Monday, August 22, 2011

Friday, August 19, 2011

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Sun Is Up

    
  
The welcome summer weather
has brought out the pop tart in me:
    

  
  
Sun is up :)
      

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Red Right Hand

My recent (if not massively ambitious) 
'Book a Week' challenge began with this:
   
      
As a modern-day disciple of the Eros & Thanatos 
 mode of thought, Nick Cave demonstrates that his
literary stylings are equally as debauched as 
those in musical form. (Quelle surprise.)
     
       

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Pray For Rain

... Not an advisable activity, given that this is reported 
as being the worst Irish summer in a generation. 
 
  
From last year's Heligoland album, this is 
currently seeing me through the raindrops.
   

Think Tank


 
'Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. They could penetrate the general culture and make celebrities out of thinkers — notably Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, to name a few. The ideas themselves could even be made famous: for instance, for 'the end of ideology', 'the medium is the message', 'the feminine mystique', 'the Big Bang theory', 'the end of history'. A big idea could capture the cover of Time — 'Is God Dead?' — and intellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night talk shows. How long ago that was.
  
If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetised are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.
  
We live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same. Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.
  
The post-idea world has been a long time coming, and many factors have contributed to it. There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests. There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young — a form in which ideas are more difficult to express.
  
But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it. The real cause may be information itself. It may seem counterintuitive that at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less.
  
We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.'
   
New York Times Sunday Review, August 14th
   

Monday, August 8, 2011

Moonlight Shadow

 
 

Speed Demon

    
Homemade Speed is the brainchild of Sam McFadden, 
whose potted biog. goes a little something like this:
  
  
'I was born beneath the mufler of a '65 ford.
My mama had to bite off my umbilical cord. 
I'm a domesticated dog in the city & a drooling 
dunce at the art institute of Chicago. interested 
in subcultural coding/de-coding/re-coding, 
hoping for a cartoonish cyber punk future.'
   

   

    
Probably no surprise, then, that her creations 
are of the weird 'n' wunderful variety.
     homemade-speed.com
   

Sunday, August 7, 2011

I Need A Dollar

As summer pennilessness strikes once more, 
I'm reminded that Mr. Aloe Blacc made an 
impression during a recent tv appearance. 
     
     
Despite a vegetatively connotative name, 
with a perplexing doubling of 'c's, he 
proved to be quite the suave soulster.
             
         
...And the song weren't bad, neither.
       

Gassenhauer


 
Currently keeping half an eye on True Romance, the
'90s homage to the classic road trip flick, Badlands
Both movies feature Gassenhauer, from Carl Orff's 
gloriously happiness-making Musik für Kinder.
 
           
Ich bin ein gross kind :)   
   

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Rhythm Of Life

      
     
   

Venus De Milo

       
The protagonists in Mike Guppy's digitally reworked
images are notable by their absence:
        
 Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus 
     
René Magritte, The Son of Man    
        
Edvard Munch, The Scream 
        

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Cross Bones Style

I like this:


Gold filled skull pendant by 
Irish jewellery designer, MoMuse