I live for the noise

Noise definitely one of those words that sounds ridiculous upon close inspection/repetition.

This post isn't actually about noise. We're not sure what it's about yet. In the title we refer to the burgeoning self-awareness of our dependence on little tokens of success, including Rightness and Male Attention, to make us happy.

Having, over the course of the past ten days, written an article, a response paper, a five page paper, a ten page paper, and discussion notes, as well as editing someone else's article, reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, some Kristeva, most of Ways of Seeing, and four pages of Simmel, I have granted myself permission to still be in my pajamas at 3:30 in the afternoon. Soon I shall shave and go to a li'l magazine launch, and then mebbe hear Seigneur Pepper Grinder talk about how to read fiction, and then return to the life of the tippety-tappety, in which we extol the virtues of up and coming music presenters in the greater Philadelphia region.

Repetition is definitely worth thinking about. On a mundane level, we notice how temporarily repetitious circumstances guide our responses: having busted two hair ties in the past week, I conclude that I need a hair cut. Squirming around with the laptop on my lap keeps pulling the powercord, which wouldn't be a problem, except the battery is bad. Two Wednesday evenings in a row waiting under a canopy with someone for the rain to slacken leads the mind, not necessarily to any conclusion, but to the expectation of one. It sets us in motion.

They say the profundity in Warhol's films, such as Haircut, consists in his resensitization to experience in time of the viewer. The films are long and boring; nothing much happens; but in that boringness the smallest action is rescaled as interesting. Minds make their conversation out of events of any size; all that's required is an emergence from a background. In quiet periods of meditation, a cough or sneeze tends to ripple small actions through other people in the room: a shift, a rustle, a sniff.

And perhaps what I really want to know is whether there is any kind of human causality *other* than this minor scatter of affect. Each person absorbs even the most major event through the senses and their mental equivalent (mind is the sixth sense organ in Buddhism), in the form of an intrusion or insistence that he or she can appropriate. Negative emotion seems often (always) to take the form of a sort of friction caused the process of appropriation; the churn and flake of what hasn't yet yielded to transparency. Positive emotion, that which sings with ease of knowledge, use. The deep metaphor of consonance and dissonance.

Poem (see below)

Sex has such
A perfect relationship
To the surface of my body
I want to throw up.

Is there anything more tedious than heteronormativity?

No.

Premonition

Repeatedly demanding "WHY DO YOU CARE???" of the fellow grad-sters in a debate about hipsters and pomo was not the best approach to winning the argument.

Still I feel it was a good question.

I better get to that Sontag exhibit on Sunday. She and I hold hands in the slatted dark of "barely closeted moral[ism]." Favorite sentence so far: "A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable."

Around here we are considering the effects of emotional interference on thinking, the well-oiled machine of this baseball town, and "The Unicorn in Captivity," which is one of several luscious and gut-boggling tapestries in the unicorn room of the Cloisters. I want there to be a sign over the door: "Post-little girls, beware your imaginary."

Paint me white and call me Moby!

RRROOWWWRRR!!!!

Runs in the family

Thanks very much for all of this. Actually I had been looking to find the Japanese chanting version of the Kannon Gyo. Very interesting translation of the "Identity".* "Do not judge by any standards" wonderfully puts that distinctively buddhist injunction or admonition I've always admired. The Faith Mind Verses include a line something like: The burdensome practice of judging should finally be abandoned at once. Does it not seem that something is immediately-at-hand and requires no name?


dad

*Hyperlinks mine.

"Trivia"

via RealPlayer

The Beach Boys personified the California spirit with their harmonious pop.

Brian Wilson is widely heralded as a mad genius.

Brian Wilson is deaf in one ear, reportedly due to being repeatedly beaten by his father.