Awesome big band outside Verizon center
I’ve been so busy the past two weeks and haven’t posted much, much less about personal stuff, but I’m excited because today my friend is taking me to a wine tasting yay wine
These 2 Maps About Student Loans Explode One of the Biggest Myths About Student Loans
The media fixates on the overall size of student debt. But where you go to school, whether you graduate, and what kind of job you get later may matter much more.
Read more. [Images: FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel]
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Anal retentive much
The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 123 (via grrrant-deactivated2012826)
(via lulian)
When someone asks, ‘what’s the use of philosophy?’ the reply must be aggressive since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not philosophy.
—Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, (via thepostmoderntestament)
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(via talkingknots)
this is in my archive at least four times now, and not time enough
(Source: seinfeldworld, via talkingknots)
The property appertaining to the commodity as its fetish character attaches as well to the commodity-producing society—not as it is in itself, to be sure, but more as it represents itself and thinks to understand itself whenever it abstracts from the fact that it produces precisely commodities. The image that it produces of itself in this way, and that it customarily labels as its culture, corresponds to the concept of phantasmagoria (compare “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” section 3). The latter is defined by Wiesengrund “as a consumer item in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being. It becomes a magical object, insofar as the labor stored up in it comes to seem supernatural and sacred at the very moment when it can no longer be recognized as labor” (T.W. Adorno, “Fragmente über Wagner,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 8, nos. 1-2 [1939], p. 17). In connection with this, from the manuscript on Wagner (pp. 46-47): “The art of Wagner’s orchestration has banished…the role of the immediate production of sound from the aesthetic totality…Anyone fully able to grasp why Haydn doubles the violins with a flute in piano might well get an intuitive glimpse into why, thousands of years ago, men gave up eating uncooked grain and began to bake bread, or why they started to smooth and polish their tools. All trace of its own production should ideally disappear from the object of consumption. It should look as though it had never been made, so as not to reveal that the one who sells it did not in fact make it, but rather appropriated to himself the labor that went into it. The autonomy of art has its origin in the concealment of labor.”*
—[X13a]
not only do we have Adorno talking about Wagner and Benjamin on the commodity character of the work of art, but this is also the final entry in the X Konvolut, which is titled “Marx”
*: note 62 in my edition: “Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 82-83. It might be said that the method of citation in The Arcades Project, the polyphony of the texts, works precisely to counter the phantasmagoria Adorno speaks of” (p. 1001 of the Belknap edition).
Seinfelt: The Atkins Diet
Elaine overhears a short news story about the Atkins diet and, deciding she could stand to lose a few pounds, tries it out. She consumes nothing but chicken, steak, and bacon until she comes down with beriberi. Kramer advises, “It’s because you need to eat some berries!” Jerry’s parents force him…
The common perception is that the great statues and buildings of ancient Greece and Rome were all pure unpainted stone or green tarnished bronze, but researchers have been arguing that this may not been what these classic monuments really looked like back in the era of their creation. That, in fact, these statues were quite alive and vibrant, full of color.
Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity is a travelling exhibition of varying format and extent that has been shown in multiple cities worldwide. Its subject is ancient polychromy, i.e. the original, brightly painted, appearance of ancient sculpture and architecture. It features more than 20 full-size color reconstructions of Greek and Roman works, alongside 35 original statues and reliefs.
The color reconstructions are based on close examination of the originals and on scientific analysis of the scarce traces of paint remaining on them. Ultraviolet light, says Ebbinghaus, “brings out ‘paint ghosts,’ differences in the surface structure of the stone caused by different paints and by the weathering of the paints. It can often give you an idea of patterns, even if no pigments survive.” The paint on these reproductions of stone sculptures appears flat, lacking the depth of, say, oil. “We can identify the colorants—mostly minerals and some plants,” says Ebbinghaus, “but binding media are hard to identify. Egg has been used for the reconstructions. If the minerals were ground more finely, a different binding medium used, the paint polished or covered with a protective coating, the effect would be quite different.”
“We now assume that almost all Greek marble sculpture was painted,” she says. “These reconstructions can only be approximations,” but at least they dispel a popular misconception—that most statues of antiquity were plain old white. Plain would not be thought ideal until the Renaissance.
Researchers believe, particalurly Vinzenz Brinkmann who has been doing this research for the past 25 years, that artists used mineral and organic based colors and after centuries of deterioration any trace of pigment leftover when discovered, would have been taken off during any cleaning processes done before being put on display, washing the historical art clear of its true colors.
The findings of this research completley changes the commonly held modern ideas of the ancient world, and the way we view modern sculpture and art today, much of which was based on those classical Greek and Roman styles.
Always a good reminder
(Source: nowhere---kid, via facelessinblack)
Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as death and sweet as love.
—Turkish Proverb (via chaishiiirin)
Would that I had some to show
