit still one second.
Every moment it became something new.
I saw great battles fought, cities trembling,
And I saw a passionate existence.

From that single work you taught me to paint,
How to translate existence into art.
In life, you were a great inspiration,
Now in death, you are an obligation:

My work must resound so strongly on earth
That you see your influence from heaven.
———— ———— ————

Point to make: the first Riopelle I saw was on a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts of Montreal with my art class. I saw Vent Traversier and it was the first time I experienced the sublime in art. My father introduced me to painting, but it was Riopelle who was my mentor. I always wanted to meet him and show him my work to show him the influence he had on me, but now he is dead. In life he was an inspiration, in death he is an obligation; I am now obliged to make sure my paintings resound so strongly on earth that he can see them from heaven, and judge from there his influence.

14 lines of iambic pentameter, an octave and a sestet

"The octave bears the burden; a doubt, a problem, a reflection, a query, an historical statement, a cry of indignation or desire, a Vision of the ideaL The sestet eases the load, resolves the problem or doubt, answers the query, solaces the yearning, realizes the vision." Again it might be said that the octave presents the narrative, states the proposition or raises a question; the sestet drives home the narrative by making an abstract comment, applies the proposition, or solves the problem.

Etymological Allegory:
The Seraglio [Enclosure]
The Carnival:
Noble, ignore, incognito, notion, Tangent, contact, contiguous, contingent, task, tangible, entire, Tenable, contain, content, continent, continuous, pertinent, sustain, tenet, tenor, tent, Tend, extend, intend, intent, pretend, tender, tension, Vision, evident, provide, review, supervise, survey, varnish, view, visage, visible, visit, vista, visual, vitreous, State, circumstance, consist, constant, constitute, contrast, cost, destitute, distant, establish, estate, exist, instance, institute, interstice, persist, press, prostitute, resist, rest, stable, stage, station, statue, status, statute, substance, substitute, superstition, transubstantiation, Statics, ecstasy, system, Trace, abstract, attract, contract, distract, entreat, extract, portrait, portray, subtract, trace, tract, trait, treat, treaty, Date, edition, pardon, perdition, render, rendezvous, rent, tradition, traitor, treason, Grade, aggress, congress, degrade, degree, digress, egress, gradient, gradual, graduate, ingredient, progress, regress, progression, retrograde, transgression, Natal, innate, nascent, nation, native, nature, pregnant, impregnate, Agent, act, agitate, ambiguous, coagulate, cogitate, enact, exact, examine, exigent, transact, Figure, configuration, effigy, fiction, figment, transfigure, File, defile, filament, profile, Final, affinity, confine, define, finance, finish, finite, refine, conform, deform, formula, inform, reform, transform, Tribe, attribute contribute, distribute, retribution, tribune, tribute, Scan, ascend, condescend, descend, scale, scandal, scansion, slander, transcend,

Docile: Disciple Didactic doctor doctrine document
Diction: abdicate, addict, condition, contradict, dedicate, dictate, dictionary, dight, ditto, ditty, index, indicate, indict, indiction, indite, interdict, preach, predicate [prædicare, to publish, proclaim, declare], predicament, predict
Capital: achieve, capital, capitulate, captain, chapter, chief, corporal, decapitate, hatchment, occiput, precipice
Capacious: [Have] accept, anticipate, cable, capable, capsule, captious, captive, captor, capture, case, casement, cash, casket, catch, cater, chase, conceit, conceive, conception, deceive, deception, encase, enchase, except, imperceptible, inceptive, incipient, intercept, occupy, perceive, perception, precept, purchase, receive, receptacle, reception, recipe, recipient, sash, scaffold, susceptible)
Have: behave, behaviour, haft, haven
Phase, Phasis, an appearance, Late Latin phasis, pl. phases, Greek phasis, an appearance – (emphasis)
Phantom: diaphanous, epiphany, fancy, fantastic, fantasy, phenomenon, Hierophant, Sycophant
Pose, appose, compose, decompose, depose, dispose, expose, impose, interpose, oppose, pose, propose, purpose, puzzle, repose, suppose, transpose
Position, [Site] apposite, component, composition, compost, compound, deponent, deposit, deposition, depot, disposition, exponent, exposition, expound, imposition, impost, impostor, interposition, juxtaposition, opponent, opposite, ponent, positive, post [a stake set in the ground, Latin postis, a post, i.e. something firmly fixed, Latin postus, short for positus, pp. of ponere, to set], postillion, postpone, posture, preposition, proposition, propound, provost, purpose, repository, supposition, transposition
Habit, able, average, binnacle, cohabit, debenture, debilitate, debt, deshabille, devoir, due, duty, endeavor, exhibit [to shew, Latin exhibitus, pp. of ex-hibere, to hold forth], habiliment, habitable, habitant, habitat, habitation, habitude, inhabit, inhibit, prebend, prohibit, provender
Sedentary, assess, assiduous, assize, dissident, excise, hostage, insidious, possess [Latin possessus, pp. of possidere, to possess, original sense was ‘to remain near’], preside, reside, residue, sedate, sediment, see, sell, session, sizar, size, subside, subsidy, supersede, surcease
Secant, bisect, dissect, insect, intersect, scion, section, segment, sickle, trisect
Similar, assemble, assimilate, dissemble, dissimilar, dissimilitude, dissimulation, resemble, semblance, similitude, simulate, simultaneous
Shroud / Scroll
Sequence, associate, consecutive, consequent, dissociate, ensue, execute, exequies, intrinsic, obsequies, obsequious, persecute, prosecute, pursue, second, sect, sept, sequel, sequester, sociable, social, society, subsequent, sue, suit, suite
Series, assert, concert, desert, dissertation, exert, insert, serried
Regent, address, adroit, alert, correct, direct, dirge, dress, erect, escort, insurgent, insurrection, interregnum, rajah, real (a small Spanish coin), realm, rectangle, rectilinear, rectitude, regal, regicide, regimen, regiment, region, regnant, regular [Latin regularis, according to rule, Latin regula, a rule, L. regere], reign, resource, resurrection, royal, rule, sortie, source, surge, unruly
Stratum / consternation, prostrate, stray [to wander], street [strata uia, a paved way; strata being fem. of pp. of sternere, to strew, pave]
Measure, [Mete] commensurate, dimension [Latin acc. dimensionem, a measuring – Latin dimensus, pp. of di-metiri, to measure off], immense, mensuration
Plate, pate, piastre, piazza, place, plaice, plane, plant, plantain, plantigrade, plaster, plastic, plateau [a flat space, French plateau, for O.F. platel, a small plate; dimin. of plat], platform [a flat surface, level scaffolding; formerly, a ground-plan, plan, French plateforme, ‘a platform, modell’ – French plat, flat, forme, form], platina, platitude, platter, replace, supplant, transplant
Plain: esplanade, explain, pianoforte, piano, placenta, plan, plane, planisphere, plank
Plenary, accomplish, complement, complete, compliance, compliant, compline, compliment, comply, depletion, expletive, implement, plenipotentiary, plenitude, plenty, replenish, replete, supplement, supply
Prehensile, apprehend, apprentice, apprise, comprehend, comprise, enterprise, impregnable, imprison, prentice, prise, prize, prison, reprehend, reprisal, surprise
Press, compress, depress, express, impress, imprint, oppress, print, repress, reprimand, sprain, suppress
Potent, [Pastor] posse, possible, power, puissant
Pain, impunity, penal, penance, penitent, pine, punch, punish, repent, repine, subpoena
Circle, circus, research, search [to explore, O.F. cercher, French chercher – Latin circare, to go round; hence, to explore]
Itinerant, ambient, ambition, circuit, commence, concomitant, constable, count, county, exit, eyre, initial, initiate, issue, obit, perish, prætor, preterite, sedition, sudden, trance, transient, transit
Chronicle, anachronism, chronology, chronometer, synchronism
Picture, (depict, paint, pigment, pimento, pint)
Move, commotion, emotion [Latin emotus, pp. of e-mouere, to move away or much], mob, mobile [easily moved, Latin mobilis], moment [Latin momentum, a movement; hence an instant of time; doublet, momentum, movement], motion, motive [O.F. motif, ‘a moving reason;’ – Latin mot-us, pp. of mouere, to move], motor, mutiny, promote, remote, remove
Fact, affair, affect, comfit, confect, counterfeit, defeasance, defeat, defect, deficient, deficit, difficulty, discomfit, effect, efficacy, efficient, facile, facsimile, faction, factitious, factotum, faculty, fashion, feasible, fetish, feat, feature, fiat, infect, perfect, prefect, proficient, profit, reflection, suffice, sufficient, surfeit
Pendant, append, compendious, compensate, counterpoise, depend, dispense, expend, impend, pansy, pendulous, pendulum, pensile, pension, pensive, penthouse, pentroof, perpendicular, poise, ponder, pound, prepense, preponderate, propensity, recompense, spencer, spend, suspend
Car, career, cargo, caricature, carrack, carriage, carry, cart, charge, chariot, supercargo, surcharge
Card, carte, cartel, cartoon, cartouche, cartridge, cartulary, chart, charter
Carnal, carnage, carnation, carnival, carnivorous, carrion, charnel, incarnadine, incarnation

Seraglio, from Italian serraglio, an enclosure; formed with suffix -aglio (-Latin. -aculum) from Low Latin serare, to bar, to bolt, shut in. – Latin sera, a bar, bolt. – Latin serere, to join together; see Series
Number: announce, annunciation, denounce, enunciate, pronounce, renounce
Nomad, nemesis, numismatic

Node, a knot (L.) – Latin nodus, a kno. Put for gnodus; cognate with Knot / denouement, the undoing of a knot (F. – L.) French dénouement, sb., from dénouer, to undo a knot – Latin dis-, apart; nodus, a knot.

Table: French table – Latin tabula, a plank, flat board, table. Lit. ‘extended’ or flat; cf. Sanskrit tata, stretched out. Der. tabul-ate, tabul-ar, from Latin tabula; tabl-eau, from French tableau, dimin. of F. table.

09/08/02 9:39:24 PM
Enclosures:
What was I doing today, it hit me, I was walking home from my uncle’s house or on the subway making way to my place, I once heard something about ideology, I didn’t hear it, I swear I said this exact thing in a dream, then in a letter about a dream that wasn’t a letter but a piece of writing about the dream, and now I’m writing it. I thought about the Bible, the whole thing, how it is a mystical vision of utmost perfection and exactness. The having-been and the to-be. Genesis and the Apocalypse. It has to do with time, with the past and present, and with memory and consciousness. I swear I wrote the first sentence of this paragraph once before in a letter to someone. I then had the dream hit me in the face while laying on the couch during an afternoon nap. It was entitled Enclosures. I saw the structures of the Bible, historical, mythical, real. I saw real people writing. I was myself a writer, chronicler of this strange dream. I dreamt months before of Allegory, same Biblical structures as Enclosures. Years before that, I had painted the Wheel, or the Wheel of Symbolism. I had imagined a great Carnival Wheel of meaning, of color, of flavors, of sound, that wheel from which variables become fixed things. Ideology is part of that mathematical language of overtones, harmonics. Ideology sounds like a resultant tone, one of those underground rumblings, the difference between two pitches.
Entre-temps et Entrecroisement:
Friday, November 22, 2002, 9:52:50 AM

The idea of Entre-temps is the interval. It is Number, cardinal and ordinal. In the passing of years, the circling of habits and events, a silence occurs between members of a sequence. In a series of technical steps, I pause. This pause must be accounted for, for it formulates my life’s punctuation. Without this punctuation, all would be one indistinguishable mass. The Entre-temps helps discern my position.

The idea of Entrecroisement is the point of contact of diverse and diverging lines, planes, circles or arcs, those trajectories which form the mesh which holds the otherwise free-floating butterfly. Without the Entrecroisement, there is no position. Locality, then, requires actions and the lack thereof (Entre-temps) and the function of a textual modality, that of interconnection or intersection, the divisive and integral fixity of the Entrecroisement. When two lines meet, we have a form of commerce. The Meshing holds the material, acts as enclosure to the dramatic event. Entrecroisement = proscenium, promontory, stage. The canvas on which the tableau vivant manifests its variegated demonstration.

Contrepoint is the ornamental dance that occurs between the mesh and its in-betweens. Résistance is the forces of rigidity binding the elastic plasticity of being to its temporary posts. Intensité, the affective spikes and dips of the organism in a sea of atoms. Devenir represents the state of varying clutches in which a being rides the waves of Intensité penetrating in a Contrepoint of Résistance in the Entrecroisement of elements.

habit, scale, step, degree, gradient, positionality, conditionality, qualia, quanta, integration, disintegration, variation, Baroque, Table / Tableau, Tabula, text, texture, fold, mesh, intertext, paradox,...

Another Field of View: On Repossessing the Damnèd in Painting

2009-11-14T11:23:00.004-05:00

12/20/02 10:49:51 AM

In Another Frame
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon And Physical Anthropology
by David Lomas

“Unprecedented in art it might have been, however this chapter seeks to demonstrate that Picasso’s transgressive schema for depicting the body recapitulates features of an established visual iconography of the female prostitute already formulated by physical anthropologists in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Contrary to Salmon, I argue that the Demoiselles was thus firmly embedded in a cultural terrain that provided the visual terms with which it could be read.” p.105

“It will be seen that a more cogent explanation for these fearsome hybrids lies in widespread fears about degeneracy at the turn of the century which led anthropologists on a quest to define a recognisable prostitutional physiognomy and body type.” p.105

[concerning Craniology at the time] “Correlations were said to exist between skull and brain size, and thus with intellectual and cultural development. Proponents of craniometry were of the opinion that raging controversies of the day surrounding the role and status of women or the potential for development of colonised peoples might be settled by this ostensibly neutral, because empirical and scientific, technique.” p.105

Anaesthesia: [Greek anaisthesia, insensibility, fr. Gk a- + aisthesis, perception, fr. aisthanesthai, to perceive] 1 : loss of sensation with or without loss of consciousness [the body loses sensation, becomes a deadened mass, Death is ultimate anaesthesia and amnesia]

Anaesthesia and Amnesia
anamnesis : a preliminary case history of a medical or psychiatric patient : a recalling to mind : REMINISCENCE

The Insensible and the Forgotten:
We have lost contact with the Demoiselles as an actual painting, as a body, embodiment of, and Picasso as well we have forgotten as an actual human being. We have characterised him, simplified and reduced him, to an automaton who saw things and put them in his art, as though he did not have the power to reflect. We have sought to find connections with his Eros and Thanatos drives, even though these are merely speculations by Freud and other psychoanalysts. I think that we should look at Picasso and his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at what they are, through themselves, using a methodology of transparency, not habitation or occupation. The critic must be invisible and let the object speak [Benjamin, Historical materialism]. Back to a historical materialism, but with a difference. We seek to have an intuition of what took place through the facts at hand reversed, brought to play on the stage of the PRESENT. I do not see 1907 as what it is, because 1907 is gone. It only has remnants like the bodies of dead prostitutes. The body of knowledge which is the criticism of Les Demoiselles is an archaeological site. In this site, one can spot many things, deduce much. SEE FOUCAULT, Archaeology of Knowledge. STRUCTURALISM + FOUCAULT + PICASSO + LOMAS + BERGSON + BENJAMIN + LEVI-STRAUSS = a new ethnographic, art historical materialism BUT without excluding Metaphysics. This is the difference with Historical materialism proper, which I believe contradicts Metaphysics by a great misunderstanding of Metaphysics. My form of art history is historical, logical, philosophical, economical. Its strategies are that of archaeology, of grave-digging, of a librarian’s occupation with the sens auguisé of a gem-cutter or period photographer, carefully scrutinising what is at hand. I have created a reproduction of the Demoiselles because I wanted the technique of reproduction to come from my body, not a machine. I wanted to be the machine, and to try and be transparent. To paint what the Demoiselles means to me AT PRESENT. 96 years have passed since Picasso painted the Demoiselles. Spring 2003 marks the 96th birthday exactly. Montreal 1897-1920, Jewish Montreal 1900-1920, the Red Light District of Montreal, 1900-1950, Automatism in Montreal 1940-2003. Automatism was the Modernism of Montreal, Quebec.

Reconstituting the Prostitute’s Body: Anaesthesia and Amnesia
I want to make my painting of the Demoiselles a collage and use pornography for it. I want to reconstitute the Demoiselles using fragments of “prostitutes” or “whores” but who are actually sex workers more particularly in the field of female exhibitionism. A Mosaic of fragments pulled from magazines. I would like to include all that went into the actual Demoiselles, cultural signifiers like primitive art, political undertones, the colonialist empire or enterprise, subjugation of women, the prostituting of oneself as artist and of one’s subject. These are my resonances.

USE YOUR SEXY POSTERS! Samantha Fox, Madonna, Traci Lords, etc.

Remember the prostitution rings in Montreal and Quebec city which were recently busted. The one in Quebec city had young girls, the one in Montreal, young boys.

