Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

A Walden Pond for Winos?

Yes, the contortionist artiste, another wage laborer performing for her corporatist patrons....an apt metaphor for life in the Microsoftocracy.......and note her ready smile, the willingness to go the extra mile, for a few shekels more

E-canis-- Yes Sartre is big on responsibility or authenticity and such, but that doesn't really help matters. Or responsibility doesn't mean much if you hold to purely subjective accounts of ethics or truth. What does he mean by responsibility? Say Robert Blake--the Baretta dude--really did murder t...

All that Sartrean claptrap about nothingness and so forth: pages and pages of if, without any real tangible claim. There is some decent information, I guess, here and there in Being and Nothingness: the more psychological stuff and "bad faith" are kind of cool but vague and unverifiable. The insiste...

Whatever really. I think the beat-countercultural tradition is admirable to some extent. People should read Ferlinghetti and Pynchon and Kesey etc. I object to "hipster hierarchies" however, and the stalinist aspects of leftist academia, where guilt carries down in some magical way (ie. hetero Ameri...

I think social science may occasionally be used for fraudulent, totalitarian, or manipulative purposes, but that doesn't mean all of it is. In some circumstances empirical research and data may be required--and there is a viable tradition of liberal and leftist empiricism isn't there? Economics perf...

Yes, there is some validity to that interpretation, that the artist is a cunning forger or conjurer; and Plato's attacks on lyric poetry and aesthetic inspiration are still relevant, I believe. Even Marx himself was disparaging towards "belle-lettrists." Who provides a better or more accurate pictur...

Check out Bruges in Belgium really, if you would care to see a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Or perhaps it's Escher. One of the most bizarre little cities of Europa.

Yes. How about American Gothic, Updated.

Es verdad, "stone walls do not a prison make", and I guess you could have a Walden Pond of the mind, but some of us would prefer to have it manifested on a more empirical realm. I think Brautigan would have agreed--recall his piece in TFIA, A Walden Pond for Winos-- the hobo-artists with a flea circ...

Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandberg, Richard Brautigan side; not the suit-and-tie, overcrowded slum, Enron, military-industrial complex, Patriot Act side. Were a Thoreau to manifest himself in 2005 America, say in Vegas or El Lay, he would, after a brief survey of the Autopolis, hurry ...

I do enjoy some entertaining, pre-frolicing chit chat with "la putain du jour"; alas, it's rather difficult when so many of them seem to have had their vocal cords removed. Sigghhhhh.

Does anyone else, after reading some Paglia, feel an urge to wash one's hands? She's another catty, colloquial pseudo-scholar cum courtesan, putting forth her great themes and literary bon mots, but with little substance or rational ability. Sort of the Heidi Fleiss of academic lit., handing down th...

Why do men -- even men who are usually very open about themselves in a variety of situations -- suddenly clam up and become very private and guarded as soon as they realize they are being considered as a potential partner by a member of the opposite sex? Perhaps I am mistaken, yet I wager this stat...

Along with the Getty Center perching over the south end of the Mullholland Pass like some Parthenon of commuting, and the deconstructed sheet metal walls of the Music Center, LA citizens are now blessed with another monument to ostentatious futility, Our Lady of the Angels, also known as Taj Mahoney...

Yeah i've noted dat tendency among LA grrls--usually their thong (black or red) is sliding up out of their hip huggies and there is some dread tat above the crack, wings of some sort, butterflies, eagle, or perhaps bat. If they have a pager ridin' on their jeans, tho, you do best to avoid 'em. Puede...