Protecting naughty children from infection

Chomsky:
"Throughout policy planners have faced the "agonising problem" of how to reconcile a formal commitment to democracy and freedom with the overriding fact that "the United States may often need to do terrible things to get what it has always wanted," Alan Tonelson observes. What the US wanted was "economic policies that would enable American business to operate as freely as possible and often as monopolistically as possible," with the aim of creating "an integrated, United States-dominated capitalistic world economy."

Hegemony or survival: p.69.

Frustrations of matter...

Good evening of work.

Painting is a dealing with the finite, frustrations of matter, possibilities and shocking human banality. The paint only can represent my current development and that pisses me off. It shows me how far behind I am by being matter, finite, human.

I keep trying, keep going back only to prove further that I am incomplete and that over time I might come to terms with this. Reapplication, raking, dealing with the faliures until something starts to surface. Nurturing that which appears until it needs no further thought.

I will only become if I keep painting. Time is the enemy and the projected reality of this coming together.

Toys: Roland Barthes

"All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosom of the adult world; they are reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.
Toys always mean something, and this something is entirely socialised, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life...Toys here reveal the list of all things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucrascy, ugliness, Martians, etc."

Maverick

The cowboy.

Had a good day in the studio.

It seems that it is all about accepting the inevitable...letting go.

Hyperreal realisation.

Thoughts. Stumbling with the idea of representing a whole idealogy through one painting. Never done, always insufficient. Overworked, wrecked. Projecting human frustrations onto the canvas. The best work it always about insufficiency and the acceptance/humility of it. This is dignity. This is what is read through the work-Tuymans/Duman/Tait.

Quick work. Drawn out colour. Dried. Two colour over working. Enough. The desire to paint that insufficiency. Learning to validate, work quickly and honestly, and then leave it alone.

This is the problem with the hyperreal. It offers solutions to these problems, whereas the problem is what is interesting. There are no solutions. It is okay to stop looking for them. Enjoy the crapness. Today: the cowboy.

shed series_duo

shed series_duo
Originally uploaded by lady pumpkin.

On plywood.

Self-referential signs: "Why is there nothing rather than something?"

Thinking about Baudrillard...

Excess.
Greed.
Aggression.
Arguments of dissassociation.
The errosion of meaning via its excesses.
Gift exchange versus sign and commodity exchange.
The object and its power to seduce.
The Capatalistic implosion due to a lack of symbolic exchange values-attacks itself: the twin towers being, as it were, 'brought down by their own weight' — forced into destruction by the society that created them.


* the era of the original
* to the counterfeit
* to the produced, mechanical copy, and through
* to the simulated "third order of simulacra" whereby the copy has come to replace the original.

"Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfil my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code." Poster


'...imaginary as virtual reality, a vast "reality show" where reality itself becomes a spectacle [vient se donner en spectacle], where the real becomes a theme park...After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version...There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show...
Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he [walt] continues to colonize the world - both the imaginary and the real - in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants].' B on "Disney world company".