Use Cézanne for Mosaic, all the influences attributed to Picasso, El Greco for the curtains, Cézanne for the still life, actual Africans or tribespeople perhaps from North and South America for the distorted faces, Arabs, everything you can get your hands on. Make it a huge disaster, make it full of outrage, just like Picasso’s Demoiselles.

Quoting the Masters + Pop Art + Photorealism + Mechanical Reproduction + Mosaic art + Historical Materialism + Maps + Stamps + Photographs… from afar the work will look like the Demoiselles d’Avignon, will be the aesthetic object that it undoubtedly is. From a closer viewpoint, the object will be filled with grotesque scenes of disaster, of blood and gore, of prostitution, pornography, disease and death, completely appropriated cultural images, tribesmen, the Other completely subjugated to my masterpiece of collage, rendered inert at a distance even imperceptible. What from a distance was beautiful, at close contact is a pile of diseased rags!”

The same with the title. From afar it will read “The Philosophical Brothel” but from up close, all sorts of things will be read, Iraq At War, etc., stuff from the newspaper, slips of the tongue, bad, bad comments about Others.. meaning perhaps that upon closer inspection, the Philosophical Brothel is a diseased old colonial empire.

ask The question
of a Philosophical discourse,
is it a Brothel for absurdity?

Or something like that. I like the idea of something from afar and something else from close up. I have often heard people say this of my art, that you discover different things from close up than you do from afar, and that this is an intelligent aspect of my art, though I first did it unconsciously. I will also work on this piece unconsciously, first cutting out all the right pieces of paper from magazines, newspapers, etc., and then gluing them at random and painting over it with acrylic medium and light colors. I can even go over it with a slight fixative spray or varnish, nothing too bold, though, just enough to give it an even finish.

12/21/02 11:19:25 AM
Notes for Anaesthesia:
Number 13 [Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street]
I. Books and harlots can be taken to bed.
II. Books and harlots interweave time. They command night as day, and day as night.
III. No one can tell from looking at books and harlots that minutes are precious to them. But closer acquaintance shows what a hurry they are in. As our interest becomes absorbed, they, too, are counting.
IV. Books and harlots have always been unhappily in love with each other.
V. Books and harlots: both have their type of man, who lives off them as well as harasses them. In the case of books, critics.
VI. Books and harlots in public establishments—for students.
VII. Books and harlots: seldom does on who has possessed them witness their end. They are apt to vanish before they expire.
VIII. Books and harlots are found of recounting, mendaciously, how they became what they are. In reality, they did not often notice it themselves. For years one follows “the heart” wherever it leads, and one day a corpulent body stands soliciting on the spot where one had lingered merely to “study life.”
IX. Books and harlots love to turn their backs when putting themselves on show.
X. Books and harlots have a large progeny.
XI. Books and harlots: “Old hypocrites—young whores.” How many books that were once notorious now serve as instruction for youth!
XII. Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
XIII. Books and harlots: footnotes in one are as banknotes in the stockings of the other.

“Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.”

Prostitution / Gambling:
“The name itself is the cry of naked lust. This sober thing, fateless in itself—the name—knows no other adversary than the fate that takes its place in whoring and that forges its arsenal in superstition. Thus in gambler and prostitute that superstition which arranges the figures of fate and…”

I think of nineteenth century Realism, Naturalism, Verismo. I think of primitive masks and shock-value. Sensationalism in an Age of Supersaturation of Information. Sensationalism plays on the repetitive sin of violence creating trauma. The spectacle is painful. Sensations in art are meant to be shocking. To experience the Sublime is to be nearly annihilated (anéanti) by its superiority. But the artist does not own sublimity. He makes use of it. To make a shocking painting, the artist plays with social taboos or with fears in the socius.

You are the devil in my neighborhood
and I ask you to be friendly

Levi-Strauss on the Proper Name:
THE NECRONYM: p.196
embodied vs. disembodied names, p.185
contamination, p.177

“If eating the totem is a kind of cannibalism then one understands that the punishment of real or symbolic cannibalism should be reserved for those who violate the prohibition—voluntarily or otherwise.” p.105, quoting Tertullian, “Through love of eating, love of impurity finds passage.”

“Sexual and nutritional relations are at once associated even today. Consider for instance slang expressions such as ‘faire frire’, ‘passer à la casserole’, etc. [‘fry’ and ‘put in the pot’, terms used to refer to seduction as well as cooking]. But how is this fact and its universality to be explained? Here again the logical level is reached by semantic impoverishment: the lowest common denominator of the union of the sexes and the union of the eater and the eaten is that they both effect a conjunction by complementarity:
What is destitute of motion is the food of those endowed with locomotion; (animals) without fangs (are the food) of those with fangs, those without hands of those who possess hands, and the timid of the bold (The Laws of Manu).” p.105-106

“The truth of the matter is that the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance. It can only be discovered a posteriori by ethnographic investigation, that is, by experience.” Levi-Strauss, the Savage Mind, p.58

brightness (value) and intensity (chroma), p.55, apply it to the classification of art, “Picasso’s Demoiselles is of the class of Paintings with Pink and Blue in them.”

LOGIC OF TOTEMIC CLASSIFICATIONS: [chapter two, p.35]
“There is certainly something paradoxical about the idea of a logic whose terms consist of odds and ends left over from psychological or historical processes and are, like these, devoid of necessity. Logic consists in the establishment of necessary connections and how, we may ask, could such relations be established between terms in no way designed to fulfil this function? Propositions cannot be rigorously connected unless the terms they contain have first been unequivocally defined. It might seem as if in the preceding pages we had undertaken the impossible task of discovering the conditions of an a posteriori necessity.
Against this it may be said that,

Mathematics and Feminism: Feministic Mathematical Logic
Ritual is played, p.30,

The Three Graces, Raphael, p.181, The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form, Kenneth Clark

2:41:48 PM
I’m not sure where to go with this. Where to now? [whereto now?] I think that I may have to read André Gide’s Travels in the Congo, and it is only 305 pages anyway. Tout Ubu, as well is something I wish to read, itself a good 498 pages.

01/03/03 1:12:23 PM
I was reading steadily for the first few days that Lana was gone, then I got depressed for whatever reason, my negative thought patterns got a hold of me, etc. Now I’m back and I’m determined to get this damn Picasso essay down pat. I began with Cubism, then Art History, then Philosophy, the Philosophy of Art, the History of Aesthetics (mildly), straight into a debate over Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, I’ve been studying that painting since last April, it’s January now, something’s got to give. I’ve been in a lot of circles. My latest development has something to do with Kant’s concept of the sublime, the sublime not being something in nature, but a sort of legislation on a domain in nature that we make in an aesthetic judgment of the sublime, the sublime being more of an experience connected with that judgment than something really in nature, though we sometimes call things in nature sublime though real sublimity happens in the mind as far as I can be understanding Kantian aesthetics at this point.
Therefore, to me, the concept of the sublime in Kant, and the beautiful, the beautiful being when we like something without interest, without any interest in the thing’s existence – and I suppose interest comes into play in rhetoric and even in studies of Post-modernism, I believe, if I remember what Lana’s been reading – then the Anaesthetic that I have found in the way that Picasso’s Demoiselles had a sublime impact or traumatic birth into the plane of aesthetic objects, for an audience, though a scattered one, came into contact with either the Demoiselles itself or other similar objects in Picasso’s studio, and then it MAY HAVE BEEN exhibited in 1918 or 1916 (check date) and ends up in New York in 1939 after having been bought by someone in 1924.. so the painting has this incredible birth, impact, was generated over years, maybe decades as an image, meaning that it was an image and/or concept, idea, that occupied Picasso’s mind and life for a while which culminated in this painting, though for Picasso this picture may not have been any more significant than all the other ones he was painting or drawing at the time, it would seem that after this blast, this aesthetic explosion (and resultant distance that receptors took from it in their reactions, criticisms, later recollections), was followed by a relative latency stage which happened to encapsulate enough time for World War I to take place and so much social change that I find it ridiculous even to speak of 1939 in terms of Picasso’s Demoiselles in the SAME BREATH as its inception/conception in 1907. Too much happened. There was not a stable, collective body of criticism, a discourse perhaps properly called, of art history. Art history may have existed for a few hundred years, it can be argued that Vasari’s Lives of the Painters is where art history begins because it was the history of art and more particularly of the artists of the time, Vasari’s time, the Renaissance. But if we look at works like Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics or his history of the concept of fine art, etc., we are not dealing with the same thing at all, and neither are we doing so when we read Kant’s Critique of [Aesthetic] Judgment. So, then, what holds it all together? Art history as a discourse, I believe, becomes epistemologizable in the Renaissance, and even way before, for there had always been a discourse on art and on history and therefore the possibility of an art history text has a range of thousands of years, but Vasari if he is any indicator, marks perhaps the beginnings of the formalization of the discourse, when the objects of art history were being more closely delineated and theories began appearing about the discourse, about defining art, about aisthesis or sensation in general and really when you get into the 20th century, or in the late 19th century with people like Heinrich Wolfflin do we get Art History as a term capable of being assigned to a defined practise of signifying a group of objects know ultimately as art history or the history of art.
1:49:17 PM - At the same time, we can only say that it is really in the 1990s that Art History becomes a discourse in the way, the tightly knitted way that critically discursive field has taken of late, of the highly reflexive, very evident, extremely contextual, multilateral in approach, becoming more and more of a practise which can be taught, imitated, and of which the body of work consists mostly now of useless arguments watered down and highly institutional in the sense that this could make it a pain to even read.. but nevertheless, we have art history now and it is possible for it to look at Picasso’s Demoiselles, but the Demoiselles was itself a reflection of the history of art, of the LIFE OF THE PAINTER, and so it makes the analysis doubly complicated/implicated. The discourse envelopes itself and must have a preliminary unveiling before we can even touch the body of the painting. I CALL THIS IMBRICATION!! It is embroiled in a knot and it is for us to untie it, unravel the twine.
The Anaesthesia makes it hard for us to look at real things, but at the same time, we need Anaesthesia and its forgetful power, we need it or else there is no such thing as history. But to need it and to make use of it are different steps in the ladder. We must harness our Anaesthetic capacities/faculties and show a real sublime hero of the universe. As of now, we are petering out, we are dying [possibly, it could perhaps].
Anaesthesia is a reality. It is a real historical experience. It has to do with images. Perhaps a necessarily inherited iconoclasm. Not the physical explosion of denuding the walls of the Church, but of what comes about in the Cabinet paintings of the IMAGE OF ICONOCLASM which to me is awfully reflexive and self-critical at the same time as almost in dialectical/diametrical opposition to the rest of the painting. Many minimalist works would do the same, even Abstract Expressionist works which say that they negate painting, and I think of Pollock who wasn’t even a painter traditionally because he did not touch the canvas, Nature [neutral] painted his canvases, and yet they were sublime in their complications/implications/imbrications [imprecations?].
Therefore we can negate the painting, but what about a negation that is understood and an image is created anyway, but the image negates particular pictorial conventions, rules, if you will, and so is rebellious, and uses strategies that painting had seen before but that had been more hidden, more at the back, more implied than revealed with celebratory dedication, with nakedness. The figures in the Demoiselles painting are Nudes, traditionally, but they harbor a sacred nakedness that would be Picasso’s added touch to the canon. The Nude and the Naked is something people like to learn about in art history classes. I believe Picasso was semi-Kantian. For if there was a Nietzsche that influenced young Barcelonian Picasso’s mind, then there was a Kant behind that Nietzsche, for there is a Kant behind every [German] philosophy after Kant, just like there is a Marx in every critic.
imprecation anathema denunciation ban hex commination fulmination curse malediction / THE CURSE OF PICASSO’S DEMOISELLES [possible Poe-ish, Kafkaesque Film Noir]: [it could seem = it would seem perhaps]

new year: galleries, portfolio, slides, web site, presentations, online publishing, writing the novel, writing a book on Picasso’s Demoiselles [I have to get it out of my face, I cannot become a writer until I have dealt with this necessary problem of correction of the discourse of art history, I cannot see myself contributing to anything unless I begin with this specific problem called perhaps broadly the Metaphysic of Art Movements –]
There is a Metaphysic of Art Movements linked into a formal moral philosophy almost of the mathematical logical sort, an algebra or calculus of forms, concepts, etc., in art and its history, the history of its conception/reception/criticism, the way a work of art enters the market but only enters the social fabric later on with popularism, and gets absorbed in a variant form, nothing is ever static: The Metaphysic of Art Movements IS META- = ABOVE ITS PHYSICS MAINLY BECAUSE OF THE NON-STATIC CONSTANTLY LOCALIZING/DELOCALIZING OF ITS ANALYZABLE PARTS. The impossibility of measurement has hit art history. Therefore one must cut around it. Make an island on which your object today is a little settlement, a domain, and you study it. I just saw a plate a sort of historical plate that was Kant’s little domains on which reason legislates which are on territories of objects in the sensory field of which it is possible to have cognition. Therefore, NOT the supersensible [the sensible, then]. Much like I imagine Foucault’s discursive formations. He must have been talking about the same sort of thing. And in a sense, Benjamin talks about similar things, and Heidegger, Heidegger and Benjamin, especially, with Gropius and Gaston Bachelard talk about the House and this is how I see the House, as this sort of conceptual constructivist plate or plane but like a Riopelle painting, a slice of history, of reality, compressed, compacted into a hieroglyphic yet solid objective frozen segment of time, of compressed time, a duration, existing in the present but holding the aged past in a mummy’s form of sorts.
Therefore, we look at Picasso’s Demoiselles but are rightfully blinded by our own operations and mediations between me myself as writer, the discourse as field of objects, and the object itself is already transmuted into another form. It takes a real alchemist to reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I am no such alchemist, but I can diagnose or describe discursive rheumatism when I feel it.
A WARNING TO INTERDISCIPLINARY ART-HISTORICAL PRACTISES: Remember what you are doing. Patricia Leighten always remembers what she is doing. Linda Nochlin too. For some reason, I don’t see any hint in these two writer’s writings of an overtly ideological intention of self-preservation of the name. But more to the point: Once a discourse becomes interdisciplinary, once the very objects of this discourse come from anthropology, criminology, post-colonial studies, etc., then you sensibly require a critique and actually altogether you cease being critics as writers but art historians, except that the practise itself, let us not get mixed up here, there is the individual interdisciplinary practises of art historians, but the field itself, the discourse which still takes place in institutions and across journals, texts, auditoriums, etc., this one is still founded on the name preservation of Vasari although it has gone further where Artists were once genuses by themselves and now an art historian or theorist or critic becomes a species of the name of the artist [I-who-write-about-Picasso, I am a brand of Picasso, “in addition to Picasso’s name, I say this”]. We could potentially all be anonymous writers. If we truly cared about this discursive practise/field of art history, we might even do that.

4:59:42 PM
I think of Baba Yaga’s hut. Mussorgsky and the Great Russian Seven, I think they’re called. I think of the intricacies of Baroque harmony, and even more so, the melodic developments of Romantic music, orchestrations and operatic expositions. I can read into music the same thing I find in mathematical logic or in historical analyses. But how would I deal with Picasso’s Demoiselles directly and immediately with a sort of angle that incorporates the music of the time [jazz + Satie] in France and not be out of focus? I needs my focus. The presentation must focus on prostitution and Picasso, art history, and must be less than fifteen minutes long.

