| main | ongoing | archive | private |
- Who wouldn’t enjoy getting paid for being curious? Journalism allows almost anyone to direct questions they would never ask of their own friends at random people; since the ensuing dialogue exists for commercial purposes, both parties accept an acceleration of intimacy. People give emotional responses, but those emotions are projections. The result (when things go well) is a dynamic, adversarial, semi-real conversation. I am at ease with this. If given a choice between interviewing someone or talking to them “for real,” I prefer the former; I don’t like having the social limitations of tact imposed upon my day-to-day interactions and I don’t enjoy talking to most people more than once or twice in my lifetime.
- Frankly, I don’t know why anyone answers anything.
- What is the psychological directive that makes an unanswered question discomfiting?
- ...possibly that people feel this need to give an account of themselves. And not just to other people, but to themselves.
- I imagined that being interviewed by other reporters would be fun.
- As a reporter, you live for those anecdotal mistakes. Mistakes are where you find hidden truths. But as a person, anecdotal mistakes define the experience of being misunderstood; anecdotal mistakes are used to make metaphors that explain the motives of a person who is sort of like you, but not really.
- "That’s part of it. It’s hard to resist whenever someone really wants to listen to you. That’s a very rare thing in most of our lives." (EM)
- "Sometimes I will be talking to journalism students and they will ask how I get people to open up to me, and the answer is that I’m legitimately curious about what those people are saying. I honestly care about the stories they are telling. That’s a force that talks to the deepest part of us." (EM)
- What makes Glass and This American Life successful is the instantaneously emotive quality of the work—the stories told on the show are typically minor moments in people’s lives, but they hinge on how those seemingly minor moments are transformative. The smallest human details are amplified to demonstrate realizations about what it means to feel profound things.
- I experienced the entire interview as her: She would ask me a question, and I would listen to myself giving the answer, and I would think, ‘That’s not going to work. That’s not going to work. That’s not the lead.’ I was editing my interview as I produced it. I related more to her than I did to myself.
- If you have this presumption that every person sees the world in a different way, how do you capture that? What you’re trying to do with any interview is abstract the way a person sees the world.
- I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is. So the deeper question is, what’s more important: narrative consistency or truth? I think we’re always trying to create a consistent narrative for ourselves. I think truth always takes a backseat to narrative. Truth has to sit at the back of the bus.
- ...if you don’t want to know something, can you not know it? Can you convince yourself that you don’t know it? Can you actually not know it, in some real sense? Can you form a barrier to knowing things?
- "I’m a great believer in self-deception. If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive." (EM)
- Do I want to be presented in a way that I would like to be seen? Of course, but “the way I would like to be seen” would almost certainly be an inaccurate, delusional depiction of who I actually am.
- “We are used to the idea of giving witness to one’s life as an important and noble counterpoint to being unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed or unacceptable situations. But in a slightly more pathological way, I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state..." (Heath)
- People answer questions because it feels stranger to do the opposite. And the next time I interview someone, I will try to remember this.
- "There are two different models. The first model is that we all have this black box inside ourselves that is filled with our secrets, and we would never want to allow any interviewer to open that box. But the second model is that even we don’t know what’s inside that black box, and being interviewed allows us to open it and sort through the contents." (EM)
- "I’m envious of writers, because a writer leaves this trail of detritus. As a writer, you have this trail of writing that is an account of yourself and who you are. For years, I was deprived of that opportunity, because I couldn’t write. So the talking was essential. It was a way to do something instead of nothing." (EM)
- It’s fascinating and stupid to watch adults destroy things on purpose. It’s a sensation that applies to a multitude of stimuli: monster truck shows, the dynamiting of sports arenas, race riots, Van Halen’s musical legacy, eggs, governments, and temporary gods. And guitars. Always guitars.
- “When we started smashing our equipment it was out of frustration, because I felt like we weren’t playing very well,” Cobain explained. “People expect it also. Give the kids what they want.” (KC)
- Why did In Utero need to be conventionally “bad” in order for it to be exceptionally good?
- The idea of Kurt forcing Courtney to return that car made me like Cobain more, but it also made him seem confused in an unknowingly solipsistic way. It’s like when Oprah Winfrey creates a game show where the whole goal is to give money away to sycophantic strangers: It’s an impossible act to criticize, because (of course) charity is wonderful. Yet there’s something perverse about high-profile public altruism...
