Saturday, October 29, 2011

on Kate Durbin on the omnipresence of fashion.

From an interview of hers found here.

I’ll start with her nub first:

“…Fashion is seen culturally as the most ubiquitous and feminine and therefore the lowest of the arts, the most shallow and market-driven. Teenage girls are obsessed with fashion, as are drag queens. Serious people, “authentic” people, do not care about fashion. But the whole of life is a costume show, and it is one with deadly serious consequences…”

“Also, it is crucial to note that the costume show -- that is, life itself -- is unavoidable. So anyone who thinks he is not “into” fashion is fooling himself. Even if you live at a nudist colony, you are part of the show. If you have a body, you are part of the show.”

Right, I’m willing to grant for the sake of argument that one must have some kind of fashion and that one must have some degree of concern for her fashion. But surely it doesn’t follow from this that everyone is “into” fashion in the same degree and in the same respect anymore than we could say that everyone is gluttonous because everyone must eat food and thereby must have some concern for it. Again: it’s certainly true that in some utterly trivial sense that an Amish person is “into” fashion, but if we try to conclude from this that the Amish person’s preoccupation with fashion is thereby the same in degree and in kind as that of Madonna’s, we’re simply equivocating.

“Fashion is seen culturally as the most ubiquitous and feminine and therefore the lowest of the arts, the most shallow and market-driven. Teenage girls are obsessed with fashion, as are drag queens. Serious people, “authentic” people, do not care about fashion. But the whole of life is a costume show, and it is one with deadly serious consequences.”

From what I said above, apparently the whole of life is not a costume show, or at least it doesn’t have to be.

“While there can be deadly consequences for our fashion choices, fashion is a way to both play with and debunk the cultural narrative.”

Right, one tyrant often overthrows another. But pure and unadulterated virtue can and will break the thesis/antithesis inertia. Thus is the power of Faith, Hope, and Love.

Friday, October 28, 2011

you just *are* your constitution.

“How do you love someone who refuses to be loved?”

“You don’t because you can’t.”

“What if her refusing to be loved is something she can’t help? Suppose she has some horrible psychological disorder or some deep emotional scars, neither of which were brought about by anything she chose?”

“The Spartans had no problem bashing in the skulls of their own weak and deformed babies. Sometimes life is just tragic.”

“Apparently the Kingdom of God is not at hand.”

“Not in this world, my friend.”

“Amen to that.”

________________________

"It's not that I don't accept God, you must understand, it's the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept."

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Aristotle's cloak.

Even though Donnie and Gretchen never actually were, they could have been, and that matters.


Tuesday, October 25, 2011

on whether God can be mocked.

“…without you, everything falls apart.”

Trent Reznor on the human condition in relation to God.




“I'm gonna show you where it’s dark, but have no fear.”

Monday, October 24, 2011

moral responsibility.

If you’re ever curious about how one could kill a man without being morally responsible for it, please read Billy Budd.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

some things are better left unsaid.

Despite the half-baked villains, uninspired plot, and (extremely well done) gratuitous violence, Drive captured the way it feels to live in the infinite chasm between moments. Most of us anxiously anticipate the middle of the moment where the uncommon is the focal point and everything else is just background. Drive inverts the spectrum, forcibly showing us how the seemingly drab background has its own vibrant backbeat. Sometimes (most times?), it’s what isn’t said that matters: the suppressed blaze of a brow, the awkward quiver of a lip, the blank stare into nowhere, the slowness of silence, or the expression of an expressionless face. This is how I usually see the world, actually, and I’m glad someone out there understands.

One meta-critique: Ryan Gosling’s character, much like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, could never ever be an actor, a minore an actor playing this very character. Furthermore, the authenticity that Drive comes so close to capturing is destroyed by the very act of displaying it, a fortiori when the medium is the silver screen. You simply can’t talk about what’s better left unsaid. Those who get it don’t need to hear it; those who don’t, won’t; and those who think they get it will write stupid blog posts about it.

“Well, why the hell are you talking about it, then?”

To show how stupid it is to try.

Also: The movie captures what it’s like to live in L.A., and the soundtrack as a whole is the utter epitome of the pink word ‘Drive’ written in cursive. Awesome.

Addendum: Perhaps the dubious villains and the “eh” plot were on purpose? I doubt anyone is that clever.