6 for coffee / 2 for water bottles / 5 for tea

5:39:12 PM
The discourse of art history is relatively young, having gone through several developments over the last several hundred years from Vasari’s Lives to Wolfflin’s Principles of Art History to late 90s and post-millennial critical analyses. This being said, the objects possible for an art historical practise such as the one I have been studying [the mini-discourse centered around Picasso and his Demoiselles painting] happen to include elements from Vasari to Wolfflin to Chivak, from the Artist to the Painting to Style to post-coloniality or Anti-colonialism. But when a discourse such as art history begins to bleed through with anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, political economy, etc., it becomes necessary to give it a critical eye, in fact, one cannot contribute to the discourse unless one is critical of the discourse and his/her position in it, in this point or outside this school of thought on the subject. It would seem that if the Demoiselles d’Avignon were to be characterised qua art object, it would be in the same basket as those art objects which shock, the anaesthetic object or object causing sublimity [sublime reactions], and therefore would be part of what I call historical art or History Paintings [not to be confused with Historical paintings who merely represent the subject of a Historical event and/or person]. The potential for the History painting or Painting of History [and therefore Painting about Painting or reflexive painting, of which there is a whole reflexive iconology like authorial self-thematization, authorial injection/insertion, reflection, etc.] comes out of the Lutherian concept of the painting as image, and all the subsequent work done on this image, the innovations, throughout the Renaissance well into the end of the 19th century. A History painting requires a moral philosophy for its position in discourse to be elucidated or justified. For why would critics/theorists/historians keep going back to the image if there were not a necessity involved at this point? and does not this necessity for the return to an aesthetic object and the aesthetic judgment on aesthetic judgments [critique of criticisms] bring us to anaesthesia, to the beginning of a reworking and thus a necessary or useful forgetting? What makes the History painting is perhaps this anaesthesia, this shock which ejects it from discourse and makes it eventful in hindsight. The History painting requires a persona, not just a painter. It becomes the subject of philosophy, the painter being what Deleuze and Guattari would call the conceptual persona, the painting itself becoming concept. But, moreover, in the process of the conceptualization of the painting [which from its inception as Luther’s Image possibly formalizes as concept through the 1970s and 80s], of the becoming-Historically-representative of the image qua painting through the use of a Vasarian Biographism qua conceptual persona as subject for a formal moral philosophy, we lose the body of the painting in a prosthetic body of criticism and reflexive criticism, reference, indices, iconology, etc. Therefore, it may become increasingly necessary to look at the formation of a painting not qua the artist’s generative process of creation of the exact object be it thematically or formally, but the painting as material object and what this means for Formal-Historical Moral Philosophy whose main mode at this point is the Habit of Discourses Around Art.
Formal-Historical Moral Philosophy looks at the special Space-inducing or Inhabiting of Space of Theoretical Outlooks, of Theory-building as Discursive Eye or focalizing beam of concentrated radiation or compacting circumspect forces,
the painting becomes symptomatic of History and vice versa. Therefore it becomes possible to have the existence of a History Therapy which comes later but is an integral part of it, for in Picasso’s case, it being what he called his first exorcism-painting, it definitely fits the mould of the History painting par excellence. It is partly the redeeming factor involved in the creation of the painting and its subsequent sanctity in criticism that gives rise to the special moral philosophy we have in mind. But this kind of moral philosophy has to do with traditions in art, signifying practises, if you will, plus critical practises, reflexive practises, image-making practises, the whole lot, but specifically what makes it moral qua mores is that it involves structurality, structurizing habits, habit as the structuring of impressionable mediums, be they the human spirit of the canvas. A Plastic Philosophy or Philosophy of Plasticity becomes necessary to work through the problem that faces us in art history at this point, at the point at which the part of the art-historical discourse surrounding Picasso and his Demoiselles d’Avignon becomes unintelligible, and which is just one among many possible examples of the type of crisis in art history which I could tentatively call the Historical Crisis which requires a moral philosophy and it is possible that other discourses are encountering this exact crisis, but I am none the wiser about other discourses. I just know that in the late 1990s there came about new books specifying art history’s history as discourse/signifying practise and the objects of the discourse of art history. At this point, things become hypercritical, we hit hypercriticism which is reflexive and works on the power of the name. The name becomes a marker as in the sciences long ago, chemistry, physics, biology, etc. The History of Art becomes truly scientific, but at the same time, it having come from philosophy, from theoretical science per se, chances to lose the objectivity that it gains as science, and losing the objects themselves which it so cherishes as those which it made possible to discover as a science of criticism, discourse, etc.
This being said, the prostitute in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in the part of the art historical discourse which deals with this painting specifically, though it is in itself a scattered discourse, is what for me made the link to the History Painting, which I was working on myself. At this point, I am not a critic, a theorist, or a historian. I am an artist, a painter, and it is through the eye of a painter that I see Picasso’s Prostitutes as enacting a preliminary removal of the body of the painting, themselves denuding the art object and making it spectacular perhaps playing on the sublime in a way that we cannot yet understand merely with Kant’s dialectic of the sublime. We need a new understanding of shock art which has taken many forms since Picasso’s Demoiselles. For it is not because the Demoiselles brought about Cubism that we need it so much as an image. It is ultimately important to understand Cubism, to keep digging at it, but not for the reasons that one might think. It is more because we need Cubism and the Demoiselles to understand the art created after 1955 than to understand it in itself as making way for the modernist enterprise. Cubism and the Demoiselles, Picasso amongst others, but Picasso for now, allow us to understand Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism, and Post-modernism, all of which have been meeting more and more application in the arts and in critical discourses. The reductio, our greatest tool in criticism, comes about not only in the Renaissance as the actual destruction of art in Churches, which was the apotheosis of art itself, not only is the art object itself actually reduced to ashes, for much art was burned, but afterwards in the re-enactment of this first violence towards the image, we have historically relived the superimage, i.e. the History Painting, the painting of History as concept, the transparent painting, the constructivist painting, etc., and we are none the wiser until we have this Theory of Habit + Moral Philosophy which allows us to understand not only the Metaphysic of Art Movements but the very special way in which a History Painting [painting-as-linguistic-cultural-personal-+-collectivist-exorcism] comes about which a crash and disappears in a whimper only to come back to haunt us as the image of the prostitute does now in our minds, a.k.a. collective unconscious. What I see as operating on the body of the Demoiselles is the Meeting-place or Meeting-point of a collectivity of trajectories. It is the screen on which many projectors are aimed which is playing the substrata of the films of History, which is the subject of History, and art history being the enactment of the search-for-lost-time-in-History, the search for meaning in the representation of everything within History, of beings and beingnesses that incorporate, the image of prostitutes not only redeems us of the prostitution of our children in Quebec, of our sabotage of Native life, culture, and language, we are now in the process of a new eradication, although quite old, stemming from the Enlightenment/Renaissance, which is of killing the Other gods, of which the images in Churches were but representations of. The aboriginal Fetish when it was discovered in colonial Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries shows a bouncing back of the original sin of iconoclasm, which though it was wholly justified in the fact that the image in the Church was sacrilegious and embodied demonic admiration, i.e. idolatry, the adoration of false gods and therefore the putrefaction of the spirit, of the intellect abandoned to false passions, to drugs and sex, i.e. all of which makes our image of prostitution today, disease and death and drugs and hedonism, well, the fetish was only one of the many points at which we confessed and/or sought ablution from our initial sin at the Fall of the Image, and henceforward the creation of the painting as image, after the Lutheran Revolution/Reformation.
Don’t tell me I’m going to start my Bachelor’s degree now after telling you this.

7:31:10 PM - Aesthetic Ideology, Paul de Man, Immanuel Kant, Gaston Bachelard, Pascal, Duchamp, Aesthetic vs. Anaesthetic,
[An]Aesthetic Education:
What the temptress says to art history:
[Who was it, was a poet, had a piece began with the Muse of History coming down to him, perhaps he was a painter, I think it was the Laocoon or something like that, who was it, what was it all about, what does it mean now?]

1. The Metaphysic of Art Movements
2. Moral Philosophy [Philosophy of Habit, Theory of Habit, as Habit, Philosophy of Plasticity and Plastication, localization/delocalization]
3. History Painting, Loss of Body, Painting Treated as Concept
4. Anaesthetic Education: History as a Forgetting and a Remembering, Anaesthesia as Shock / Trauma + lapsus, an unconsciousness, and the artist as being blind before the canvas, ergo Automatism and the Trauma of Painting as Historical Object
5. Picasso as Displaced Lutheran Iconoclast vs. the Constructive and Minimalist Schools of Iconoclasm [read utilitarian design-friendly social art as type of Iconoclastic Revolution or Development]
6. The Anti-Painting as History Painting or Transparent-Author-Painting-About-Technique as mimicking History at this moment, as constructivist work par excellence
7. Disinterestedness and Anaesthesia, possible pen-pals
8. Commodity Fetishism, Consumerism, Colonialism, all as pointing towards the possibility of a History Painting, BECAUSE the painting as image as object as portable canvas on canvas stretchers, as objet d’art becomes commodity absolutely, moves from displaced icon and devotional media or vision-board in religious institution to aid the mesmerist and captivated audience, becomes object of desire, of hot, magmatic passion, and at the point at which there is a superfluousness of art objects, of commodified objects in general, High Art slowly degrades in the 19th century, or adopts topics, themes [thema] which were not considered to be noble [see Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals], and this makes Realism in art and literature [Naturalism in Zola] plus the Verismo operas of late-19th century Italy. The art object lost its fetishism, Picasso was bringing it back, then there was a latency stage and now the art object has regained its fetishistic / mesmerizing power, although it was fetishistic/mesmeric to many, to art collectors and artists non-stop throughout the 20th century. There was also a great commodity superfluousness in the 1950s which led to Pop Art, but Pop Art is no less Historical Art or Social Art, Constructivist, than was Picasso’s Demoiselles. I am trying to understand the modern history of art in a way different than how it was taught to me. I am a cynic and I do not believe the way in which it has been simplified as being an unending sequence of art movements, forgetting national boundaries, impossibilities in some cases for two linguistico-cultures to understand one another be it because of class structures or a geographic reason. What culminates in Picasso’s Demoiselles is only culminating now. What I am seeing, at least, did not exist in the Demoiselles or in Picasso during the early 20th century. It exists now because of the type of crisis we are meeting. Crisis is not negative or bad, it only means a necessary cognizance, that no matter what we do, we will begin doing certain things to Picasso’s Demoiselles and given some time I could detail them exactly because of the moral philosophy and the metaphysic of art movements which sees the History Painting and prescribes Historical Therapy, a.k.a. Moral Philosophy in the formal/historical/habituating/theoretical/practical way. We need to understand Mannerism to understand the Metaphysic of Art Movements, for Mannerism is its Second Moment. The First Moment is Innovation. It is the Water Cycle, but nothing like Vico. Vico and Vasari are only the founders of Art History. Their concepts make up a great part of what art history narratives were for the last several hundred years. Marx was the next big thing. But we use Marx’s name when really we are using Engels’ and Benjamin’s and many others’ concepts of Marx. We are always caught in a displacement or transference, projection or reflection. And in the process we transmute the object we are speaking of until it pretty much looks all distorted like one of Picasso’s Prostitutes. PICASSO’S PROSTITUTES ARE WHAT BEAUTY LOOKS LIKE WHEN AN AESTHETIC OBJECT ENTERS THE REALM OF CRITICISM. This is partly what I believe Picasso’s painting makes discernible: and this, to me, being a critico-critical image or one could say even post-modernist, in the sense of a double-coding that is not purely allegorical [a new allegory? a figure of historical-pivot-point or nodus?], whose subject is first the subject of a painting, then of a discourse, and then pops up as a historical reality, as two of them, one in the 19th century and early 20th century in Europe and now one in the 21st century in North America? It reminds me of Picasso’s Triangular Theoretical Eye-Glass.

01/04/03 1:00:14 PM
Gian Paolo Lomazzo incorporated into his Temple of Painting, great mnemotechnical machine of artistic and astral knowledge, “seven governors” which embodied the perfection of an artistic domain: Michelangelo, Proportion; Gaudenzio Ferrari, Movement; Polydoro da Caravaggio, Form; Leonardo da Vinci, Light; Raphael, Composition; Titian, Color; and Mantegna, Perspective. This, in a sense, is not very far from criticism of modern art and modern art history. We also classify artists and movements according to similar headings. Futurism, Movement; Cubism, Proportion; Impressionism, Light; Abstract Expressionism, Expressionism in general, and Op Art = Color, etc., etc..
I have a much better understanding of the Reformation and its necessary upset of the realm of art. Luther basically created our concept of art, let alone the image and the painting. When we look at the history of painting, its techniques, its forms and formalities, its significance, thematism, moral, political, and ideological imports, I am amazed at the changes that go on in the image itself, and how these, where all the other factors will change invariably, into indistinguishable variations, the general shape or outline of the concept of image at whatever time CANNOT under its present features coming from Reformation in the North, have more than a few differing points. I know it sounds idealistic, but I believe it to be true. When we look at the image throughout the history of painting, from roughly 1522 to 2003, we see great formal, semantic, etc., changes, complete reversals, but the image, seen as a phenomenon and intellectual, technical, formal/material construct, does not go so far from its origins to be unrecognisable. Subject matter sees great highs and lows, as does technique – with the advent of the camera, of chronophotography, of the Daguerreotype, it cannot be doubted that technique takes a blow. But the camera and its blow of technique was not what you might think: it encouraged technical aspirations in painting and drawing, even aided its developments. But it nonetheless remains that the image qua portable painted art object signifying life on earth or in the Heavens through terrestrial imagery, through Historias, has a consistency to it that cannot change form completely unless a new concept of image comes into play, which has not yet taken place.
Today, we see the image with its ideological, political, social, and philosophy implications. So did the Calvinists and Lutherans [Protestants of the Reformation]. It was a great sin to disobey the First Commandment. The image was dangerous. Is this so different from our depreciation, derision, or abjuration [abjection?] of propagandistic uses of the image? “Oh, this man pontificates with his imagery!” What has just happened recently, however, is that through the 20th century, through conceptual art, and its subsequent minimalistic tendency, through broadcast media and the oversaturation of images, from the word become image, the image become part of a pictorial semiosis, from all these developments in thought to catch up to the image’s movements, it has become necessary to bring the body of the image back from the dead. We are to Resurrect the Image. What began with a debate over transubstantiation and consubstantiation has become Resurrection and Archaeology. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge is not radically different from Lomazzo’s Temple of Painting or Idea of the Temple of Painting. What could in hindsight be called the Victorian Revolution, with the advent of the Textile arts, of Design and Illustration, Arts & Crafts, of Ruskin and Morris, of Realism as well later to become Impressionism through the loophole of Zola’s Naturalism [which by denying the authorial presence or transcendental subjectivity, actually gave way to a dispersed subjectivity, in Atmospheric Subjectivity of Impressionism and Formal [and consequently Color] Subjectivity of Expressionism, we could call the Victorian Culmination just one of the many nodules on the belt of the Image’s History. But Historiography too would have an image, and a whole civilization built on the image, though the image is consistent and strong enough to withstand being built on, being settled or inhabited, it works against the favor of the image and negates its materiality, though in the wrong way, because it needs its materiality.
This is what I conclude happens. The image is res terrena, it is God on Earth or the Movement of the Heavens in Symbolic/Metonymic Pictorial Semiosis, a rhetoric of the branch, the leaf, the trunk. It is very physical, in fact, this is what differentiates it from God or anything Cosmic/Heavenly/Cerulean. Once the subjectivity is dismantled, the image goes under the name of objectivity, but without the distance which accompanies transcendental subjectivity [which is actually the transcendence of subjectivity by dominant viewpoint or outlook which focuses the image, imitating the tightly knit fabric or medium of the canvas itself, the image being a quality of the object, being itself imagal object or object-image. This objectivity, however, this representation of noumena is quite impossible. Therefore we are in the realm of impossibility, in the realm of speculation, and the physical object, the portable painted art object with terrestrial meaning, becomes itself transubstantiated, the image becomes merely conceptual and loses its Might [its fear power]. It is still somewhat speculatory for me, but it amounts to that in the end. I am using intuition, not scientific observation for the main part. I know that further study will only edify my building of noisy prose.

3:13:42 PM - Lomazzo’s Temple of Painting was hermetic. It is the House of the Spectacle, or Phenomenal Universe. The image was once characterised as having to do with phantasm, or the imaginary, I suppose, as opposed to real things, of which God is the only one we need to worry about being real. I want to trace the Painting’s [qua Image] trajectory, but more particularly, the painting’s beingness. This has not changed much, and it is this being of the image, or being image, that has stayed with us forever after the Reformation of the Catholic Church.
Try to find a painting that does not do this. Look at Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans, their origins in the material ergo terrestrial realm. Much of constructivist art was based on Marx’s views on political economy, social reality/material conditions, etc. We find in this type of painting the same elements as the Flemish Still Lifes, which mark the birth of the still life genre, after a long debate full of hot passion on the image.
From the beginning, the image had been connected with ideas of incorporation or eating. The Eucharist, the flesh and blood of Christ, our Lord and Savior; the image was but a profane body that did not belong in the Church because it could not represent God, or was not God himself, whereas through transubstantiation the body and spirit of Christ was incorporated physically. Eating the word was the only choice open for salvation.

