Database for Headcase

PTSD

2012-01-15T00:04:00.002-05:00

Dialectical Monism

2012-01-03T17:43:00.002-05:00

Dialectical monism, also known as dualistic monism, is an ontological position that holds that reality is ultimately a unified whole, distinguishing itself from monism by asserting that this whole necessarily expresses itself in dualistic terms. For the dialectical monist, the essential unity is that of complementary polarities, which, while opposed in the realm of experience and perception, are co-substantial in a transcendent sense.

--taken from WIKI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_monism

2011-12-28T19:20:00.001-05:00

B

2011-12-28T19:19:00.001-05:00

We Want

2011-12-21T11:07:00.000-05:00

We want
to give you something beautiful
we want
to adorn you
crown you
allow, create bedding
downy, feather soft underfoot
for feet
of all considerations
we want
to invite you to sit
we want
to show you you
but the
part of you you
need to know
we want
this for you
but instead
we are copying and pasting.

Hello

2011-12-12T17:19:00.000-05:00

I don't know why you read this blog, but you do. That is NOT to say you aren't welcome. You are welcome to. It's just a perfect example of the continually interconnected separation that is to be a living identity. You are there, but you are not there. You are witness, I have no idea who you are.

Carry on!

asemic writing, abstract calligraphy painting by Matox ( Nuno de Matos)

2011-12-02T10:16:00.001-05:00

Paracas textile: Peruvian, over 2,000 years old

2011-10-18T13:33:00.003-04:00

Respectfully lifted from the BBC's A History the World in 100 Objects podcast.

synecdoche

2011-10-10T12:47:00.000-04:00

Synecdoche ( /sɪˈnɛkdəkiː/; from Greek synekdoche (συνεκδοχή), meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech[1] in which a term is used in one of the following ways:

Part of something is used to refer to the whole thing (pars pro toto), or
A thing (a "whole") is used to refer to part of it (totum pro parte), or
A specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or
A general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or
A material is used to refer to an object composed of that material, or
A container is used to refer to its contents.

Phoneme (taken from Wiki)

2011-09-14T16:23:00.002-04:00

In a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.[1]

Thus a phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example of a phoneme is the /k/ sound in the words kit and skill. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.) Although most native English speakers don't notice this, in most English dialects, the /k/ sounds in these two words are actually pronounced differently: they are different speech sounds, or phones (which, in transcription, are placed in square brackets). In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated, [kʰ], while the /k/ in skill is unaspirated. The reason why these different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme in English is that if an English-speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other phonemes could be substituted (creating a minimal pair) which would cause a change in meaning: producing words like still (substituting /t/), spill (substituting /p/) and swill (substituting /w/). These other sounds (/t/, /p/ and /w/) are, in English, different phonemes.

In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are different phonemes, and are perceived as such by the speakers of those languages. For example, in Icelandic, /kʰ/ is the first sound of kátur meaning 'cheerful', while /k/ is the first sound of gátur meaning 'riddles'. The fact that these two different words have different meanings which can be readily identified by speakers of Icelandic tells us that Icelandic speakers perceive the sounds as different phonemes.

Diagram of basic procedure to determine whether two sounds are phonemesPhones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophones. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones of the same phoneme or separate phonemes relies on finding minimal pairs: words that differ by only the phone in question. For example, the words tip and dip illustrate that in English [t] and [d] are separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/, in English: the two words have different meanings that are readily recognizable, meaning that English speakers can readily distinguish between the two sounds. In other languages, though, including Korean; there are no such pairs available. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing /t/ and /d/ in Korean indicates that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/. (/tʰata/ is pronounced [tʰada], for example. That is, when they hear this one word, Korean speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, whereas an English speaker would perceive different sounds in these two locations.)

Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, and Noam Chomsky) consider phonemes to be further decomposable into features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be designated as acoustic (Jakobson) or articulatory (Halle & Chomsky) in nature

Decision Fatigue, NYTimes

2011-08-17T15:38:00.001-04:00

August 17, 2011
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
By JOHN TIERNEY

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation. To study the process of ego depletion, researchers concentrated initially on acts involving self-control — the kind of self-discipline popularly associated with willpower, like resisting a bowl of ice cream. They weren’t concerned with routine decision-making, like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, a mental process that they assumed was quite distinct and much less strenuous. Intuitively, the chocolate-vanilla choice didn’t appear to require willpower.

But then a postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister’s laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab’s ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch?

“By the end, you could have talked me into anything,” Twenge told her new colleagues. The symptoms sounded familiar to them too, and gave them an idea. A nearby department store was holding a going-out-of-business sale, so researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products — not exactly wedding-quality gifts, but sufficiently appealing to interest college students. When they came to the lab, the students were told they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle? A vanilla-scented candle or an almond-scented one? A candle or a T-shirt? A black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile — let’s call them the nondeciders — spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. They were asked just to give their opinion of each product and report how often they had used such a product in the last six months.

Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can. The impulse is to pull your hand out, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster; they lasted 28 seconds, less than half the 67-second average of the nondeciders. Making all those choices had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn’t an isolated effect. It was confirmed in other experiments testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from the college catalog.

For a real-world test of their theory, the lab’s researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. The researchers politely asked them to do as many as possible but said they could quit at any time. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.

Any decision, whether it’s what pants to buy or whether to start a war, can be broken down into what psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul. When Caesar reached it in 49 B.C., on his way home after conquering the Gauls, he knew that a general returning to Rome was forbidden to take his legions across the river with him, lest it be considered an invasion of Rome. Waiting on the Gaul side of the river, he was in the “predecisional phase” as he contemplated the risks and benefits of starting a civil war. Then he stopped calculating and crossed the Rubicon, reaching the “postdecisional phase,” which Caesar defined much more felicitously: “The die is cast.”

The whole process could deplete anyone’s willpower, but which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.

The experiment showed that crossing the Rubicon is more tiring than anything that happens on either bank — more mentally fatiguing than sitting on the Gaul side contemplating your options or marching on Rome once you’ve crossed. As a result, someone without Caesar’s willpower is liable to stay put. To a fatigued judge, denying parole seems like the easier call not only because it preserves the status quo and eliminates the risk of a parolee going on a crime spree but also because it leaves more options open: the judge retains the option of paroling the prisoner at a future date without sacrificing the option of keeping him securely in prison right now. Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée’s suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth.

“By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself,” Levav recalls. “I couldn’t tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became ‘What do you recommend?’ I just couldn’t take it.”

Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit (the $2,000 price made that decision easy enough), but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann, then at Christian-Albrechts University in Germany; Andreas Herrmann, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and Sheena Iyengar, of Columbia. One involved asking M.B.A. students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer.

Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the 100 fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.

Shopping can be especially tiring for the poor, who have to struggle continually with trade-offs. Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly. Because they had more money, they didn’t have to spend as much effort weighing the merits of the soap versus, say, food or medicine.

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget. In one study, he found that when the poor and the rich go shopping, the poor are much more likely to eat during the shopping trip. This might seem like confirmation of their weak character — after all, they could presumably save money and improve their nutrition by eating meals at home instead of buying ready-to-eat snacks like Cinnabons, which contribute to the higher rate of obesity among the poor. But if a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich — because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs — by the time they reach the cash register, they’ll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases.

And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.

The discovery was an accident resulting from a failed experiment at Baumeister’s lab. The researchers set out to test something called the Mardi Gras theory — the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. In place of a Fat Tuesday breakfast, the chefs in the lab at Florida State whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects who were resting in between two laboratory tasks requiring willpower. Sure enough, the delicious shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on the next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group of people who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The Mardi Gras theory looked wrong. Besides tragically removing an excuse for romping down the streets of New Orleans, the result was embarrassing for the researchers. Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.

Baumeister tried to be optimistic. Maybe the study wasn’t a failure. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless glop had done the job, but how? If it wasn’t the pleasure, could it be the calories? At first the idea seemed a bit daft. For decades, psychologists had been studying performance on mental tasks without worrying much about the results being affected by dairy-product consumption. They liked to envision the human mind as a computer, focusing on the way it processed information. In their eagerness to chart the human equivalent of the computer’s chips and circuits, most psychologists neglected one mundane but essential part of the machine: the power supply. The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods. To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.

Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Skeptics pointed out that the brain’s overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing, which doesn’t square easily with the notion of depleted energy affecting willpower. Among the skeptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually wound up at Dartmouth, where he became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behavior. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn’t see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels. To observe the process — and to see if it could be reversed by glucose — he and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter — a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food’s appeal registered more strongly while impulse control weakened — not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control — and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight. They start out the day with virtuous intentions, resisting croissants at breakfast and dessert at lunch, but each act of resistance further lowers their willpower. As their willpower weakens late in the day, they need to replenish it. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:

1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.

2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.

As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more candy but not other kinds of snacks, like salty, fatty potato chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweets. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate. A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control (that’s why it’s convenient to use in experiments), but it’s just a temporary solution. The problem is that what we identify as sugar doesn’t help as much over the course of the day as the steadier supply of glucose we would get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.

The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 percent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 percent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn’t want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 percent. After lunch it soared up to 60 percent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3:10 p.m. and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1:27 p.m., the first case after lunch, and he was rewarded with parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the judge’s glucose levels.

It’s simple enough to imagine reforms for the parole board in Israel — like, say, restricting each judge’s shift to half a day, preferably in the morning, interspersed with frequent breaks for food and rest. But it’s not so obvious what to do with the decision fatigue affecting the rest of society. Even if we could all afford to work half-days, we would still end up depleting our willpower all day long, as Baumeister and his colleagues found when they went into the field in Würzburg in central Germany. The psychologists gave preprogrammed BlackBerrys to more than 200 people going about their daily routines for a week. The phones went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, then at the University of Würzburg, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.

Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. Half the people were feeling some desire when their phones went off — to snack, to goof off, to express their true feelings to their bosses — and another quarter said they had felt a desire in the past half-hour. Many of these desires were ones that the men and women were trying to resist, and the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shouldn’t sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they had already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previously reported one.

The results suggested that people spend between three and four hours a day resisting desire. Put another way, if you tapped four or five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. The most commonly resisted desires in the phone study were the urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or playing a game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking Facebook. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it. Their success was decidedly mixed. They were pretty good at avoiding sleep, sex and the urge to spend money, but not so good at resisting the lure of television or the Web or the general temptation to relax instead of work.

We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before BlackBerrys and social psychologists, but it seems likely that many of them were under less ego-depleting strain. When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen Web sites a day and gets fatigued by the continual decision making — whether to keep working on a project, check out TMZ, follow a link to YouTube or buy something on Amazon. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year.

The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further). Like those dogs in the experiment, ego-depleted humans become more likely to get into needless fights over turf. In making decisions, they take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. Like the depleted parole judges, they become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

John Tierney (tierneylab@nytimes.com) is a science columnist for The Times. His essay is adapted from a book he wrote with Roy F. Baumeister, “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” which comes out next month.

Editor: Aaron Retica (a.retica-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

More in Magazine (1 of 16 articles)
The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy

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MIX

2011-08-11T15:28:00.002-04:00

http://8tracks.com/lxs/scatterbrain-deluxe-with-smile-insert-hooray

2011-06-28T11:09:00.001-04:00

It wouldn't be so hard to live one's life out in the state of Colorado.

2011-06-24T16:39:00.000-04:00

if typing on the keyboard could be the equivalent of playing the piano, then we would be serenaded all day every day in these offices.

The Gutai Manifesto

2011-06-24T14:48:00.000-04:00

With our present awareness, the arts we have known up to now appear to us in general to be fakes fitted out with a tremendous affectation. Let us take leave of these piles of counterfeit objects on the altars, in the palaces, in the salons and the antique shops.
These objects are in disguise and their materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance by human hand and by way of fraud, so that, instead of just presenting their own material, they take on the appearance of something else. Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us.

Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other. The material is not absorbed by the spirit. The spirit does not force the material into submission. If one leaves the material as it is, presenting it just as material, then it starts to tell us something and speaks with a mighty voice. Keeping the life of the material alive also means bringing the spirit alive, and lifting up the spirit means leading the material up to the height of the spirit.

Art is the home of the creative spirit, but never until now has the spirit created the material. The spirit has only ever created the spiritual. Certainly the spirit has always filled art with life, but this life will finally die as the times change. For all the magnificent life which existed in the art of the Renaissance, little more than its archaeological existence can be seen today.

What still keeps that vitality, even if passive, may be primitive art or the art created after Impressionism. These are things in which either, due to skillful application of the paint, the deception of the material had not quite succeeded, or else, like Pointillist or Fauvist, those pictures in which the materials, although used to reproduce nature, could not be murdered after all. Today, however, they are no longer able to call up deep emotion in us. They already belong to a world of the past.

Yet what is interesting in this respect is the novel beauty to be found in works of art and architecture of the past which have changed their appearance due to the damage of time or destruction by disasters in the course of the centuries. This is described as the beauty of decay, but is it not perhaps that beauty which material assumes when it is freed from artificial make-up and reveals its original characteristics? The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life? In this sense I pay respect to Pollock’s and Mathieu’s works in contemporary art. These works emit the loud outcry of the material, of the very oil or enamel paints themselves. These two artists grapple with the material in a way which is completely appropriate to it and which they have discovered due to their talent. This even gives the impression that they serve the material. Differentiation and integration create mysterious effects.
Recently, Tominaga Soichi and Domoto Hisao presented the activities of Mathieu and Tapi? in Informel art, which I found most interesting. I do not know all the details, but in the content presented, there were many points I could agree with. To my surprise, I also discovered that they demanded the immediate revelation of anything arising spontaneously and that they are not bound by the previously predominant forms. Despite the differences in expression compared to our own, we still find a peculiar agreement with our claim to produce something living. I am not sure, though, about the relationship between the conceptually defined pictorial elements like colours, lines, shapes, in abstract art and the true properties of the material in Informel art. As far as the denial of abstraction is concerned, the essence of their declaration was not clear to me. In any case, it is obvious to us that purely formalistic abstract art has lost its charm, so that the Gutai Art Society founded three years ago was accompanied by the slogan that they would go beyond the borders of abstract art and that the name Gutaiism (concretism) was chosen. Above all, we had to search for a centrifugal approach, instead of the centripetal one seen in abstract art.

In those days we thought, and indeed still do think today, that the most important merits of abstract art lie in the fact that it has opened up the possibility to create a new, subjective shape of space, one which really deserves the name creation.
We have decided to pursue the possibilities of pure and creative activity with great energy. We tried to combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material in order to concretize the abstract space.

When the abilities of the individual were united with the chosen material in the melting-pot of psychic automatism, we were overwhelmed by the shape of space still unknown to us, never before seen or experienced. Automatism naturally made the image which did not occur to us. Instead of relying on our own image, we have struggled to find an original method of creating that space.

The works of our members will serve as examples. Toshiko Kinoshita is actually a teacher of chemistry at a girls’ school. She created a peculiar space by allowing chemicals to react on filter paper. Although it is possible to imagine the results beforehand to a certain extent, the final results of handling the chemicals can not be established until the following day. The particular results and the shape of the material are in any case her own work. After Pollock many Pollock-imitators appeared, but Pollock’s splendour will never be extinguished. The talent of invention deserves respect.
Kazuo Shiraga placed a lump of paint on a huge piece of paper, and started to spread it around violently with his feet. For about the last two years art journalists have called this unprecedented method "the Art of committing the whole self with the body." Kazuo Shiraga had no intention at all of making this strange method known to the public. He had merely found the method which enabled him to confront and unite the material he had chosen with his own spiritual dynamics. In doing so he achieved an extremely convincing result.

In contrast to Shiraga, who works with an organic method, Shozo Shimamoto has been working with mechanical manipulations for the past few years. The spray pictures created by smashing a bottle full of paint, or the large surface made in a single moment by firing a small, hand-made cannon filled with paint by means of an acetylene gas explosion, etc., display a breathtaking freshness.

Other works which deserve mention are those of Yasuo Sumi produced with a vibrator or Toshio Yoshida, who uses only one single lump of paint. All their actions are full of a new intellectual energy which demands our respect and recognition.

The search for an original, undiscovered world also resulted in numerous works in the so-called object form. In my opinion, conditions at the annual open-air exhibitions in the city of Ashiya have contributed to this. That these works, created by artists who are confronted with many different materials, differ from the objects of Surrealism can be seen simply from the fact that the artists tend not to give them titles or to provide interpretations. The objects in Gutai art were, for example, a painted, bent iron plate (Atsuko Tanaka) or a work in hard red vinyl in the form of a mosquito net (Tsuruko Yamazaki), etc. With their characteristics, colours and forms, they were constant messages about the materials.

Our group does not impose restrictions on the art of its members, letting them make full use of their creativity. For instance, many different experiments were carried out with extraordinary activity such as art felt with the entire body, art which could only be touched, Gutai music (in which Shozo Shimamoto has been doing interesting experiments for several years) and so on. Another work by Shozo Shimamoto is like a bridge which shakes everytime you walk over it. Then a work by Saburo Murakami which is like a telescope you can enter to look up at the heavens, and an installation made of plastic bags with organic elasticity, etc. Atsuko Tanaka started with a work of flashing light bulbs which she called "Clothing." Sadamasa Motonaga worked with water, smoke, etc. Gutai art put the greatest importance on all daring steps which lead to an undiscovered world. Sometimes, at first glance, we are compared with and mistaken for Dadaism, and we ourselves fully recognize the achievements of Dadaism. But we think differently, in contrast to Dadaism, our work is the result of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life.

We shall hope that there is always a fresh spirit in our Gutai exhibitions and that the discovery of new life will call forth a tremendous scream in the material itself.

(Proclaimed in October 1956, published in December 1956 in the art journal "Geijutsu Shincho")

Jiro YOSHIHARA

The Poet...Sarah Blackman

2011-06-24T14:29:00.000-04:00

Sarah Blackman, Instructor
Email: Sarah Blackman

Sarah Blackman is a poet, fiction and creative non-fiction author originally from Washington D.C. She graduated from Washington College, summa cum laude, with a BA in English, minor Creative Writing, and earned her MFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 with a primary concentration in fiction and a secondary concentration in poetry. For the past five years she has been teaching composition, creative writing and literature at the University of Alabama where she also served as the fiction editor for the Black Warrior Review. Sarah’s poetry and prose has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, Third Coast, The National Poetry Review, American Poetry Journal, Oxford American Magazine and The Greensboro Review among others. She has been anthologized in the Poets Against the War Anthology and Best New American Voices, 2006, and was the recipient of the 2006 American Poet’s Prize and the 2007 Laureate Prize for Poetry. Currently, she is the Assistant Prose Editor for DIAGRAM magazine and is at work on a novel set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

taught art conception triad

2011-06-23T15:30:00.003-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism
autodidactic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didacticism
didacticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art%27s_sake
autotelic

stasis

2011-06-23T15:21:00.001-04:00

playlist

2011-05-29T16:11:00.001-04:00

A moment in Turkish Art

2011-05-18T19:29:00.000-04:00

The New York Times

May 18, 2011
Turkish Magnate Puts His Passion on Display
By SUSANNE FOWLER

ISTANBUL — Art collecting is often a very private passion, but the textile magnate Oner Kocabeyoglu has taken his passion very public with the exhibition “20 Turkish Artists of the XXth Century” at Santralistanbul, an art, music and education space at the tip of the Golden Horn.