*Plot [sic] Spoiler*

On reflection, I’m convinced my prima facie impression was correct. The reason why the knife fight in the last scene between Gosling’s character (henceforth GC) and Bernie is chronologically spliced up and concurrent with their “prior” Chinese restaurant conversation is because we’re watching GC running various subjunctive conditionals through his mind about what Bernie would do. GC knows that if he’d go head to head with Bernie, his chances of coming out on top would be 50/50. Those aren’t horrible odds, given the conditions, but why settle for them if you could do better? Furthermore, having a full on scuffle in broad daylight would attract the kind of attention that would eventually come back to haunt GC. To get the edge on Bernie, then, GC acts as if he isn’t expecting Bernie to stab him. By coming off as if his guard were down, Bernie would go for a quicker yet less-lethal blow, for it’s better to incapacitate quickly and then kill than to lower your odds of killing altogether by delivering a potentially more fatal yet slower blow. But, as it actually pans out, GC anticipates Bernie’s anticipation that GC isn’t anticipating Bernie stabbing him, which means that Bernie is caught completely off guard when GC stabs him back without flinching.

Isn’t it weird how counterfactuals—would be facts that aren’t facts—can contribute causally to the actual facts?

Had GC not reasoned counterfactually, then GC wouldn’t have done what he actually did.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

“…one moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?”

Labels:

Saturday, October 08, 2011

on being a person.

Suppose you had been born into a set of conditions qualitatively identical to those of John Wayne Gacy Jr. (viz.,—suppose you were born into the same environment and with the same genetic make up and so on and so forth). Would you have, by that very fact, made the identical choices that he did make? Could you have chosen to act differently than he in fact did?

1. If your answer is “YES” to the “Would you…?” and “NO” to the “Could you…?” questions: It seems that you’re committed to the idea that what one does at any particular moment is a logical consequence of all the facts that are true of a person at that particular moment. I.e., that the sufficient reason that necessitates whatever one does is some combination of her psychology/physical constitution plus her environment, and that’s it.

Problem for 1.: No one ever had a choice about the conditions she was born into. I.e., no one chooses where she is born or to whom she is born, and no one has a choice about her genetic makeup. Well, if no one has a choice about the initial conditions that one is born into, and all of her subsequent actions/choices are the product of these initial conditions, it seems that one is no more responsible for what one does at the age of 23 than what one does at the age of 1 day old. But if that’s right, then it seems someone like John Wayne Gacy Jr. is no more responsible for the evil he did than a redwood is responsible for crushing a lumberjack.

2. If your answer is “NOT NECESSARILY” to the “Would you…?” and “YES” to the “Could you…?” questions: It seems that you’re committed to the idea that what one does at any particular moment may or may not be the logical consequence of all the facts that are true of a person at that particular moment. I.e., that the combination of one’s psychological/psychical constitution plus her environment may not be sufficient to necessitate whatever she does.

Problem for 2: If there is a situation where one chooses to do something and this choosing to do something is not a logical consequence of her psychological/physical constitution plus her environment, then it seems that there is no ultimate reason why she did what she did other than the brute fact that she simply decided to do whatever it was she decided to do. And if this is right, trying to completely understand why we do what we do in terms understanding our psychological/physical constitution and our environment will turn out to be an abject failure. In the words of Chisholm, “there can be no science of man,” for like God, and unlike ordinary material objects, we can move things without ourselves being moved by anything at all.

“Let Us make Man in Our Image...” (Gen 1:26)

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

how bizarre.

“One is tempted to try: ‘It follows from the physical laws that if the match is struck against that surface (at the specified force and angle) and everything is normal then the match ignites’, but this brings the very strange predicate ‘normal’ into the story. Besides, maybe conditions weren’t ‘normal’ (in the sense of ‘average’) at the time. (In infinitely many respects, conditions are always ‘abnormal’: a truism from statistical theory.)”

Hilary Putnam, “Why There Isn’t a Ready-Made World” (Putnam’s emphasis)

Observation 1: How strange (ironic?) that the predicate ‘normal’ is strange. For isn’t what we normally predicate ‘normal’ of is that which is common or familiar—viz., what’s normal? And if so, aren’t we by that very fact very acquainted with the meaning of ‘normal’ in such a way that the predicate ‘normal’ is anything but strange?

Tangent 1 of Observation 1: Could there be such thing as the inherently strange that’s such that even if it were to be as normal (common) as can be, it wouldn’t be any less queer? E.g., suppose that, due to a massive toxic waste spill, every person develops the fully functioning genitalia of both sexes that enable individual persons to impregnate themselves. Wouldn’t that smack of being absolutely bizarre however common it might be?

Observation 2: Putnam says that as far as the ‘average’ sense of ‘normal’ goes, in as many respects as can be imagined and then some, things are “always ‘abnormal’.” Doesn’t this imply that, at least on some level, it’s normal for things to abnormal? And if that’s right, how is it the case that conditions are always abnormal?

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