4:24:08 PM - Eat the Word that you may not lie. Ingest the Word, but is not the word Knowledge, and was it not this eating or incorporation which brought on the descent of the Lord in the first place? To free us of the sin of the First Fall? and why is it that after these hundreds of years of philosophy, we are still stuck in theological concerns? is it possibly because there really is a God who is becoming angry at our constant sinning, or perhaps it truly is wrong to adore the image? Kant’s Moral philosophy is such a one as that the image itself is to be admired at a distance. The necessary distance of Critique.
What, then, are these Critiques of Capitalism and Representation? are they malodorous tributes to false gods, gods of money, of possessions? did not the Buddha warn us once about this voluntary attachment which crowds the soul with disillusionment and caves the soul inward into unrepentant doom and twisted, hellish half-existence? The other half of existence is letting go. Let go of the image. Let it fly. The image will not go anywhere, it has proven that it will stay no matter what. No matter what matter it takes up to be materialized. The image, an immaterial thing on its own, takes up a body. The image takes part in a sort of transmigration. It embodies a body, or possesses it in the spiritual/demonic sense. The image, a ghost floating in the ethereal, takes a body captive and this is as far as alchemy goes in all artistic production or creation in general. The image takes a host cell, a host body, holds it in captivity, but it is a two-way street: I possess the body as a spirit that is possessing this body. I is not spirit, I is body, it is muscular, cellular, skeletal embodiment of spirit; the body is the host cell of the ghost cancer spirit, said spirit inhabiting the body as animistic spirits possess sticks or fetish objects. The fetish object possesses this immaterial element, said element which possesses the fetish as the domain of its temporary settlement. Spirit can leave the body, in which case the body is dead. But an art object is dead body anyway. In what way, though, can the art object qua body be possessed, or be itself a possessor, and of what? We give them attributes, we give the formation of the image a lineage. All this is in the abstract. What does the body of the image actually possess? It only possesses this body, and all else is superfluous. We must, and I hate to say it, but we must necessarily consider the body of the image, the body of the painting, and not get lost in immaterial non-stuffs, for in doing this we miss the actual, I say real immateriality of the object’s body, the spirit, say, of the art object, though in the case of dead matter, the body is not inhabited by spirit, but by technique, by theory, by History, by material conditions, etc. But we cannot see these things as attributes of the image. They are attributes of the body and we cannot treat the body without knowledge of the image which is done through the body qua embodied spirit [in the case of art, read concept of image instead of spirit], and the concept of the image only goes through slight modulations. The concept of image is not a plastic medium. The concept of image, the abstraction of the positionality of the image acts on plastic bodies to give itself expression, but even then, the image is never expressed, hence art is never expressive.
Art, on the other hand, is deliberative. It is discursive, or intertextual, within itself and with other art objects. It lives in a community of cells, i.e. art objects’ bodies as cells of a larger organism, perhaps called Art Movement or Style, though it is open to debate. How, then, can we speak of Picasso’s Demoiselles as Painting of Prostitutes? We speak of it as an image which possesses the body of a canvas, and prostitutes being diseased, underprivileged atrocities, defective, broken, fallen whores, it becomes clear that this is not the image, but what we have read into the body. Historical materialism, to me, means this: read trace and aura instead of spirit for the object’s spirit. Only living things have spirits, and even that is questionable, as Buddha makes it clear that everything in this world is empty, it is Sunyata, an emptiness that itself is empty. Things are not baskets in which spirits of life lies, there are no baskets because all is emptiness. Emptiness is not lack, not even lack of existence. It cannot be conceived, hence why meditation is so powerful a remedy for the soul’s ailments, because it brings into play a complete blockade through which the mind can never pass, and therefore the mind must abandon itself, has no choice but to give up, to accept that it cannot perform the impossible task required to physically think emptiness. This is similar to Kant’s concept of the sublime whereby the understanding, I think it was, sees the Might in Nature and knows it to be more powerful than itself. This creates fear, and the fetish creates fear, not of the unknown, but the Unknowable. It is the knowledge that a thing is not knowable that persists in giving us the freedom of the feeling of sublimity. Not that reaching it is a difficult and arduous task, but that it cannot be done, and therefore we recognize our own impotence. Philosophy is all about power, not in the political/institutional sense, but in the sense of Spinoza’s modes as powers, the mode of the essence as the power or capacity for it to affect, the degree or intensity of its possibility of affectivity. Philosophy is about plastic mediums, and therefore calls forward Habit as its necessary first object whereby the criterion for plastic objects, plastic things, things possessing plasticity, qua capable of being acted upon, impressed upon, or moved [affectus, emotus]. The image cannot be impressed upon. It does the impressing. The image is a habit in the sense that it structures materiality. Composition in the sense of a technical skill does not do it all on its own: it begs the composing power of the image to inflect the body of the object with possessionality, with a two-way channel by way of which the image impregnates the host cell and fixes itself there in thematic material or ornament or whatnot, the point being that this Having an Image of the art object as plastic medium capable of being manipulated AND inhabited by Image, this Having through Habits as Capacities-of-Being-Impressed-Upon-or-Affected + Habits as Techniques & Theories + the Habits of Identity of Humans and of Things, it so happens that the formal-historical Moral philosophy of Habit investigates the movements of the Image through multiple bodies in a strange calculus of which we are disinterested but amply motivated to continue the construction. In construction, the image becomes materialistic. The phenomenology of the image is part of moral philosophy. There is an Ethic of Semiotic Embodiment & Disembodiment. There is an Ethic of Having, for where there is power, i.e. Power of Having, there is an Ethic. Ethic = Mode, modus, = Habit as Mode. It is for a reason that fashion in French is la mode. Habit, too, is the name of a suit, but also of customs. Manners..
This is why Mannerism is so important to the Metaphysic of Art Movements. If there is a concretization of the image into bodily form, a.k.a. art object or fetish, then there is the capacity for an object to be constructed in the manner of which the actual one was constructed, and this goes for art objects as it goes for natural phenomena constructed into art objects as it goes for art objects criticized in other plastic mediums such as writing or song, the whole constructive enterprised seen from the inside out at the level of phenomenal existence [phenomenological ontology].

5:49:04 PM - I have been instructed from on high to do exactly this. I did not receive notice by a voice or an apparition. I was merely doing this all along and so it is my ethic, my formal-historical destiny to be doing exactly this. I can change a whole bunch of the intimate details of my existence, but what results is the same, has the same underlying structure, in a sense, my image’s habit, my identity as habit and Habit as Body-Inhabited-By-Having-Identity qua Habit-Theoretical Existence Historically.

Histority. Hystery. Battle for Hysteron.

9:54:40 PM - How do the prostitutes come into all of this? They represent the Image of Prostitutes, and so must be analysed using our Moral Philosophy. Gaston Bachelard makes brilliant analyses of images, what he calls poetic images, and I suppose that a painting’s image would have a similar analysis. The Demoiselles, also, are in an interior, inhabit an interior space, which must be taken into consideration in the analysis.
We would begin then, in one of three ways. Either we begin with art history, a brief recount of its main developments, why or how it has become so that one can give an interdisciplinary reading of the Demoiselles like Patricia Leighten does so neatly. The objects of art history and how they came to be discernible by the discourse of art history. The tableau of which Picasso’s Demoiselles is definitely one, comes from the Lutheran Reformation, or Protestant Revolution. Therefore:
1. The Image as Object of Art-Historical Discourse
2. The Demoiselles as specific kind of Image, History Image or Painting
3. What must be done now, after all these developments in art history and in the creation of images themselves
4. Traumatic Birth of the History Painting and Subsequent Anamnesis/Amnesia
5. Anaesthetics as Way of The History Painting

Birth of the History Painting:
In 1522, 1566, and 1581, according to Victor I. Stoichita [1997], were the three main iconoclastic eruptions. There followed in the second half of the sixteenth and then the seventeenth century ‘an unprecedented dramatization of the status of the image’.
What is meant by the being of the image? Gaston Bachelard uses that expression. If I were to use it, it would mean two things: a)the being of the image at all, in whatever form [more towards its conceptual/immaterial construct-like assemblage], and b)the body which the image inhabits. But the image can lay across several bodies. The Prostitute in Painting is an image. It is not a theme. Themes did not work that way in painting. A theme might be the memento mori, but even that, we call that a genre. Themes could be Vice and Virtue, but Picasso did not paint a theme. There is no theme in the history of painting that has fetishistic masks or perhaps syphilitic prostitutes [for William Rubin contests that there is a strong resemblance to the two masks at the right and early photographs of faces distorted with symptoms of syphilis]. Decades before Picasso’s painting, anthropologists were searching for the ideal body type, through craniology and all sorts of fantastical measurements, skulls, limbs, especially proportions of all the body parts, coming up with the ideal man, who just happened to be European [check where exactly, what it the Spaniard? [David Lomas, the Anthropology link].
Let us see how Bachelardian topo-analysis can help us with the image of the brothel.
[153 pages of notes on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Something’s got to give. A book on post-modern aesthetics.]

Bibliography [focused]:
1. The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
2. The Self-Aware Image, Victor I. Stoichita
3. Being and Having, Gabriel Marcel
4. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
5. Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant
6. Cubism and Culture, Mark Antliff & Patricia Leighten
7. Cubism, Edward Fry
8. Das Kapital, Karl Marx

01/05/03 1:05:43 PM
To someone who has studied Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or for anyone in general looking at it from today in hindsight, it doesn’t necessarily have the same impact that it once did back in 1907 when its audience first began taking shape. Today it is questionable what the audience is, in fact. Is the Demoiselles audience a group of privileged speakers on the subject? of established art historians or theorists who have the status to speak on the topic of this image? If I show a random audience the painting, what do they feel before it? do they feel anything of which these privileged speakers allude or refer to? One of the problems of looking back at 1907 is what came after it. At a time when people have recently made art work with human feces, it begs us to ask why the Demoiselles painting was shocking in the first place. Formal innovation was so rampant at that time in every sector of Industry that it remains to be answered if it is true that it was shocking because of its abandonment of certain conventions in painting. I’m sure that the film projector at this time or the locomotive also saw great formal changes and that as far as I know, we do not focus, as historians, on the shock-value or the brutality with which a new brand of cereal or a new technology or design [pattern, etc.] could raise such astonishment.
Art at the time, or well into the nineteenth century at least, was not on the same footing as transport vehicles or the budding communication technologies. Art had a special lustre, it was not the textile arts, it was not weaving or knitting or stitching or agriculture. The pig farm changed, I imagine, just as drastically. But we spent our time worrying over formal innovations and the artistic abandonment or rebellion of a group of artists and thinkers who formed what we now and then called the Vanguard or Avant-Garde. The avant-garde is not a new thing, was not one then. So what’s the problem?

3:57:06 PM - The Marquis de Sade’s writings sent shock waves through the societas [the social fabric].

01/06/03 8:13:30 PM
8:13:15 PM - What is inflection?

the golden sun
splash
the golden girdle
splash

the golden sun
SPLASH
the golden girdle

01/06/03 9:09:51 PM

Rewriting the Golden:
Embarrassed head-in-the-clouds
Seeing girl-who-represents-Night
the Clashing of Swords
a Night like this
Caught in his forgetfulness
“It looks like sulking,”
Clash of Nights
Evening we twice remember thee,
remember we thine eloquence,
dressed in thirds,
forgetfully remembering.
Your sky dream-lit
lights strike your developing dark,
where was I in the dream?
“You look stupid like that,”
Eyeing the gap between us,
developing,
Head-in-clouds remembers being a butterfly,
“I was not sorry then,”
not sorry now.
Embarrassed by the moment’s Naked,
caught between the slide projections,
lined within the frame
of a canvas we know not when.
It could have been dreamt yesterday,
a picture you held in your hand,
it dropped, pausing in mid-air a second,
enough to acknowledge
and make a distinct memory.
But your fragrance
was not erotic,
it was the moment
when you say when
and I dive into the darkness,
unremembered.
Or else I with clouded head
slump in a lurking,
readying myself for the coming night
where storms seem in the brewing
the night in thirds playing soft moonlit intermezzos
hair and the tip of smile caught in its twisting
remembering eyes look slanted sidewise
gripping a pictured memory
wiping the fog off the lens
gripped in reverie
to acknowledge it or me.
I bet I could remember thee,
Night of Twisted Waiting
on a plane flying to Arabia,
in some nonsensical dream.
The lights flashed and I remembered nothing.
Much like the crashing of a plane into my eye.
I felt dizzy and woke up middle of the night
gripping for a smile extinguished
as the light floods in
searing the edges of the photograph.
Ah, bet you could remember too.
You stood in the middle,
between the frames,
halfway in and out,
something strange yet elegant,
a painting of an elephant,
may have been inspired by
studies on Imperialism.
I would wait for thee,
but mine is not fast enough,
my slow crawl through the cracked glass,
etching my contours onto the fabric
with liquid being, always oozing-into.
I repeat:
I was not there yesterday,
was half-asleep,
I remember almost nothing.
“I stopped by, between 5 and 6,”
it was as though the memory
slipped through the cracks,
between sleep and waking,
between punching numbers on the dial,
between your getting there
and my becoming-distant.
Catch me if you can,
I’m flying, butterfly I am,
the river twice the length of me,
run over, it lengthens.
I spooled the tape,
watched you on video.
“Caught nothing of what you just said,”
Sometimes it’s better that way.
Smile if you can or please,
I’ll be remembered by my own discomposure.
The body growing old,
frozen still, the picture,
your eyes,
night-darkness,
just before you left me,
eyes remember
not your shape
or fragrance
not a faded memory
nor a light
or a page
or canvases.
I remember your presence
which needn’t you to the be-there.
Like you’ll forget my face
and I’m just another tossed photograph.
But the presence acted on your body
and aesthetically,
I’ve challenged your resources
which will always remain
my image in the vacuum,
an eating-of-space
where I inhabited a part
of the mass of darkness,
betweenness,
and a strange brewing
which made up your life.
I’m glad it is over.
We’ll twice remember it
in the end.
“It isn’t over, just different,”
then let’s pretend to laugh.

***
Chagrin writing on the screen:
Faces puckered in sourness,
to be your wife,
the length run over,
faded dismemberment
of a moment challenged in waiting.
I gasp for air,
caught between
some distant becoming
or an elsewhere, out of focus.
Bitter-sweet betweenness,
bitter betweenness, between sweetness..
and bitter.. between sweetness.

There is a certain history
to which I the begin follows.
I have not two more than that
for the window knows no one.
Affably correcting the concern,
situation all normal all fucked up
all normal all fucked up for all.
For all that it is worth,
don’t buckle under it.
Give it the foot loose.

[discountenance]

11:05:22 PM - Inflection: Sanskrit poetry, Sanskrit poetics… for the before follow… should it? [the before follow].

11:18:47 PM - Projection thus:
They erected the Cinéma Tonale.

Le Cinéma Tonale, un vieux batiment où les gens du pays furent allés ensemble tout les dimanche matins. Le Cinéma dans sa splendeur irradiante [iridité? iridescent]. On regardait passer devans nous des images, de belles images, une série par dessus un autre série, nous remplissant de joie, mais pas n’importe qu’elle joie: une joie délirante. Ils se parlèrent ainsi quand ils partèrent pour le Cinéma.

partirent eurent parti
ils eurent se parlé

ils parvinrent, ils eurent parvenu
[tenir = tinrent]
vous eûtes tenu

pain trajectory: anus, left butt cheek pimple,

Prison-States & Their Transcendance: A Post-Industrial Johannine "Spiritual Golgotha"; Or, In Toledo Thoughts Escaped My Mind

2009-11-12T14:21:00.006-05:00

Disalienation and Transcendence

Sunday, August 27, 2006—

Introduction

The title is new, but the brute thought has been ten or more years in the making. This book is a testament of my thinking mind. I have for the longest time had a quality in my thinking that has perhaps made me a great thinker amongst some circles: I am open-minded. This means that I will make a 180 degree turn in thought. I’m not afraid to wake up one morning and negate half of my theories, and with ardor.

So this book is what is left after about fifteen years of thinking. The book’s greatest fault, it might be said, is that it is systematic philosophy. I tried and I tried not to be systematic, with a disdain for Hegel’s long, inaccessible phrases, and the product is a system as difficult at times as Hegel’s own. I blame the human mind for this, although I take responsibility for all faulty thinking in this book. Then there are things that I can’t take responsibility for because they are thoughts that I came up with with other people, or thoughts that come from known philosophers that I have modified. A work of philosophy is in a sense a work of society. I like to think that this book takes a stand on certain social problems. The main social problem is tyranny, which I have tried to conceptualize in my so many deterministic prison-states.

PART ONE: DISALIENATION
MAN HIMSELF
• Man as lost to himself, alienated
• Man as having nothing, total debt, dispossession
• Man is not even who he is
• Man is substance that seeks further materialization of spiritual activity = dream-genesis
• evaluations, value-judgments
• logopathy = attitude, belief, cognition, emotion, values, the whole thought/feeling apparatus
• man can have principles if he chooses, he is an agent of choice
• the basic choice, in its pure or extreme form, is the “Life or Death” dilemma
MAN AND TECHNOLOGY
• technology changes the identity
MAN AND THE WORLD
• hostile nature, natural environment
• lack of control over material conditions
• make an entente with the world based on YOUR principles.
MAN AND ANGUISH
• life is stress
• neurotrauma
• ecstasy (of the system)
MAN AND OTHERS
• man, in groups, seeks to limit his possibilities, because freedom makes him anxious
• moral law is a stress response, a deterministic one
• desire
• love
• lust
• trust, do not trust anyone
MAN AS CHILD
• the independent child
• the independent child is not responsible for his mother’s anxiety or shame
• the independent child is responsible for acquiring the skills needed to survive
• the independent child manipulates to get what he needs
• it’s the adult that’s dependent on his child, not the other way around, we just project our own dependence on the child, saying that it is in need. Its needs are covered, believe me, and if you don’t give the child what it wants, it will go elsewhere
•
MAN AND GOD
• The poverty of religious dogmatism
• theological materialism
• Spirit of ecstasy, ecstatic vision
• the God within (())
•
MAN AND SCIENCE
• Technocracy
MAN AND PHILOSOPHY
• debunking moral philosophy
• the dereliction of phenomenology
MAN IN THE CITY
• the polity
• decentralization
• communities
MAN AND HIS COUNTRY
• national terrorism, active resistance against tyranny and oppression
POLITICAL MAN
• active resistance against tyranny
• national terrorism

PART TWO: TRANSCENDENCE
The Personal Mission
• stages on life’s way
• emotions as signals for action
• emotions as access channels to dark truths, acquired genetically by the species
• acquired genetic information versus information acquired by individual experience
• maximization of life as fundamental goal, growth and reproduction
• needs satisfied, fundamental purpose of life
Transcendental Anthropology
• presupposition-less anthropology
• Joyful and Sorrowful conceptions of man
Crises of Belief
• doubt as to belongingness
• doubt as to rightness of one’s actions
• disproof of basic conceptions
• disapproval, rejection
Epistemology of Choice, Choice of Epistemology
• what is belief, are beliefs chosen
• belief => value => norms, normative rules => attitudes => behaviors = results, outcomes-
Theological Materialism
• God as the animating force, as bioenergy, bioelectricity, the God molecule
•
Ontological Christology
• God within
• inwardness as a vocation
• the path of solitude, introspection

The Familiar vs. The Strange: Uncomplicated Complex Complications

2009-11-12T10:57:00.004-05:00

Okay, I didn't ask to see symbols stretching across the sky over Montréal this morning around 10h00, on this the 12th of November, 2009.