- In Utero sounds like what it is: Guilt Rock.
- “I don’t feel the least bit guilty for commercially exploiting a completely exhausted Rock youth Culture because, at this point in rock history, Punk Rock (while still sacred to some) is, to me, dead and gone.” (KC)
- I look at canonized rock bands the same way I look at canonized U.S. presidents. Even if America lasts ten thousand years, the list of our greatest presidents will never change; it will always include Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson.
- They were the first rock group of the media age that was (a) regularly defined as the biggest band in the free world, while (b) using their espoused hatred of that designation as the principal means for their on-going success. Every band that becomes megasuccessful ultimately feels trapped by that adulation; the sensation of self-hatred is common among artists. What made Nirvana different was how that overt self-hatred defined the totality of their being. It was their principal aesthetic. They always seemed like a group that was producing popular culture against their will. This notion is something they invented accidentally, so all future bands that mine this worldview can only hope to replicate what Nirvana already popularized...
- Koresh merely picked the wrong myths to believe unconditionally.
- Sometimes I wonder if Cobain’s transcendent depression was ultimately due to the combination of (a) having so many people caring about his words, despite the fact that (b) he really didn’t have that much to say.
- But how do we tell the difference between an instrument and its sound?
- If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word coincidence exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.
- All they had to do was make a record. Any record would do. Whatever they produced would be exactly what the world wanted. But that was only true as long as nobody believed they cared; the reason America loved Nirvana was bc they were convinced that Nirvana did not need their love.
- My thesis at the time (and to this day) was that the impossibility of time travel is a cornerstone of reality: We cannot move forward or backward through time, even if the principles of general relativity and time dilation suggest that this is possible. Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water). My sense of the world tells me otherwise. I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed. So even though the prospect of liquid thinking metal is insane and idiotic, it’s still more viable than time travel. I don’t know if the thinking metal of tomorrow will have the potential to find employment as Linda Hamilton’s assassin, but I do know that those liquid-metal killing machines will be locked into whatever moment they happen to inhabit. It would be wonderful if someone proved me wrong about this. Wonderful. Wonderful, and sad.
- Real-world problems are inevitably too unique and too situational; people will always see any real-world problem through the prism of their own personal experience. The only massive ideas everyone can discuss rationally are big ideas that don’t specifically apply to anyone, which is why a debate over the ethics of time travel is worthwhile: No one has any personal investment whatsoever. It’s only theoretical. Which means no one has any reason to lie.
- Here’s a question I like to ask people when I’m ⅝ drunk: Let’s say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past. You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the fifteen-year-old version of you. However, you will only get to talk to your former self for fifteen seconds. As such, there’s no way you will be able to explain who you are, where or when you’re calling from, or what any of this lunacy is supposed to signify. You will only be able to give the younger version of yourself a fleeting, abstract message of unclear origin. What would you say to yourself during these fifteen seconds? From a sociological standpoint, what I find most interesting about this query is the way it inevitably splits between gender lines: Women usually advise themselves not to do something they now regret (i.e., “Don’t sleep with Corey McDonald, no matter how much he pressures you”), while men almost always instruct themselves to do something they failed to attempt (i.e., “Punch Corey McDonald in the face, you gutless coward”). But from a more practical standpoint, the thing I’ve come to realize is that virtually no one has any idea how to utilize such an opportunity, even if it were possible.
- It doesn’t matter what you can do if you don’t know why you’re doing it.
- When Abe and Aaron start traveling back in time to change their own pasts, they attempt to stoically ignore the horrifying reality they’ve created: Their sense of self—their very definition of self—is suddenly irrelevant. If you go back in time today and meet the person who will become you tomorrow, which of those two people is actually you? The short answer is, “Both.” But once you realize that the short answer is “Both,” the long answer becomes “Neither.” If you exist in two places, you don’t exist at all.
- It takes a flexible mind to imagine how time travel might work, but only an inflexible spirit would actually want to do it. It’s the desire of the depressed and lazy.
