Enter the Void
Hi, my name is Dan, and this is not for you.
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."
Most of my posts are film, music and television related, with the occasional non-sequitur about my personal life.
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23rdMayWed
The cultural constraints under which we operate include not only visible political structures but also the phantasmatic processes by which we eroticize the real. Even if we are born straight or gay, we still have to learn to desire particular men and women, and not desire others; the economy of our sexual drives is a cultural achievement. Perhaps nowhere are we manipulated more effectively and more insidiously than in our most “personal” choices or tastes in the objects of our desires. Those choices have cultural origins and political consequences. To seek to understand what might be called the line of constraint running from one to the other is itself a political imperative.
[Bersani, Leo. “Loving Men.” Constructing Masculinity. Eds. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson. New York: Routledge, 1995. 115-23.]
19thMaySat
“ So far as photographs with the most solemn or heartrending subject matter are art–and this is what they become when they hang on walls, whatever the disclaimers–they partake of the fate of all wall-hung or floor-supported art displayed in public spaces. That is, they are stations along a–usually accompanied–stroll. A museum or gallery visit is a social situation, riddled with distractions, in the course of which art is seen and commented on. Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually the specificity of the photographs’ accusations will fade; the denunciation of a particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become a denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer’s intentions are irrelevant to this larger process. ”
- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
19thMaySat
“ A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advance industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images. ”
- Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)
18thAprWed
“ After 35 years of knowing John Waters I turn to my wife and I said to her, ‘I have the feeling that this man is gay.’ ”
- Werner Herzog (via meetmeinmalkovich)
12thAprThu
“ Wanna collaborate and make a movie revolving around a pizza delivery guy ”
- text from my sister’s boyfriend
7thAprSat
“ If the signs of love and jealousy carry their own alteration, it is for a simple reason: love unceasingly prepares its own disappearance, acts out its dissolution. The same is true of love as of death, when we imagine we will still be alive enough to see the faces of those who will have lost us. In the same way we imagine that we will still be enough in love to enjoy the regrets of the person we shall have stopped loving. It is quite true that we repeat our past loves; but it is also true that our present love, in all its vivacity, ‘repeats’ the moment of the dissolution or anticipates its own end. ”
- Gilles Deleuze. Philosophy. Proust and Signs: the complete text. Translated by Richard Howard. 2000. (via evawucollier)
(Source: moredapper)
gpoyw
(Source: throwherinthewater)
2ndAprMon
(Source: geeksquadgangbang)
31stMarSat
“ Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves ”
- Audre Lorde, ‘Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface’, in Sister/Outsider, p. 63. (via feministquotes)
30thMarFri
“ A long-lived relationship is about so many things. It is such a dense and complex process — always a process — and it’s not to be summed up. It’s not to be turned into some kind of vignette. If we are serious, we also have to recognize that even the longest and richest and densest relationship must end, and we see it around us. We see it in that inevitability of time’s power, if you will. ”
- Adrienne Rich, on relationships [the complete 1989 Fresh Air interview] (via nprfreshair)