My first impression was that God was sending me signals, for it must be told that I was just coming out of the Church from the 9 o'clock mass.

I asked a witness to corroborate: She, too, saw the smoke-paintings, she thought it said "25" and have a lollipop. I think she was right. So much for divine intervention.

However, if you write the number "25" upside-down.. anyway, I hope you'll get the picture and see how I could easily be mistaken by a shoddy craftsman in the art of making smoke-designs in the sky.

I was altogether and quite thoroughly spooked. What happened in 1984, anyway? Seen from the North Shore, it looked like cryptic sky-writing from God. And it's only an anniversary, is that funny or is that sick, what do you think? Look and see for yourself. Come back to me with some comments.

What's up with you, Jonas-Thanatos the Engineer?

2009-10-26T10:43:00.002-05:00

System dynamics is up with me. System dynamics, social dynamics, Work 2.0, social evolutionary computing, cloud computing, all of these things are interests of mine at the moment.

I like to keep up to date. When I first began this Research and Remedies blog, I was practising the Feldenkrais Method, Awareness-Through-Movement. I was reading Moshe Feldenkrais' works, I was into Wilhelm Reich, especially his work "Character Analysis".

This was a few years ago. Now I have four blogs on this same blogger account, blogger now being run by the people at Google. There is a very specific reason why there are four blogs, and in fact, each addition of a new blog, for these last three blogs after the initial Research and Remedies, has had its very unique circumstances.

Critical Journalism is a blog I keep for art criticism, or for anything that has to do with the arts & culture.

Jonah Cartier: a Voyage of Speculation is more of an artistic blog. I gave this one a look that I find particularly aesthetic. Jonah Cartier was a nom-de-plume that I was using for my philosophical conference work back in the early 2000s. Again, there were very specific reasons why I used a nom-de-plume, too. I was an independent scholar and I needed to spike my credibility. I was able to do it with a nom-de-plume, and the name just stuck after all these years. There were also already websites that came up when I did a Google search for the name "Jonah Cartier", of my work at the Concordia Humanities Department R/Evolution Conference (the students in the interdisciplinary doctoral programme, 2002-2005 or so).

The Midst of Things is a more personal blog. You see, I am weeding out personal references from this Research and Remedies blog here. I am going back to what it was in the beginning: A blog about my reflections and my research on human behavior. I needed three extra blogs to be able to do what I wanted to do as a net-artist, which is becoming a bigger and bigger part of my enterprise as a professional artist and sound designer.

For now I'm keeping it at this. I found the Wikipedia entry for "System dynamics" particularly moving, in an aesthetic sense. It reminded me of the look of my Jonah Cartier: A Voyage of Speculation blog. I was both proud of the work that I had done and aweinspired by the animated gif files on the wikipedia page. I mean those aren't even done with Mathematica! those are just itsybitsy teenyweeny animated gif files! and yet so incredibly aweinspiring!

My jaw falls open to the ground. I want to study stocks & flows! or make such diagrams in my next series of paintings!

As for the Feldenkrais, I still practise a modified form of the Feldenkrais Method in my day-to-day life. Much progress has been made. I will be coming back to this blog to really jot down the gist of my latest research activities.

I capitulate for I cannot Top That! : Evidence of Interesting Interludes

2009-10-21T10:39:00.005-05:00

I did a quick check of the surface web (as opposed to deep web). Individuals will have their names rendered illegible. I did a search using the elastic social medium of G**gle, i.e. "method of agencies" + "cooperative games" + "attorney agents" and nothing really happened.

I tried B*ng and I got the same four sites, all reflections of a paper by Professor Mr. John Forbes Nash, Jr., i.e. Studying Cooperative games using the Method of Agencies., mostly @ www.math.princeton.edu/ ).

There wasn't a page on the W*k*p*d*a Network either, for the search terms "attorney agents". Funny fact. I had just read the latest entry available at the web address of Seth Godin's blog, an article called "Top This!", which I clicked on my Facebook Profile as a sort of hyperlink.

I decided that I couldn't Top That. Taupe, in French, is akin to Rat. I don't have an ounce of ambition to make money, get rich & famous. I want to do what I do best and love it, and for a long time. If I am only popular in 2000 years, that's okay, it's as fine by me as anything else.

Namedropping is so lucrative on the web! But why is Web 2.0 already causing so much anxiety? Is there reason to fear Fatigue? This isn't the industrial revolution, you know! Not its beginning anyhow, and nowhere near its rightful end. We are not machines. Yes, I espouse a Hobbesian mechanistic worldview, and yes I see very many Mechanisms in nature, in man not a many also consequently.

Namedropping, Peter Fingar. Process Management. The concept of Workware.

I checked G**gle and the W*k*p*d*a for "Workware" and found almost nothing. Anyone read the PDF "Work 2.0" by Mr. Peter Fingar? You should.

I myself have been reading Bill Gates' 1995 classic "The Road Ahead". I want to read a book called "dot-cloud", it really seems magnificent. But as I flow in the direction of the cutting edge, my mind is split in two. Do I accept or deny, take or reject (take-it-or-leave-it "Putting-Together" of disparate processes, Work Processing in two-person contractual agreements, contracts that are always re-emerging, being re-processed, re-interpreted, etc. etc. - too many thoughts in my mind all at once.)

IT's hard to process. Where is that Golden Child that could digest Finnegans Wake as-is, in one flow of reading, one current of absorption? Didn't need learning management systems, I WAS one..

B.F. Skinner, rise from your grave! Where DID you put your "Freedom & Dignity"?

Reminds me of the Pope Benedict XVI

Pillars of Design Presents: The Lavatory part II

2009-10-08T13:59:00.001-05:00

Pillars of Design Presents: The Lavatory part II

VirtualSynchronyFig1 JPEG image

2009-10-07T19:23:00.001-05:00

VirtualSynchronyFig1 JPEG image

The Girl Inside the Girl Inside the Girl

2009-10-04T23:31:00.001-05:00

The Bashful Expression: A Natural Antiface Protector

2009-09-15T10:24:00.006-05:00

Familiar thou art, I am sure, dear Reader(s), with the particularly bashful expression so common and instantly, infectiously disarming in young children. All humans, in theory, can produce the bashful expression, but doesn't it just seem that toddlers have it down pat in an profoundly cute, beautiful, and as I said, a definitively disarming way?

It must be a fact of nature, a natural means of self-protection, that a child uses. It is half-inviting and half-repelling. It says, "I don't know who you are," but it also says, "Hi, my name is x, y, z," and "I am a cute little child, you cannot harm me."

I swear sometimes that a young child's basfhul, coy smile, could disarm an enraged individual filled with wrath and hatred, with an insatiable thirst to do harm. The coy boyish smile will disarm him instantly, and he will smile, however evil he may think he is, he will crack a smile, I swear to you!

Perhaps it is a naturally occuring honest signal: The coy facial expression. It is to engage the stranger in a dialogue, it is the beginning of all modes of diplomacy and well-meaning negotiations. The child negotiates with his interlocutor, in silence, without the need of making sounds.

In the French language, bashful is translated as "pudique", which doesn't have the same connotation. La "pudeur", essentially, is decency or a sense of propriety, reserve, delicacy, a sense of modesty. In the French, though, it has more of a sense of a sexual reservation, what we could translate, saying of someone that they are "prudish". "Prudish", though, in our American culture, tends to have a pejorative connotation to it, which "pudeur" does not.

In fact, in French language and law, what we call a "atteinte à la pudeur", is actually a sexual crime, though I can't quite think of a translation. The way I see it is what in English we call "hostile environment sexual harassment", for example, a workplace has men looking at pornography on a computer while a woman is present. It is a crime against the onlooker's dignity, his or her "sense of modesty", if you will.

When I think of modesty seen this way, I think of being bashful and/or coy, and I think of an individual's right to hide something, his or her right to discretion, privacy, and intimacy. Making loud noises becomes harassment when, say, your neighbor is screaming obscenities that have to do with YOU. If the noise is perceived as harassment, it IS harassment.

But being bashful, it is what I call a "weapon of passive seduction", or "massive seduction", and yet at the same time, it has much to do with one's dignity. I was rereading the Book of Genesis last night and it made much sense to me, more than it ever has. It is interesting to read precisely how it was written that Adam and Eve, after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, become aware of their own nudity. If you read it carefully, after this point, God clothes them with skin, so the nudity that they saw must have been akin to exposed flesh. It is the awakening to concupiscence..

So being bashful, I see it as a powerful, natural means of disarmament precisely because of what it holds within its treasurebox, which it holds sacred: The dignity of the individual.

Shame has to do with this hypervigilance of one's "nudity", one's vulnerability. We are human, our dignity CAN be abused. Situations of distrust DO occur, people are abused, rights are violated, values are transgressed, boundaries too. Shame is to me an exaggerated form of embarrassment. ...more@a_later_date...

La Méthode Feldenkrais, Le Lésions Cérébrales, et la Neuroplasticité

2009-08-26T16:00:00.004-05:00

Bonjour, mon nom est A. L'autre soir j'ai vu un homme à la télévision qui m'a touché par ses propos. Il parlait de sa jeune fille qui avait eu un accident de voiture et comment ça lui faisait de la peine, surtout de l'avoir laissé prendre la voiture ce soir-là. Vous voyez, si je suis touché, ce n'est pas parce que je suis un artiste donc nécessairement hypersensible, mais c'est que moi je vie depuis bientôt quatorze ans une situation assez précaire quant à mon cerveau: J'ai été diagnostiqué avec la schizophrénie paranoïde. L'homme que j'ai vu à la télévision, avec Josélito et son émission "On Prend Toujours Un Train" (soirée avec Maman Dion et Guy Latraverse, fin août, 2009), et bien, il venait de parlée de son diagnostique à lui et comment il vie sa bipolarité depuis bien des années. Donc j'ai été touché, doublement touché, et puis ça va encore plus loin. Écoutez, ça va peut-être vous toucher vous aussi!

Alors, c'est ça. De 2006 à 2008, j'ai eu la chance de pratiqué la Méthode Feldenkrais, et ça gratuitement en plus. Je vivais à St-Mathieu-de-Beloeil près de l'Église + la paroisse aussi j'imagine du même nom, et je faisais du Feldenkrais par l'entremise de l'organisme L'Élan-Demain, à Beleoil ça aussi, à l'endroit où était placée la CLSC avant son déménagement (et son changement de nom, i.e. CSSS).

Pour faire une histoire courte car le temps sera une des valeure ou donnée la plus importante quant à comment son rétablissement va se poursuivre, parlant toujours de la fille à M. Guy Latraverse. Donc, pour être bref, car je trouve ça déjà incommodant de ma part de parler comme ça en publique de la vie d'une autre personne.. sauf que je me rapelle de l'anecdote que mon prof de Feldenkrais nous disait à chaque semaine ou presque.. comment Moshe Feldenkrais, qui était une fois un maître du judo pendant très longtemps et qui s'était blessé à un genou à un moment donné, si je ne me trompe. Les médécins disaient qu'il ne marchera jamais, et que surtout le judo était fini.

M. Moshe Feldenkrais s'est dit, "Non, je vais trouvé une solution!" Et c'est comme ça que cet homme a décidé de se guérir, de marcher, et tout le reste. Il a explorer sa jambe et ses mouvements tranquillement.. à un moment donné, il avait des prises de consciences, etc., et avec patience il essaya d'autres mouvements.. Il a fini par comprendre la motricité humaine comme aucun autre penseur dans l'histoire de l'humanité.

Donc je me dis, oublions la Méthode de M. Moshe Feldenkrais, mais pensons à qqch pour un instant. Les savants parlent de neurogénèse et de neuroplasticité. Je ne suis pas un savant, je suis un schizophrène du type schizophrénie paranoïde. J'ai fait un peu de Feldenkrais. Mais je vous le dis, le temps s'écoule toujours trop vite après tout trouble qui a pour organe affectée le cerveau ainsi que les systèmes nerveux. Sauf que la neurone est une des plus puissante et belle invention de Dieu. Le cerveau est une grâce de Dieu, un pure gratuité, et tellement intelligente. Le cerveau est plus fort que la nature, l'homme lui n'est pas si fort, mais son coeur est fait fort, plus que l'impuissance de son utilisation des moyens propres et guérisseur de son propre cerveau.

Regardez, il y a beaucoup d'espoir. Le Feldenkrais en tant que tel n'est pas une thérapie, donc ce n'est jamais un médecin qui va prescrire du Feldenkrais. Sauf que des joueurs de golf professionnels utilisent la Méthode Feldenkrais ainsi que de musiciens parmient les plus grandes Orchestres du monde.

Donc existe-t-il un moyen pour que la fille de Guy Latraverse puisse retrouver toute sa santé et ses moyens, ses possibilités, comme avant l'accident? Est-ce qu'elle pourra guérir totalement, à 100%? Suis-je fou de croire avec tout mon coeur que oui c'est possible?

Si c'était un autre organe, comme le coeur ou le pancréas, je ne serai pas du tout confiant d'une guérison totale comme prévisible. Mais le cerveau, je vous le jure, n'en douter pas, surtout quand autours de nous il existe des individus qui ont eu des traumatismes crâniens.. nous leurs devons de ne jamais abandonner dans notre espoir, mais de chercher les ressource. Je suis ni homme riche ni médecin, ni un savant. Je suis un homme, un artiste, et je souffre depuis 14 ans d'une maladie du cerveau grave qui affecte ma vie gravement. Je suis un invalide, dans le fond. Les gens me regardent, il ne voyent pas ma condition, ma blessure, ma dopamine, mon cerveau malade. Mais je suis heureux; le Feldenkrais est une des chose qui m'a aidé le plus, ainsi que mon médecin qui a choisi avec moi un plan pharmacothérapeutique à long-terme qui fonctionne de plus en plus bien.

Moi, je n'ai qu'à penser à une chose: de garder ma stabilité, de la ménager, de bâtir sur elle, un avenir, et ça sera l'avenir que je choisi. Mais une chose qui est très difficile à vivre, sans parlant du traumatisme physique, mais quand le cerveau est affecté, ça peut être tellement souffrant, vous ne vous l'imaginez pas. Donc ceux qui sont en santé, surtout quant à une situation comme celle dont je parle, nous nous devons d'être rempli à craquer de compassion et d'intelligence. Je veux voir qqun qui pense à tout ça et qui trouve au moin UNE SOLUTION GÉNIALE!

Pourquoi pas aider même un petit peu? Et bien, quand je pense à tout ceux qui m'ont aidés moi.. et ma maladie n'a jamais eu rien de déplorable physiquement comme douleur, etc.. c'est-à-dire, je n'ai pas vécu de traumatisme physique, pas de coma et tout ça.. donc moi, trop souvent brisé par la peur, par en dedans, qui se sens parfois déchiré, mais qui fonce, qui marche pas-à-pas, suivant une Hygiène de Vie avec une bonne dose de sobriété, etc..

...Je dis que le temps est une donnée extrêmement importante. La possibilité de neurogénèse et la neuroplasticité en gros, ça se batît de mieux en mieux quant à la rapidité de l'intervention. Je ne me donne pas le droit de douter que la famille de M. Guy Latraverse, et ses proches, vont avoir une jeune femme en parfaite santé, qu'on dira peut-être même un jour qu'il y a eu une sorte de miracle. Croyez-y, s.v.p., pour cette jeune fille.

Rethinking Papal Missives: Ancient Rhetorical Artistry or "Love in Truth"?