- They allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money. But she still doesn’t earn a fraction of what she warrants in a free-trade cultural economy. If Britney Spears were paid $1 every time a self-loathing stranger used her as a surrogate for his own failure, she would outearn Warren Buffett in three months. This is why entertainers (and athletes) make so much revenue but are still wildly underpaid: We use them for things that are worth more than money. It’s a new kind of dehumanizing slavery—not as awful as the literal variety, but dehumanizing nonetheless.
- Ask any basketball fan who remembers who Benny Anders was, and he will almost certainly say great things about his ability. He is retrospectively beloved, expressly because he failed in totality. He’s an example of blown potential, but people remain envious of the man he never became.
- In the game’s closing seconds, the Cavaliers were unable to get the ball to Sampson; he didn’t touch the rock until after the buzzer had already sounded. In an act of stoic frustration, Sampson flipped the ball nonchalantly toward the basket, underhand. It sailed straight through the twine, touching no rim—perfect, but pointless. It was an illustration of how easy the game came to him and of how hopeless his plight seemed to be. He never won an important game after high school.
- From a historical viewpoint, injuries tend to improve the way basketball players are remembered. It exaggerates their potential.
- This is not an example of the media building someone up in order to knock him back down; this takedown was far less satisfying. Sampson busted big by succeeding mildly. That was the only role he ever played for anyone. There is no alternative universe where Ralph Sampson is a beloved symbol of excellence. There’s no Philip K. Dick novel where he averages a career double-double and gets four rings. He could never be that guy. ...He was needed to remind people that their own self-imposed mediocrity is better than choking on transcendence.
- It was that I was too young to envy a stranger for a life that wasn’t mine. I did not subconsciously resent the fact that Sampson was born bigger and smoother than the rest of society. I had no idea that being six foot four is something a seven-foot-four man should not want. A ten-year-old boy doesn’t want a hyper-dexterous giant to choke, just as a ten-year-old girl doesn’t feel good when Britney Spears has a nervous breakdown on live TV. Only an adult can feel good about someone else’s failure.
- One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we’d love to see (again) for the first time. Even classic films that hold up over multiple viewings—and even those films that require multiple viewings—can never deliver the knockout strangeness of that first time you see them, particularly if parts of the story are willfully designed to momentarily confuse the audience. When a film becomes famous and its theme becomes familiar, that pleasantly awkward feeling is lost even more. Sometimes I want to unknow things.
- There’s a visceral, physiological charge that only comes from unknown pleasures. Think back to ordinary life situations where the outcome was unclear, and try to remember how you felt during those moments: You’re introduced to someone you’re immediately attracted to, but you don’t know why. You attend a party where various guests dislike each other and everyone is drinking heavily. You’re playing blackjack and the entire game rests on whatever card is drawn next. You wake up, but you don’t recognize where you are. Mentally, these situations are extremely stressful. But—almost inevitably—the physical sensation that accompanies that stress is positive and electrifying. You are more alert and more attuned to your surroundings. Endorphins are firing like revolutionary guerrillas. Adrenaline is being delivered by FedEx. Unknowing feels good to your body, even when it feels bad to your brain—and that dissonance brings you closer to the original state of being. It’s how an animal feels. Take the wolf, for example: I suspect it’s unbelievably stressful to be a wolf. The world would be an endlessly confusing place, because a wolf has limited cognitive potential & understands nothing beyond its instinct and its own experience. Yet the wolf is more engaged with the experience of being alive. A wolf isn’t as “happy” as you, but a wolf feels better. His normal state of being is the way you feel during dynamic moments of bewilderment.
- As a critic, I have more things to say about the depiction of reality on MTV than about the depiction of reality in reality. But as a human, my boring neighbor felt infinitely more watchable, regardless of how little she did. So why was that? I think it was bc I knew less. Even though MTV was actively trying to keep me interested, there were certain things I knew I would always see, because reality programming is constructed around predictable plot devices. There were also certain things I knew I’d never see, because certain types of footage would either be impossible to broadcast or broken as gossip before making it to the air (for example, we might eventually see a suicide on The Real World, but never a suicide we won’t expect). The upside to knowledge is that it enriches every experience, but the downside is that it limits every experience. This is why I preferred watching the stranger across the way, even though she never did anything: There was always the possibility she might do everything.
