Barry Graham's Blog, page 107

InThe Myth ofSisyphus, Camus asks whether the meaninglessness of life requires that a rational person commit suicide.

“No,” he answers. “It requires revolt.”

He is wrong, because the question is wrong. It shows the essential flaw of all human-centered, therefore self-centered, philosophy.

Revolt by whom, against what?

Life is only futile or not futile, absurd or not absurd, depending on the self-centered story being told about it. So, Sisyphus’ eternal pushing of the...

The Human Centipede is a well-done, but vile, film about a mad scientist who joins three people together, mouth-to-anus. The person in front gets to eat normally, but the second person has to eat his shit, and the third person has to eat both their shit.

This seems to me to be a perfect physical representation of the class system.

Not So New American City

This video shows how the downtown Phoenix art scene was in the 1990s.I’m amazed at how many of these events I remember, and moved to see so many old friends, some of whom have since died.

Watching the documentaryBeautiful Losers, I travel back in time.

It is 2005. I am reading a magazine, #37 of Giant Robot. One article is accompanied by a picture of a young woman standing facing the wall of an art gallery, a can of paint in her left hand, a paint brush in her right. She is wearing a dark tank top, her hair is tied back, and her attention seems focused on the tip of the brush as it touches the canvas on the wall. This is what she does, who she is.

In December 1963, in a speech he gave while accepting the Tom Paine Award, Bob Dylan said he could relate to Lee Harvey Oswald:

I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where —what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too - I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone - I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me - not to go that far a...

Either way, happy new year to all my readers, my friends, my enemies, my teachers, my students, and all the beings of all the worlds.

Barack Obama is prepared to extend tax cuts for those who make less than $450,000 a year. He promises that there will be no tax increase for the middle class. The working class is barely mentioned.

There are those who still don’t realize that Obama is one of the most right-wing U.S. Presidents, and who say that he is simply being pragmatic, and that he always said that he wanted to reach across party lines, to govern from the center and reach compromise with his opponents.

Even if we give...

I think hate crimes laws are absurd. They privilege certain groups over others, and seek to police and punish thought, motivation and intention rather than action.

I’ve always believed that Margaret Thatcher orchestrated the Falklands war to boost her declining popularity. Newly declassified documents suggest she was willing to negotiate a compromise to avoid it.

If bloodshed had been avoided, I wonder if she’d still have been re-elected?

After the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, a scene from the forthcoming film Gangster Squad, showing a shooting in a movie theater, was cut. Following the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained was delayed, and cuts were made to violent scenes in Jack Reacher.

This seems to me to be antithetical to art. What purpose does it serve for films (or any other art form) to scurry away from the realities of violence and suffering?...