befuddled

the funny truth is, more people come to my page to stop sweetgum fruit more than anything else.

-brian

I'm starting up...

perkleate again. that's where i'll post lyrics, poems, quotations, and brief reviews of art that really moves me. go there.

[so]
-brian

these days

-"These are my best pants!" Tim said. And then he just threw here pen away.

-Passing... We are all passing.

-Critical theorist Walter Benjamin intrigues me. He makes the following argument: industry, its reproduction of artistic works, and its medium of film, have had a profound effect on "art and its traditional form." Through reproduction, art has become widely available at the expense of authority (uniqueness of substance) and venue (uniqueness of location). Art reproduced ad nauseum loses its "aura"—the perceived distance between the object and the viewer, a certain respect for the "otherness" of the object—in the viewer's mind. This aura is sacrificed for the sake of an ever-expanding "sense of the universal equality of things."


-Has art really lost its aura? Or did it just go somewhere else?

-The last two thoughts were probably not interesting to anyone else.

-"the distance between
thinking and perceiving
grows with every
passing evening"

-Some people become less talkative as soon as they enter a classroom, and more talkative once they leave. But I've never met a person who works the other way around.

-Maybe we have celebrities so that we can find a release for our bad impulses. They really are a bunch of assholes, taken as a whole. Seriously.

-"the distance would grow
more grieviously
if not for more of you
and less of me"

-Someone had a thought project: "Imagine if there was an experience machine which you could plug into. You could program it to give you whatever set of experiences you would like: as much pleasure, as little pain, whatever God, society, etc. you desire. As soon as you were plugged in, you would forget that you were ever a part of any other world. Now would you choose to live in a fabricated reality that felt every bit as real (and much better) than 'real' reality?"

-I would never choose the experience machine. I am not God, and don't want to be a god of my own privately-defined reality'. The losses would be too great. I would lose reality for illusion, my friends for friends', my God for God'. My world, for world'... I live too much in world' already without the interference of an experience machine.

-Give me truth, and I will see.

-Tomorrow is today. Tomorrow is a big day. Today is that big day.

-It is good to be here.

[well. yeah.]
-brian

lull

it's hard to blog when you say everything you want to say to people...

i said something funny the other day:

[watching jeremy play a video game]
brian: what game are you playing?
jer: need for speed undergound 2.
brian: you're not doing very well.
jer: nope.
brian: can i try?
jer: sure.
brian: [time passes] i suck at this. [drops the controller]
jer: at least i finished the race!
bri: at least i know when to quit.

[ouch]
-brian