Web Log 2010
I really like what this RSA is doing with animating illustrations of philosophers ideas from lectures. This one is from one of the great thinkers of our time Slavoj Žižek. You can see the entire, but admittedly less entertaining lecture in it’s original form here. He has a way of bringing a lot of important and complex ideas to life.
Not totally sure where this guy is headed, but he makes some pretty good points. Pablo Picasso said “All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?” Wish it didn’t end with an iPhone endorsement.
I am quite fond of Russian Literature, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and the likes, but have never read a Tolstoy book. I have made several attempts at War and Peace, but I find that the book itself is a bit of a barrier for me. Besides its size, the fact that the book has become so iconic makes it a bit of a cliche to be seen in public with, so many of my attempts at the book have been made in the small amount of time I spend at home. Recently I purchased an ipod touch, which has a free app which will download literature from www.gutenberg.org and display them as e-books. I loaded it up last night with all my faves, and plan to use it to try to put away this Russian tome once and for all. Will post a review once my mind has consumed it.
Historian Howard Zinn, and author J.D. Salinger both passed away yesterday 1/27/2010. Frankly I didn’t know Salinger was still alive, but Howard Zinn was still an active and outspoken guy. I had just looked up his speaking tours a few days ago in hopes of seeing him speak. He was a pretty important figure in a great number of social movements. I am sure he will be missed.
I have been trying to hash out a review of this book on and off for about 2 weeks now, but I seem to be getting nowhere. I figure that I had better just post this or it will never get done. Here it is.
Asterios Polyp was written by David Mazzucchelli. The driving theme of the graphic novel is the Apollonian/Dionysian conflict that arises in an approach to art and its existential(sorry) implications to real life circumstances. I closely identify with the Apollonian perspective, as I observe myself disecting my compositions, defining what I like about them, scrutinizing what I dislike, and ultimately abandoning the work altogether. As the idealistic framework of the theoretical world of art becomes more and more perfect and demanding in the mind, it demands art that itself can never meet the expectations, and even if it did, despite all the measured perfections it had attained, it would miss the point of art entirely.
