Let’s do something crazy, Something absolutely wrong

Waiting For The Miracle

Have had this song in my mind since the Theatre of Spontaneity group on Tuesday.

That was the group theme, ambivalence, sticking with the known.

I love the verse:

Ah baby, let’s get married
We’ve been alone too long
Let’s be alone together
Let’s see if we’re that strong
Yeah let’s do something crazy,
Something absolutely wrong
While we’re waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

 

Lyrics follow Continue reading “Let’s do something crazy, Something absolutely wrong”

Book: The Heart, Frida Kahlo in Paris by Marc Petitjean

 

“Marc Petitjean grew up in a house where Frida Kahlo’s painting, The Heart, also named Memory, hung on one of the walls. Uncovering the story of how the painting was given by Frida to his father, Michel Petitjean, he unfurls not only a passionate love affair between them in pre-Second-World-War Paris, but also a back story about Frida’s paintings around the time and the intersections between France’s surrealist circles and contemporary politics.”

 

Enjoying this half invented book with lots of name dropping of French artists in the thirties. Interesting.  Here is the art in question 

 

Listening on Scribd

 

and reading on Kindle.

So many people! I’ll bring them in and their art as I did with another book Optic Nerve (blog post)

I’ll start with Frida and then Diego Rivera

Continue reading “Book: The Heart, Frida Kahlo in Paris by Marc Petitjean”

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)

Listened to – On Being with Krista Tippett

Drew Lanham’I Worship Every Bird that I See’

Drew related to Mercy Mercy Me as an ecology anthem. Yes.

I watched these two kererū as I listened.

Marvin Gaye

Apple

Whoa, oh, mercy mercy me

Oh, things ain’t what they used to be, no no
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows from the North and South and East
Continue reading “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”

The Ballad of the Drover

 

Across the stony ridges, across the rolling plain,
Young Harry Dale, the drover, comes riding home again.
And well his stock-horse bears him, and light of heart is he,
And stoutly his old pack-horse is trotting by his knee.
Up Queensland way with cattle he travelled regions vast;
And many months have vanished since home-folk saw him last.
He hums a song of someone he hopes to marry soon;
And hobble-chains and camp-ware keep jingling to the tune.
Beyond the hazy dado against the lower skies,
And yon blue line of ranges the homestead station lies.
Thitherward the drover jogs through the lazy noon,
While hobble-chains and camp-ware keep jingling to a tune. Continue reading “The Ballad of the Drover”

Dialectics

Recently I the podcasts I listened to all came up with discussions about dialectics.

Hari Kunzru, Into the Zone .

You will get introduced to ‘Teddy’ i.e. Theodor Adorno.

Its always sunny in the dialectic

Look on the bright side! In a country obsessed with positivity, Hari traces the path of exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno to sunny California, where he gets stuck in traffic with the British writer Geoff Dyer. How this positivity relates to church and state? Turns out there’s a lot to complain about.

*

Revolutionary Left Radio

for some political clout.

The Principal Contradiction: Applying Dialectical Materialism

Torkil Lauesen joins Breht to discuss his newest book “The Principal Contradiction”. In this discussion, Torkil and Breht discuss dialectical materialism, how it is applied in real world situations, and the role that contradiction plays in it all. In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen was a member of a clandestine communist cell which carried out a series of robberies in Denmark, netting very large sums which were then sent on to various national liberation movements in the Third World. Following their capture in 1989, Torkil would spend six years in prison. While incarcerated, he was involved in prison activism and received a Masters degree in political science. He is currently a member of International Forum, an anti-imperialist organization based in Denmark.

Find more of his writings HERE

*

The Partially Examined Life.

For a through philosophical analysis by people who can’t make up their minds about anything.

Episode 136: Adorno on the Culture Industry

On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963). How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno (armed with Marx and Freud) thinks that our “mass culture” is imposed from the top down to lull us into being submissive workers.

*

OK, listen to the lot and makes some comments!!

 

 

The Map is not the Territory

Structural Differential — Alfred Korzybski.

 

Podcast

#278: Tim O’Reilly – The Trend Spotter The Tim Ferriss Show podcast

Transcript

Tim O’Reilly: Let me go back to George Simon because a lot of what he taught was a kind of mental discipline that was rooted in a model of how consciousness happens. It was framed somewhat in the language of Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics. Korzybski drew this wonderful diagram – it was actually a tool he used to train people – that he called the structural differential.

Korzybski’s fundamental idea was that people are stuck in language, but language is about something. And so, he represented what he called the process of abstraction so that people could ask themselves, “Where am I in that process?” So, the first part of the structural differential was a parabola, and the reason why it was a parabola is because reality is infinite, but we can’t take in all of reality.

And so, hanging from the parabola was a circle, and the circle was our experience, which is our first abstraction from reality. And then, hanging from the circle are a bunch of label-shaped tags – multiple strings of them – and these are the words that we use to describe our experience.

Korzybski’s training was for people to recognize when they were in the words, when they were in the experience, and when they were open to the reality. George mixed that in with this work of Sri Aurobindo, who was an Indian sage, and had come up with a model that integrated a spiritual view of this, and a practice which was just listening and being open to the unknown.