Trapped in the Web of Love!
Tuesday, 10. November 2009, 12:54:23
Thursday, 5. November 2009, 23:00:05
Wednesday, 4. November 2009, 17:43:55
... doctors don't like to research death. Although most people die in hospitals, the subject of death is almost taboo there.
Geoffrey Gorer, an authority on death and dying, says that death has replaced sex as the forbidden topic. Today, sex education is part of the schoolchild's curriculum. Death education is ignored. Says Gorer: "One has the right to cry only if no one else can see or hear. Solitary and shameful mourning is the only recourse, like a sort of masturbation."
Tuesday, 3. November 2009, 22:31:28
I don't belong to any political groups, I don't really say anything unless I'm asked directly and I don't even demonstrate in public. I always assume that so-called authoritarian figures just assume that pop/rock music is slightly insane and an untouchable platform for the working classes to stand up and say something noticeable.
I've been kind of interested in the Virginia Tech massacre, too. Obviously, it's kind of unimaginable what it would have been like to be there and the whole thing is horrific, but when I read the newspaper reports and they focused on the writing of this character, which those around claimed was "surreal" and "morbid" and so on, I couldn't help feeling like I might have been Cho Seung-Hui in a past life or something. I mean, I feel like it could easily have been me. And there was something about a play or story he wrote in which a father (step-father?) was choked to death by his son - choked to death with a rice-crispie bar.
That's such an unexpected image. It's weirdly pathetic.
It occurred to me that perhaps the only difference between myself and Cho Seung-Hui is the fact that maybe I can write a bit better. I don't know why, but I feel confident that I am a better writer, even though I haven't actually read any of his stuff. And that this is the difference, and somehow the reason, or the most telling symptom of the reason, why I'm not doing the same thing he did. I mean, I have often and explicitly thought of writing as a kind of revenge, somewhat in the way you described in a previous e-mail.
I kind of feel that Cho Seung-Hui is basically Mizoguchi, from Kinkakuji, but maybe I'm projecting that. Anyway, I certainly feel I understand the idea of being a kind of total loser who feels himself in some way 'forced into this' because people are simply unable to accept him. There is no doubt he has now had an incredible impact on a great many lives.
As far as the victims go, as I was heading to bed last night, I heard that my good friend Stack (Ryan Clark) was one of the first confirmed dead. I didn't want to believe that I'd never get to talk to him again, and all I could think about was how much I could tell him how much his friendship meant to me. During my junior year, Ryan, another friend and I used to get breakfast on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Shultz Dining Hall, one of the cafeterias on campus, and it was always the highlight of my day. He could talk forever it seemed and always made us laugh. He was a good friend, not just to me, but to a lot of people, and I'll miss him a lot.
When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn't pressure him to give closing comments.
While I "knew" Cho, I always wished there was something I could do for him, but I couldn't think of anything. As far as notifying authorities, there isn't (to my knowledge) any system set up that lets people say "Hey! This guy has some issues! Maybe you should look into this guy!" If there were, I definitely would have tried to get the kid some help. I think that could have had a good chance of averting yesterday's tragedy more than anything.
We are not so different from the Aztecs; we give more attention to Cho killing people than we do to anything beautiful. Killing people to get attention says as much about the society that gives it media coverage as it does about the murderer. We already live in a factory farm, it`s called human society, and in it we are all abused and all eventually die. Why play by the rules of the factory farm? Wouldn`t it be better to blow it up?
Tuesday, 3. November 2009, 18:37:40
Tuesday, 3. November 2009, 00:10:45
Sunday, 1. November 2009, 23:40:37
Sunday, 1. November 2009, 23:17:11
Sunday, 1. November 2009, 16:47:48
Sunday, 1. November 2009, 13:12:35
Your role in the band has included the writing of lyrics. All of these have had what might be called a negative or pessimistic tone. Do you think that will change in the future?
I think the whole first world, its suffering is very self-indulgent. There's no reason to be unhappy, but I think everybody feels melancholia quite regularly.
And that falling into melancholia (before you know it), is that the way your own path in life has taken you?
My father is really, really happy, and his standard of living when he was my age was nothing compared to mine. And yet, I sit in my house and I moan and complain, and he just doesn't understand. And, I don't know why, it's just the way our generation is, I suppose.
