Posts tagged Balance and Sexuality

Push people away and they become distant. ~ü [Photo: Galina Lukyanova]

Push people away and they become distant.

~ü

[Photo: Galina Lukyanova]

crashinglybeautiful

The culture of the United States has always been one of massive internal contradictions in which surface harmonies breed countercultures that merely represent the dualistic opposite of the previously dominant cultural pieties.

The most massive internal contradiction of American society: a puritanically sexually repressed country that produces and consumes behind closed doors more pornography than any other spot on the globe.
Bram Dijkstra from Naked: The Nude in America

kateoplis

Wonderfully prescient: So the revolution has begun, and as usually happens with revolutions, nobody can agree on where it is going or how it will end. Nils Nilsson, director of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, believes the personal computer, like television, can “greatly increase the forces of both good and evil.” Marvin Minsky, another of M.I.T.’s computer experts, believes the key significance of the personal computer is not the establishment of an intellectual ruling class, as some fear, but rather a kind of democratization of the new technology. Says he: “The desktop revolution has brought the tools that only professionals have had into the hands of the public. God knows what will happen now.” From a 1983 article in Time magazine declaring The Computer as the Person of the Year.  Ten years later, I was dialing into a local BBS (Bulletin Board Service) in my darkest teenage days.  The BBS’ name was Zeller Zone in Peoria, IL.  My terminal software dials.  681-8727.  The modem rings.  A handshake at 1200 bps.  Here were the like-minded.  Trading files, pictures and thoughts.  Ready to explore the breadth of good and evil.  The PC made the desolate isolation of high school manageable.  For better, or for worse.  That’s what happened.  People that wanted to think and act differently finally had a place to go. ~ü

Wonderfully prescient:

So the revolution has begun, and as usually happens with revolutions, nobody can agree on where it is going or how it will end. Nils Nilsson, director of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, believes the personal computer, like television, can “greatly increase the forces of both good and evil.” Marvin Minsky, another of M.I.T.’s computer experts, believes the key significance of the personal computer is not the establishment of an intellectual ruling class, as some fear, but rather a kind of democratization of the new technology. Says he: “The desktop revolution has brought the tools that only professionals have had into the hands of the public. God knows what will happen now.”

From a 1983 article in Time magazine declaring The Computer as the Person of the Year.  Ten years later, I was dialing into a local BBS (Bulletin Board Service) in my darkest teenage days.  The BBS’ name was Zeller Zone in Peoria, IL.  My terminal software dials.  681-8727.  The modem rings.  A handshake at 1200 bps. 

Here were the like-minded.  Trading files, pictures and thoughts.  Ready to explore the breadth of good and evil.  The PC made the desolate isolation of high school manageable.  For better, or for worse.  That’s what happened.  People that wanted to think and act differently finally had a place to go.

~ü

TIME

Awkwardness is collaborative.
James Guida, Marbles

invisiblestories

This advertisement by the Martin company in 1959 conveys our first baby steps into space.  It reads: Toward the preparation of man for the first steps into deep space,the Martin space medicine research program and space ecology laboratory facilities - now in development at the Denver Division -are among the most advanced activities in the free world.  Especially noteworthy is the Martin Lunar Housing Simulator.  This will be a self-sustaining environmental closed system which will permit advanced study of survival requirements and techniques applicable to airless lunar or planetary conditions. Many think that to grow into a being that can survive in space, we must become something different - physically and mentally - than what we are.  The man of today is fumbling around, attempting to play God, and designing the man of tomorrow.  These are the slow moving, invisible wheels of creation. ~ü Image: [Aviation Week, September 21, 1959]

This advertisement by the Martin company in 1959 conveys our first baby steps into space.  It reads:

Toward the preparation of man for the first steps into deep space,the Martin space medicine research program and space ecology laboratory facilities - now in development at the Denver Division -are among the most advanced activities in the free world.  Especially noteworthy is the Martin Lunar Housing Simulator.  This will be a self-sustaining environmental closed system which will permit advanced study of survival requirements and techniques applicable to airless lunar or planetary conditions.

Many think that to grow into a being that can survive in space, we must become something different - physically and mentally - than what we are.  The man of today is fumbling around, attempting to play God, and designing the man of tomorrow.  These are the slow moving, invisible wheels of creation.

~ü

Image: [Aviation Week, September 21, 1959]

The secret of happiness is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less
Socrates

findingnowhere

If this was the cover of a book, it would be called The Spectrum of Light Reveals Itself, Duality and Other Short Stories of Symmetry and Enlightenment.  I’d read it. ~Schmüdde

If this was the cover of a book, it would be called The Spectrum of Light Reveals Itself, Duality and Other Short Stories of Symmetry and Enlightenment.  I’d read it.

~Schmüdde

quiettime

Symmetry in Narrative

Piero di Cosimo’s Misfortunes of Silenus (c 1505/10)

Depictions in narrative order:

  1. The drunken Silenus falling off his horse (center)
  2. Unsuccessfully helping Silenus to his feet by his band of satyrs (half man, half horse) and lustful women (right)
  3. Boys rubbing mud on his forehead (left)

The same narrative relationship can be seen in Perseus Rescuing Andromeda (1513).

The spark of the story, not the climax, is depicted in dramatic fashion as the centerpiece of the visual narrative.  Although analogies to time-based media like film are dubious because the viewer is shackled to the movie’s flow of time, a similar structure could be Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007).  The climatic centerpiece (the explosion of Michael Clayton’s car) is also the first thing you see in the film and an event you come back to later as the film resets to a point before it.