The show, through June 19, features more than 430 works by 18 painters and two sculptors, accumulated by Mr. Kocabeyoglu and selected and arranged over three floors in collaboration with the writer and art critic Ferit Edgu.

At first, visitors may think they are seeing earlier works by Picasso or Klimt, but many of the paintings are by Turks who lived in France after 1940 as part of the École de Paris wave, working, studying and carousing with the Westerners creating masterpieces.

The exhibition covers a particularly interesting period for Turkish painting, Mr. Edgu said by telephone, in that it shows how Turkish artists, from a Western point of view, “caught up” to what was being painted by the Europeans. And they did this, in many cases, by packing up and moving to Paris.

But the collection itself began in 2001 when Mr. Kocabeyoglu, just 30 years old, made his first acquisition: a small gouache by Selim Turan.

“From then on, I got more and more involved,” Mr. Kocabeyoglu, whose company, Papko, manufactures clothing for retailers like Zara, said by e-mail. “I started reading about them, went around galleries. Then it became a way of life for me. I would travel to see a painting, attend a fair, or bid at an auction.” He said he would buy only “what really touched me,” until over the course of a decade he had formed a collection that is akin to an immersion course in modern Turkish painting.

He knew very little about Mr. Turan when he bought that first painting and “knew absolutely nothing” about the Turkish artists of the École de Paris, or Paris School, whose works “drew me to them with extraordinary force,” he wrote in the preface to the exhibition’s three-volume catalog. “One painting brought another, one painter another.”

“If I can express it this way,” he wrote, “they were my teachers of painting: They educated my eyes and continue to do so. Without exaggeration, I can say that the love of painting which finally became a passion gave meaning to my life, and filled a great void.”

Mr. Edgu, in his own catalog commentary, says collecting “is a passion, and like every passion, does not listen to reason. That virus that lies dormant within the individual can sometimes be awakened by a very insignificant little object, by a painting, by a line, a sculpture, a curio, a coin. And the result is as unstoppable as the run in a stocking.”

“From what I have seen, this is what happened to Oner Kocabeyoglu.”

In curating the show, Mr. Edgu divided the works into three sections: figurative paintings by artists including Fikret Mualla and Abidin Dino; pieces from the Paris School of abstract painters like Mubin Orhon, Fahrelnissa Zeid (the lone woman in the exhibition) and her son, Nejad Melih Devrim; and works by artists including Ferruh Basaga and Burhan Dogancay, under the heading of “Geometry, Light, Music and Walls.”

The editing process was a challenge. “First I went to see the whole collection, approximately 900 pieces by 40 to 50 artists,” Mr. Edgu said. After he whittled down his choices, “the collector went out and bought some more paintings, so about 40 new pieces were then added to the show.”

Mr. Kocabeyoglu said that when he began collecting art, “I was not interested in their specific value and did not buy to invest,” adding that he “was lucky in a way as these artists were not in vogue when I started collecting them, but within this period they became quite valuable” as Western interest rose in Middle Eastern and Turkish art and houses like Sotheby’s, Bonham’s and Christie’s held auctions of Turkish modern and contemporary art.

Elif Bayoglu, head of sales for contemporary Turkish art for Sotheby’s in London, said by telephone that paintings by Turkish artists of the past century have been finding new audiences and selling for record prices.

“In our sales, the most successful result came last year from Zeid,” Ms. Bayoglu said, calling her one of the most important artists of the period not only in Turkey but on the French scene. “It has extremely good provenance in that it came from the family. One of her major works, it had been estimated at £300,000 to £500,000, and sold for £657,250 to an international collector,” the equivalent of about $1,060,000.

Sotheby’s first auction of Turkish art took place in 2009, Ms. Bayoglu said, and a fourth is planned for spring 2012.

“If I didn’t tell you the works were Turkish, you probably would assume they were French, or international,” she said. “The quality was very high and they did exhibit in Paris and around Europe with the rest of the international modern artists of the period. Most of these artists have died and the supply of good quality works is very limited, which is also why they are very valuable and very rare to come by.”

Some pieces are acquired through the artist’s relatives, she said, “but for the most part, they come from collectors who bought back in 1940, ’50, or ’60 and held on to them. But now with the values rising, are coming into the market.”

“Collectors held on to some of these for 50 years,” she said, “and it’s amazing to see works you didn’t know and learn where they’ve been hiding. It’s very exciting: You just don’t know where, or what else, has been hiding.”

But the first thing exhibit visitors will see upon entering the main gallery space is portraits of the artists themselves, taken over the years by the renowned Turkish-Armenian photographer Ara Guler.

“I was in Paris between 1950 and 1960,” Mr. Edgu said, “and all of the painters in this exposition were my friends, so I have a deep affinity for them and their work. Ara Guler was also a friend of mine from those days. And he has always been passionate about taking pictures of artists, Turkish or foreign, even Picasso and Dalí. Knowing this, I figured he had portraits of all these people in his archives. I was right. Of the 20, only one was missing, and luckily he was still alive, so Ara was able to shoot him, too.”

Mr. Kocabeyoglu advises collectors of Turkish art “to go about it carefully. There should definitely be passion but also selective choice and a lot of self-education.” The sole purpose of the exhibition at Santralistanbul, he wrote, was “nothing more than to share it with lovers of art” and to “repay in a small way my debt to these painters who have opened the doors to a new world for me and brought me much pleasure.”

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:( book :)

2011-05-15T22:22:00.001-04:00

money

2011-04-18T11:47:00.003-04:00

job searching is a somewhat soul-less activity. it feels soul-less bc there about a zillion things i would love to do and most of the doors refuse to open.

Sonia Delaunay--NYTimes, Roberta Smith

2011-03-18T09:57:00.000-04:00

March 17, 2011
Swatches Illuminate a Painter’s Other Art
By ROBERTA SMITH

It is the rare museum exhibition that bets most of the house on fabric swatches — or, more politely, textile samples — and succeeds. This is the impressive achievement of “Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay,” a sumptuous and enlightening show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum that may change forever the way you look at dry goods.

Orchestrated by Matilda McQuaid, the museum’s deputy curatorial director, and Susan Brown, its assistant curator, “Color Moves” examines the more practical side of the multi-faceted achievement of Delaunay, the pioneering modernist painter (1885-1979). In the process, the show raises interesting questions about painting’s relationship to other two-dimensional, implicitly pictorial arts, including textiles, carpets and rugs, and even suggests that, for all the historical significance of Delaunay’s abstract paintings, she may have been in her best artistic form when designing fabric.

With her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Sonia Delaunay originated the especially radiant French brand of Cubo-Futurism that their friend Guillaume Apollinaire named Orphism in 1910 . But there is much more to her achievement than painting.

“I have lived my art,” she declared on more than one occasion, and indeed she had. Adamantly ignoring the stifling distinctions among the categories of fine, decorative and utilitarian art, she painted, sewed, drew, embroidered, stenciled and above all designed her way through a long, eventful life, guided by an inborn faith in color’s visionary force and a survivor’s instinct for adaptation. An important artistic turning point that confirmed her interest in the clash of forms and color that she and Robert called “simultaneity” was simply a patchwork coverlet she made for their son in 1911; in 1962 she proudly wrote a friend that it was “nowadays shown in art galleries as one of the first abstract paintings.”

Her life seems to have been a combination of luck and incredible drive. Born Sarah Stern in Gradizhsk, a town near Odessa in Ukraine, into a Jewish laborer’s family, she was adopted at the age of 5 by her maternal uncle, Henri Terk, a wealthy lawyer in St. Petersburg. She grew up as Sonia Terk in a multilingual, Russian-bourgeois, Jewish-intellectual milieu. Life included regular trips to Europe and a summer house in Finland.

Delaunay’s precocious artistic talent prompted her adoptive parents to send her to Germany to study art in 1903. Within a few years she was ensconced in Paris, just in time to have her affinity for color corroborated by the paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin and Rousseau, as well as Matisse and the Fauves, whose lessons she quickly absorbed. Her parents urged a return to St. Petersburg to make a proper marriage. Instead she made a marriage of convenience with Wilhelm Uhde, a homosexual German art dealer who gave her an exhibition in 1908 and introduced her to the Parisian avant-garde. The union turned inconvenient once she began a love affair with Robert Delaunay, whom she married in December 1910, three months after her divorce from Uhde and two months before the birth of her son.

In 1917, while the Delaunays were sitting out World War I in Portugal, the Russian Revolution wiped out Sonia’s allowance, and she put down her paintbrushes and turned to work as a designer in order to support her family. In essence, she began to funnel her abstract vocabulary into an array of endeavors that ranged widely in terms of economic efficacy.

For the fashion houses bearing her name — first in Madrid and then in Paris — she designed striking dresses, scarves, hats and coats (including one made for Gloria Swanson). She designed costumes for Diaghilev’s dancers in Madrid and, later, in the 1920s, for Dadaist evenings in Paris, collaborating with Tristan Tzara on garments festooned with his poetry. She tried her hand at tapestry, rugs and bookbinding. By the late ’20s it was clear that her most successful endeavor would be fabric design, especially for Metz & Company, a Dutch department store headquartered in Amsterdam.

Delaunay’s impressive prolificacy is still being sorted out. The last museum survey of her work in this country, in 1980, concentrated on her paintings, in an attempt to free her art from her husband’s shadow, and largely ignored the fabric designs that she continued to make even after she returned to painting in the late ’30s.