I had decided at that particular time to remain in Madrid all week, and two days later I had a little argument with Esther on the subject of Ken Park, the latest film by Larry Clark, which she had been keen to go and see. I had hated Kids, and I hated Ken Park even more, the scene where this dirty little shit beats up his grandparents was particularly unbearable. That film-maker completely disgusted me, and it was no doubt this sincere disgust that made me incapable of stopping myself from talking about it, whilst I strongly suspected that Esther liked him out of habit and conformism, because it was generally cool to approve of the representation of violence in the arts, and that she liked him without any real discernment, in the same way she liked, for example, Michael Haneke, without even realising that the meaning of those sorrowful and moral films by Michael Haneke was completely different from that of those by Larry Clark. I knew that it would have been better for me to keep quiet, that abandoning my usual comic character could only bring me trouble, but I couldn't, the imp of the perverse was the stronger. We were in a bizarre, very kitsch bar, with mirrors and gold fixtures, full of paroxysmal homosexuals who buggered themselves silly in adjacent backrooms, yet which was open to everyone, with groups of young boys and girls calmly drinking Coca-Colas at neighbouring tables. I explained to her whilst rapidly downing my iced tequila that I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West's absurd attraction to cynicism and evil, and that I therefore felt myself ideally placed to assert that among all the merchants of evil, Larry Clark was one of the most common, most vulgar, simply because he unreservedly took the side of the young against the old, because all his films were an incitement to children to treat their parents without the least humanity, the least pity, and that there was nothing new or original about this, it had been the same in all the cultural sectors for the last fifty-odd years, and this supposedly cultural tendency in fact only hid the desire for a return to a primitive state where the young got rid of the old without ceremony, with no questions asked, simply because they were too weak to defend themselves. It was, therefore, just a brutal regression, typical of modernity, to a stage preceding all civilisation, for any civilisation could judge itself on the fate it reserved for the weakest, for those who were no longer either productive or desirable, in short Larry Clark and his abject accomplice Harmony Korine were just two of the most tedious - and artistically the most miserable - examples of the Nietzschean scum who had been proliferating in the cultural field for far too long, and who could in no way be put on the same level as people like Michael Haneke, or like me, for example - who had always made sure to introduce a certain element of doubt, uncertainty and unease into my shows, even if they were (I was the first to admit it) otherwise repugnant. She listened to me with a sad expression, but with great attention, she hadn't yet touched her Fanta.
The advantage of giving a moral lecture, is that this type of argument had been under such strong censorship, and for so many years, that it provokes an incongruous effect and immediately attracts the attention of the interlocuter; the disadvantage is that the interlocuter never manages to take you completely seriously. The serious and attentive expression on Esther's face threw me for an instant, but I ordered another glass of tequila and ploughed on, whilst becoming conscious that I was getting excited artificially, that there was something false about my sincerity: apart from the patently obvious fact that Larry Clark was just a small, undistinguished merchant and that to cite him in the same sentence as Nietzsche was already in itself something derisory, I felt in my heart of hearts scarcely more concerned about these subjects than by world hunger, human rights or any rubbish of that kind. Nevertheless, I went on, with increasing acrimony, carried away by that strange mixture of nastiness and masochism, which I perhaps hoped would lead me to my destruction, after it had brought me fame and fortune. Not only did the old not have the right to fuck, I continued ferociously, but they no longer had the right to rebel against a world that nevertheless crushed them unsparingly, made them defenceless prey to the violence of juvenile delinquents before dumping them in ignoble twilight homes where they were humiliated and mistreated by decerebrated auxiliary nurses, and despite all this, rebellion was forbidden to them, rebellion too - like sexuality, like pleasure, like love - seemed reserved for the young and to have no point for other people, any cause incapable of mobilising the interest of the young was disqualified in advance, basically, old people were in all matters treated simply as waste, to be granted only a survival that was miserable, conditional and more and more narrowly limited. In my script The Social Security Deficit, which hadn't seen the light of day, and this appeared highly significant to me, I continued, almost besisde myself - I incited instead the old to rebel against the young, to use them and to show them who's boss. Why for example should male and female adolescents, voracious and sheep-like consumers, always greedy for pocket money, not be forced into prostitution, the only means by which they could modestly reimburse the immense efforts and struggles that were made for their well-being? And why, at a time when contraception had been perfected, and the risk of genetic degeneration perfectly localised, should we maintain the absurd and humiliating taboo that is incest? Those are the real questions, the authentic moral issues! I exclaimed angrily; now that was no Larry Clark.
Saturday, 31. October 2009, 11:58:07
In actual fact, the government has no particular interest in the truth. As Professor Nutt said yesterday, the Home Office's decision to upgrade cannabis from Class C to Class B had a far more significant political effect than the error of its imposition. With the experts all telling the government this was the wrong move, and all the data pointing to a reduction in use since the drug was downgraded in 2004, Smith, under orders from the prime minister, upgraded it to class B anyway. The precedent was clear: experts and evidence mean nothing. Tabloid headlines mean everything.
There could be no better lesson upon which to start a politically conscious life: the government is not telling you the truth. With that piece of knowledge you can become a fully active citizen, rather than the passive sponge government wishes you to be. The next time a prime minister tells the public that a country can attack us in 45 minutes in order to justify a war, the kids will be suspicious. The next time politicians throw insults at each other as a means of evading debate, they will be suspicious. The next time a politician justifies taking away British freedoms with reference to the threat of terrorism, they will be suspicious.
Thursday, 29. October 2009, 13:05:58
Tuesday, 27. October 2009, 23:40:01
Two things cannot alter,
Since Time was, nor to-day:
The flowing of water;
And Love's strange, sweet way.



... Tao is the flowing course of nature and the universe; li is its principle of order which, following Needham, we can best translate as "organic pattern"; and water is its eloquent metaphor.
Monday, 26. October 2009, 19:47:17

Monday, 26. October 2009, 13:47:00
Danish string theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen and the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya say that the yet to be discovered Higgs Boson could have the ability to turn back time to stop its cover being blown, reports New Scientist.
The duo had proposed to prove their theory by printing millions of cards with the words "carry on" written on them, and then slip in a couple of cards that say "shut the thing down".
They conclude that if you randomly draw out a card that reads "shut the thing down", that Higgs is attempting to influence the future, and that the world's largest machine should be shut down.
Sunday, 25. October 2009, 19:51:07
Friday, 23. October 2009, 13:46:42
A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.
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