Noesis

A recipe for my sister: Pork and Walnut Pasta

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:51:00 +1000

Dinner the other night was an experiment spawned from the recesses of someone else’s blog...

beyondthegoblincity: How about an apple, dearie? source: my...

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:16:24 +1000

beyondthegoblincity:

How about an apple, dearie?

source: my scan

These days that sounds like a demonisation of Apple Inc. My how times have changed.

vlynx: Benson Island

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 18:39:43 +1000

vlynx:

Benson Island

craigknowles: Quick doodle of a slightly camp Nosferatu. This...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:38:33 +1000

craigknowles:

Quick doodle of a slightly camp Nosferatu.

This stretched, emasculated, caricature of Nosferatu is a good way in to seeing how the ridiculous sublime functions in the modern aesthetic sensibility. The figure’s cartoonishness offsets its genre: horror. The gnarled, sharp fingers and slightly blunt fangs gesture to a lifetime of stalking and consuming prey that is now no more than an ironic glimmer. The maudlin palette with a mild air of toxicity forces shadows to be blistering white. It is curious how the index for these shadows is the white collar and the eyes. Taken in their semiotic unfolding, they seem to suggest a fixated gaze, locked around the throat of something from the shadows. And then the white that surrounds the figure strikes one as odd; as though the ‘white shadow’ has parted to reveal this sublime undead figure of too much life, its predatory nature ridiculed by its representation. The ridiculous sublime thus has less to do with the object in the frame than with the framing of the object per se. The inversion of shadow from black to white parallels the inversion of effective predator to a less dauntingly, camp figuration. This inversion is the key to the ridiculous sublime: unlike the traditional sublime that overpowers one’s finite body or mind, the ridiculous sublime makes the smallest trace disable the gaze, incapacitate the ear, numb the touch, banish all scent and aroma.

I only theorise what I like, as a sign of respect. Better things be thought through than hastily forgotten.

French Toast

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 10:14:00 +1000

I don’t share recipes very often. Ingredients 4 Eggs 2/3 Cup of Milk 2 tsp of cinnamon 8 thick...

“The Ballet of The Red Shoes” is from a fairy tale by Hans...

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:11:00 +1000

“The Ballet of The Red Shoes” is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of Red Shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she get’s tired and wants to go home, but the Red Shoes are not tired. In fact, the Red Shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes dance on. In the end, she dies.

And, as Slavoj Zizek has noted:

In Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won’t stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion. These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being. This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’: although the subject cannot ever ‘subjectivize’ it, assume it as ‘her own’ by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this!’ it nonetheless operates in her very kernel. 6 As Fink’s book reminds us, Lacan’s wager is that it is possible to sublimate this dull satisfaction. This is what, ultimately, art and religion are about.

6 One should mention here Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, a suicidal variation of the same motif. At the end of the film, the shoes the young ballerina is wearing also take on a life of their own. However, since there is no one there to cut her legs off the shoes carry the ballerina out onto a high balcony from which she is forced to leap onto the railroad tracks where she is hit by a train. The crucial thing this cinematic version adds to Andersen’s fairy tale is the opposition between the ‘partial drive’ embodied in the shoes and the normal sexual desire, i.e., the girl’s sexual interest in her partner.

yangwong: St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:22:03 +1000

yangwong:

St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

yangwong: St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:21:45 +1000

yangwong:

St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

pleatedjeans: misunderstood shark

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:20:57 +1000

pleatedjeans:

misunderstood shark

Wine Tip

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:39:46 +1000

Wine Tips - by Andrew Corrigan Master of Wine “Air Force” – breathing and decanting - Part 1 Most...

newyorker: Why the best way for an unpublished author to sell a...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:27:31 +1000

newyorker:

Why the best way for an unpublished author to sell a children’s book may be to start giving it away for free.

itsfullofstars: NPR requested from NASA this 1980s-era video...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:51:08 +1000

itsfullofstars:

NPR requested from NASA this 1980s-era video with commentary by astronauts of various missions. The footage, which we edited, arrived on VHS. We don’t know much about it, except that it’s playful in tone, so we decided to have some fun with it, too. Here’s an “instructional video” on survival in space, in case we ever decide to resurrect the program.

Credit: Emily Bogle & Mito Habe-Evans/NPR

Via @spacefuture

Minecraft too often misses out on this.

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:55:55 +1000

Minecraft too often misses out on this.

If Social Media Was Around For The World Wars

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 22:30:02 +1000

If Social Media Was Around For The World Wars

Photo

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:54:31 +1000

Nietzsche: the Dionysian/Apollonian tension vs the decadent Christian ethos of modernity

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:06:58 +1000

The Dionysian presupposes its Apollonian ‘other’, but the ethos of Christian modernity...

dcmetropeople: Seeking Enlightment. Submitted by Pablo...

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:11:36 +1000

dcmetropeople:

Seeking Enlightment.

Submitted by Pablo Benavente.

“EVE is real” trailer In the YouTube comments to...

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 10:32:58 +1000

“EVE is real” trailer

In the YouTube comments to this trailer, the follwoing suggestion is made: “It seams an addicted dude trying to explain his addiction to his psychiatrist.” This comment only gives us half the message however. WE, the audience, are the supposed psychiatrist, we are the Other that sustains the meaning of the message.

The structure of the trailer, its endless return to a ‘causa formalis’ of “I was there, it was real,” reveals that what CCP Games Inc. are asking for from its EVE Online players is not just attachment to the game world. Rather, the message calls for a kind of ‘clear sighted’ identification with the world of EVE Online — ‘clear sighted’ in the sense that the fiction of EVE Online renders the experience of playing EVE as ‘true’. This is ideology today. It is not that the story the narrator tells us in the trailer is a lie, but instead that while the spoken/enunciated message is true (“It was real”) all the implicit content of EVE Online as a fictional mmorpg universe is a lie.

In this sense, EVE is a ‘real fake’ that gives body to the self-imagining of the subject. At the end of the trailer this is nicely demonstrated as the ‘all too human’ body is rendered in its symbolic substance as an avatar with the semblance of the narrator. But if EVE is real, if “I was there”, then the point is that the ‘all too human’ lacks the ontological consistency provided by the avatar.

We should be careful to not be too naive here. The point is not that the avatar is somehow a projection of the player. Rather, the symbolic texture of the avatar ‘fills out’ the partiality of the all too human making its truth palpable/sensible by giving it a symbolic context. Deprived of this context at the outset of the trailer, the player stares off to the side of shot uttering bewildered phrases like “It was real,” as though the player is being confronted by his own ontological incompleteness, the obscure truth of himself.

I think the hidden message of this trailer taps into the homelessness of humanity. The way the ‘all too human’ is stuck on the symbolic because it lacks proper instinctual support: the human has to first symbolise/interpret its surrounds.

Eo ipso

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 09:25:30 +1000

Another day, another lesson on reflecting on one’s own existence. My perennial winter...

Don't bump the titan!

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:13:29 +1000

osomo: Read More