How come in this age of complete attention deficit more (and more and more and more) people want me to spend my time watching crappy videos?
Is it that some humans have actually developed a different kind of attention span that enables them to devote their time to such mindless activity? Or is it that those clamoring for others to watch them and their videos have succumbed to a belief in their complete self-importance and now think that us-others, whose attention is assaulted at every minute of the day, actually have any attention span left to view said crappy videos?
Whatever the answer, a lot of materials and energy are devoted to creating a lot of trash, figurative and literal.
The realization that everyday reality conceals no higher reality, no realm of being-in-itself to be disclosed ecstatically, and that everyday practices leave no room for a redemptory vision, cures the sober Rorty of his Platonic sickness.
I don't often find a reason to be proud of being from South Carolina. Today I found one: Lindsey Graham.
Way to go Senator!
Dear Senator Graham,
I usually write to complain about something or other; but today I just want to tell you how impressed I was by your choice to support Judge Sotomayor’s nomination for the supreme court. Not necessarily because of her qualifications, which are impressive; but because of your political courage in doing so.
I have not been too proud of being from South Carolina as of late. You have given me a good reason to hold my head a little higher.
After a hiatus of fourteen years, the Ranting Economist and I returned to visit the place where our souls know our bodies came from: the ocean. I don't know what is worse, to stay away from it and try to forget that it makes us whole, or to revisit it every once in a while and feel like a body part has been wrenched away from us every time we leave it to return to a land-locked existence.
Land-locked I am once more, pining for the feeling I get from being on and in that body of water whose composition so closely resembles that of my blood. ...And guilty, guilty with the knowledge that my mere existence as a homo, most modern, sapiens is surely destroying that which I love most.
Yesterday marked an anniversary of sorts for me. I felt compelled tostart this blogwhen Sarah Palin first came onto the national political scene. And now that she is threatening to.... uhhh.... do some sort of unspecified thing in a big way, I feel like it marks a milestone in the trajectory of this weird mode I have found of cataloguing my thoughts while, once again, questioning some people’s grip on reality.
I realize that in a post-post-modern age, it's hard to speak of one overarching "reality" without offending somebody's subjective sensibilities and sense of the thing. However, without establishing some consensus parameters and standards within a social and political context, not to mention an educational one, mere existence becomes an onerous task and communication barely possible. It is here that I question the die-hard faction of the oddity that has become the Republican Party in their belief that this woman is capable of one day leading this nation.
Maybe I don't speak English "so good"; but I can't make heads or tails of what ex-Governor Palin is actually trying to communicate in her "miracle speech" [1]. However, after the speech and despite it's lack of any trace of comprehensible substance, one could actually see the mental cogs spinning in the brains of her unquestioning supporters as they recuperated from shock by quickly tapping into their weird inner-reserves of faith in order to view her act of quitting (and the word quitting has not yet lost its negative connotations) as a bold move on Palin's part to lead them out of the wilderness and into the promised land. It seems to me that either these people have not yet developed the skills necessary to navigate in an era of spectacle; or maybe it is I who am still holding onto some old fashioned idea of reality, not to mention grammar.
"Raving Artist" might be a misleading title. Yes I usually rave, and yes, I am more of an artist than not, depending on the definition of the word. But most of the stuff I write here is not about art. In the end, this is just one more blog about nothing in particular by nobody in particular. I write because I like to do it; or more specifically, because "vira e mexe" ("every now and then", but more like "every now") something tweaks me and compels me to do it. I find that this is as good a place as any in which to dump my thoughts; and moreover, I am always pleasantly surprised when someone actually reads it. ...That being said, I do feel guilty about the ridiculously enormous amounts of energy it takes to run the servers that power our contemporary living.... oh well, outasite outamind...