The Cooper-Hewitt exhibition, like a series of recent shows in Europe, takes the opposite tack. Its brimming installation is sprinkled with a handful of artworks — a bright painting from 1946, several gouaches — and a small but vivid selection of garments and accessories, including a radiant passel of boldly geometric scarves. Swanson’s coat is here; its stepped designs in shades of black and sandstone conjure up Navajo art and its desert environment. So is a section from another coat that might almost be a wall hanging by some embroidery-obsessed contemporary artist.

There are photographs of pleasantly robust fashion models (by today’s standards) in Delaunay designs, posing beside a Delaunay-decorated Citroen B12. Also on hand is a copy of the 1913 “Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jehanne of France,” a six-foot-long fold-out poem by Blaise Cendrars to which she added stencils of prismatic color squares that influenced Paul Klee.

But the show’s primary energy source is a group of some 90 small, lively gouache studies and their equally vibrant commercial results: hand-printed silks, velvets and cottons, represented by more than 120 textile samples laid out in large vitrines. It is especially fascinating to see the same patterns repeated in different color schemes.

With consummate vitality the assorted motifs of the gouaches and the fabrics variously revisit, amplify and presage much of the history of modern painting. Delaunay’s designs of the 1920s tend to be geometric and boldly scaled with considerable use of diagonals, diamond patterns and zigzags. You can see her picking up ideas from the art around her: in one instance the zigzags suggest Brancusi’s “Endless Column.” There are moments of loosely rendered stripes — horizontal, vertical, undulant — that might almost be paintings by Mary Heilmann; a black and green arrangement of concentric patterns suggests the work of James Siena.

These designs were often produced by her workshop, Atelier Simultané, and sold under her Paris fashion label, Maison Delaunay. She closed both businesses after the stock-market crash and began to concentrate almost exclusively on textile design, working most closely with Joseph de Leeuw, the farsighted head of Metz & Company. De Leeuw also commissioned designs for furniture from Gerrit Rietveld and for textiles and rugs from Bart van der Leck, examples of which are included in this exhibition.

Delaunay’s fabric designs from the ’30s and beyond, which dominate the show’s second half, are in many ways more conventional and intimate in scale, more appropriate perhaps to ladies’ garments. But they also have an irresistible sprightliness. Their dashed-off lines and shapes retain a remarkable sense of the artist’s hand. They give you the feeling that, confronted with a blank sheet of paper, Delaunay was rarely at a loss. She wrote of devising 10 or 20 designs at a sitting.

In her designs for Metz & Company, Delaunay alternated fruitfully between the organic and the geometric. In many of her floral and leaf designs she is in some ways effectively cultivating ground broken by Matisse. In others she adopts to simple grids and color bars, sometimes absorbing some of van der Leck’s austerity and sometimes using repeating dots and dashes in ways that look forward to Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. But many designs negotiate brilliant resolutions of the abstract and the natural, as when she intimates fields of blossoms with clusters of buoyant spirals or when she resorts exclusively to blurry, horizontal strokes.

In her fabric designs and scarves especially Delaunay practiced painting, and drawing, by another name. For all their radiant colors, her actual paintings can seem a tad bombastic, belabored and fuzzy compared with the refinement and elegant efficiency of her textile designs.

Marshalling its numerous fabric swatches, and concentrating on the usable, livable side of her art, the Cooper-Hewitt’s show invites us to rethink the standard hierarchy of art mediums while revealing Delaunay’s talent at its most protean. It is quite a sight.

“Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay” is on view through June 5 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan; (212) 849-8400, cooperhewitt.org.

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Close

mysteries of cambodia

2011-03-16T17:29:00.001-04:00

mysteries of cambodia

2011-03-16T17:29:00.000-04:00

A.W.

2011-03-16T17:24:00.000-04:00

Thailand Mixed Up

2011-03-16T17:19:00.001-04:00

Phuket in Phlashes

2011-03-16T17:15:00.001-04:00

Phuket

2011-03-16T14:42:00.003-04:00

Beautiful Cambodia

2011-03-10T21:38:00.001-05:00

Images from Bokor Hill Station, Cambodia

2011-02-28T00:08:00.000-05:00

Istanbul Art, Pt 2

2010-12-10T04:48:00.001-05:00

Art in Istanbul...street and gallery

2010-12-10T04:42:00.002-05:00

There is definitely a thriving art scene in Istanbul. It isn't huge, but it is present and will probably grow. The very upscale galleries are some of the most unfriendly and pretentious I have EVER been in. I guess they feel they have something to prove. On the other hand, the actual artists I met were interested, interesting, engaging, open, and generally down to earth.

gosh darn perdy things w shitty pics

2010-10-23T14:28:00.001-04:00

whorx

2010-10-23T14:21:00.000-04:00

"Agnes Martin" by me

2010-10-04T06:23:00.000-04:00

Ed Ruscha

2010-10-01T03:35:00.002-04:00

I am the anti-Ed ruscha...with my work. nothing against the man himself.

http://www.edruscha.com/site/biography.cfm

abandoned bath house in Quba, Azerbaijan

2010-02-15T09:48:00.000-05:00

wall of words: playing the illusion game

2010-02-15T09:22:00.001-05:00

one of my azerbaijan doors

2010-02-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

NYTimes article: Post-Minimal to the Max

2010-02-15T02:22:00.000-05:00

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: February 10, 2010
TO paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there is a whole lot of art making going on right now. All different kinds. But you’d hardly know it from the contemporary art that New York’s major museums have been serving up lately, and particularly this season. Skip to next paragraph
The current exhibition of Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art along with the recent ones of Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum and of Urs Fischer at the New Museum have generated a lot of comment pro and con. So has the Tino Sehgal performance exhibition now on view in an otherwise emptied-out Guggenheim rotunda. But regardless of what you think about these artists individually, their shows share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note. After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.
The goal in organizing museum exhibitions, as in collecting, running a gallery and — to cite the most obvious example — being an artist, should be individuation and difference, finding a voice of your own. Instead we’re getting example after example of squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous takes on that unruly early ’70s mix of Conceptual, Process, Performance, installation and language-based art that is most associated with the label Post-Minimalism. Either that or we’re getting exhibitions of the movement’s most revered founding fathers: since 2005, for example, the Whitney has mounted exhibitions of Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham. I liked these shows, but that’s not the point. We cannot live by the de-materialization — or the slick re-materialization — of the art object alone.
After 40 years in which we’ve come to understand that dominant styles like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop are at best gross simplifications of their periods, it often feels as though an agreed-upon master narrative is back in place.
What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.
Why hasn’t there been a major New York show of Philip Taaffe, whose layered, richly colored paintings are actually taking the medium of painting in a direction it hasn’t been before? Why has a retrospective of the painter Chris Ofili — with his volatile mix of color, pattern, popular culture and identity politics — opened at the Tate Britain but not yet been scheduled for a New York museum? And why not see what a survey of the work of an artist as endlessly varied and yet dauntingly consistent as Joe Zucker — a veteran of the Post-Minimalist outfield — might look like? If the public can handle an empty museum as art, it can deal with some paintings made of cotton balls. I, for one, would rather see a tightly organized overview of Mr. Zucker’s work than Marlene Dumas’s warmed-over Expressionism, which was recently displayed in bulk at the Museum of Modern Art.
How did we get to this point? In the 1970’s the Whitney used to be committed to showing artists from across the United States; they were called regional artists in those days. That term has thankfully fallen out of fashion, but the artists have all but disappeared from museum walls. The Modern, for its part, used to present several works each by 10 to 15 artists under the rubric of its “Americans” show.
But a combination of forces threatens to herd all of our major art institutions into the same aesthetic pen. The need to raise and make money sends curators hunting for artists with international star power who work big at least some of the time, deploy multiple entertaining mediums and make for good ad campaigns (like the self-portrait featured in the MoMA ads for its coming exhibition of William Kentridge). The small show devoted to an artist who doesn’t have an immense reputation and worldwide market becomes rarer and rarer.
The consistent exposure to the big-statement solo exhibition becomes self-perpetuating, as these shows condition not only curators but the public to expect more of the same. I realize to my horror, for example, that the idea of seeing a survey of contemporary painting at the Modern makes me squirm. It would look — I don’t know — too messy and emotional, too flat, too un-MoMA.
The New Museum is a notable exception to all this. Compared with other museums in town, it deserves credit for trying to sum up recent trends outside latter-day Post-Minimalism. “Unmonumental,” its inaugural exhibition in its new building, explored recent developments in collage and assemblage, while “After Nature” plunged into a range of mediums in pursuit of a humanistic theme. Both shows sprawled to the point of incoherence but were still ambitious attempts to account for swaths of contemporary art.
The Guggenheim doesn’t play it as safe as the Modern or the Whitney. With its Sehgal show, as with its “Theanyspacewhatever” exhibition in 2008, it acts like a place where anything can happen. But shows where we encounter an artist’s single-minded, highly personal pursuit that proceeds one object at a time tend to feature past masters. The Guggenheim’s recent, fantastic Kandinsky exhibition was an example (as was the Modern’s Ensor show). Yet there are plenty of artists working this way now. They may not be making history (or entertainment, either), but they are still making really good art whose very unfolding has its own integrity and is exciting to see.
I wouldn’t have a problem with these shows of the gods and godlings of Post-Minimalism if they were balanced and mixed with other stuff that is completely different. But that other stuff is largely missing in New York museums, though there is plenty of it around.
It is amazing that some aspect of Laura Owens’s or Dana Schutz’s work is not thought worth some kind of small, well-organized museum show. The same goes for Lari Pittman, who could sustain something larger. European artists, who bring a little more wit and accessibility to Post-Minimalism, include Rosemarie Trockel and Fischli & Weiss. Someone should do a show of the early paintings of Peter Doig.
And there is more demolition work to be done on the master narratives of the recent past. It would be interesting to see how the eccentric California painter Roy De Forest holds up, what with the several returns of representation and of painting since he emerged. Similarly, the midcentury West Coast painter David Park — more than Richard Diebenkorn — could do with another New York retrospective. He’s the kind of artist who can light a fire under a young artist and also teach the public a great deal about looking at painting, a skill we seem to be in danger of losing.
The paintings of John Wesley, an elder statesman of alternative Pop Art, were seen in quantity at the Venice Biennale; he had a retrospective at P.S. 1 in 2000 but has never had a show of any size in a Manhattan museum. Other deserving painters who emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, often working small and usually beyond the pale of Abstract Expressionism, include Alice Trumbull Mason, Beauford Delaney, Steve Wheeler, Loren MacIver and Lois Dodd — who, by the way, is still making art.
You’d never know from looking at museums that figurative painting, running the gamut from realist to quasi-expressionist, is on the rise. (Speaking of which, if some New York curator didn’t see Nicole Eisenman’s recent show at Leo Koenig and at least consider doing a show, we are in trouble.) Some kind of local museum attention could be given to the realist painter Rackstraw Downes, the abstract painters Thomas Nozkowski, Larry Poons and Stanley Whitney, or to an artist like Dona Nelson, who refuses to commit to either camp and whose eccentricities are a good match for Joe Zucker’s. These painters seem slated to become the forgotten artists of the future. David Bates is having a perfectly interesting career without any attention from the New York art establishment, thank you very much.
New York missed out on a recent retrospective of the cantankerous political surrealist Peter Saul. A survey of the work of the painter Jim Nutt — our era’s crazed answer to the Northern Renaissance — being organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, does not yet have a New York stop. And it has finally been determined that the long overdue survey of the abstract ceramicist Ken Price that has been undertaken by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will come to the Metropolitan Museum. I’m glad it will be seen here, but the fact that the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Modern could not fit it into their schedules shows an appalling narrowness of vision. I don’t care how many scheduling conflicts can be cited.
If this sounds harsh, let me also say that I think curators of contemporary art in New York museums have some of the toughest jobs in the art world. They rarely seem able to act on their own without some kind of committee oversight and are under unbelievable pressure to succeed at the box office. Museum gallery space is at a premium and is almost uniformly unforgiving. Excepting the idiosyncratic flexibility of the Guggenheim’s ramp, there is barely a decent gallery among our main museums, although we seem to have stopped talking about the effect this has on curators, their exhibitions and thus on the seeing and comprehending of art.
New York museum curators also have to compete with New York galleries, which are out there discovering new and overlooked artists and — increasingly — mounting invaluable historical shows. At the same time the amount of inspiration and information curators can gain from galleries is unparalleled. However, gathering it requires spending more time seeing shows beyond the six or eight galleries whose artists get most of the big museum shows these days. The idea that a moment’s most visible artists are concentrated in a handful of powerful galleries is only superficially true. By now we know too much not to willfully work against this notion.
Museum curators need to think less about an artist’s career, its breakthroughs and its place in the big picture and more in terms of an artist’s life’s work pursued over time with increasing concentration and singularity.
They have a responsibility to their public and to history to be more ecumenical, to do things that seem to come from left field. They owe it to the public to present a balanced menu that involves painting as well as video and photography and sculpture. They need to think outside the hive-mind, both distancing themselves from their personal feelings to consider what’s being wrongly omitted and tapping into their own subjectivity to show us what they really love.
These things should be understood by now: The present is diverse beyond knowing, history is never completely on anyone’s side, and what we ignore today will be excavated later and held against us the way we hold previous oversights against past generations.
Message to curators: Whatever you’re doing right now, do something else next.