2009-08-21T13:10:00.004-05:00

I wanted to sort of add this as an addendum, for it's a question I've had to ask myself. I wondered yesterday after posting what I posted, I thought, "Is the reason I love the Pope's writings so much merely because he's an expert rhetorician capable of persuading the masses with his writing?" I thought, Well maybe after a couple of thousand years of religion, the Vatican pretty much knows how to convert a man, how to reach him down into the bottommost profundity of his heart of inwardness. But then I think, No, I am at this very moment examining myself, my conscience, and I find that what the Pope says is, yes, profoundly moving, beautiful, it almost has a poetic tinge to it.. For starters, it's not doing any harm, it is graceful, proper, and prim, it does not speak angrily, its tone is soft and yes almost enchanting.. So if Pope Benedict XVI is merely an enchanter, then so be it, I have been enchanted and am perhaps amongst the latest of metanoic converts. Honestly, though, I wouldn't feel normal or myself if I didn't doubt everything, even God, the Pope, the entire Catholic faith, which was meant to be mine by birthright in this Roman colony in the Roman province of Québec in North America, near Montréal which was built and once-owned by Catholics.. I mean my culture, my people, were instructed by the finest of the finest of the Company of Jesus, the Jesuits, and others, the Saint-Sulpicians who founded the Seminary of Montréal.. I definitely would not be a young Québécois man if I did not have a few iotas of doubt re: the Catholic Faith. Yet lest my forefathers in heaven bedamn me, of all known faiths, the Catholic faith is by far the most prized by me and the first faith I turn too when I am not subjugated by my own doubts and fears. (If you are familiar with my history, though I speak a little less of myself here in this blog of late, you will know that I have suffered much from a debilitating brain illness, and that a lot of my wariness re: matters of faith, has to do with a fundamental disturbance in my perceptions making it that even if I saw God come down in a shining beam of radiant light, I would probably say, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" rather than "Hello, Jesus," and it's what led me to study theology for the last ten years, precisely to be able to distinguish the hallucinations from the realities of struggling with life and with faith. I want nothing more than to be religious, yet thus far the Catholic religion itself has been entirely closed in terms of granting me the holy sacrament of baptism and perhaps at this point I am developing some disdain for all forms of institutionalization.. which is why I love Pope Benedict XVI's latest Encyclical, for it deals with and delves into the Church's official Social doctrine.. which I like because it gives answers, it provides solutions.. and it is AWARE of its own shortcomings in the past, and aware of the ethical debate, of a million ethical debates we could have on all these matters and matters in their kind. So I continue to be moved and touched by this religion, by the Apostolic College in its entirety, by the most beautiful and true doctrine.. and yet at the same time I abide in a prison-state of near-complete atheism, verging on the antitheistic and antigospel. Alas, what can a man do? I thought I ceased choosing perdition and its twisted paths. Aha! maybe I AM the rhetorical wizard here much to be feared!)

"CARITAS IN VERITATE", an Encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI: On the Catholic Church re: its Social doctrine

2009-08-20T17:31:00.004-05:00

I love hearing what the Pope has to say, honestly, I am genuinely pleased to read his Encyclicals and am always anticipating with glee what he will compose next. The two first Encyclicals, Deus Est Caritas and Spe Salvi were successes in my book. They hit home and were extremely erudite, relevant, and also quite beautiful in their expression of a truly human faith. The Pope's theology is not only perfectly accurate and concise, his expression succinct and to-the-point, it is also revolutionary. In theological terms, I don't think that the Papacy has ever had such an accomplished, genius theologian at its head.

After reading the latest Encyclical, I think that what the Pope has done will be remembered in the history books as something truly significant. In fact, in Pope Benedict XVI's papacy thus far, I have found the tone very down-to-earth, and focused on truly significant themes , which I tend to see as part of the personal side of this Pope. When I read his Encyclicals, I truly sense that he is writing to me, to all of us, to the human individual. I am reached in a private, inward way.

I am called to witness this. We are all called to witness love and truth, charity, justice and peace. More specifically, I find that the Church's Social Doctrine is really taking shape, with this new focus on the principle of subsidiarity, with a refreshed look at "human development", of humanity as one human family, etc. The tone is ecclesiastical, sure, but it is learnèd, it has wide pedagogical implications, it is truly contemporary and is a sharp response to the current critical stage of the world economy.

Geopolitical differences aside, I think it is to be seen, heard, listened to, in the same way that we perhaps ought to take the time to listen to President Jimmy Carter in his new book on Peace in the Holy Land. Why jump on these individuals and criticize them severely? I find that many lack respect where respect should ne'er be lacking. A man who was President of the United States of America and who is still working hard for a cause which might seem lofty and idealistic, but couldn't these individuals be given the benefit of the doubt? I mean if I can suspend disbelief when reading a book of poetry or fiction, can I at least muster up the patience and strength NOT to discriminate and fuel hatred in the world by coming down hard on Presidents, Popes, etc.? It's the same thing with multibillionaires like Bill Gates or Donald Trump. I would rather overestimate someone's attractive, desirable traits than overestimate what is less likable in them.

(Post-Scriptum: They say, though, that it's easy to love those with whom we are likeminded. It's harder to love someone completely unlike us, like a philosopher-pope, if you will. I firmly disagree: How can I not love someone who despite all the ugliness in the world, can assert before the world stage with full assertiveness, "It's good to be Christian". That one floored me, I found it shocking and out-of-whack at first, like what the..?? And then I contemplated the phrase a little and it hit me.. yes, why not, it IS good to be a Christian, it's not a bad thing, and we are not called by God to Sacrifice ourselves.. it is not to torture oneself masochistically to love God and to want to follow and imitate the Lord.. In passing, though I often speak in favor of the Catholic Church, esp. of its vastly expansive and tight, concisely systematic doctrine and dogmatic theology, etc., I am by all standards radically atheistic. I cannot at the moment delve too far into the matter, I just want to say that I accept all faiths and all lacks of faith, for my lack of faith is pretty much absolute, though I find nothing more beautiful and inspiring than a true faith, like I see in the Catholics, esp. the Carmelites, certain Franciscans, Trappists, in Lutheran Pietists, Sufis, and so many true - and beautiful - mystical faiths and practises.)

New York, New York

2009-08-10T01:01:00.003-05:00

(This piece was composed on Saturday, January 18, 2003. The portrait was painted in the beginning of August, 2009)

New York, New York:

She wore a strange perfume that followed me around for days. “Is that her or just my memory?” I’d think, confusedly searching the city streets for God knows what. I might have needed a coffee, a pack of cigarettes, or just to be held one last time before I died. I wasn’t anywhere close to death, but I thought I was.

I’ve never been into New York city itself. I have been close, but never tasted that cigar. Cities are like old cigars, that smell, not the smell of cities, but her sweet perfume carried with me on my walks through this city. This city is not New York but it could have been. The smell of cities as in their attitude. Montreal leads to a general pattern of existence. You live here and you follow the pattern. It is not a smell, but how badly I needed her!

I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I think she may have been a figment of my imagination. She was the woman I could have been in the city where I could have lived. But I was born a man in this city, this coiled snake which follows me everywhere I go.

I could have went to New York City itself, but I was scared. I was scared of dying. It was a stone’s throw away, but I chose to remain at a friend’s place in Purchase. I think Purchase is close enough to New York City that one could make it there on a bus within an hour or a couple of them. Hours, makes me think of Virginia Woolf. Not because of the movie they just made to remember her by, a film to popularize her image. Hours because Virginia Woolf is the clock that tells the time of my writing. I can write anytime and anywhere. But when Virginia Woolf possesses me, I enter the carnivalesque. I become a dreamer of dialogues. Some strange radio broadcast possesses me internally. I ring at a certain frequency and melodies find me. I’m in some sort of garage playing in a band but in a basement. I am an old grange. I remember her writing.

She sat there writing, snow had melted but the chill still remained of winter’s memory. I forget all my friends’ names, addresses, phone numbers because I make cigarette filters with those pieces of cardboard I write all that information on. It’s not so much an addiction or a habit as it is a pleasure. The pleasure of forgetting. The luxury of burning it all away. To burn life away. That is the holy secret.

I didn’t smoke nearly as much then. I was that Quebecois guy from Montreal. I represented all that was French-Canadian. I have a passion for disappointing my family on Christmas. I long for the smell of burnt wood on summer nights eating marshmallows on a stick. I long for the old province that I never got to see. If she, my Quebec, could hold me, I would not walk these streets sorrowfully, guided by a smell I may have dreamt up. I feel the need for the image of the cigar.

There’s nothing I abhor more than dreamless sleep. If I am to sleep, I must dream. In fact, I like to dream in my waking life as well. To live is to dream, for me. To live is to need dreaming.

"Christian Discourses" by Soren Kierkegaard, part II: To That Solitary Individual

2009-08-06T21:33:00.003-05:00

Here I am, once again, writing about the Danish philosopher and theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. I have been a big fan of his philosophical works for more than a decade now. In fact, the first book that I read by Kierkegaard was his "Practise in Christianity". I had picked it up at Purchase College when I was visiting the University Town somewhere in 1999, I believe. I read it on the 8-hour bus ride back home to Montréal & environs and I was instantaneously converted to Christianity.

Metanoic conversion isn't all that spectacular and yet at the same time it can be rather awe-inspiring. I don't find religious experiences all that special, and I still consider myself largely a radical atheist. If I was a Christian, I would be baptized a Catholic, at any rate.

Come to think of it, I have done about five years of catechesis towards an eventual baptism but have yet to be endowed with the experience of a single sacrament. I find the Catholic Church rather stupid not to baptize me, for I would be a pretty powerful Christian. But, alas, after five years of catechesis, I was told that in my current state, even if I was dying, no priest would even give me the last rites, or whatever you may call it, that Eucharistic Meal given to the dying as their spiritual, sacramental "Last Meal".

It's all great, actually, because I was converted to Christianity by a Lutheran Pietist. Like I have said elsewhere, Kierkegaard at any rate was much more of a Catholic than today's Catholics. Go figure.

I have yet to get a hold of a copy of his "Christian Discourses", but I have been able to read them through the visor of secondary sources and reference materials.

I still hold that Soren Kierkegaard should be made a Doctor of the Church, of the Doctrine of the Catholic Church. Nothing that this man wrote in his theological writings goes against official Catholic doctrine, at least nothing that I have yet to encounter in his writings. I find that he captures the essence of what it means to be Christian in the same way that Saint Hildegard of Binger, Saint-John of the Cross, and Saint-Teresa of Avila did. In fact, Kierkegaard's religious works remind me of that sort of Rhineland mysticism, if I can call it that, a sort of Germanic "Black Forest" mysticism. None of these words mean anything to me, I have no idea what I am saying, but it makes sense in some ulterior way. I think of Kierkegaard and I think of the Pays-Bas just as much as I think of Swedish nobility / royalty. It's that Protestant Anglo-Saxon thingamajig, and there is some truth to all forms of mysticism. But Kierkegaard isn't what we'd normally call a mystic, though he was by far rather saintly in his faith, in the way that he must have lived it.

I do not believe that one must take Kierkegaard's biography into consideration when reading his books. Actually, I think that that would be the worst thing to do. When I think of the individual named Soren Kierkegaard, I think of all individuals, all individuals who essentially are alone in their solitude. It isn't a solitude in the same way that the Desert Fathers, the first ones, experienced, say the Stylites sitting for decades on their columns. I think that being that "solitary individual" means being a being that is thrown-into-the-world, that is to say a being thrown into the temporal realm. Man is a prisoner of this temporality and its many tempers and temperaments. Man is lost to himself, to his true self, which is eternal. He can only grasp at whatever he grasps at in a moment, in the "present age". But man can after all touch a little of that larger more expansive, all-encompassing temporality we call Eternity, in an hourglass or in an icon of the Virgin Mary, or in anything one wants. So long as one finds at some point the spirit in which the gospels were written, which to me is still one of the most important points in Thomas à Kempis' "Imitation of Christ", i.e. when reading Scripture, try to read it in the spirit that it was written, to the best of one's knowledge and abilities.

At any rate, I was converted once, I had my dark nights, my spiritual aridities. I find it all rather bland and boring, I would call all things spiritual mostly nondescript and of little surface value. Except that I dream of one thing and one thing only: To live my life fully in a purely routine everyday manner, but with much passion, much enthusiasm, in the bonds of love.

Kierkegaard taught me what love is, what love means. Obedience, fruitbearing, and as I like to call it, The Heart of Resolve.. for the heart IS a heart of truth and is therefore always also a heart of resolve. And the heart's resolve, of course, can see itself through anything. Nothing is so great that it can stop a man's heart, for of love are all things made. A heart of chagrin wrote this as part of his secondary works called heretofore his "Works of Grief".

It will come together one piece at a time maybe ten years to this day. Take care and thanks for sharing these moments with me.

-That Solitary Individual... btw, the picture is a snapshot I took of the moon a few days ago. Last night was the full moon, I believe, of the night of August the 5th, 2009.

From Feldenkrais to Fantômhaus: Life in a House of Physical Memory and the id's Theater of the Grotesque

2009-07-16T13:18:00.005-05:00

Just wanted to say how indebted I am to Moshe Feldenkrais, his writings and his Feldenkrais Method. When I started practising the Feldenkrais Method, it was the first time I think in my lifetime that I felt really "in" my body. I tended before that point to position myself, my consciousness, etc., more around my head, my eyes. Practising the Feldenkrais Method helped me learn to "place" myself, my being, closer to a sort of center. It isn't "Body/Mind Centering", it's the Feldenkrais Method, there is nothing like it. It isn't a deep myofascial massage either, it's the Feldenkrais Method. It ain't yoga or antigymnastics, though it is in the realm of "somatic education".

The word "somatic" is being thrown just about anywhere these days. Somatic this, somatic that. It's all good, but wait until you really realize that you have a soma, what it's shape is from the inside. It is phenomenal, it can be a metaphysical almost mystical-ecstatic experience. For me, it just happens that it was almost religious-like as an experience. I took the Feldenkrais classes for two years and haven't been able to find any around the city where I moved in 2008. Yeah, tell me about it, the city, it's the same city where you can study Feldenkrais, I think that the Uni. of Sherbrooke has a Feldenkrais program, if I'm not mistaken (might be UQAM). I'll have to look harder.

But in the meantime, I'm having a blast, a great summer. I am a Pilgrim of "la Dérive".. a mixture of constitutionals, walking-meditation, and psychogeographic "wandering".. ambulatory digressions through space, topographic social interaction.. field experiments..

A sickness made me unable to do a lot of the things "normal" people do. I am in essence a retiree. I may be plagued with a horrible illness, but I am nonetheless graced with a lot of free time on my hands. So I perfect the body, the mind, the soul. I have a sort of tendency to make the everyday ceremonial, if I'm not virtually trying to bring the sacred right into the streets. To me, Montréal and environs is my Holy Land. Am I even allowed to say such a thing? That the province of Québec is MY Holy Land? That if you don't like it here, get lost, cause you're pissing on my Holy Land?

Okay, then, but can I at least have my body to do with it what I please? I just want to be/have a body and feel good inhabiting my body and its phenomenal landscapes of intentional geo-grammatical forms & formulations.

A head-case. Historical Therapy with Dr. Gaganov.

The Philosopher: Can Pythagoras be amongst us still if we souls transmigrate?

2009-07-09T16:23:00.002-05:00

It's a self-portrait, but I can't say who it is by. He was once a crypto-kierkegaardian mystical catholic atheist.

Drugs, Pills, and Eminem "Scares": A How-To Guide to Living Contemporaneously

2009-06-08T19:06:00.005-05:00

This is going to be in part autobiographical, in part sociopolitical critique, in-part-nothing-going-nowhere. My name has been Xed out for reasons of discretion (otherwise said, I have taken great care in being discrete, ever aware and concerned I am these days with concepts and practises linked to human confidentiality, human intimacy, human information, human dignity, yada yada yada.

The latest Eminem album, folks, is a #1 smash hit! It's sooooo good that I'm scared to promote the album, you know, like say I liked it.. or lie and say I bought it when I didn't when all I did was rip 'er onto my facsimile i-pod (one of those cheap Apple imitations, last for 3 days or so, kinda Dollarstore material)..

Okay that wasn't an ad for Apple Computers either.

Question: What if I promote Eminem by saying I like his shit? what if people start buying his CDs like they was lemons, man, and like the guy gets giganto-famous? No, I'm fucking serious, what if the guy gets mega jumbo so bad so fast he's the next white president? (I mean the next president, but since the present one is black, the next one, if it is a white one, would be a white one... if President Obama is madated 8 years or whatever it is, and say there are like 4 black presidents after him... and 80 year old future Eminem tells his grandkids, "What you never seen a white person before, I mean run for President of the Americas?"

Jokes aside, I am soooo darn supportive of Marshal Mathers the IIIrd (I might have his name wrong and trust me I do NOT know anyone by the name of Slim Shady, I am a serious artist and fucked up on psychiatric drugs.. or by them... or I dunno... this autobiographical "cautionary tale" should explain...)

