intellectualammo
-
Posts
1874 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
5
Posts posted by intellectualammo
-
-
Yes, let's have a drink on that, Thales, to the people whose living is based on cleaning, collecting/recognizing garbage and disposing of it for being such...garbage qua garbage...
...but that drink might not stay down after more from Tzara.This I found from the “Dada Manifesto” by Tristan Tzara. Tzara on Dadaism:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/tzara.html
“Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.”
I wanted the drink to stay down, so I just briefly looked at the link, looks like a lot could be pulled from it.
The last particular sentence in that link, reminds me of an excellent well-written article from Greg Perkins titled, “The Last Gasps For The God Of The Gaps”, in Axiomatic’s first issue in Vol.1.….that God exists in the gaps of our knowledge…here with the above quote Tzara states that Dada is in “all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.”
I’ve often said that faith is like a mad lib for reason, where the blank spaces are, (regardless of how or why they are blank to begin with), they just fill it in with faith, feeling, force.....or Dada....labeled underneath the blanks. I also think that in Perkins article can use writing such as Tzara to further illustrate a point that he was making about morality ….“that Rand effectively closed off the last refuge of the God of the Gaps and cleared the way for a rational, scientific morality based in facts and causality”…or in regards to what Tzara wrote, Rand/Objectivist ethics and epistemology has effectively made the spaces impermeable or closed to the “virgin microbe” which is Dada….haha, tata, Dada!!!!
Here's to Objectivist ethics and epistemology...*Steve raises his glass*
-
Maybe it's just because I seem to have a touch of the flu, but reading and looking at this stuff really made me feel a little sick to my stomach like how you feel after you've been spun around for awhile.
Here is an write-up about what others think of neo-Dada. They thought it literally was garbage, and threw it away!! This was actually very funny to me when I read it:
http://badbadart.blogspot.com/2005/01/garb...t-in-trash.html
Thirty dustmen were sent to modern art classes so they would be able to distinguish garbage from garbage, no?
In the said article I read from the NYT(Jan 6, 2006) in my post, I also read that there where cleaners in an art museum who mistakenly threw away "half-full coffee cups", bottles, and a few other items thinking it was trash that needed to be discarded. But later on they found out that they threw away part of an artists display or installation...
-
I just got my left hand done, a few hours ago, the way it looks like in the above reply. I also had my other hand done all over again, with some improvements to the “A’s”. They were all done in black ink. I love the way they look. The permanence, commitment, seriousness, somewhat acting as conversational pieces, and most importantly a form of reverence are what tattoos are to me. I live on the South Side of Pittsburgh, and I notice quite a few pragmatists who are waist deep in nihilism here, expressing their implicit/explicit philosophy with clothing, tattoos and so forth. I always expressed my chosen philosophy, with shirts and such, thought about getting more tattoos previously, but now I have become a bit radical living here and combined with what I dealt with in college and in recent relationships. Yes, radical, but not irrational. It all depends on “why” you are getting a tattoo and “what” you are getting done.
Definition of “radical” from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:
“3 a : marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional : EXTREME b : tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions c : of, relating to, or constituting a political group associated with views, practices, and policies of extreme change d : advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs <the radical right>“
Ayn Rand said in the Introduction to CUI “We are radicals for capitalism”.
Peikoff writes this in OPAR:
“Objectivists are not "conservatives." We do not seek to preserve the present system, but to change it at the root. In the literal sense of the word, we are radicals—radicals for freedom, radicals for man's rights, radicals for capitalism. We have no choice in the matter.
We have no choice because, in philosophy, we are radicals for reason.”
In AS, John Galt said to Dagny:
"Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity? Ask yourself why. Ask yourself how long a country that did that could hope to exist, and whose moral standards have destroyed it. It was the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. If this is evil, by the present standards of the world, if this is the reason for damning us, then we—we, the dollar chasers and makers—accept it and choose to be damned by that world. We choose to wear the sign of the dollar on our foreheads, proudly, as our badge of nobility—the badge we are willing to live for and, if need be, to die."
