John Steppling

"'Yugen' as a concept refers to mystery and depth. 'Yu' means dimness, shadow filled, and 'gen' means darkness. It comes from a Chinese term 'you xuan' which meant something too deep either to comprehend or even to see." Donald Richie A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick "The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the … [Read more...]

The photo above, from the great Maneul Alvarez Bravo, is one I've been looking at a lot this week. I can't find where it was taken except that, obviously, it was Mexico. It reminds me a bit of Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico. And of that famous snapshot of Zapata and the U.S. Council. This is a world increasingly remote from our own. I think that is part of the sadness embedded in the above image. "Satire? Call it instead a projection of existing givens—trends clear to those not already brainwashed, from escalation of war-making activities, counterrevolutionary in spirit and purpose, to the eradication of privacy of the individual on a global basis, and in-between, the stabilization of a … [Read more...]

"True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams." Gaston Bachelard "If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point." Mark Rothko Almost everything in this culture that purports to be a sign of compassion or respect or care, is in every instance an expression of the exact opposite. Politically correct terms or labels, programs from the state claiming to assist the poor, reforms designed to protect consumers, etc. Humanitarian interventions, or the war on poverty. This trickles down, as both cause and effect, to the individual and his vocabulary. On an individual level people have begun to speak … [Read more...]

"Violence so permeates society that popular pleasures are organized around an 'aesthetics of vulgarity', with the state staging public rituals in which 'the masses join the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology', and when power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence." Achille Mbembe (quoted by Randy Martin in Empire of Indifference) "Women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were, they'd be all over me.” Elliot Rodger "(fascism is) the sum total of all the irrational reactions of the natural human character." Wilhelm Reich "What needs to be … [Read more...]

"...the era of neoliberal revanchism was characterized by a discourse of revenge against minorities, the working class, feminists, enviromental activists, gays and lesbians, and recent immigrants: the political enemies of the bourgeois political elite and their supporters." Tom Slater (on Neil Smith) "...this triple exclusion, the prison and the criminal justice system more broadly contribute to the ongoing reconstruction of the ‘imagined community’ of Americans around the polar opposition between praiseworthy ‘working families’—implicitly white, suburban, and deserving—and the despicable ‘underclass’ of criminals, loafers, and leeches, a two-headed antisocial hydra personified by the … [Read more...]

"The neat division between roles and real selves reduces society to a masquerade party. Yet not even plastic surgery can heal the psychic disfigurements. The social evil reaches into the living fibers; people not only assume roles, they are roles." Russell Jacoby "Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning." Ludwig Wittgenstein "The problem of limits (of langauge, of technique) is precisely what interests Tarfuri and seperates him from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Lyotard. For Tarfuri, as well as for Georg Simmel, the limit, the confine, the border (and, as such, form and history), is the place of contradiction - the place, that is, where the thing itself, and, at … [Read more...]

". . . the difference between native peoples and Western peoples [is that] there are still people who know about what came before, and who know that there's still wild nature available and that they have a relationship to it. Among the native cultures of the world there's still a memory and a philosophical base for resistance. As to why some people don't resist and are done in by it, I'd say it results from a complex of factors. Politically, they're overpowered. Technology overpowers them . . . We're uprooted, alienated Westerners feeling vindicated by the fact that now the Indians are also going for it. We look at them and say, "They're going for the snowmobiles and they're dropping the … [Read more...]

"The meaning of this parable is not easy to define. But one thing is clear: this type of parable is not to be thought outside the theatre, or rather outside a certain kind of theatre. In narrative prose Edgar could, of course, lead the blind Gloucester to the cliffs of Dover, let him jump down from a stone and make him believe that he was jumping from the top of a cliff. But he might just as well lead him a day's journey away from the castle and make him jump from a stone or any heap of sand. In film and prose there is only the choice between a real stone lying in the sand and an equally real jump from the top of a chalk cliff into the sea. One cannot transpose Gloucester's suicide attempt … [Read more...]