You've taught me a lot.

Goin' now.

Will be back in 3 - 5 years with some recorded material for ya'll to critique.

Right now the manufacture of mass [consumer, mallcondo] culture imposes a thin shell of cultural similarity across English-speaking North America, but even that is under strain as subcultures use the decentralizing power of today's communications and move more boldly in their own [possibly more sane, possibly more wise] directions.

The end of the industrial age will bring down [most of] the Internet, but it will also play taps for the technologies that make mass culture possible.

In the bubbling cauldron of a future North America, today's cultural initiatives will fuse with older traditions, imports from abroad, and new movements in ways we can't imagine today.

The loss of political unity and the end of easy long-distance travel will make the rise of new local and regional cultures certain.

- John Michael Greer, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World

These critics like to say Bouguereau's work is really only derivative, harking back to earlier artists. Only in the 20th century has such a thing ever been scorned. To this I have one thing to say:

JUST WHAT IS WRONG WITH BEING DERIVATIVE?

That's one of the core beliefs of modernism that must be soundly vanquished by self-evident logical analysis. Nobody can accomplish anything of merit if they are in fact not derivative. Only by mastering the accomplishments of the past and then adding to it can we go still further. Every other field of endeavor recognizes this truth. Without the knowledge of the past we are doomed to everlasting primitivism.

And, as far as holding our works up to the old masters -- that's what we want to happen. If we are to accomplish things of true merit and excellence, we must germinate and nurture great masters in the next millennium too. Bouguereau was quite aware that his work would be compared on the altar of past accomplishments, as were his contemporaries. It was precisely because they mastered the techniques of the past, built upon them and opened them up to an avalanche of new subject matter and Enlightenment ideals, that they accomplished the greatest half-century of painting in art history.

http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/ArtScam/artscam.php

Being in love with a girl, knowing it's doomed, and yet knowing you want the experience of loss because only through that can you move on from love for love's sake, and on to knowing what you want to fit into the bigger picture. Abstraction rules art. You want to take something specific, put it half into context, show us every essence of the experience of it, and then put it fully into context and make that context relate to the specific attributes of the something specific.

http://www.anus.com/metal/hall/index.php/topic,4770.msg29165.html#msg29165

I thought of some loose ends on dopamine addiction. At the moment, through porn, games, and drugs, anyone in the industrialized world has the option to slide into unproductive pleasure. Without these technologies, some people can still do this, but only if they have very strong imaginations. In civilized culture, these are the "dreamers", and a few become great artists and philosophers. In primitive culture, these must be the people who become shamans.

Some questions: If you use your own imagination to self-administer dopamine, in what ways does this make you stronger than if you were to do the same thing with external tools? In industrial society, is it better to get pleasure through solitary daydreaming, than by engaging with other people in "useful" activities that are mostly harmful? Is there anything we get pleasure from anymore, that is unquestionably good? And now that everyone can get dopamine-addicted, how do we play the advantage of having a strong imagination?

- Ran Prieur

Think of him as the accidental warlord. And a shard of hope. In less than a year, Mr. Aden, who was born in Somalia and emigrated to the United States at age 22, has essentially built a state within a state.

With money channeled from fellow clansmen living in the United States and Europe, he has transformed Adado and its surroundings in central Somalia, which used to be haunted by bandits and warring Islamic factions, into an enclave of peace, with a functioning police force, scores of new businesses, new schools and new rules.

Somalia is one of the most violent countries on the planet, and at times Mr. Aden has had to speak with the business end of a machine gun. His patch — which encompasses around 5,000 square miles and a few hundred thousand people, most of them desperately poor nomads and members of his own Saleban clan — is now one of the safest parts of this broken nation.

...

It did not hurt that Mr. Aden had a pipeline to overseas cash and a college degree from Minnesota State in management information systems. With the elders firmly behind him, he was able to form a well-armed police force of several hundred fellow clansmen who are fiercely protective of him — essentially his own private army, which has made it difficult for the extremist Islamists wreaking havoc in other parts of Somalia to establish a beachhead here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/world/africa/03somalia.html