Friday, June 29, 2012

“What appears shameful to the mind, is sheer beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the great majority of people it is in Sodom and nowhere else.”

— Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich"

Napoleon Bonaparte

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Weldon Irvine - Pleasure, Pain And Me

“In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.”

— Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman … And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translation by H.M Parshley

"The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.

The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses," - George Monbiot

LA Voucher Students Taught Creationism, Climate Change Denial, and Bigotry

Kiyohiko Senba & The Haniwa All-Stars feat. Demon Kogure

≪侵入された思考の再生≫松井冬子

Monday, June 25, 2012

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Ayn Rand

The earliest evidence of ancient dentistry we have is an amazingly detailed dental work on a mummy from ancient Egypt that archaeologists have dated to 2000 BCE http://kvetchlandia.tumblr.com/

“People thought we were a Spanish band”, Joey Ramone

Gertrude Stein Uncredited and Undated Photograph
“Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain.
There. Make twenty-five be a woman. The meaning of that does not interest me. It is a complexion that interests that makes ridiculous because that does not make it something else. But it does make them which is again me.
Make twenty-five be a woman. I do not lose it. The color is there. Do you see. Dependent entirely upon how one word follows another. Who knows how Howard likes hearing. I can do it so easily it always makes grammar but is it grammar. Forget grammar and think about potatoes. Grammar after all has to do with why they were presented.” Gertrude Stein, “How to Write” 1931

http://kvetchlandia.tumblr.com/

Andy Kaufman on Letterman (June 24th 1980)

William Gale Gedney Young Girl, Cornett Family, Eastern Kentucky 1964http://kvetchlandia.tumblr.com/

I want you to know

one thing.

You know how this is:

if I look

at the crystal moon, at the red branch

of the slow autumn at my window,

if I touch

near the fire

the impalpable ash

or the wrinkled body of the log,

everything carries me to you,

as if everything that exists,

aromas, light, metals,

were little boats

that sail

toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,

if little by little you stop loving me

I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly

you forget me

do not look for me,

for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,

the wind of banners

that passes through my life,

and you decide

to leave me at the shore

of the heart where I have roots,

remember

that on that day,

at that hour,

I shall lift my arms

and my roots will set off

to seek another land.

But

if each day,

each hour,

you feel that you are destined for me

with implacable sweetness,

if each day a flower

climbs up to your lips to seek me,

ah my love, ah my own,

in me all that fire is repeated,

in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,

my love feeds on your love, beloved,

and as long as you live it will be in your arms

without leaving mine.—

Pablo Neruda, “If You Forget me"

Chiaki Kuriyama

Michael Snow, La région centrale, 1971, 16mm film, 191 minuteshttp://snowce.tumblr.com/page/10

http://snowce.tumblr.com/page/5

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Charles Bukowski, “Gamblers All”

sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside
remembering all the times you’ve felt that way, and
you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway,
get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the
newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee table, kiss your
wife goodbye, and then you are backing the car out into life itself,
like millions of others you enter the arena once more.

you are on the freeway threading through traffic now,
moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch
the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow
get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull
days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful
and so disappointing because
we are all so alike and so different.

you find the turn-off, drive through the most dangerous
part of town, feel momentarily wonderful as Mozart works
his way into your brain and slides down along your bones and
out through your shoes.

it’s been a tough fight worth fighting
as we all drive along
betting on another day.

The Gigapixel Camera

via: Andrew Sullivan's/Daily Beast

It's able to capture crazy detail:

Researchers have developed a prototype "supercamera" that stitches together images from 98 individual cameras (each with a 14-megapixel sensor) to create a 960-million-pixel image with enough resolution to spot a 3.8-centimeter-wide object 1 kilometer away.

The camera is currently "two-and-half feet square and 20 inches deep." It will eventually slim down:

"The camera is so large now because of the electronic control boards and the need to add components to keep it from overheating," [David] Brady [one of the camera's creators] said, "As more efficient and compact electronics are developed, the age of hand-held gigapixel photography should follow."

(Photo from Duke University via Gizmodo)