2010-01-25T07:19:00.001-05:00

Insanity
Is doing the same wrong thing
Over and over again

This is how you know
You are
Insanity

Walk into the trap
Like the gap in the floor
Has never meant
A single prayer
Sent out towards
The monotheistic ear

Each time I think
The peak is near
Each time the cliff
Gives way
And it is just a video game

How many lives do I have?

Instinct is a shoelace
Either tied, knotted, laced, or straight
My feet are in step
And I fall in step
Knowing
Where to
Fall for
Maximum impact

Traverse an unweeded path
Hoping for Kerouac
But wiping with poison oak
That creeps up with tentacles
That wrap around your testicles
And call them to order

Once I pop this pill
I forget about the crash
And once I enter here
I suppose I’ve fully come

art scene in istanbul

2010-01-11T23:23:00.000-05:00

IstanbulThe reputation of Istanbul’s contemporary art scene has been steadily growing in recent years, with the Web site ArtKnowledgeNews.com recently calling it “one of the most innovative in the world.” That reputation is bound to be burnished even more this year, now that Istanbul has been named the 2010 European Capital of Culture (a designation it shares with Essen, Germany, and Pecs, Hungary).
There will be a series of events, gallery shows and stage performances throughout the city to mark the occasion. (A complete list of events can be found at en.istanbul2010.org/index.htm.)
But one of the best ways to get a crash course in what Istanbul’s leading artists are up to right now is to spend some time wandering around the Misir Apartments (311/4 Istiklal Cadessi), right on the busy pedestrian thoroughfare that cuts through the trendy Beygolu neighborhood. Inside this elegant, early-20th-century building are some of the city’s most cutting-edge art venues, like Galerist (www.galerist.com.tr) and Gallerie Nev (www.galerinevistanbul.com)
Afterward, head to the rooftop terrace and have a drink at 360 Istanbul, a stylish bar and restaurant that offers stunning views of the city’s skyline (360istanbul.com). — Stuart Emmrich
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/travel/10places.html?pagewanted=2&em

one definition of type

2010-01-10T23:58:00.000-05:00

A small block of metal or wood bearing a raised letter or character on the upper end that leaves a printed impression when inked and pressed on paper.

gsap3

2010-01-10T06:47:00.000-05:00

georgian street art part 2

2010-01-10T06:38:00.000-05:00

tbilisi street art 1

2010-01-10T06:22:00.001-05:00

art on the streets

2010-01-10T05:00:00.000-05:00

for the street

2010-01-10T04:52:00.001-05:00

2010-01-10T04:08:00.000-05:00

Old
Being the hanging clouds
Breaking up light
Redistributing it across me
In shards
Pinching my skin and lifting it
In twenty different
Tangible
Directions

New
Being the lift off
And farewell to the ground
But also the
Come down
And greeting to the ground
Who teaches me
How to stand all over again

Gorky Exhibit in Philly

2009-10-26T01:28:00.000-04:00

From Mimic to Master of Invention

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 22, 2009
PHILADELPHIA — Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century. Skip to next paragraph
Before that he was many other artists. He was Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, Miró, André Masson and Roberto Matta, more or less in that order, as he assiduously and almost selflessly emulated a succession of existing personal styles to teach himself how to be a painter.
This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape. Gorky’s protracted apprenticeship was followed by distinctive wonders: the rustling and throbbing landscape in “Water of the Flowery Mill”; the penumbral, narcotized mood piece called “Soft Night”; the meat-colored “Agony,” which suggests a slab of burned flesh and dates from 1947, the year before Gorky died.
What’s surprising about the Philadelphia show, though, is how much it feels of a piece, even if it doesn’t look like it. Stylistically, eclecticism rules as you move from Gorky playing Cézanne, to Gorky doing Cubism, to Gorky the Surrealist. Constant throughout, though, is an impression, as strong and invisible as a force field, of physical and psychic concentration.
It radiates from meticulously drawn, plotted, eraser-smudged and redrawn studies for paintings and from the painted, scraped-down, piled up, scratched-into surfaces of the paintings themselves, which betray revisions made to incorporate new formal and technical information that Gorky gleaned from prowling museums, poring over art magazines and talking with artists.
And much as he was one of the great absorbers in art, Gorky was also one of the great pretenders in life. The two roles, both about survival through invention, are closely related. Just as he changed aesthetic identities, he changed personal histories.
He was born Vosdanik Adoian in Armenia near the Turkish border, probably around 1902; he gave different dates at different times. His father, a trader and carpenter, emigrated to the United States in 1908 to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army, leaving behind a wife, Shushan, and children.
In a 1912 studio photograph a moony, preteenage Gorky poses beside his mother, who is seated and wearing an apronlike gown embroidered with flowers. The portrait was probably made to be sent to America, to remind the absent husband and father that his family was waiting to join him, though for one of them this would prove impossible.
By 1915 the Turkish government initiated what became a systematic genocide of the Armenian population in and near Turkey. Gorky and his family became refugees, often on the move, repeatedly subjected to exposure and food shortages. His mother sickened , and in 1919, at 39, she died of starvation in his arms. A year later he made it to the United States, first staying with his father in New England, but soon striking out on his own. At which point the self-invention began.
He was no longer Armenian. He was now a Russian named Arshile Gorky, a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky. He was a painter; he had, precociously, already studied with Kandinsky and exhibited in Paris. Far from being a shy, bookish, provincial youth, he was a cosmopolite, a bohemian genius prepared to cut a swath through the cultural world of New York, where he settled in 1924.
His story was, of course, full of holes. Did he even know that “Maxim Gorky” was itself a pseudonym for a writer named Alexei Peshkov? It didn’t matter. This was America. You could be what you wanted to be. And what he wanted to be — this is the core of truth in his story — was an artist, even if one very much in the making.
The retrospective, organized by Michael R. Taylor, curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum, scrupulously tracks that making, or self-making. Among the Gorkys in the opening gallery, for example, are a view of Staten Island rooftops rendered à la Cézanne, graphite portraits in the manner of Ingres, and Picassoid deconstructions of a Greenwich Village studio interior.
Certain early pictures, though, fall outside the program of self-training through imitation. In 1926 Gorky began two large paintings based on the 1912 photograph of himself and his mother. He paints the figures essentially as they are in the photo, no distortion, no fooling around. Stylistically, Picasso and Matisse are there as he paints, but they’re also beside point. Gorky doesn’t subject himself to their styles, but uses them to shape a fixed and talismanic memory of his life, his real life.
He isn’t trying to be some other artist. He’s trying to be himself, and at this stage in his career the effort is awkward. Both paintings have clearly been thought and rethought countless times, and with every rethinking seem to have become harder to grasp, less complete. In the end he left them, like the weaving on Penelope’s loom, unfinished, as if waiting for the sitters to return and resume their places.
Although he kept one of these paintings with him all his life, he appears to have stopped work on both around the time of his final stylistic immersion, into Surrealism. This began around 1939, when World War II drove Surrealist artists to New York, among the first to arrive being Matta, from whom Gorky learned to thin his paint to a wash and to loosen up his hand.
The show heavily emphasizes the Surrealist influence on Gorky, on the grounds that it has been underestimated, even denied in the past. But the influence is obvious and acknowledged now, so the issue feels overplayed in the catalog and in a large gallery given over to Gorky’s Surrealist phase.
The mere presence of the great painting titled “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb,” with its slaughterhouse motifs and air of monstrous jollity, would have clinched the point. But here it has been surrounded by many — and I would say too many —related pictures, all hung against a chocolate-brown band that zigzags over the wall. The idea is to suggest Surrealist zaniness. The effect is to diminish the dynamism of the art and make the wall labels jump out.
With Surrealism, Gorky once more proved himself an ardent student. He examined his model, mastered its particularities, took it in and made something surpassingly personal of it. What that movement gave Gorky was spontaneity, and after decades of discipline he was ready to make optimum use of it, to let art and emotion flow together. In many paintings of the early 1940s they do, and almost for the first time you sense his work relax into joy.
In 1941 he married a woman he adored. In 1943 they had a daughter. His career was going well. He was spending months in the countryside, rediscovering, or imagining, the love he had felt for the farmlands of Armenia as a child. Many of his marvelous abstract landscapes — bathed in autumnal Keatsian mist, their forms as pulpy and sweet as peeled ripe fruit — come from this time.
But emotionally more ambiguous paintings do too. “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” dates to 1944. So does “How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life,” another memory painting, but in this case abstract and chaotic, like a close-up, baby-at-the-breast view of fraying fabric.
In 1946 Gorky’s life started to unraveled with shocking force. His studio burned, with a significant loss of work. He had debilitating, humiliating surgery for rectal cancer and sank into a depression. Over the next year his marriage foundered; his wife had a fling with his mentor-friend Matta. In 1948, after losing the use of his painting arm in a car accident, Gorky hanged himself.
Knowing about this end naturally darkens our view of all that came before, but darkness really was there early with his family’s life as refugees and his mother’s death, and despite the relocations and reinventions, it never withdrew. What kept life manageable was art, and specifically the practice of art, a practice that Gorky turned into an art, a kind of yoga of learning, looking, focusing, doing, redoing, humbly, pridefully, hourly, daily.
Creation was salvation. That sounds romantic, but why put it any other way? Gorky was a Romantic, though that only becomes fully evident in his art at the end. If the Philadelphia show seems to take a long time to get to the end, the great stuff there is worth the wait. And besides, you’re getting some of it all along the way, in art that is all one thing, all one life.
“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” runs through Jan. 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. It then travels to the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Hume, Belief

2009-08-18T05:19:00.000-04:00

Belief requires that there also be some fact present to the senses or memory, which gives “strength and solidity to the related idea.” In these circumstances, belief is as unavoidable as is the feeling of a passion; it is “a species of natural instinct,” “the necessary result of placing the mind” in this situation.

Belief is “a peculiar sentiment, or lively conception produced by habit” that results from the manner in which ideas are conceived, and “in their feeling to the mind.” It is “nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain” (EHU, 49). Belief is thus “more an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures” (T, 183), so that “all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation” (T, 103). This should not be surprising, given that belief is “so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures.” “It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency” than to trust it “to the fallacious deductions of our reason” (EHU, 55). Hume's “sceptical solution” thus gives a descriptive alternative, appropriately “independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding,” to philosophers' attempts to account for our causal “reasonings” by appeal to reason and argument. For the other notions in the definitional circle, “either we have no idea of force or energy, and these words are altogether insignificant, or they can mean nothing but that determination of the thought, acquir'd by habit, to pass from the cause to its usual effect” (T, 657).

beautiful sad child

2009-08-15T02:11:00.001-04:00

Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy

2009-08-01T23:39:00.000-04:00

First published Wed Jun 28, 2006
Zen aims at a perfection of personhood. To this end, sitting meditation called “za-zen” is employed as a foundational method of prāxis across the different schools of this Buddha-Way, through which the Zen practitioner attempts to embody non-discriminatory wisdom vis-à-vis the meditational experience known as “satori” (enlightenment). A process of discovering wisdom culminates in the experiential dimension in which the equality of thing-events is apprehended in discerning them. The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is seen in its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday “life-world” when associating with one's self, people, and nature. The everyday “life-world” for most people is an evanescent transforming stage in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety. Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm by practically achieving an holistic perspective in cognition, so that the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with a stillness of mind, a life of tending toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature. For this reason, the Zen practitioner is required to embody freedom expressive of the original human nature. Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it “here and now,” for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencing before one's eyes or under one's foot is no other than an expression of suchness, i.e., it is such that it is showing its primordial mode of being. It also understands a specificity of thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, and vice versa. As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” i.e., “positionless position,” where “not two” signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while “not one” designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen's achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither “not one” nor “not two”).

Watsuji Tetsuro

2009-08-01T23:08:00.000-04:00

Influenced by Heidegger, Watsuji's Climate and Culture is both an appreciation of, and a critique of Heidegger. In particular, Watsuji argues that Heidegger under-emphasizes spatiality, and over-emphasizes temporality. Watsuji contends that had Heidegger equally emphasized spatiality, it would have tied him more firmly to the human world where we interact, both fruitfully and negatively. We are inextricably social, connected in so many ways, and ethics is the study of these social connections and positive ways of interacting.

Human beings have a dual-nature, as individuals, and as member of various social groupings. We face each other in the betweenness between us, where we can either maintain a safe distance, or enter into intimate relationships of worth. Fundamental to positive, intimate relationships is trust, and trustworthiness.

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC)

2009-07-18T04:48:00.000-04:00

Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice, commonly abbreviated ZFC, is the standard form of axiomatic set theory and as such is the most common foundation of mathematics. It has a single primitive ontological notion, that of a hereditary well-founded set, and a single ontological assumption, namely that all individuals in the universe of discourse are such sets.
ZFC is a one-sorted theory in first-order logic. The signature has equality and a single primitive binary relation, set membership, which is usually denoted ∈. The formula a ∈ b means that the set a is a member of the set b (which is also read, "a is an element of b" or "a is in b").
Most of the ZFC axioms state that particular sets exist. For example, the axiom of pairing says that given any two sets a and b there is a new set {a, b} containing exactly a and b. Other axioms describe properties of set membership. A goal of the ZFC axioms is that each axiom should be true if interpreted as a statement about the collection of all sets in the von Neumann universe (also known as the cumulative hierarchy).
The metamathematics of ZFC has been extensively studied. Landmark results in this area established the independence of the continuum hypothesis from ZFC, and of the axiom of choice from the remaining ZFC axioms.

continuum hypothesis, Cantor

2009-07-18T04:47:00.001-04:00

In mathematics, the continuum hypothesis (abbreviated CH) is a hypothesis, advanced by Georg Cantor in 1877, about the possible sizes of infinite sets. It states:
There is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and that of the real numbers.

socrates, glaucon, polemarchus

2009-04-30T00:08:00.000-04:00

I - Socrates - Glaucon
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I WENT down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.
I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.
Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus appeared, and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus the son of Nicias, and several others who had been at the procession.
SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS - GLAUCON - ADEIMANTUS
Polemarchus said to me: I perceive, Socrates, that you and our companion are already on your way to the city.
You are not far wrong, I said.
But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
Of course.
And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are.
May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to let us go?
But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.
Certainly not, replied Glaucon.
Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.
Adeimantus added: Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?
With horses! I replied: That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them one to another during the race?
Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will he celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be perverse.
Glaucon said: I suppose, since you insist, that we must.
Very good, I replied.