A symbol on our foreheads...figuratively though. That partially gave me the idea/attitude for what I did, to grow from. I thought why not be a radical for logic and write an equation across my hand? A radical for reason(like Peikoff stated above) and display the name of one of it’s best defenders and fighter, Ayn Rand, and write in across my other hand? Have it written using rapidly moving needles dipped in ink, written with a vibration and a little sting?
-----------------------------------------------------
“The author has a proudly selfish stake in promoting capitalism. As an American -though a teacher- he is rich, as are all Americans by both historic and current non-capitalist standards of wealth and poverty. Since capitalism is the only system capable of creating universal prosperity, he recognizes that his ongoing wealth depends on its continued existence. All readers who seek to preserve their own wealth- or more urgently, to earn wealth and economically rise- should recognize a similar selfish stake in understanding and promoting the content of this book.”
The Capitalist Manifesto, Andrew Bernstein, p.24-5.
-
"Their purpose, the Dadaists said in 1916, is to cultivate the senseless by unleashing on the public every imaginable version of the unintelligible, the contradictory, the absurd. "Dadaism,'' said its advocates, "is against everything, even Dada." It is against every form of civilization and every form of art. "Art," they said "is shit"—a dictum faithfully implemented by pictures of the Mona Lisa wearing a mustache, or by collages pieced together from the leavings in somebody's gutter, or by exhibits such as Max Ernst's in Germany in 1920. One entered the exhibit through a public urinal, in order to contemplate, among other items, a block of wood with a notice asking visitors to chop at it, an aquarium containing sundry objects immersed in a blood-colored fluid, and a young girl in a communion dress loudly reciting obscene poetry.(16)
Dadaism is a consistent extreme of the cultural trend of <ompar_173> the period. It is the voice of unreason in art gleefully taking on the forms of madness. This is the movement which a prominent American philosopher, some years ago, hailed as "one of the valid eruptions of the irrational in this century,"(17) and which the German avant-garde at the time praised as daring, witty, and anti-middle class."
From Ominous Parallels, LP
(That Objectivism CD-ROM really is great)
Try reading Dadaist POETRY!!!...it actually reminds me of Lois Cook' s writing from the Fountainhead...I bet Keating could understand it like he could Cook!!
http://www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/Dadaism/poems.html
These were written by Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) who partly founded Dada in 1916. It was started in France and Germany. Dadaism now is sometimes called Conceptual Art, I think, not fully sure, though. So there is an artist I was reading about in the NYT’s newspaper Jan. 6th. In the article a "neo-Dadaist" named Pierre Pinoncelli took a small hammer to Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," the factory-made urinal that is considered the cornerstone of Conceptual Art. He also I think is a dadist. Here have a look at this fine piece of art work:
http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/fountain.html
Not only did he take a hammer to it, he also urinated in it!!! And this is what he had to say about doing it, which I got from a different article(I think he might have be jailed for it and/or fined like almost $40,000.00)
"Pinoncelli, a performance artist pissed in the fountain and then hit it with a hammer. He claimed that the pissing was "to restore to it its real value" and the hammer blow was to protest "the art market going to the dogs."
But that's not all...I found this about Pononcelli as well:
"At an arts festival in the Colombian town of Cali, Pinoncelli lopped off his little finger. The action was a show of solidarity with the kidnapped Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Pinoncelli then wielded his damaged hand like a paint brush splattering blood across a poster with the letters FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who kidnapped Betancourt - an outspoken critic of the group)."
I have also seen, read, art and performance art from Rev. Steven Leyba, from the Church of Satan (which I actually still have my red card and was a member of it years ago) who at one performance had someone cut a baphemet into his back, and then proceed to urinate on it!! I don't know too much about what he would categorize himself as though, maybe it's on the site in case you wanted to see...