- The only reason it’s possible to piece this puzzle together is bc the only things we see are inevitably connected, and that’s not how window watching works. Rear Window implies that voyeurism is enticing because we get to see the secret story of who people are—we peep at a handful of interwoven brushstrokes that add up to a portrait. The reality is that voyeurism’s titillation comes from the utter chaos of noncontextual information.
- During the same period I was living in my $160 Fargo apartment and watching my neighbor by accident, I spent a lot of my free time sitting in parked cars and being weird. My best friend had a vehicle we used for this specific purpose; we would park her car in a dark place and be weird together. One night we were doing this in the parking lot outside of the newspaper where we both worked. It was a little past eleven o’clock. We were listening to ELO. During the chorus of “Don’t Bring Me Down,”...
- We continued to watch him read NME for twenty minutes, and then we drove home. It was a wonderful, memorable night. I still don’t know why. What did I expect to learn? What was I afraid I might observe? There are no answers to these questions.
- But there is something unexplainable about spying on strangers that doesn’t seem connected to what we actually see. On the surface, it seems like this should be similar to the human affinity for gossip, but it’s not; we’re never interested in gossip about people we’ve never heard of, and we’re rarely interested in average gossip about average people. It’s not interesting to hear that an old man was building a bookshelf at three am last night, especially if I’ve never met the old man in question. But if I were to see this act through a neighbor’s window, it would be different. I would watch him, and I would be transfixed. And I wouldn’t imagine what books he was putting away, and I wouldn’t speculate about why he was doing this construction so late in the evening, and I would not think I suddenly understood something about this person that’s intimate or telling or complex. I would simply be seeing something I could not control and would never understand, and I’d be cognizant of a reality we all consciously realize but rarely accept—that almost all of the world happens without us. To look through the window of a meaningless stranger proves that we are likewise meaningless; the roles could just as easily be reversed with the same net effect. And that should disturb us, but it doesn’t.
- In general, it’s continually amazing how obsessed early adopters of technology are with their own low-level activities. When Dennis Crowley was launching his phone application Foursquare in 2009, he argued, “What we wanted to do is turn life into a video game. You should be rewarded for going out more times than your friends, and hanging out with new people and going to new restaurants and going to new bars—just experiencing things that you wouldn’t normally do.” Rewarded. Crowley feels like technology should reward him … for eating at different restaurants!
- But looking through another man’s window helps. It diminishes our feeling of insignificance, because spying illustrates how all lives are equal (“We are the same”). It also feeds the hunger for spontaneity, bc there is no sense of control or consistency (“This stranger’s reality is beyond me”). No one thinks these thoughts consciously, but we feel them when we snoop. Seeing the secret lives of others removes the pressure of our own relative failure while reversing the predictability of our own static existence. It is more and less interesting at the same time. And our body understands this, even if we do not.
- Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.
- Music that skews inauthentic is almost always more popular in the present tense. Music that skews toward authenticity has more potential to be popular over time, but also has a greater likelihood of being unheard completely.
- What Garth cared about more were statistics. Like a nongambling Pete Rose, Brooks was consumed by the magnitude of his own numbers: With career album sales over 128 million, he is currently the bestselling solo artist of all time. This was not happenstance: At Brooks’s request, some outlets slashed the retail price of his late nineties albums to guarantee massive openingweek sales. “I believe in the Wal-Mart school of business,” Brooks has said. “The less people pay, the more they enjoy it.”
- "Sadly, I enjoyed feeling self-destructive."
- But I’m not intoxicated. I’m distraught. I’m a hyper-emotional person who can’t accept the inherent unfairness of the universe.
- Baseball sells itself as some kind of timeless, historical pastime that acts as the bridge to a better era of American life, an argument that now seems beyond preposterous. The NBA tries to create synergy with anything that might engage youth culture (hip-hop, abstract primordial competition, nostalgia for the 1980s, the word “amazing,” Hurricane Katrina, etc.). NASCAR connects itself to red state contrarianism. Soccer aligns itself with forward-thinking globalists who enjoy fandom more than sports. But football only uses football. They are the product they sell.
- Sometimes it’s hard to tell if things that happened in your life only happened to you or if they happened to everyone. Every formative incident feels normal to the child who experiences it, so sometimes it takes twenty-five or thirty years to realize a particular event was singularly bizarre.
- The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merits of one’s own reality. In other words, it’s a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it’s a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite.