late picasso exhibit

2009-04-20T02:05:00.001-04:00

Going All Out, Right to the End
By ROBERTA SMITH
In the main, Picasso only got better. That’s the take-away from the staggering exhibition of Picasso’s late paintings and prints at the Gagosian Gallery.
One of the best shows to be seen in New York since the turn of the century, it proves that contrary to decades of received opinion, Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark. For some, his decline began as early as 1914, when he and Braque went their separate ways after inventing Cubism. Others deferred until the arrival of the bourgeois Olga Khokhlova in 1917, or the pliant Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927, or the end of World War II. But the mid-1950s have been generally accepted as the point of no return.
That stance has steadily eroded over the last 25 years, and should finally bite the dust here. The 50 paintings and 49 prints on view demonstrate that in the decade preceding his death in 1973 at 91, Picasso painted, as usual, for his life. But his life was drawing to a close, and pressure was mounting. He diverted it into paintings whose emotional rawness, physical immediacy and often wicked pictorial joyfulness were not quite like anything he had made before. They may not have changed the course of art, but give them time. First they deserve their due.
This is not the first big exhibition of late Picasso. But it may come at an unusually receptive time, when art is wide open, and the understanding of what it takes to be an artist has gotten a bit fuzzy around the edges. Or perhaps this show represents an unusually rigorous sampling of the last decade, having been chosen by John Richardson, Picasso’s formidable biographer, and superbly installed by him in the elegant, austere, sky-lighted galleries in Gagosian’s West 21st Street space in Chelsea.
Like the retrospective of Piero Manzoni that recently filled Gagosian’s West 24th Street emporium, “Picasso: Mosqueteros” should make any museum glow green with envy. And it looks better than just about any museum could manage. Free of wall texts and free of charge, it assumes that the public knows how to look at art and keeps distractions to a minimum.
As befits its title, the selection abounds with paintings of big-headed musketeers and matadors. Extravagantly clothed and mustachioed, they present an opportunity for excoriating self-portraiture disguised as caricature, while also dueling with past masters like Velázquez, Manet and Rembrandt.
There are thick-limbed figures of several kinds: entangled lovers whose mouths sometimes merge in desperate kisses; female nudes folded this way and that, with boxy feet and pebble-round toes; and a few male nudes that recall Cézanne’s bather in the Museum of Modern Art or the kouroi statues of archaic Greece, here seen in a golden Arcadian light heated to a brash egg-yolk yellow.
In this show the late paintings often have a fierce, antic urgency that recalls “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Their scale and surfaces can be jarring, too close for comfort from any range. The figures have prominent black eyes that resemble those of the demoiselles, as well as of Picasso himself (as Mr. Richardson pointed out in a recent newspaper article). But this late style is softer and more fluid, a combination of painting, drawing and calligraphy that verges on automatism.
It makes as much sense to call it deconstructionist as Expressionist. The images disintegrate and recombine as you look, keeping every particle of paint and every scintilla of gesture in view while often cracking wise. In one of the show’s most haunting images, the terrified, seemingly flayed face of a matador is rendered in offhand smearings of lavender. The bullfighter may be looking at death; the surface laughs in its face.
In his catalog essay Mr. Richardson writes that Picasso said that technique was important, “on condition that one has so much ... that it completely ceases to exist.” But according to a short film playing in a small side gallery, Picasso also said that “unless your picture goes wrong, it will be no good.”
Some of the paintings are thickly built in caroming wet-on-wet strokes and stabs, as if aping the deft flourishes of the old masters. A prime example is the lavish “Portrait of a Man With Sword and Flower,” which reinterprets one of Velázquez’s dwarfs. His comic legs are so splayed that the soles of his nailed boots point in opposite directions; his undulant grisaille face, taut and knowing, has fish-skeleton eyebrows.
Other works are so sketchy as to be more bare canvas than paint. The light-to-heavy range is spelled out across four relatively pale gray and blue paintings on one wall; they offer female nudes, alone or not, and a bust of a beruffled court painter in profile. They culminate in an image of a nude accompanied by a musketeer and, behind them, a large phallic finger that may make you rub your eyes once or twice.
The gallery of etchings makes a perfect foil for the paintings. They show Picasso shaking this alchemical medium to its foundations, often by introducing a lithography crayon, while ransacking history even more actively. The frequently ribald costume dramas or studio scenes (or both) that result are rendered in a manner that can be as dainty and refined as the paintings are not.
Especially telling are two states of an etching at the end of a long wall. They depict an artist gussied up like Rembrandt working from the model; but the main effect is a dense squall of scribbles, spirals and scratches that nearly obliterates them. It is as if the pressure of Picasso’s final years generated its own weather system.
In “The Celestina,” a storyboard mosaic of 66 small impressions on a single, large sheet, Picasso offers a seemingly encyclopedic survey of mark making and printing techniques. Don’t miss the short man — naked, bald and quite Picassoesque — staring out at us from the crowded scene at the center of the bottom row.
Picasso worked in relative isolation during his last decade, but it is hard to believe that a competitive lifer like himself didn’t keep up to some degree. He must have known Dubuffet’s big-headed figures, vigorously scratched in paint, from the late 1940s; the CoBrA group’s colorful figurative shenanigans of the 1950s; or even Jackson Pollock’s last quasi-figurative works.
Closer to home, Picasso’s active involvement with ceramics in the 1950s could have contributed to the shorthand speed of these paintings. Until 1953 he also had direct contact with the art made by Claude and Paloma, his children with Françoise Gilot. And his paintings of them, like those from the ’30s of Maya, his daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter, tend to have open, seemingly unfinished surfaces and a monstrous scale that points toward the musketeers.
This show should relieve doubts about the essential role of commercial galleries in a vital art scene. Anything this charged and unforgettable is bound to nourish anyone who sees it, but especially artists, regardless of affiliations of style or medium. It reveals one of their greatest going all out, providing a breathtaking reminder that art can be anything an artist wants it to be, as long as it is driven by inner necessity, ruthless self-scrutiny and a determination to make every attempt not to repeat the past.
In the end, such inoculations are the only real protection against the vicissitudes of opinion. Art that successfully internalizes them will in all likelihood come to be seen as part of its own time and retain a vigor that is capable of inspiring the art of the future. That is the feat of Picasso’s extraordinary final offerings.
“Picasso: Mosqueteros” remains on view through June 6 at the Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, Chelsea; (212) 741-1717, gagosian.com.

Hegel's Aesthetics

2009-03-05T02:20:00.000-05:00

The principal aim of art is not, therefore, to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. It is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom—images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art's purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are. Art is there not just for art's sake, but for beauty's sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/

Let there be by Jimmy Chen

2009-02-19T06:20:00.001-05:00

There is an overpass above the highway. There is a barbed-wire fence that prevents pedestrians from jumping off the overpass. There are electrical wires above the overpass, conducting electricity from one side of the freeway to the other.
There is a bird that flies into a wire and falls onto the barbed-wire fence and dies. It stays there for days, dead. It rains, it pours. The sun, it shines. The bird is still there. The cars rush ahead below, driven by nervous people with unclear goals.
There is a large building on one side of the overpass. There is a two bedroom condominium inside. There is a man lying down on a futon after work, eating a tangerine and listening to this ceiling. There is an obese woman walking around loudly in her condominium. Her floor is the man's ceiling. There is no humor in this world.
There is saxophone in a studio. A man with excessively curly hair is playing the saxophone while being recorded. The notes that come out of the saxophone, and their relationships to each other, can be described by the word ‘horrible.’ He is famous. His music is horrible. His name is Kenny G.
There is a woman at work. There are two speakers. There is a CD drive. There is a play button. The woman at work has pushed the play button and Kenny G—or at least the digital semblance of his once manifest presence—plays horrible music. There is a stop button. It will not be pushed.
There is a man at work. He sits next to the woman who plays Kenny G all day. He is irritated because his job ‘sucks’, a word used to describe an abstract yet distinctly relevant negative feeling one has about the existence of an object, including persons, and the object’s relation to other objects.
There is a God. He creates light and sound. Everyone concentrates on the light and forgets about the sound, though there are sounds everywhere; the cars under the overpass, the obese footsteps above the ceiling, and the horrible music inside the speakers.
There is a man at work. There is a man at home. There is a man who can’t sleep in his bed. There is a man who can’t stay awake at work. There are dichotomies. There is the global economy. There is the falling American dollar. There is a mortgage. There is unemployment. There is welfare. There is homelessness. There is death. There is a man at work.
There is an overpass above the highway. There is a barbed-wire fence that prevents a man from jumping off the overpass on his way home from work. There is a dead bird hanging upside down from the barbed-wire fence. There is a man who stops to look at the bird. There is a sky happening behind all of this. It makes no sound.

once upon a time that is an alternate now. from the diary of an old friend

2009-02-06T06:09:00.000-05:00

I found it particularly hard to examine young girls my age, who rarely recognized me as a peer although I easily saw them in the light of girlfriends. By what cruel twist of luck had I been born as me, and they as them? I could just as easily have been born in Sub-Saharan Africa, and then it would have been me, undressing on that cold table, infected with a virus that would slowly strip me of my dignity and humanity. And maybe, in an alternate universe, it would have been her, awkwardly fiddling with her stethoscope, staring at me through eyes that brimmed with clumsy pity.

coraline

2009-02-06T03:03:00.001-05:00

Its look and mood may remind adult viewers at various times of the dreamscapes of Tim Burton (with whom Mr. Selick worked on “Nightmare”), Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch. Like those filmmakers Mr. Selick is interested in childhood not as a condition of sentimentalized, passive innocence but rather as an active, seething state of receptivity in which consciousness itself is a site of wondrous, at times unbearable drama.

barack obama's inaugural address

2009-01-21T01:03:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address
Published: January 20, 2009
Following is the transcript of President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, as transcribed by CQ Transcriptions:
Skip to next paragraphPRESIDENT BARACK Thank you. Thank you.
CROWD: Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama!
My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.
I thank President Bush for his service to our nation...
(APPLAUSE)
... as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.
The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real, they are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.
(APPLAUSE)
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
(APPLAUSE)
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.
It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed.
Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
(APPLAUSE)
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.
The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth.
We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.
We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality...
(APPLAUSE)
... and lower its costs.
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
All this we can do. All this we will do.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.
MR. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.
Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.
And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.
But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.
The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
(APPLAUSE)
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.
Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations.
Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.
And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.
(APPLAUSE)
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.
They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
We are the keepers of this legacy, guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort, even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We'll begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard- earned peace in Afghanistan.
With old friends and former foes, we'll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat and roll back the specter of a warming planet.
We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.
And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that, "Our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken. You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."
(APPLAUSE)
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.
We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.
And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.
To those...
(APPLAUSE)
To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
(APPLAUSE)
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.
And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages.
We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service: a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.
And yet, at this moment, a moment that will define a generation, it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.
It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours.
It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.
These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.
What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
(APPLAUSE)
So let us mark this day in remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled.
In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by nine campfires on the shores of an icy river.
The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.
At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
"Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."
America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Thank you. God bless you.
(APPLAUSE)
And God bless the United States of America.
(APPLAUSE)

me and the tag car

2009-01-08T07:48:00.004-05:00

2009-01-08T07:27:00.003-05:00

2009-01-08T06:50:00.005-05:00

car on tagiyev beach on the way to school 6

2009-01-08T06:09:00.003-05:00

back to the words: melting

2009-01-08T05:59:00.001-05:00

pods

2009-01-08T05:54:00.001-05:00

green

2009-01-08T05:48:00.002-05:00

the bus from gobustan

2009-01-08T05:39:00.002-05:00

2009-01-08T05:26:00.001-05:00

2009-01-08T03:57:00.000-05:00

2009-01-08T03:42:00.002-05:00

my artist statement from bklyn show

2009-01-08T03:39:00.003-05:00

What is real and what is simulated?