***
When I was a kid, my mom sneaked into my bookcase or closet or whatever it was and found my mickey of what we called "Jungle Juice". I am 31 years old, this was approximately 18 or even 19 years ago. I started drinking every day at that age, 12 or 13, I was in grade 6 or 7.. I mostly drank while I did my homework.. anyway...

My mom found my liquor, the hard stuff, it all came from a mixture of shit in her liquor cabinet. I felt ashamed and something prophetic and self-fulfilling occurred.

My mom said, "You been drinkin this shit, m'boy? Why I oughta fucking make you drink this whole mickey right in front of me, you wouldn't be drinking for very long after that now wouldya, getting all fucked up right in front of your mother now huh? Don't you know, my child, oh lord, don't you know that this leads to pills????!!!"

There are three pictures here. One is a picture I ripped off a google image search. I think I queried the words "psychiatric drugs". The other two are also from google image searches: one with the query "pills", the other with the query - if I am not mistaken - and strangely enough, of "psychiatric medicaments".

***
Think about it before you judge and criticize. 19 or so years later: I am recovering from a major relapse that almost killed me this time, but for real. I've been crying all day long, I don't know anything about who Proof was or what he meant to Eminem and I swear the tears are welling up again... if there are any real men left in this world, y'all will understand... for the others, I'll fill ya in, Dr. Phil ya in style, motherfuckers...

I never took pills when my momma said I was gonna be takin pills if I kept drinking. I felt so violated from having my intimacy and privacy raped like that... makes me think of an Alice and Chains song.. and I cry for Layne Staley too, to this day..

Man, I felt so ashamed... I drank everyday almost for 19 years... with all the other stuff... but it only became a problem after they forced me to take psychiatric medication..

So go figure. But you know what? And you lissen boys and girls, this is the goddamn truth with a capital T Middle Finger Fuck-You Towers:

1. I don't blame my mum for jack squat.
2. Neither do I blame pharmaceutical companies or psychiatric medicine, or any health care professionals or scientists related to such fields as medicine, health care, etc.
3. Third of all, I don't blame drugs or myself - for taking drugs - for my severe neurological disorder..

I don't blame genetics for schizophrenia, I don't blame politicians for what they do.. I don't blame half the world for being ignorant.. I don't even blame God..

You know what, I get better and better every day, my Lord God do I ever.. When I take the pills to come down they hit so hard my heart begins to skip beats and shit, I have major spasmodic reactions in my limbs.. some of the meds cause restlessness and insomnia, in fact they are known to cause hallucinations in some people, but I don't suffer from hallucinations, just paranoia mostly..

So what the heck do you think I'm paranoid about then if it ain't the fault of all of the above? Well, I understand that I have a disorder. I take medication for that. Yes, the medications are classified as drugs, but not street drugs. It is entirely licit and I agree to taking them as part of a medical treatment for my illness. Those medicaments have saved my life so many times you wouldn't believe it if I told you!

Drinking a whole Mickey of like 40 proof shit in one shot in front of my mother would have killed my 11 or 12 year old ass, man! Or don't you think I woulda been like mentally retarded or crazy after that? Hell no! I love my momma cause her goddamn wisdom rings true to this day, friends and neighbors! Wouldn't ya know, alcohol abuse DOES lead to pills!

***
Note: I have never taken the drug called "ecstasy" ever in my entire life. It is MDA or MDMA or whatever, those "pills" my mom was probably talking about... Shit, she was a genius, no one even took ecstasy back in the mid-to-late 1980s that I knew of.. I never took that shit myself, never got hooked on heroin either.. though yeah my arms are a cemetery for a whole school of demons I call the Pinhole Dragon.. Mr. Pinball Machine Economy.. the Economics of Sadistic Need and Biological Prison-States of Urgency..

I cry for William S. Burroughs.. I cry for friends I lost to drugs, friends I lost to death by natural causes... to N.B. who committed suicide ten years ago...

I cry for Serbia and for the future Ms. K.B. (I hope it all works out, man, I swear I do, I cry for you the most, I cry for you tonight, Kristina! If you would only see, I'm not a boogieman, I'm a human being with feelings too...)

Most of all though.. it's all semantics, idn't?

I
One man's pills are another man's drugs
One man's rap is another man's crazy white man talk
But medicine ne'er killed no one
I used to call it Uncovering the Ungun..
It was my first cut-up novel,
not unlike the 990 pages of cut-up I lost
the last year of my existence.

II
I of late, think, reflect back, and cerebrate,
I speak of twisted, proverbial things,
I foolish am and seem, in ways poets cannot yet flaunt in words
Nor shall thinkers ever find ways effective for this cause speculate,
though I only begin to espy the true magnitude of the demon-house of haunted dreams which I inwardly alone can with great discipline articulate to you, my listeners..

Conclusion; Or, Chorus: I don't give a rat's ass, y'all can just suck it. yeah..

Signalling Theory & The Handicap Principle: Honest Signals, Costly Signals, Market for Signals

2009-05-21T12:06:00.002-05:00

Just thinking of the value of information, the increasing value, one could say. Why would an honest signal ever be a costly signal? What makes a signal costly? Is sexual selection in humans even possible? Wouldn't Feminists, Queer Theorists, and Lesbian Eco-fascists love that!

Competition and social cohesion. The Battle of the Sexes. Why women really love macho men. Strategic reasoning. Strategic planning. Information collection, documentation practises, building databases, information systems. Information security, risk. Risk aversion. Psychobiology, evolutionary sociobiology, human behavioral ecology.

Treatment of information, processing. Key knowledge. The Intelligence cycle. Optimization theory and Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. Human honest signals. Game theory and strategic human intelligence. Human MapQuest.

Animals I love

2009-05-15T12:15:00.007-05:00

This is a short videoclip of one of the squirrels currently living in my backyard. Or should I say that I currently live in this squirrel's frontyard? I'll have to ask him. Actually, come to think of it, I never got his permission to show this video of him working hard on his precious little nest. So please view this with respect for my little squirrel friend that I caught on film while he was off-guard!

General Warning on Walking Without Guidance: The Truth about my Vision of Feldenkrais

2009-04-17T23:23:00.005-05:00

I practised the Feldenkrais Method for approximately two years straight after which point I ceased attending classes but kept practising the Method in a different form.

Nowadays, this being a sabbatical year for me, I am doing a lot of walking. I remember the numerous times I hit the reset button on walking and had to learn how to walk again. It was marvellous. Nothing like a good Feldenkrais class to make you forget how to walk. I feel most at peace after those kinds of classes or experiences in general.

Walking can be hard on the body, though. It's not so much that it is intense exercise because it really isn't. It's all in the way you walk, honestly. When I put ear-plugs in my ears, for instance, and take a long walk, I "hear" the pressure of my footsteps in my head and I "feel" the percussive, pummeling blows at the back of my head and near the base, hitting me directly in the spine.

This is dangerous. Without ear-plugs I never realized how poorly I had been walking of late. I put the ear-plugs in and I can feel my heals landing, hitting the ground, which is an unnecessary movement. No wonder I have strange fits of anxiety after some walking experiences! I used to think I was entering a trance, but really I just might be giving myself slight concussions. It may sound crazy, but if you heard what I heard with those ear-plugs in my ears this afternoon, you would be awakened to a slightly worrisome idea, that of pounding one's entire body into the ground with every step.

I try walking without walking. I just sort of perambulate around aimlessly. Sometimes I dance a little or I pretend that I am running a 100 m race except that I am in slow motion.

There is a feeling I find which for some reason I associate with leaving on a great, once-in-a-lifetime Holy Pilgrimage. Really, I am merely taking a stroll out in the community / neighborhood, but I genuinely feel it is much, much more than a stroll, and every single time. They are voyages.

Soon I want to write on the subject of memory and on neurodevelopmental functions, learning disabilities, paranoid schizophrenia, stretching and exercise, classical ballet re: warping the human skeletal system, and much, much more. I await you, reader, next time, with great anticipation.

A Handyman's Investments: Embedded data storage, or How You Can Be Your Own Agent 007!

2009-04-16T11:38:00.004-05:00

I think that 2009 is the year to invest in data storage, though I cannot profess to having any knowledge whatsoever in matters of investments having to do with money, economics, or any financial matters whatsoever. N.B.: I know nothing about money, finances, economics, or banking, investments, in fact, I am not only poverty-stricken, I can't even manage the little money I do have in an efficient, "economical" way. I do, however, know a great deal about other kinds of investments, such as salience when we speak of salient things, say, for example, in one's field of visual perception.

I was born and raised a house-painter as well as a professional painter's son (world renowned pastellist). I know a great deal about the visual aspect of everyday life, of the eyes and the orbital cavities in the human head. I know too much at times about what people's eyes like to covet. I have studied all too closely and perhaps even all too well pretty much all aspects of the human sense of sight, its physiology, biochemistry, its psychology, etc.

What choice did I have? It's not easy being a painter: My father told me that when I was a kid. He was right; the market for paintings is worse than a market for lemons. It IS in a sense a market for lemons, if we call artists lemons and perhaps even buyers too. The entire world of the culture & the arts has become something of a big yellow-bellied sour-puss, a lemon of sorts.

About investments, though, as an artist I have decided to think more and more about data storage. The USB flash drive cigarette lighter is actually more than a genius idea and invention: As a concept it is filled to the rim with great solutions.

Think of it this way:
Data storage = hard drives = portable data storage...
But think of it with this in mind: The possibility of a Handyman's laser measuring tape with the capacity to store measurements. The key is to think of versatility; in household appliances and in a handyman's tool-box, versatility has been a huge concept for millennia.

Now take a look at things the Ikea way: Think of space, get Feng Shui about it if you must, and then remember how amazed you were about something you saw on television and dreamt of procuring for yourself "if you had the money"*, say the storage box that is also a chair, etc., i.e. the concept of "multiple usages or functions".

I think it is time to take the concept of data storage to the next-level. I have always been a next-level thinker: I try to take it to the next level in thought. Data storage: The term is lame. The storage of information is in fact one of the hinges of, well, pretty much the whole darn universe. Let me explain a little, the rest you will have to think through on your own.

An anecdote. "Every time I go to a stinking party, I lose my lighter. Everyone's always pocketing my darned lighter. It bugs me, someone should invent a lighter on a string." Or: "I'm going to wear this USB key around my neck cause I certainly can't afford in the least to lose the priceless information that is stored on it."

Solution: The USB flash drive cigarette lighter. It solves multiple problems in one blow. You won't lose your lighter if it has your name on it, your birth certificate and financial information or other private input, will you? Say your lighter was diamond-incrusted, do you think someone will accidentally pocket it? Ah, but if it's a lighter or looks like a 50 cent lighter, no one will think that it is also a gadget for storing data and that it happens to have data on it that is PRICELESS. For a smoker, it's a great thing: You'll never lose your lighter and you'll never misplace your USB key cause you smoke a pack and a half a day.

So I say: I'm investing in data storage as an idea. The phrase echoes in the hollow of my mind: All that is solid melts into air. Withstanding the test of time, history, physical memory, the ravaging Winds of Time, etc. The key to the Library of Alexandria, we'll say, in ancient history, is what? What do you think can save the world's greatest library?

To eternalize knowledge:
a) Make it as monumental as possible;
b) Make as many copies of everything as you can in as many different formats as possible;
c) Make it as weatherproof, accident-proof, and fail-proof as possible.

Also, you need to make information as easily accessible as possible. On top of that, it needs to have some sort of organization so that one can easily orient oneself in the masses of data.

What KIND of information can I store on a flash drive? The sky is the limit, not the number of gigabytes. You can use up 80 gigs for nothing or cause turmoil with 22 k or less. Make it a staple in your tool-kit: The handy objects in the tool-box, the handier ones still on the TOOL-BELT. Proximity can be a key element in many a thing such as this.

I call it the Orion Belt of Knowledge. It is a series of concepts, or a cluster, if you will. It has to do with the library arts & sciences, also with concepts I have worked on for a time, such as the Antique Moderne, Info Ops Art, and the like.

N.B.: Read the "Traité de Documentation" by P. Otlet.

Then apply it to 25 000 years of history and several millennia of philosophy.

Then make it fit in the palm of your hand.

Who knows, maybe there is an impending logic, urgency, and necessity for implanting computer chips under people's skin which has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with anything eschatological, prophetic, or in any way remotely religious, theological, or spiritual. It could just be a great solution for a lot of huge everyday problems. How many times do you lose your keys? Your wallet? your ID cards are lost, or were they stolen? In the matter of security/securities of self, which I hope becomes one of the number one rights and liberties in this new millennium and a huge focus in forums for humanitarian thinkers, the national ID chip could also be the next best thing since sliced bread.

They sliced gold into paper money and they called it bread. They sliced Worldwide Telecommunications into Blackberries and made you King of the New Blue-Tooth Society. Now you can do everything from anywhere you like: Free enterprise meets freedom of mobility, Ergo you can work on the road, in the bathroom, from a motel or from home. Legislation is always a little behind when times are a-changin' at a fast pace. No one is out to get you: Trust your elected governments and officials. Why wouldn't you?

Cause that's the main hinge that CIVILIZATION ITSELF is hinging on right now, and also a bit of a gamble. Will you be willing to trust your next elected official? Will you trust your neighbor if he voted against what you voted for? What will happen in the future to our freedom of political and religious beliefs? What about expression, can I truly speak my mind to anyone, even my therapist? Will a catholic priest even hear my confession if I am not baptized? If my choice is to be baptized a Catholic, will they baptize me in time, i.e. before I die? What if my confession, which God needs to hear and which requires at least a spiritual guide, counsel, if not a priest, archibishop, cardinal, or the Vicar of Christ Himself as the Ears... what if my confession cannot wait for the process of my holy baptism now 5-years in the making?

I think God Himself would be ashamed of humanity today. But he would love you anyway and he would give you more than enough opportunities to trust your neighbor. As for new invetions with data storage.. I am investing time and mental energy in the concepts at least, concepts of handiness, handy objects, proximity of handy objects, tools & technologies, telecommunications, data storage, documentation, the ancient art of tabular accountancy... game theory, scoreboards, evolutionary stable strategies, fitness criteria, ethology as a whole, face-work, symbolic interaction, the I-Ching vs. morphometry of the Human Visage and its Expressions.. etc.

Bogged-down by the Blog

2009-03-22T12:42:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends, Readers, & Cie.,

I am presently bogged-down, finding it difficult to find the time and patience to put it all down on paper. I normally would be writing on this blog as well as on my other blogs the equivalent of 100 pages per day of innovative writing.

The ideas are there, I'm just in a transitional phase right now. Lots of projects on the go, lots of important dates coming and going.

And the remainder of life is as it usually is. Stuffing for the pie, a sort of creamy dish. Routine existence, a ragout de boulette for your soul.

A little Christianity around this time of year, why not? Fasting a little here and there, finishing a mystical hypnagogic novel in the name of All Great Things. By Jupiter..

Lots of painting and writing, but most of all, apart from the constant singing and dancing, I am putting my entire past corpus of work into collections. The collections are streamlined and ready to ingest. This year holds many prospects, great avenues have opened up, more on top of much on top of much more.

The Gothic Novel, Victorian society, Surrealism in typography and text. Great dates in history.

I was thinking of the English Language Textbook Style. Gothic in its textuality, like a textile, a world of woven dreams & hopes extinguished. A mass grave for cpus called technopark. Miniature Monumentalism, l'Antique Moderne.

Vernacular Infographics. The Old Steinbergs "S".. with serifs?!!!

OpenSocial@http://www.opensocial.org/

2009-02-22T01:20:00.000-05:00

Furniture for the Soul: The House of Habit and Memory

2009-02-15T02:55:00.002-05:00

I grew up in the St-Lawrence Lowlands. In the province of Québec, the Seigniorial System of Land Distribution has always been the norm. It seems that we are all victims here of a profoundly touching form of nostalgia. It seems, too, that the déjà-vu experience is more common than we will ever admit to.

I remember the first house that I lived in. It was in a place we call Stoneridge, though the name doesn't show on any maps. The Québécois people form a nation. Our ancestors were the Habitant people. We were once a people of Voyageurs, we had private entrepreneurs that worked the fur trade.

The French came here, it would appear, to trade. Our intentions were never genocidal. The Québécois people are a nation of pacifists. We always seek a diplomatic and democratic solution to even the worst of political-economic problems. We once had a dream of sovereignty for our nation. That dream no longer fills the collective imagination and when one does think of self-governance, one usually just forgets all about it, dwelling instead on thoughts of how privileged we are here in comparison to other parts of the world.

One can always dream of something BETTER. One can always dream, period.

I am thinking of the monumental as possibly the form of cultural expression that is the most historical. Monuments can be seen as a form of writing that is truly more resistant to the passage of time as any text. Clay tablets used to be cooked and were mostly used for messages. One could write an important letter, an epistle, if you will, in tabular form. But since the beginning of civilization as we know it, the monumental is where all of the truly important messages were written.

Messages meant for the gods, intended for immortality, were inscribed in stone, in pyramids, not on clay tablets that could break much more easily.

