Below is a short NFB film by Oscar-winning animator Chris Landreth called Ryan. The film is based on the life of Ryan Larkin - a highly regarded Canadian artist who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. I watched many of Larkin’s short animations as a child and they always fascinated and stimulated my developing thought in ways I can only now vaguely understand. Larkin's work was influential at a time when I was just becoming aware of my own intellectual/artistic inclinations.
The film is an incredible look into the amazing and nightmarish life of one of Canada’s pioneering artists. Through computer-generated characters and colorful symbolism Landreth reveals Larkin's downward spiral from award-winning animator to his current existence as an alcoholic panhandler walking the streets of Montreal.
Next is a film called Alter Egos. The films picks up where Ryan left off, by delving deeper into the tale of Larkin’s descent and the fascinating relationship that developed between Larkin and Chris Landreth after the making of Ryan. Using excerpts of both men’s Oscar-nominated works, this film is a poignant study of artists, addiction, creativity and human frailty.
13.2.11
11.2.11
Egypt Rising
Congratulations to the Egyptian people! Their courage, wisdom and character have thrust them into a new phase in their historic evolutions. Simply put: they did it – together:
follow events here:
Egypt's Mubarak quits under protest pressureRead More @ CBC News
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has resigned and handed over power to the military, ousted by a historic 18-day wave of pro-democracy demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who demanded his removal.
The terse announcement was made live on state TV by a grim Vice-President Omar Suleiman at about 6 p.m. local time Friday. "In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country," Suleiman said in a five-minute address translated into English. "May God help everybody."
Several hundred thousand protesters packed into Cairo's central Tahrir Square screamed for joy, waving Egyptian flags, blowing car horns, jumping up and down and chanting slogans such as: "Egypt is free," "God is great," "The people have brought down the regime."
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| Thousands of Egyptians in Cairo celebrate President Hosni Mubarak's resignation Friday night.................... |
Al Jazeera English | Live Feed
10.2.11
Catastrophic Normalcy
For two decades now we've been ignoring the impassioned pleas of the world's top scientists about how our use of fossil fuels was much more than just a bad idea. That was then, this is now: massive storms, flooding, forest fires, mind-blowing heat waves (2010 was the hottest year in recorded history). Such things are no longer 'projections' - they are happening right now. Welcome to the new normal: Read More @ AlterNetCatastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?
By Bill McKibben
If you were in the space shuttle looking down yesterday, you would have seen a pair of truly awesome, even fearful, sights.
Much of North America was obscured by a 2,000-mile storm dumping vast quantities of snow from Texas to Maine--between the wind and snow, forecasters described it as "probably the worst snowstorm ever to affect" Chicago, and said waves as high as 25 feet were rocking buoys on Lake Michigan.
Meanwhile, along the shore of Queensland in Australia, the vast cyclone Yasi was sweeping ashore; though the storm hit at low tide, the country's weather service warned that "the impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations," especially since its torrential rains are now falling on ground already flooded from earlier storms. Here's how Queensland premier Anna Bligh addressed her people before the storm hit: "We know that the long hours ahead of you are going to be the hardest that you face. We will be thinking of you every minute of every hour between now and daylight and we hope that you can feel our thoughts, that you will take strength from the fact that we are keeping you close and in our hearts."
Welcome to our planet, circa 2011--a planet that, like some unruly adolescent, has decided to test the boundaries. For two centuries now we've been burning coal and oil and gas and thus pouring carbon into the atmosphere; for two decades now we've been ignoring the increasingly impassioned pleas of scientists that this is a Bad Idea. And now we're getting pinched.
I'm left wondering what kind of communities will form within conditions where catastrophic normalcy permeates? What type of individuals will we generate and what types of practical adaptations will we be necessary? Will the ‘stress’ of such an existence increasingly require us to shift our priorities towards survival as opposed to civility and/or other such complex luxuries? Perhaps our next move is to begin cultivating explicitly post-apocalyptic sensibilities? I believe it’s time to ask these questions in earnest.
9.2.11
8.2.11
Bruno Latour: "politics as the composition of a common world"
Bruno Latour on modernity, ecology and new politics (h/t Scu):
“On governments the question becomes complicated because we are now talking about the politics of Nature and that's a rather new quandary.” - Bruno LatourAn Interview with Bruno Latour, thinker and social anthropologist.
Bruno Latour is one of France's most innovative, provocative and stimulating thinkers and social anthropologists. Given French Cartesian orthodoxy, it is not surprising that he is more appreciated in the Anglo-Saxon world, where his books such as “We Have Never Been Modern” (1993) are better known than in his native France. Jon Thompson, the publisher and chief editor of Polity Press, London, described him as France's most original and interesting thinker and in 2007, Bruno Latour was listed as the 10th most-cited intellectual in the humanities and social sciences by The Times Higher Education Guide.
Mr. Latour's seminal work has been in the field of Science and Technology Studies. With his “Actor Network Theory” he has advanced the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory. Thus scientific activity is viewed as a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices, reconstructed, not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. Mr. Latour will be in India this week conducting workshops in New Delhi. In this exclusive interview with The Hindu's Vaiju Naravane in Paris, he discusses the new challenges facing humanity and of India's role in the climate debate.
