"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left." -- Albert Einstein.
Uh-oh.
This blog continues, just at a different time-rate than most others. We continue to issue warnings, anyhow.
12.31.06: Winter's gone, the river's on the rise
Norman M. Klein, Los Angeles critic and historian, writes of how the cult of the image has flattened cultural reality into out into an increasingly manipulative electronic baroque of imaginary depth. The laws of this new technological pseudo-reality purport to have done away with the "meaning" of the single, printed record of electromagnetic radiation we once called the photograph. We feel increasingly cut off from that trace of the real once peculiarly available to Barthes' Camera Lucida.
But we had better not be. No matter how much new interests seem to make us want to think the image is dead, the image everyday manipulates us more at the service of seemingly disembodied power. Increasingly disturbing is how the image's very reputation of having been cut off from the real has helped place the real itself by infinite regress into an altogether different universe. One where, for instance, a 1983 photograph showing Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein shaking hands in a "well-documented" meeting is by its very visibility perfectly invisible.
Fact: We're not in an altogether different universe. We're in this one. We share an exterior world of physical laws and a system of relations that can be reliably collaborated upon as both communities and inviduals. It would do us all a lot of good were we to spend some more time both keeping track of the situation and facts of our world, and demonstrating to eachother our power within it.
12/19/06: PALE BLUE DOT
We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. -- CARL SAGAN
07/18/06: REST IN PEACE, AMERICA
06/19/06: TOO MUCH NEWS
It began when I noticed that though nothing at all had happened there was too much news. I looked for stories that might be victims of some sort of elaborate cloaking scheme.
Two stories in particular caught my attention. This one, concerning a mysterious red rain in a particularly sacred region of India. And this one, concerning an enormous supernova in no known galaxy.
Both of these stories were not news. They reported mysteries not yet solved. Yet they implied news, news of an order, that were it announced in full completion, would be the big k.o. for all reporting. Almost big enough that reporting would never ever be necessary. Yet they came and went quietly, as if they were simply speculations on Britney Spears not having sex with her bodyguard.
I thought about this and said, wait a minute. Reporting is no longer necessary now. That is to say the news itself occurs as news before it even happens, happens for sure anyway. Speculation and reports of speculation abound but rarely is anything newsworthy in itself. Our wars are not quite wars, our anonymous sources provide essentially unreportable events, on events so mired in alternate histories that they can't even generate sustainable comment. If it weren't for sports there would no longer be anything to comment upon at all.
It ended with an obvious realization.
And Rabbi Milkblood says: I FEEL SO MUCH BETTER NOW THAT I'M SEQUESTERED AWAY.
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Hi. Here's the SCA blog. Not much
to say. Noting some confusion among
our listeners, we've put together a SAMPLER of relevant
favorites as an introduction to the site.
We'll try to keep you posted here about recent
songs or pruess press related events. Songs
are uploaded regularly, so check the lists on
the MAIN PAGE at your own discretion.
