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[wintler2]

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
Dorothy Day

[Allegro]

The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind is, to find, in everything, those certain bounds, quos ultra citrave nequit consistere rectum. These boundaries are marked out by a very fine line, which only good sense and attention can discover; it is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In manners, this line is good breeding; beyond it, is troublesome ceremony; short of it, is unbecoming negligence and inattention. In morals, it divides ostentatious Puritanism from criminal relaxation; in religion, superstition from impiety; and, in short, every virtue from its kindred vice or weakness.
~ Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, 4th Earl

[Elvis]

I’m not aware that the Administration is not misleading the public about this or any other issue.

-- Charles Timothy "Chuck" Hagel, to House Foreign Affairs Committee, Sept 4, 2013

[justdrew]

The story goes into eye-glazingly weird lists of the prince's excesses. Reading it, I found myself tuning out, losing the ability to focus on the lists of spectacular waste, only to be brought back to reality by an extravagance so over-the-top that it shocked me out of my stupor. It's a kind of pornography of capitalism, a Southeast Asian version of the Beverly Hillbillies, a proof that oil fortunes demand no thought, no innovation, no sense of shared national destiny: just a hole the ground, surrounded by guns, enriching an elite of oafs and wastrels.
...

[MacCruiskeen]

“When material needs are largely satisfied,” writes Carl Rogers, “as they tend to be for many people in this affluent society, individuals are turning to the psychological world, groping for a greater degree of authenticity and fulfillment.” The clear distinction between material and psychic needs is already the mystification; it capitulates to the ideology of the affluent society which affirms the material structure is sound, conceding only that some psychic and spiritual values might be lacking. Exactly this distinction sets up “authenticity” and “fulfillment” as so many more commodities for the shopper. Rather it is the fissure itself which is the source of the ills—between work and “free” time, material structure and psychological “world,” producers and consumers.

- Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia, 1975

[MacCruiskeen]

Harper:
The cats have come in on the side of the French.

[...]

Joan:
Of course birds saw me, everyone saw me walking along but nobody knew why, I could have been on a mission, everyone`s moving about and no one knows why, and in fact I killed two cats and a child under five so it wasn`t that different from a mission, and I don`t see why I can`t have one day and then go back. I`ll go on to the end after this. It wasn`t so much the birds I was frightened of, it was the weather, the weather here`s on the side of the Japanese. There were thunderstorms all through the mountains, I went through towns I hadn`t been before. The rats are bleeding out of their mouths and ears, which is good, and so were the girls by the side of the road. It was tiring there because everything`s been recruited, there were piles of bodies and if you stopped to find out there was one killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we were burning the grass that wouldn`t serve. The Bolivians are working with gravity, that`s a secret so as not to spread alarm. But we`re getting further with noise, and there´s thousands dead of light in Madagascar. Who`s going to mobilise darkness and silence? that`s what I wondered in the night. [...]

- from Caryl Churchill's Far Away

[MacCruiskeen]

“because if you really love anybody or anything or any principle or any science or belief, you will hate, hate, hate, and keep hating anybody or anything that tries to hurt, or kill or destroy that which you love. Unless love has got this hate, it’s not love at all, it’s a cave full of mysticism, and one of the most dangerous forms of cowardice”.

- from a letter Woody Guthrie wrote to his second wife, explaining why he had chosen to fight fascism by serving on the Atlantic convoys during WWII.

http://monthlyreview.org/2011/05/01/woo ... remembered

[MacCruiskeen]

I met Murder on the way –
He had a face like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

- Shelley (from 'The Mask of Anarchy')

Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.

- Byron

[Allegro]

Henry James in his short story The Middle Years:

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Leo Tolstoy, in his essay “What Is Art?”:

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Frank Lloyd Wright, writing in 1957, as cited in Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Nature, and the Human Spirit: A Collection of Quotations:

Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, one of 5 essential books on fear and the creative process:

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

Charles Eames, cited in the fantastic 100 Quotes by Charles Eames:

Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic.

Elbert Hubbard in a 1908 volume of Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers:

Art is not a thing — it is a way.

Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Thomas Merton in No Man Is An Island:

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Francis Ford Coppola in a recent interview:

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.

André Gide in Poétique:

Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

Friedrich Nietzsche, made famous all over again by Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing:

We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.

Michelangelo Pistoletto in Art’s Responsibility:

Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums — they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.

Federico Fellini in a December 1965 piece in The Atlantic, not currently online:

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity:

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.

The Greek philosopher Aristophanes, writing in the 4th century B.C.:

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

And, lastly, my own take in a recent piece I wrote for the National Endowment for the Arts:

This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/22/what-is-art/

[hanshan]

...

At his height he had a wonderful talent shot with psychosis.

from the review in the LRB by Andrew O'Hagen of
the recent bio of Norman Mailer

The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan
Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp, £30.00, November, ISBN 978 1 84737 672 5

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n21/andrew-ohagan/the-reviewers-song



...

[MacCruiskeen]

As I sat in the bathtub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy.

(Quoted in a review of Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence.)

[cptmarginal]

"I have described the intelligence service as a socially acceptable way of expressing criminal tendencies," he said. "A guy who has strong criminal tendencies -- but is too much of a coward to be one -- would wind up in a place like the CIA if he had the education."

Some time before dawn, I was called into the embassy for a meeting with the
first CIA officer I'd ever knowingly met. He gave no name, I didn't ask for
one. Joe had told me he was CIA, that was all I needed. The guy was short,
stocky, bald and wearing what I would come to know was a typical CIA
uniform: a khaki leisure suit. He looked at me with a mixture of bemusement
and disdain that I would also learn was typical.

A product and practitioner of Cook County politics, Donohue resembled W.C. Fields in looks and mannerisms and, you get the feeling, in ethics, too; to wit, he joined the CIA when he perceived the cold war as "a growth industry." When he spoke, his words came in melodramatic exclamations. As he pondered, he paced nervously, like a pool hustler circling the table, picking his next shot. In all these respects, Donohue was the prototypical CIA officer -- a cagey position player using a glib exterior to mask a calculating mind.

[cptmarginal]

Some think the third World War will be set off by a nuclear missile. For me, that’s the way it will end. In the meantime, the figures of an intricate game are developing, a game whose de-coding will give historians of the future – if they are still around – a very hard time. A weird game. Its rules change as the match evolves. To start with, the super powers’ rivalry transforms itself not only into a Holy Alliance of the Rich against the Poor, but also into a selective co-elimination of Revolutionary Vanguards, wherever bombs would endanger sources of raw materials. As well as into the manipulation of these vanguards to pursue goals that are not their own. During the last ten years, some groups of forces (often more instinctive than organized) have been trying to play the game themselves – even if they knocked over the pieces. Wherever they tried, they failed. Nevertheless, it’s been their being that has the most profoundly transformed politics in our time. This film intends to show some of the steps of this transformation.

[Elihu]

Job 6:16 NLT
when it is swollen with ice and melting snow.

Job 37:10 NLT
God's breath sends the ice, freezing wide expanses of water.

Job 38:29 NLT
Who is the mother of the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens?

Job 38:30 NLT
For the water turns to ice as hard as rock, and the surface of the water freezes.

Psalm 147:18 NLT
Then, at his command, it all melts. He sends his winds, and the ice thaws.

[Elihu]

"It looks terrible for the whole sport when people are collapsing, ball kids are collapsing, people in the stands are collapsing," the Wimbledon champion said. "That's obviously not great." - Andy Murray