Disgusting, huh? That's not even the word for it, huh? His statement, or quote on the site "Son, you can do anything you want in life, just don't get caught"....hmmm...it reminds me of a character named Philip from Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (which really isn't worth reading, but nice in how he lives his life throughout the book by different principles, values, etc. and what the consequences of each are in his life): "Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner." Aleister Crowley's statement,(which Satanists also quote often).."Do What Thou Wilt, Shall Be The Whole of The Law" also comes to mind. All these quotes are all maxims that they live their lives according to. It is the moral code or their code of values...I shrug all of it, and carry an objective theory of values in it‘s place.
So now I open it up for anyone who knows anything about Dada, about installation art, Conceptual Art, or all the other tangents I went on, and so forth. Comments are welcome.
-
I just borrowed Cirque Du Soleil's Varekai DVD from a library and I must say I am very captivated by what I have seen in this DVD. Some of the scenes and performances in it I have to watch over and over again. I can't stop watching the scene (Ch. 18) titled "Handbalancing on Canes" which is my favorite, and also (Ch. 3) titled "Flight of Icarus". I really don't have too much knowledge about Cirque Du Soleil or any of the other productions they have out. But what I have seen in this particular one, has left me curious about what the others are like. I really can't tell HOW the artists do some of the performances they have done, even when I see it from the multi-angle view in the DVD.
The Russian female, Olgi Pikhienko, who plays the part of the catepillar, falls in love with Icarus after his fall. He fell because he flew to close to the sun(as the Greek mythology goes?) and falls to where she is at. Throughout the performance, different creatures try to keep them apart, she is even kidnapped and put into a cacoon. I am not sure if I want to say too much more about what happens, so as not to ruin it for those that might be interested in it. The scenes that I particularily like are the ones that involve the two of them together, the way they show their emotion for each other through the movements of their bodies, expressions, and special performances they do when the two are with each other. Olgi is absolutely breathtaking, her balancing on the canes, her every movement is very well planned to express as much emotion to us as possible. She says in her interview on the DVD. "Anything I do, I try to make it as expressive as possible." "I get free of my skin" "You control yourself. This is the way I feel in life. This is the way I express it on stage." To paraphrase her...What she feels she puts into movements. The artists that audition, the ones that make it to Cirque Du Soliel, are some of the best at what they do...if not the best. The Cirque standards for the most part, in various contexts, are very high indeed. At least that is what I gather from what little I do know so far about it.
What I have seen in Varekai , in those said performances in part, I have found an extremely fitting quote written by Ayn Rand:
“The keynote of the stylization achieved in ballet is: weightlessness. Paradoxically, ballet presents man as almost disembodied: it does not distort man's body, it selects the kinds of movements that are normally possible to man (such as walking on tiptoe) and exaggerates them, stressing their beauty—and defying the law of gravitation. A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet's image of man. It projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision, but it is man with a fine steel skeleton and without flesh, man the spirit, not controlling, but transcending this earth…
Within each system, specific emotions may be projected or faintly suggested, but only as the basic style permits. Strong passions or negative emotions cannot be projected in ballet, regardless of its librettos; it cannot express tragedy or fear—or sexuality; it is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.”
“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 68.
Here is another quote that I found :
“…a performance may be entertaining, in such fields as vaudeville or the circus, but it has nothing to do with art. The performance of an aerialist, for instance, demands an enormous physical skill—greater, perhaps, and harder to acquire than the skill demanded of a ballet dancer—but what it offers is merely an exhibition of that skill, with no further meaning, i.e., a concrete, not a concretization of anything.”
Ibid.,70
Well I think that Cirque Du Soleil at least in Verakai, I can’t speak for the rest, does in fact present various performances of skills, like contortionists, aerialists, trapeze, ballet…with meaning, with a plot, and characters that are specifically using, directing, explicitly stating, consistently adapting and integrating their particular talents and skills TO concretize..... This is Cirque Du Soleil qua Cirque Du Soleil. This is what makes them so original in what they do. These are just premature comments I am making. I don’t have an extensive knowledge about this field or about Cirque.