Often, when people think of representational and figurative art, people think of art depicting the real, i.e. a recognizable object and scene. Representational art is usually juxtaposed to its supposed opposite, abstract art, and held up as retaining the strongest reference to the actual world. However, hidden behind this surface understanding of the term representational is its etymology: to represent. To represent something, by definition, is not to be the thing itself.
Most of the paintings within this show incorporate naturally occurring patterns including watermarks, thumbprints, and wood veins. Although each painting is abstract, each incorporates a form of natural reality and not its representation.

What does it mean for something to be natural?

Many philosophers, including Descartes and Plato, separated our perceived physical world from the abstract ideals of the mind. For Plato, geometry is an ideal form because logical tautologies are always true, despite what the physical world presents. In the case of Descartes, the mind is all we can know, because physical externality is always distanced from us by our filtering of perceived sensations. This conceptual separation of the ideal form from the natural still exists today and one such example is the duality of science versus art. Science, it is thought, objectively explains our natural world via empirically observed facts. Art, on the other hand, is thought to be subjective expressionism. But, don’t personal expressions factually occur? Once they are created, are they not empirical? Also, aren’t subjects necessary, at all times, for the contemplation of any ideal form? In other words, what are ideal forms if they are not contemplated by a subject?

My paintings work to defy conceptual dualities regularly accepted by Western culture. Geometric patterns, ideal forms, pictures of physics problems, and math are regularly featured within my work next to poetry, natural patterns, intuitive marks, and happenstance. These supposedly diametric aspects of life weave into one another until the extremes wear away.

2009-01-07T04:01:00.002-05:00

2009-01-07T04:01:00.001-05:00

2009-01-07T04:01:00.000-05:00

2009-01-07T03:40:00.003-05:00

2009-01-07T03:18:00.004-05:00

2009-01-07T03:08:00.001-05:00

2008-12-25T02:02:00.002-05:00

Thought about it
Thought about it
Thought about it
Until the thought itself
Died its own
Private death
From utter exhaustion
The wheels burst open
They lost their grip
The road dead ended
At an unused field
Two inches under rain water
Pencil tip reached
The eraser
Reached the pencil tip

2008-12-25T02:02:00.001-05:00

A friendship born
And done
For the grip of dust
And under the raining brush
Split yellow with shards of green
Dripping down
Unlike the glass
It learned to cut from
Independent of previous talk
The chatter gone and done
A friendship born
To die
If not attended slowly gently
Like a fussy
Delicate plant
Or
A hyper tasty dish
That deserves
Or requires
Attentiveness at all times
Before
Ultimately getting consumed
Quickly, innocently
In the mouth of animal powers
And turned
To shit

2008-12-25T01:58:00.000-05:00

Its dawning on me
A nice conversation
That lingers
Like a good dinner
You deserved
After a long week of listening
And never speaking
After a long week of waiting
And never getting your turn

Its coming slowly
Over the gray hills
Over the brown hills
Its goo falling down
And collecting the branches with it
It’s a half speed wind storm
With all the force
But slow
Painfully slow
Like watching a child
Untie an impossible knot
With no fingernail tips
For help
Like watching an old man
With a cane
Cross a busy intersection

Its here
Right in front of me
And it is
Not me
And I can hear it speaking
Under my skin
Between my lungs
It’s a collective burning
That climbs up
Rung by rung
To my throat
And soon
Maybe
I can tell it to you too
If you care
To know

11.5.08

2008-12-23T07:36:00.000-05:00

hey punches to the pouch
straight to the face
covered by jolly fat
hahahahaaa
we laugh and we eat it up
it’s a cherry in my drink
it’s the many cherries in my very many drinks
and its readjusting my blood
its turning cherry red
and you can taste it on my lips
I see you looking, looking right at them
But you won’t
You can’t
You wouldn’t dare
So go ahead and stare and remember the taste of cherry
On your own lips
And hey
You can always go ahead and throw a punch
To the back of some guy’s head
Look, he isn’t looking
Go for it
All yours
And when he turns around I’ll say the other guy did it
And when he stays mad
I’ll make him taste my cherry lips
But he won’t forget
So get the fuck out of there

goodbye

2008-12-23T07:33:00.000-05:00

Funeral
For an old idea
Funeral
For a dying box

May the dirt
Remain on top
May the fire
Burn down
the fear, the expectation, the confusion
of the same
mistakes

time to pay respects
for how
these feet function
somehow
on ground
and how
this back can bend
without pain
here is my respect
to my sick ideas
newly departed

there is no heaven
there is no hell
it’s cloudy sky
with sun behind
that’s not a secret
its not mine

2008-12-23T07:31:00.001-05:00

Don’t trust
The killing instinct
As she wakes up
And pulls the chain
Towards the center

Revolt from the ground
Look up
Be blinded
I heard rumors that we develop eyes
If we try
And so I allow
Sun stabs
To swallow my head
In hopes
Of losing vanity

Don’t trust the thing in the ground
That growls
At you
When you begin to run
When you pick up speed
That seems to be beneath your heels
As you refuse
The temptation
To turn around and look back
Run

traveling in the belly

2008-09-09T19:48:00.001-04:00

traveling in the belly, originally uploaded by alexistentialism.

industrial belly

2008-09-09T19:47:00.001-04:00

industrial belly, originally uploaded by alexistentialism.

union street, my home

2008-08-11T23:52:00.001-04:00

boat sway

2008-08-11T23:37:00.001-04:00

sky is moving up

2008-08-11T23:34:00.000-04:00

from a tilting boat

2008-08-11T23:31:00.001-04:00

2008-07-30T15:06:00.001-04:00

The gods prefer

The sad soul

So as

To have someone

To sing for

It’s all

The self

Coming in

It’s self

2008-07-30T14:54:00.004-04:00

The million to one

Forget-ability ratio

What a bet

It’s already gone

And I’m the millionaire

To one

Who reconsidered

And remembered

Today the sheet signed itself

A proclamation

With no author

No voice but it’s own

A sheet of rain, a sheet of voice

Drowning out the ink of words and letting them float back into the throat

By the process

Of reincarnated everything

The Long Countdown

2008-07-30T14:54:00.003-04:00

it’s too late in the year

for a remedy

to dispel the facts as they surround us like barracudas

looking for a snack

it’s far too late

and the sun is nothing shorter than dead

nothing blacker than

her hair

staring at me

instead of her eyes

no one could say a thing

and I know this

‘cause no one did

And that’s all I needed to hear

For me to know

It’s time for me to turn my ticket in

And to

Give up the show

My witness is no longer needed

2008-07-30T14:51:00.000-04:00

It’s time for hibernation

I can see the bear eyes closing

Slowly drifting in and out of here

Going back and forth

Between the living and the dead

Warm covenant of winter

Underneath and in the middle

A pile of consciousness snuggling

Rubbing noses against one another

Keeping the fur down

For my head

Loving sleep

Another answer for the quiet

Indispensable moon

That lets me dream in his bed

And curl between many downy sheets

Made from wheat, feathers, and foam

Until my eyes give

All together

Attempt 3: why what you have is never good enough

2008-06-05T11:02:00.000-04:00

Partly it’s the education

I know things exist

They are all pictured, exquisitely, on the internet

On poster walls

Partly it’s the feeling

An ache

That says

That something else is better

Something else is correct

Partly it’s the knowledge

That I didn’t want it in the first place

Partly it’s the knowledge

That I have exactly what I wanted all along

There is nothing in a couplet

that exposes meaning

it’s only in the word

alone

or in the middle of so many other words that it’s drowning and waiting for something to stand out from the bunch and just say something anything really that would have the potential to get at the heart of any matter that matters to you

but all

the talking

but all

the words

don’t amount

to that thing that very dream you wonder about.

Nothing answers the question

Especially when

Asking is unpermitted

Attempt 2: why what you have is never good enough

2008-06-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

There was a thought

Rolling across my face

You saw it

I saw it

I can deny it

But the thought

It rolled

Slowly, creaking, stopped right smack

In the middle of my face

Undeniable

Tangible

Destructive

Space between what I know and what I don’t

Fills up with dreams

Tangible dreams

Asking me, slowly, what I think

Asking me, slowly, what I feel

(it’s the same thing)

Fickle animal, fleeing for the woods, on a whim

Following after rabbits, red and white

Behind cracked doors

Recreating the math