a modern farce, though not one bard may attest

I think the easiest thing to make light of lately is probably the fact that the estimated asking price of the first pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's twins will be around $15 million. Nevermind that the US dollar is in the tank and the US is quickly becoming the playground of Europe's relatively rich. The wealth of society and the amount of money being pushed around for the myriad and correspondingly inane predilections of the supermarket-aisle-strolling women of America has attained such a stupefyingly large precedent that this has become possible. I'm sorry for that horrifying sentence, but there's little that can control or even adequately describe my rage right now, so a long, winding sentence that only partially grasps it is far better than something inadequate.

I think this goes down into the depths of the human consciousness. An example might suit us: Pandas, evolutionarily speaking, are the most useless animals on the planet Earth. Since their main source of food is bamboo, Pandas must eat massive amounts of it in order to gain enough sustenance (stay with me, this is going somewhere). An animal that can do little else than eat, and even at that, it must eat all day in order to simply have enough energy to move to the next place of forage. An animal like this seems destined for extinction! Yet, inexplicably, these animals appeal to some deep human center of emotion--call it the "sympathy for utterly lazy individuals who do little else than eat, sleep, and do not make any sudden movements". Because of this, Pandas are deified, world-renown, and are flourishing in exactly the places they were not ever meant to live: Zoos. But that's just it, wildlife that appeals to us is a spectator sport, while destruction of the environment is more or less an inevitable state of affairs.

Back to the Brangelina twins: is really necessary that someone fork over $15 million to these people for pictures of their first born? Are we that low, as a species on the Earth? It is times like these that my brain balks at the task of comprehending or eliciting any sort of meaning from human existence. Is this it?

new directions

This blog is alternately introspective, alternately polemical. I really haven't been able to come to a good decision as to which direction I'm going to take it in. Gathering my cues both from my position as intern with Radar Magazine as well as my distinct admiration for The Onion AV Club's The Hater, I might as well play to my strengths and start talking shit about pop culture. Get ready, steady readership.

long silences and doleful indolences...

Sorry to my unabashedly silent yet fervently present readership, I've been awake but hardly moving. Junior year has wound itself around its suffocating conclusion, and I'm not altogether worse for wear. I've had a lot of personal / philosophical revelations during the past year. I now have a new-found appreciation for religious modes of consciousness. I have delved much more deeply into what constitutes me as a person.

I think that the most detrimental progression I've undergone has been a growing propensity to over-intellectualize and question every action. The most amazing class I had this semester roughly corresponded to my problem and taking a survey of 19th-century German philosophy has been a boon to my ability to analyze and dominate this problem.

We started this semester with Hegel - the giant of that era, and then moved from him to Kierkegaard, Marx, and finally Nietzsche. Each of these philosophers can be seen as responding to Hegel (especially Marx and Kierkegaard). But in a sense Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard all represent a virulent strain in human thought that is all too easily duped into separating interesting aspects of the world into their contingent pieces and launching a philosophical inquiry with little regard for Man's place in the world as subject. Hegel was answering this debate as it manifested itself in the battle between traditional Kantian philosophy and Fichte's radical new interpretation. But I think the real problem lies in the initial figuring of man's relationship with reality. The very syntax of the previous sentence gives up the game to Hegel--because it puts man in a relation to reality, not as an actor inside reality (which I believe to be his primary position and mode of consciousness).

In any case as with most of the posts on this blog I am dangerously close to rambling. The class was brilliant but now as far as my life goes I have arrived at something of an impasse: how do I reconstitute my life with a mind for contemplation but knowing also that the only way to live a good, happy life is to live one of action and effect, not reaction and contemplation? I think that this is entirely within the boundaries of Nietzsche's thought, which is why I am so interested in him. Yet I am not altogether sure that the answer he provides is satisfactory or even makes any sense.

tides and turnings

sorry for the relative silence, dear crowd of devout readers. I've been devoting most of my writing-online-time to my other blog; head over there if you find my prose in any way witty.