So I'm going to open this up to everyone:
Has anyone else seen this, or any of their various performances and shows? Any comments about them, about Cirque Du Soleil, about performance art in general, or if I'm mistaken or incorrect in what I have said, they are all welcome.
-
Moose had typed:
"I was thinking of having it in a sort of Objectivist-style theme, like a stylized "A is A" or something like that."
Well, a few weeks ago, I had "A is A" tattooed across the fingers on my right hand. I am also going to get "Rand" tattooed across the fingers of my left hand, and "Ayn" would be tattooed just above it, between the knuckles.
So, if I were to make fists, for example, it would look something like this:
..................................................a y n..............................................
across the right....A i s A..and..R A N D across the left
It cost $70.00 to have "A is A" done. The "A"'s are around 3/4 of an inch and the "i" and the "s" are around half an inch in length. They are all done in black ink and a bit stylized(Black Castle lettering with some changes). I am very surprised that most of the ink held as well as it did. I will definately need to have it touched up soon, but it just healed a week ago, and I am not sure how early you can have it done again. Maybe I'll get it touched up when I get my other fingers on my other hand done.
-
There is a composer that I enjoy listening to, who is also a well known German philosopher, of which most of the board may already be well aquainted with his literary works, but not yet his musical compositions. This particular composer that I am speaking of is Friedrich Nietzsche. I came across his mature years compositions (Vol. 2) and am very anxious to hear his earlier compositions (Vol. 1). My favorite composition in Vol. 2 is Eine Slyvesternacht, which is also one of my favorites in my entire collection of music. I have read that when Nietzsche later lost his sanity, he would listen to these compositions.
I have not seen anyone mention my favorite violinist, Anne-sophie Mutter. I have seen Diana Krall noted by some of the posters here. I have been watching her Live In Paris DVD quite often on my laptop while I read "Of Human Bondage", by Someset Maugham.
~Steve~
"He felt like a man who has leaned on a stick, and finds himself forced suddenly to walk without assistance."
"From old habit, he unconciously thanked God that he no longer believed in him."
both from "Of Human Bondage", by Somerset Maugham
-
That was a wonderfully put together essay, Diana.
Toleration and also the wrongful advocation of Objectivism as being an open philosophic system needs to be meet with opposition every step of the way. From what I understand Branden and Kelley are both supporters of these.
This is from "How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?" (VOS82):
"I will confine my answer to a single, fundamental aspect of this question. I will name only one principle, the opposite of the idea which is so prevalent today and which is responsible for the spread of evil in the world. that principle is: On must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.
"Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man's character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil."
Toleration(with a few exceptions like the young) speads evil in the world by not giving it the full amount of opposition it deserves. By not pronouncing any judgment at all when the context indicates it, is also responsible for the spread of that evil, by allowing it to exist through your sanctioning of it.
Oppose it, or it spreads by your sanction. Zero tolerance, zero compromise between good and evil.
We The Living
in Ayn Rand Book Club
Posted · Edited by softwareNerd
The last two chapters in We The Living are the saddest chapters I have read thus far. It makes me get a lump in my throat, tears in my eyes, each time I go back and read them, very emotional scenes indeed for me. Kira, just saying or typing that name, what that name means to me…ahhh…I've fallen for her character so hard. I often think of what I would have done in her place, or if I was Leo in the novel. This paragraph is one of the most important paragraphs in the entirety of the novel:
Kira is my favorite female Rand character right now. I enjoy rereading specific scenes from the novel, like her conversation with Andrei, when she tells him of how she was proud of using him to pay for Leo's betterment. I have a very strong attachment to Kira. Her actions in the novel, like her consistency for one, I admire greatly.
(Added quote block - sNerd)