- But only ABBA could make ABBA Music in totality. They are the only group who completely understands what they do, including the things they do wrong. So if that is what you like, there is only one place to really get it. The rest of culture does not matter. The Grateful Dead were kind of like this as well, but not as singularly as ABBA; while it’s easy to think of artists who deliver a comparable sonic experience to the Dead, the closest equivalent to ABBA Music—probably the Bee Gees—doesn’t come close at all.
- Those issues are minor. What bothers me is the underlying suggestion that what you are experiencing is different than whatever your mind tells you is actually happening. Moreover, laugh tracks want you to accept that this constructed reality can become the way you feel, or at least the way you behave. It’s a concept grounded in the darkest of perspectives: A laugh track assumes that you are not confident enough to sit quietly, even if your supposed peer group is (a) completely invisible and (b) theoretically dead.
- Germans don’t fake-laugh. If someone in Germany is laughing, it’s bc he or she physically can’t help themselves; they are laughing bc they’re authentically amused. Nobody there ever laughs bc of politeness. Nobody laughs out of obligation. And what this made me recognize is how much American laughter is purely conditioned. Most of our laughing—I would say at least 51%—has no relation to humor or to how we actually feel.
- I would reach into my pocket and discover I had no coins, so I would reply, “Um—heh heh heh. No. Sorry. Ha! Guess not.” I made these noises without thinking. Every single time, the clerk would just stare at me stoically. It had never before occurred to me how often I reflexively laugh; only in the absence of a response did I realize I was laughing for no reason whatsoever. It somehow felt comfortable. Now that I’m back in the U.S., I notice this all the time: People half-heartedly chuckle throughout most casual conversations, regardless of the topic. It’s a modern extension of the verbalized pause, built by TV laugh tracks. Everyone in America has three laughs: a real laugh, a fake real laugh, and a “filler laugh” they use during impersonal conversations. We have been trained to connect conversation with soft, interstitial laughter. It’s our way of showing the other person that we understand the context of the interaction, even when we don’t. This is not the only reason Germans think Americans are retarded, but it’s definitely one of them.
- There are important assumptions we bring into the show as viewers; we are assuming that this is escapist (read: nonincendiary) humor, we are assuming the characters are ultimately good people, and we’re assuming that our relationship to Friends mirrors the traditional relationship Americans have always had with thirty-minute TV programs that employ canned laughter. It’s not always funny, but it’s in the “form of funny.” And because we’re not stupid, we know when to chuckle. But we don’t even have to do that, because the laugh track does it for us. And over time, that starts to feel normal. It starts to make us laugh at other things that aren’t necessarily funny.
- Watch The Daily Show in an apartment full of young progressives and you’ll hear them consciously (and unconvincingly) over-laugh at every joke that’s delivered, mostly to assure everyone else that they’re appropriately informed and predictably leftist.
- The more media someone consumes (regardless of who they are or where they live), the more likely they are to take their interpersonal human cues from external, nonhuman sources. One of the principal functions of mass media is to make the world a more fathomable reality—in the short term, it provides assurance and simplicity. But this has a long-term, paradoxical downside. Over time, embracing mass media in its entirety makes people more confused and less secure. The laugh track is our best example. In the short term, it affirms that the TV program we’re watching is intended to be funny and can be experienced with low stakes. It takes away the unconscious pressure of understanding context and tells the audience when they should be amused. But because everything is laughed at in the same way (regardless of value), and because we all watch TV with the recognition that this is mass entertainment, it makes it harder to deduce what we think is independently funny. As a result, Americans of all social classes compensate by living like bipedal Laff Boxes: We mechanically laugh at everything, just to show that we know what’s supposed to be happening. We get the joke, even if there is no joke.
- Canned laughter is a lucid manifestation of an anxious culture that doesn’t know what is (and isn’t) funny.
- Build a machine that tells people when to cry. That’s what we need. We need more crying.
- It’s that omnipresent notion that there’s some deeper truth in business that’s intentionally counterintuitive—you’re never selling what you’re actually selling. You sell people Pepsi by selling them Obama. That’s the trick, and everyone knows it.
- People love advertising. They say they don’t, but they do. And I don’t just mean that they like clever commercials or reading Lucky; I mean they like the idea of a Draper (a) whom they’ll never meet who (b) understands what they want and (c) views that wanting as important.