I noticed today that some people had sprayed some stencils on the quad. It's interesting that almost immediately afterwards someone had been bye to scrub the stencils off of the pavement. It's not that they were offensive; I recall them being mostly innocuous, if a bit unoriginal. The funny thing I've discovered about this school is that the students are given a very 'hands-off' message from the administration. While on the one hand they hold so-called 'events' to encourage students to take part in student life, it is striking to me that any 'out of the ordinary' acts of creativity are almost always quashed. People complain weekly in the newspaper of the pervasive apathy in the student body. I can't disagree. I simply think that if there is one person to blame it is the president of the college, for treating this place more like a business rather than a place of higher education, where individual viewpoints are given higher priority over a general sense of 'beauty' that the administration imposes upon the campus.

all apologies

Loyal readership--I know you have all been waiting with baited breath for my triumphant return to ye 'bogosphere'. Never fear, I have been lurking, biding my time to unleash a polemical the likes of which the electronic world has not yet beheld and for which is certainly unprepared...

But that will have to wait until another time. Today, because I am so generous, I am going to talk about the end of the world. "The end of the world!?", you might exclaim? Well, faithful reader, it seems like that is the only thing on the consciousness of most Americans these days. The decline and fall of western civilization (if anyone can wrap their mind around that fruitful concept), is something we have been preoccupied with for time immemorial. However what I want to argue today is that the 'end of the world' as such will not appear in the form of some cataclysmic terrorist attack, meteor strike, volcanic eruption or other farcical disaster.

What most Americans fail to wrap their heads around is the idea of "leveling" (first used in this sense by my man Kierkegaard). Quiet ramblings of a depraved man, some readers might say, but the concept remains useful. Kierkegaard believed that the notion of a 'public' is not only created, but is used by indolent individuals to blame themselves for nothing and to take refuge in a perceived notion of "mass acceptance" (how we justify our opinions). Does this ring any bells? But I digress.

This post could be fleshed out (and may very well be over the course of the next few weeks), but really what I want to say is that the idea that some untold-of disaster will wipe out life as we know it is false and above all lazy. We will not be destroyed by God's will. We will be destroyed slowly, and above all anticlimactically. Gas prices will rise, corn prices will correspondingly rise, the food supply will tighten, and general unrest will rule. The unemployment rate (which as it is is kept artificially low) will unavoidably rise, and the masses will revolt. This sounds all very exciting and dramatic, but the revolt I am talking about will be the first ever 'starving revolt', or perhaps 'lazy revolt'. [I leave it to the advertising executives, who, out of work at this time, will have plenty of time to content themselves with the proper nomenclature for this phenomenon]. People will stop going to work, GDP will fall, and society as we know it (growth-based economic model with a currency both of stored value and commercial liquiditty) will cease to function.

Oh boy...

Normally I would post this on each of your respective walls, but I must append a short message to this video that is about to unleash a hitherto unknown fury upon your helpless retinae.

I, like you all, have spent many a short while on the website youtube.com, deriving amusement from (in short order): other people's misfortunes, awesome shit, clips from hilarious TV shows, and other topics relevant to my interests.

Nothing I have seen in my (relatively) long career surfing the internet has prepared me for this video. What I link to below will shock, horrify, disturb, and amuse you simultaneously. I can safely say that this is the single video that in one 6-minute act manages to prove that the internet is the single greatest invention of all time, and to our harm or detriment, we are categorically better off than any other demographic group in any other part of the long, checkered history of the human race.

Without further ado, I present to you: "Dancing man wearing a horse mask cooks wild mushrooms."

Back in March 2003 when the Iraq war was beginning, there were a few rumblings of protest in the University center. A few days later a counter-protest was planned. I remember two things from that day: A young hispanic man standing in the median of the street with a loudspeaker, yelling: "Bomb Saddam! Bomb Saddam!" or something of the sort. On the other side of the street, in the bed of a pickup truck, a woman had arrayed several young children, each holding a sign criticizing the "liberals" who were protesting the war.

I suppose I pity them, but more than anything, I confess I want nothing more right now than to find out where these people live, stand in front of their houses with a loudspeaker, point and laugh. I think my desire to laugh is one less of schadenfreude than an inability to comprehend these peoples' conflation of their own personal views with the narrow self interest of people at the opposite end of society. Poor fuckers.