Yesterday was an unofficial American national holiday. The final game of the NFL season was held in New Orleans, The Super Bowl. Ostensibly the athletic championship is a thin pretext for one of the most expensive marketing spectacles of the year, fueled by many of our largest companies. The component of sport is a…
The silhouette sharpens the electric saw with the sheaf of papers,hitting the pages with the saw, and the red splotcheson the walls move around, coalescing and separating; A hammer and sickle appear,no, it’s a five-pointed star, or maybe a stylized arrow-like jeemnext to an elongated map… Is it a victory sign?A sun? A peasant?A…
What this brings us to, more or less, is a poetic, ironic analysis of events. Against the simulation of a linear history “in progress”, we have to accord a privileged status to these backfires, these malign deviations, these lightweight catastrophes which cripple an empire much more effectively than any great upheavals. We have to…
Words are a lifeline: The connecting link between my inner awareness, the layered consciousness, and memories which we loosely call “self” to other selves, and to “the world. ” The connectors are a matter of words, grammar and syntax. Therefore a deft touch with words is key to becoming more real, the process of…
Cause and effect reversibility… I get into reading Jean Baudrillard because this philosopher bends language reminiscent of poets. Change and times passage are interchangeable, the given of our experience on this planet. We tip our hats to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic thinker who famously said that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. Another…
A few minutes ago a friend mentioned in passing that he intends to be absent from Starbucks for a few days. He plans to be on a cruise in the Caribbean, out of the country, anticipating the inauguration of the Trump administration on January 20th. Coincidentally I happened to be reading this text at…
A hangover is what this feels like. Perhaps you recall your last hangover? It is Thursday morning after Christmas day. You know, that day anticipated by everyone with the highest of expectation. For my adult self, reason/experience insists “that longing is fantasy, a shape shifting, media driven, ginned up illusion” so snap out of…
Christmas Eve and I begin the day at Starbucks… Why wouldn’t I? Beginning a day, any day with some reading, some contemplation, and pleasant conversation is agreeable to me. That is what I want. For the most part, on many occasions I have no idea about what I want. If you were to ask,…
There are, indeed, events, forms and oscillations which are only open to a long contemplative gaze, but remain hidden to the working gaze; things that are subtle, fleeting; inconspicuous things, minor things [das Geringe]; that hover or retreat, which evade any violent efforts at their capture. The Scent of Time by Byung-chul Han, trans….
Another day, and yet not just ‘another’ day. There has never been, or can there ever be a segment of space and time that mirrors, replicates this one. The “eternal return” as a rule-of-thumb is a safe bet. Patterns become familiar. We’ve seen them before. Would we expect anything else? Matter and the personalities…