The miniature painting is perhaps one of the most difficult forms of expression. It is much simpler to paint something in a large format than to paint something the size of a postage stamp.

The House of Memory, the House of Changing Rooms & Hallways, the Permutation of Chambers & Corridors. We all have our Dream-House, our Nostalgic Vision of Things.

The Dutch Vanitas tradition... the memento mori, marking the passage of time.

Following the sun, the moon, and the planets with markings on an animal's thigh bone.

The tabular form of ancient accountancy. Tables, cost-benefit analyses, scoreboards. Competition, finances, household economy... Sports and games...

I win, you lose. The Prisoner's Dilemma.

I think of the word PARADOX and Socrates comes to mind. A Socratic existence, an ironic existence, being a Sign of Contradiction, like the Christ-Jesus.

Soren Kierkegaard as a modern - Christian! - Socratic ironist. The Paradox of Paradoxes! Abraham's beard.

Abraham, father of three monotheistic religions. The beard through time, throughout history. Elijah and all the mountain mystics. Mount Carmel, Mount Tabor, the Mount of Mounts, Mount Aetna. Vulcan's Forge, Pythagoras and the Blacksmith Shop of Ratiocinative Hammer Weight Calculations. The Cult of Numbers, C.I.A. visions of delirium tremens, of the numinous, the obscure, delirium obscurans, Ecstasy of the System.

Enter the Screen. Part I of the production property, Dali's reverie, 1989 sex half-self, Minotaur man half-sex body.

Merleau-Ponty and Feldenkrais. Tai Chi and the ninja's hammerfist.

The question is, folks...

2009-02-12T20:59:00.003-05:00

If schizophrenics have a shorter life expectancy than many others, are victims of violent crimes more often than a lot of people, and if schizophrenics are stigmatized, outcasted, rejected, and verbally, psychologically, economically, and morally abused in their dignity as human beings, then what the heck are they so afraid of?

I mean if, as some like to think, schizophrenia is a degenerative brain disease that will only get much, much worse in time, then what does a paranoid schizophrenic really have to be afraid of in his life?

What if hell IS other people, when you are paranoid?

Cinematic Thinking, Cinematic Memory, a Magnificent, Cinematic Life, though slightly Depersonalized

2009-02-09T07:35:00.002-05:00

I was traveling in the country once, a long time ago, and was chanced to see a beautiful little rooster. I was awestruck by the rich color of his plumage and immediately fell for him. His feathers were of the color of Dawn, though some of the orange hues were much darker, attaining the color we painters call Burnt Sienna.

I remember that little rooster not like it was yesterday nor as though he was here right now before my eyes. The truth is that he IS here with me presently, for I have a cinematic memory. I have worked out these ideas in a therapeutic vein, in something I call Historiotherapeusis, with techniques I invented based on this faculty of cinematic experiences, cinematic thinking, dreaming, cinematic memory, etc. I will be talking more and more about the methods of "Dream Genesis" (for OCD-types) and of "Physio-Imaging" in general, for the self-presentation of one's history (history-in-the-making?).

This work is largely based on my scrutiny of the works of Wilhelm Reich and others. Breakfast is calling, I fear I must depart from writing at present.

I'm ugly too, it seems: Ain't life grandiose? Operatic and carnivalesque, anyone?

2009-02-04T08:04:00.005-05:00

Miracles happen every day, everywhere, no use sitting around waiting for nothing good. When one finds oneself searching for lost things, one can merely cease, take a pause, and make it pregnant by yelling, "Eureka! I have found it!"

It is at this point that the bell rings and round two begins. The great composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, called it "Tada-tatum", and it appears that his opera "Fidelio" was the most magnificent expression of this clarion call of destined hopes and desires met, the moment of epiphany or awakening, rude at times and not so rude also at times. I find that the video of "Ma Môme" by Jean Ferrat might just be as great as anything else in the world. At least for me on this a fine morning of the 4th of February, 2009, it is quite excellent. I thank all those who have made this little day-after-the-day-after Groundhog Day possible for me. I am alive and well, so great thanks be given!

Sincerely,

Painter A., inimitably

In beautiful memory of Nancy, Guy, et vous, grandmère

2009-01-27T15:28:00.004-05:00

Regrets

Oui, je le jure par ma vie,
j’ai passé une longue nuit
comme celui qui fraternise
avec la douleur lancinante.

Et tout au long de cette nuit,
le chagrin m’a dit ses secrets,
étendu sur le même lit
comme un compagnon de sommeil.

Et maintenant à chaque fois
que je regarde une demeure
que ses habitants ont quittée,
les larmes coulent sur mes joues.
Le lieu où je vis à présent
a vu s’en aller un bon maître,
le meilleur des bons conseillers,
celui qui ne trompa jamais.

Ami, ne nous reproche rien
si tu nous vois marcher ainsi,
humiliés, tout attendris,
ne songeant qu’à son souvenir.

Auxiliary states of exile and imprisonment

2009-01-20T13:41:00.002-05:00

We can safely say that life in general is not always perfectly simple and fun and that some of the time life does not flow so smoothly with seeming effortless ease. We might be driven to wonder if things EVER do in fact run smoothly with effortless ease, but for now we'll perhaps leave it at the following: LIFE IS NOT ALWAYS A PIECE OF CAKE.

I hear so many things coming out of people's mouths, most of which sounds as though they were great pearls of wisdom. I find myself asking myself, quite innocently, "How could such pearls of wisdom come out of the mouths of such extremely miserable people? What is it that I am not getting here in this picture? Is part of being truly happy and well PRETENDING TO BE COMPLETELY MISERABLE?"

I cannot pretend. Not even once upon a time. I was never all that good at being facetious and not wholly myself. A word of caution, though, that this is one of the very worst of all diseases that one can contract while here in this life on this earth, and it can possess you from birth: To be an authentic individual self, to find great comfort in being this whole self that you are, and to esteem this very self as the highest good amongst all things possible.

With that being said, maybe we can now look at some of the auxiliary states of being a self, a self that is exiled from itself or from the world and others who are in it, as well as a being trapped inside this thing called a self, which some still choose to call a "mortal coil", usu. unaware of where that quote comes from.

Next: "The Benign Bliss of Eternal Hell in Cellular Form"

Reloading the Renoir into World Portraiture

2009-01-17T23:47:00.002-05:00

Pierre-Auguste Renoir has got to be the latest of the world's greatest portraitists. This portrait means a lot to me. I recently found a print of it in a Salvation Army type store selling cheap used objects. The painting cost me 1$ and it has a frame worth at least 400$. I didn't know this portrait, but it speaks to me, and it taught me a lot about Renoir himself. The young girl is combing her hair, but the comb has a look to it almost as though it were a pair of scissors or the edge of a blade. It made me think of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (I think it was Pope, anyway!) Then I just thought about grooming in general, of a young woman looking in the mirror and combing or brushing her hair, how it was a very intimate, personal experience. For Renoir to portray women in such intimate positions must have been difficult. Think of how easy it is nowadays to be labelled a pervert. Imagine what people would think if I took my camera to take pictures of young ballerinas! So props to Renoir who set the standard and set it high for such intimate encounters portrayed with such fineness and subtlety. He is a master and one of the last of the very greatest of portraitists. Wait until I finish my Mona Lisa portraits though, of a close friend of mine who is so beautiful she awakens the Renoir in me...

The Genetic Process of Dreaming

2009-01-14T13:08:00.002-05:00

What's the deal with bipolarity, dude?

2008-12-18T14:37:00.002-05:00

I thank you all for your readership and welcome your comments. I want to answer a question directly this time. The question comes from Malice and has to do with bipolarity. So let's take a close look at the problem at hand.

I'm assuming that the question of bipolarity has little to do with bipolar disorders in human psychology. I was thinking more along the lines of poles and polarities in mathematics and theoretical physics, etc. I also remembered a few things from some of my favorite philosophers, but didn't think I should bore readers with a bunch of useless quotations when I could handle the problem myself.

I have dealt with many kinds of polarities, from unipolar elements to bipolar and multipoint dynamic systems. There's more to it than a mere pendulum swing, but like a pendulum, it can lead to very fruitful voyages of speculation. That is, it is a handy tool, like a pendulum would be. It does not in itself constitute the necessity of a quest for a perpetuum mobile machine and I would advise anyone who wanted to do something of the sort to start with a few years in pure and applied sciences. You might want to go into some form of engineering, though I couldn't tell you which field exactly. I studied sound design and sound engineering and I am also a professional painter, so I see dichotomies, antinomies, polarities, etc., in a rather biased way, biased by my designer goggles.

I think of equilibria, not merely in game theory, but I think of game theory a lot as always. Tit-for-tat is almost always a dominant strategy and is all the more successful when the time is ripe for it and calls for such a strategic line. Think of it this way, if I was born in a world, say we call the world "Stalinist Russia", then how could I succeed in such a world, in terms of a tit-for-tat kind of strategy? Well, I would have to be pretty transparent and a pretty good reflecting surface or mirror to get out of a totalitarian regime.

Now I'm thinking of automata, not celullar automata, more like conceptual automata. Take the idea of a prison-state, call it world x, some form of stalinist regime, a closed system, a milieu from which automata cannot escape, like a sort of labyrinth, if you want to give the problem something of a Kafkaesque appeal. A prison-state, that's what Kafka's Castle was, wasn't it, along with his Trial and his Amerika? How does one get out of such a mess, anyway? Well, it sure isn't going to be by swinging back and forth like a pendulum or a golf swing. You can maybe golf your way to ecstatic rapture or mystical visions, but you can't just golf your way out of any situation. You have to be able to golf a little first, I imagine, before you try any sort of emergent gameplay from golfing itself. Cause as far as I know, golf is about playing golf, like a football field is for playing games of football. Whatever spin you put on it after that is your prerogative. But I'd be wary of what stories I choose to spin about such games, or of seeing everything as a game. It requires a lot of skill and coordination as well as a modicum of patience.

In Kant's Critique of Reason as well as in his Critique of Judgment, I believe I remember him breaching the topic of Antinomies. Jacques Derrida wrote a lot about binary oppositions, too, and that's what I would like to call up to mind at present. I think that there is a danger in relying too much on binary logic or binary thinking. It reeks of reptilian brain thinking and is not as highborn as that more cortical kind of thinking, frontal lobe thinking, etc. But reptiles too have thoughts, just more of the kind of snap categorical judgments we tend to call black-&-white thinking, overgeneralization, maximization, minimization, etc. Essentially, the reptilian brain jumps to conclusions and uses big categories, cause you don't want to risk thinking a snake is just a piece of rope, if it is a venomous piece of rope. On the other hand, you can freak out and panic over a piece of string, but you'll get over it. It doesn't bite, but snakes can bite pretty hand.

Survival does not always allow for a lot of philosophical speculation. Crisis management, that's part of what every living thing does and it does it pretty much all of the time. It's often a matter of a pass or fail, an all or nothing kind of system. They say the amygdala in the human brain is constantly on the look-out for threats or menaces to our survival. It passes over everything, or processes all incoming information for potential threats. When a threat is possible enough, it sends the appropriate signal to the motor cortex or whatnot. Necessity often bypasses the neocortex and the old reptilian brain is always in the know especially when the newer more frontal parts of the brain absolutely are not.

It doesn't matter. I don't need to know if Russian spies are coming. If someone is going to bust into my house and harm me in five minutes, I'm not going to spend five minutes panicking, especially if I knew they were coming. There is a logical flaw in waiting for something when you know that it isn't going to happen for a specific amount of time. If I anticipate the event with anxiety, anxiety in every other case except the one where my life is in danger, will not kill me. Too much anxiety at the wrong time, though, can paralyze me, and the wrong kind of paralysis at the wrong time can be very, very harmful to my health, well-being, or to my life.

Survival is a pass or fail kind of thing. You make it or you break it, or however the saying goes. So I can understand black and white categories, except that I really think that most of everything takes place in the grey zones of existence and that there are no purely black or white things in this world. I'm not just talking about the optics of the matter here, either. That is an altogether different thing, and as far as optics go, I would have to say that there is in fact a dark rainbow of imaginary colors that are much more important to one's existence and survival or success in the world than are the 220 hues of the classical rainbow of colors from visible like hitting the prism or whatnot.

These are not dark hues or chroma of feeling, either, nor are they purely visible. I discovered these things by becoming a painter. I have painted for the better part of my life, and when I got into ambient sound design, it really did something to my senses and my mind. I began tuning into very slight subtleties, slight differences in grades of things, almost imperceptible, infinitesimal. When I make a drawing, we'll say, and I decide to apply color to it, when I finish, you will see a colorful painting of, say, a bowl of cherries. What was there before I made the painting, if anything? Well, maybe I had a design in mind of what I was going to do, i.e. paint a bowl of cherries. But all I did was apply a substance called paint to a material support called a canvas. Maybe I primed it or whatnot. I have a ground and I add pigment somehow with whatever means or mixture, technique, treatment, etc.

What if I saw the bowl of cherries in my mind's eye and then painted it. If you could compare both images to one another, the finished product, the result of the act of painting, image a, "a bowl of cherries", and the same image seen in my mind's eye prior to any technical activity, image b or whatever, what would you see? I think that the image in my mind does not have the same kind of colors. I think that perhaps everything is exactly the same except that there is no visible light that gets into my mind's eyes. So the rainbow of hues that I see when I imagine something are not 220 or 7 or whatever in number, but are perhaps infinite. I call them imaginary colors and I say that my imaginary colors form my dark rainbow of imaginary colors, insofar as I am a painter in this life.

I think of Dr. Maxwell Maltz and his concept of the servomechanism. If I imagine something, I can perhaps make it happen if I imagine it enough, for imagining things will tend to make me move towards that image/goal (a target, or goal-image) if only in a purely organismic manner. We are far, however, from the idea that "thinking merely makes it so". There is no scientific nor physical explanation for such a superstitious belief, and I wish that my dark rainbow didn't have a sort of mystical sound to it, cause really I am a physicalist at heart, a materialist as well as an individualist (egoism, a little or a lot, is not such a nasty thing, folks!).

So I can think something and then move towards it. Think and then do. Those philosophers I spoke of are Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard wrote about apathetic sympathy and sympathetic antipathy, the fear of what we love and the love of what we fear. Wasn't it Schopenhauer that spoke somewhere about a sort of pendulum swing between desire and frustration, from wanting something and striving to get it, to gaining it and then growing tired of it and therefore seeking a new avenue or means of satiation of some other desire? and that it was an endless cycle? This is a rather simplified model, binary in intent and principle, and not a very great formulation of what life actually is like when you live it for real. It could be that everything binary just has a rather self-evident quality about it when we think about it because binary, categorical thinking or judgments are what the very oldest parts of our brain are most accustomed to doing. So I see it as a very lukewarm kind of thinking and not very fascinating as concepts. Like you were still at the very bottom of the ladder in terms of philosophical thinking, step or square one on the scala paradisi.

Even in certain forms of Buddhism it is warned not to go into seeking for non-ego, then non-non-ego, then non-non-non-ego, ad infinitum. This concept reminds me of the infinite regress or sort of recursion I remember seeing for the first in Kant's Critique of Reason. That's more of a spiral-like kind of idea, but then we're still in basic geometric thinking, and not any less room temperature as far as brilliance of ideas goes. Sorry to have to tell you, humans aren't all that bright.

So you have a scale and you balance an element to the left of the fulcrum and another element to the right of the fulcrum. In real-time, there is a dynamic relation, depending on what the ambient medium is made of, gas or liquid or whatnot, and on the force of gravitation, etc., something happens. But in your mind there aren't forces like gravitation, though you might not really be able to imagine a world without gravity either. It's tough, I know, and I am the first to capitulate in the face of a trying problem, mathematical or otherwise.

What differs in my case is that I keep at it. I still don't really know what makes 4 out of 2x2. I get mixed up between different kinds of decimal systems, Dewey or numerical or whatnot. A base of ten, a homebase in a game of baseball, square one, the square of pi, what the heck?!! I get lost in reverie, lost in thought. And then I come back.

So I hope that I have helped with the problem of bipolarity. I think that it is a simple geometric problem of an elliptical sort, applicable with a little extra work to the problem of orbits in the astral world of real bodies involved in planetary movements of whatever kind. Oscillations too, in sound, vibrations of all kinds, waves, etc. Up and down, back and forth, it's all quite lukewarm and boring. In fact, when you take the universe as a whole and imagine that at some point there must be a form of spacing out and cooling down that takes place, call it heat death or whatever you like, I guess the same sort of thing happens in thinking. We are lacking in supernova-proportion, galactic thinkers in our world. I myself am pretty good, but I don't even come close or compare to someone like Stepher Hawkings, though I also have known a greatly trying disability, called paranoid schizophrenia in my case. I also had problems with addiction for many years. I am doing alright now and love answering questions from one of my biggest fans. Thank you, Malice, for your provocative questions and comments. See you soon, at the brink of the new moon!