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Showing posts from April, 2011

utopian limit

Utopia is not even popular speculative holiday destination these days. It's so deeply unfashionable that they have stopped evening brochures. The climate is deemed too warm and fuzzy for our cleanly defined clarity seeking fragile psyches. Twenty years ago my friend foz lent me Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Early on in the book Wilson lays out an idea of the thinker prover mode of research. In short we discover what fits with the tunnel.reality we have constructed for ourselves. since then I have always tried tones beyond the end of my nose even when lying to myself. The rest of the book was slightly baffling and a little unnerving in their apparent inpenatrability. Recently I picked the book up again and found myself skipping through its overviews of expanded consciousness with that ineffable joy that cometh falling in love writing beautifully clear and such like phrases in the margins. The book felt even more current despite being almost thirty years old. the reason I

sleep walking detective drama

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metaphorically speaking

When I read that an artist such as Oscar Tuazon tries to avoid "all that stuff" when asked about metaphor my hunch is that they mean simile. Metaphor is not a controlled adjunct to the creative act, rather it occurs inspite of the artists desire to control every aspect of their work. The story called the Fugitive by Primo Levi beautifully illustrates how the poet can never retain control over a piece of inspiration. Increasingly I feel like artists are turning into town planners who are not generally employed for their ability to create something that adds up more than the Sum of its parts. We seem to adopt the model of Duchmpian forward thinker but just as I am sure Aristotle did not envisage himself as the godfather of compartmentalised ring-fencing I also suspect that Duchamp did not himself as the assassin of intuitive thought processes in art. I like to imagine that in the future we will look back at this time as the era of The Art Cage and laugh softly at how rigidly w