Read More @ The HinduQ: I wish to start this interview with a discussion of one of your most famous books — “We Have Never Been Modern”. Could you explain what you meant by that? What made you write this book and where do you go now?LATOUR: The Great Narrative of the Western definition of the world was based on a certain idea of Science and Technology and once we began, 30 or 40 years ago to study the practices of the making of science and technology, we realized that this definition could not sustain the old idea of western rationality taking, in a way the place of archaic attachment to the past.
The Great Narrative was based on the idea of Science which was largely mythical. Science has always been linked to the other cultures of the Western World, although it has always described itself as apart — separated from politics, values, religion and so on. But when you begin to work on a history of Science — Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Einstein, Kantor or whoever, you find on the contrary, that things have never been severed, that there has always been a continuous re-connection with the rest of cultures and especially with the rest of politics...
7.2.11
Agustin Fuentes on Human Nature and Experience
From Neuroanthropology:
Agustin Fuentes on Human Nature, Early Experience, and Our Social Niche
Agustin Fuentes, professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, gave this in-depth talk “Social Cooperation, Niche Construction, and the Core Role of Intergenerational Bonding in Human Evolution”. It comes with a warm and touching introduction by Jim McKenna. Great to see both of my friends in action!
Augustin Fuentes, Human Nature and Early Experience from ACEatND on Vimeo.
His talk was part of a conference on Human Nature and Early Experience, and you can access more videos from the conference, including talks by Stephen Soumi, Douglas Fry, Vincent Felliti, Wenda Trevathan, and many other illumaries.
Cornel West on Truth and Finitude
Cornel West (b.1953) is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. West is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Center for African American Studies and in the Department of Religion.
Below is a clip from the documentary film The Examined Life where West talks about the ultimate nature of reality and human experience:
West is known for his combination of political and moral insight and criticism and his contribution to the post-1960s civil rights movement. The bulk of his work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, pragmatism and transcendentalism.
Below is a clip from the documentary film The Examined Life where West talks about the ultimate nature of reality and human experience:
"A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. It takes tremendous discipline. It takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. That socratic imperative requires courage in a way William Butler Yates used to say, 'It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul, than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.' Courage to think critically. Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.
Plato says philosophy is a meditation on, and a preparation for death. By death what he means is not an event, but a death in life. Because there's no rebirth, there's no change, there's not transformation without death. And therefore, the question becomes how do you learn how to die. Of course Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay, 'To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.' You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.
I believe that Theodore Adorno was right when he says, 'The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.' That gives it an existential emphasis, you see. That if we're really talking about truth, as a way of life as opposed to truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world. Human beings are unable to ever gain a monopoly on Truth capital T. We might have access to truth small t, but they're fallible claims about truth. We could be wrong. We have to be open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many of the existential thinkers be they religious like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich, or be they secular like Camus and Sartres, that they are accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things, and therefore you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is, you're gonna talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth.
How do you sustain a journey, a path toward truth, the way to truth. So the truth talk goes hand in hand with talk about the way to truth. And scientists can talk about this in terms of deducing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so on. And religious folk can talk about this in terms of surrendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you. But they're all ways of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility." - Cornel West
5.2.11
JuiceMedia's Wikileaks Rap
Watch independent video producer JuiceMedia's awesomely funny, sometimes scary and seriously poignant WikiLeaks inspired rap video below:
Source: JuiceMedia
3.2.11
The Horizon of Immanence
I haven't been doing much else in my spare time besides watching and reading as much as I can about the situation in Cairo, but I do want to share a few quotes about a notion that resonates with me more deeply than most any: a "horizon of immanence". This 'horizon' is the very worldspace, or clearing which affords us the opportunity to be, know and do. I will have much more to say on this topic over the next few weeks as I begin to make explicit some key tropes in my thought which continue to shape my explorations.
From Hardt and Negri's Empire:
“By the time we arrive at Spinoza, in fact, the horizon of immanence and the horizon of the democratic political order coincide completely.” (Hardt and Negri 2001:73)
And from Fredric Jameson's Valences Of The Dialectic:
“We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling of secularity which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance. Yet within the horizon of immanence, we wander as alien as tribal people, or as visitors from outer space, admiring its unimaginably complex and fragile filigree and recoiling from its bottomless potholes, lounging against a rainwall of exotic and artificial plants or else agonizing among poisonous colors and lethal stems we were not taught to avoid. The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn form the very fibers of our own being and at one with us in every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself we continue murmuring Kant's old questions - what can I know? What should I do? How may I hope? - under a starry heaven, no more responsive than a mirror or a space ship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic qualification: what can I know in this system? What should I do in this new world completely invented by me? What can I hope for in alone in an altogether human age? And failing to replace them by the only meaningful one, namely how can I recognize this forbiddingly foreign totality as my own doing, how may I appropriate it and make it my own handiwork and acknowledge its laws as my own projection and praxis?
“... We may argue that Utopia is no longer in time just as with the end of voyages of discovery and the exploration of the globe it disappeared from geographical space as such. Utopia as the absolute negation of the fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained cannot now be imagined as lying ahead of us in historical time as an evolutionary or even revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it cannot be imagined at all; and one needs the languages and figurations of physics - the conception of closed worlds and a multiplicity of unconnected yet simultaneous universes - in order to convey what might be the ontology of this now so seemingly empty and abstract idea. Yet it is not to be grapsed in this logic of religious transcendence either, as some other world after or before this one, or beyond it. It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world - better to say the alternate world, our alternate world - as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.” (Jameson 2009:608)
[ h/t Mark Fisher ]
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