- When Americans watch Super Bowl commercials, they analyze them as pieces of art; they think about the message the images imply and they blog about what those implications are supposed to prove about the nation as a whole. We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective. We’re smarter than that. But that understanding makes us more vulnerable. We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are. Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us. We do most of the work for them.
- In 2006 I delivered a lecture at Boston University, and a person in the audience wanted to know what I thought of the Weezer album Make Believe. This man, for whatever reason, was extremely upset about it. “Is Rivers trying to fuck with us?” he asked. “That album contains three of the worst songs ever recorded.” I mentioned there were at least three songs on the album I liked: “Beverly Hills,” “We Are All on Drugs,” and “Freak Me Out.” The man in the audience immediately lost his mind. “Those are the three songs I was referring to!” he exclaimed. “They’re terrible. It’s almost feels like he’s trying to make fun of me for buying his music.”
- German film director Werner Herzog sometimes talks about truth being “elastic,” a modifier that should indicate his definition of honesty does not have much to do with being literal. His persona is built around fictionalized mythologies...
- To quote Herzog: “Facts create norms, but they do not create illumination.” He once said he would only touch truth “with a pair of pliers.” This sounds like a metaphor, but maybe it isn’t.
- This is a man who once consumed his own leather shoe, simply bc he promised Errol Morris that this is something he would do. Sometimes Herzog is literal in a manner so straightforward that almost no one pays attention.
- "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder." (Werner Herzog)
- It makes us laugh, because it’s disturbing to take literal thoughts literally.
- Whenever we watch cinema verité movies, we unconsciously think of them as more lifelike than conventional film, simply because they’re made to look cheaper and more amateur than they are. This is why Herzog hates cinema verité: It’s more realistic, but it’s not remotely literal. It’s the least-literal filmmaking there is.
- Maniacal Slovenian monster-brain Slavoj Žižek once made a perverse, semi-relevant point about the movie Titanic; he argued that people are so out of touch with their true feelings that they mentally construct fantasies they don’t even want, simply to feel like they have control over their unknowable desires.
- It makes sense that Nader could not function inside a romantic relationship, as those are always nonliteral relationships. All romantic relationships are founded on the shared premise of love, a concept defined differently by all people. Conversations between couples are theatrical and symbolic; the first thing anyone realizes the moment they enter a serious relationship is that words (especially during fights) never represent their precise definitions. Nader would be paralyzed by the content of wedding vows—he would want to qualify everything. “In sickness and in health” would become “In sickness, with the possible exclusion of self-contained vegetative states, and in health, assuming neither party has become superhuman or immortal.” It would be a deeply wonkified ceremony, probably held in rural Oregon.
- Now, all of these answers are partially true. But the deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naïve. How do we know how we feel? I’m likely much closer to Žižek’s aforementioned description of Titanic: There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel. Very often, I don’t know what I think about something until I start writing about it.
- Kaczynski’s brother David deduced that the Unabomber was probably Ted when he noticed that several of Ted’s pet phrases were used in the manifesto, most notably the term “cool-headed logicians.”
- Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.
- TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder intellectual ceiling. The first time someone tries to convince you to take mushrooms, they often argue that mushrooms “allow you to think whatever thoughts you want.” This sentiment makes no sense to anyone who has not taken psychedelic drugs, because everyone likes to assume we already have the freedom to think whatever we please. But this is not true. Certain drug experiences do expand a person’s freedom of thought, in the same way that certain media experiences make that freedom smaller.
- Mander’s point is that technology evolves much faster than we do physically or mentally, and the consequence is that vague sense of alienation expressed by Thom Yorke on OK Computer.
- As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now.
- My existence is constructed, and it’s constructed through the surrogate activity of mainstream popular culture. I understand this. And bc I understand this, I could change. I could move to Montana and find Ted’s cabin and live there, satisfied in my philosophical rightness. I could go the Christopher McCandless route and shoot a moose for food and self-actualization. But I choose the opposite. Instead of confronting reality and embracing the Experience of Being Alive, I will sit here and read about Animal Collective over the Internet. Again. I will read about Animal Collective again. And not bc the content is important or amusing or well written, but bc the content exists. Reading about Animal Collective has replaced being alive.
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +