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‘The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.’ –Spinoza

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Feelings, especially the kind that I call primordial feelings, portray the state of the body in our own brain. They serve notice that there is life inside the organism and they inform the brain (and its mind, of course), of whether such life is in balance or not. That feeling is the foundation of the edifice we call conscious mind. When the machinery that builds that foundation is disrupted by disease, the whole edifice collapses. Imagine pulling out the ground floor of a high-rise building and you get the picture. That is, by the way, precisely what happens in certain cases of coma or vegetative state.

Now, where in the brain is that “feel-making” machinery? It is located in the brain stem and it enjoys a privileged situation. It is part of the brain, of course, but it is so closely interconnected with the body that it is best seen as fused with the body. I suspect that one reason why our thoughts are felt comes from that obligatory fusion of body and brain at brain stem level.

{ Antonio Damasio/Wired | Continue reading }

Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

Damasio’s books deal with the relationship between emotions and feelings, and what their bases may be within the brain. His 1994 book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, is regarded as one of the most influential books of the past two decades.

In his third book, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, published in 2003, Damasio suggested that Spinoza’s thinking foreshadowed discoveries in biology and neuroscience views on the mind-body problem.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | USC }

photo { Nathaniel Ward }

Our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus. 80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers.

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Holding in each hand an orange citron and a pork kidney

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(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. Birds of prey, winging from the sea, rising from marsh lands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, connorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlin, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese. The midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black goat-fell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless yawn. Tom Rochford, winner in athletes singlet and breeches, arrives at the head of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void. He is followed by a race of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they spring from the brink. Their bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads to protect themselves. laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. It rains dragon’s teeth. Armed heroes spring up from furrows. They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O’Brien against Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M’Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond John O’Leary against liar O’Johnny, lord Edward Fitzgerald against lord Gerald Fitzedward, The O’Donoghue of the Glens against The Glens of The Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the field altar of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. From the high barbicans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O’Flynn, in a long petticoat and reversed chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mash. The Reverend Mr Hugh C. Haines love MA. in a plain cassock and mortar board, his head and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrants head an open umbrella.)

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, 15, 1914-21 | Continue reading }

‘Victory goes to those who will be able to create disorder without loving it.’ –Guy Debord

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Jeff Koons, the creator of sculptures based on the image of a balloon dog, recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company selling bookends that represent a balloon dog and to the manufacturer of said dogs. It is doubtful Koons could win this one in court. We have all watched at a street fair as somebody twists long balloons into dogs or other animals. So what can Koons say is really his? The man has made his reputation as an appropriator—as an artist who borrows images and styles and ideas more or less wholesale from other more or less creative spirits. He himself has been sued for copyright violation four times, which may help to explain his eagerness to establish some legal precedent for appropriation as a form of creation. It is easy to make fun of Koons. But to the collectors, dealers, curators, critics, and historians who have invested time and in many cases considerable sums of money in his work and that of Warhol and other appropriators, the originality of the death of originality cannot be taken lightly. I think there is some concern that the artists will not finally escape what Sir Joshua Reynolds, in speaking about artists’ appropriations from other artists to the students at the Royal Academy in 1774, referred to as “the servility of plagiarism.” (…)

Jeff Koons, when accused of copyright infringement, tends to settle out of court. One has the impression that he prefers writing a check to actually discovering what a judge or a jury might have to say. But in his heart of hearts Koons probably feels that if Poussin became Poussin by stealing from Titian and Raphael, why on earth is he being bothered by questions of copyright and fair use?

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

Balloon dogs everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief: SF’s Park Life store/gallery announced that artist Jeff Koons has dropped legal action against the sale of its balloon dog-shaped bookends.

{ Bay Citizen | Continue reading | Thanks JJ }

related { How to Make a Balloon Dog }

bonus:

Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth

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{ Robert Gligorov, Untitled (octopus with bird), 2001 }

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{ Robert Gligorov, My Wife, 2001 }

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{ Robert Gligorov, Kikka, 2006-07 }

Money isn’t everything, but it’s right up there next to oxygen

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Nasa has 18 facilities across the US, from Maryland to California, and its major contractors, companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have dozens more. But no place has assumed the identity of the country’s space programme quite like Brevard County. A mosquito-bitten slip of coast, 20 miles wide and 70 miles long, it was somewhere people used to drive through on their way to Palm Beach, until the US army decided to start testing its missiles there in October 1946.

And then, quite suddenly, it was colonised. The arrival of Wernher von Braun, designer of the V2 rocket, and the other founding fathers of the US space programme, made Brevard the fastest-growing county in America. Nasa, founded in 1958, built bridges and water systems, and when the space race reached its exorbitant heights in the mid-1960s, Brevard was the edge of the world. Astronauts raced their cars on the beach, newsmen camped out on their lawns and the county was given the dialling code 3-2-1 after the launch sequence. In 1973, Brevard put the Moon landing on its county seal.

The Apollo boom was followed by bust: 10,000 people lost their jobs when the programme was cancelled in 1972. But since then, Brevard has rebuilt itself around the space shuttle, Nasa’s longest-serving spacecraft and one of the most recognisable vehicles ever to fly. The parts may be manufactured elsewhere and its missions managed from Houston, but for the past three decades Brevard County and KSC have been, in Nasa-speak, where the rubber hits the road. The tourist-friendly launches and everlasting work of 132 missions have made the shuttle the central activity of America’s Space Coast—the stuff of daily life and conversation. (…)

Brevard hasn’t escaped the property crash. Property values in Brevard County have fallen by 45 per cent since 2007 and are still falling—more than 10 per cent last year. (…) Yet it is nothing compared to what is to come, because the rockets and the recession are about to collide. There will be at least two or maybe three missions this year: Discovery, planned for February; the official final flight, Endeavour, scheduled for 1st April; and possibly a “final final” mission if Atlantis gets the go-ahead, most likely in June. But at some point in 2011, the space shuttle will fly for the last time.

{ Prospect | Continue reading }

photo { Brian Ulrich }

He who sleeps cannot catch fish

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Port Royal Jamaica is the only submerged city in the Western Hemisphere. (…)

Port Royal was a city of cultural and commercial exchange. The city was a commercial center of trade in African slaves, sugar, and other goods.

Port Royal was also a hot spot for cut throat pirates. (…) The economy was flooded by the wages of a common artisan’s honest day’s pay, and revenue from under the table deals of pirates, gamblers, and tavern keepers. Women of ill repute frequented the taverns, and sailors who made a semi-honest living at sea lavishly spent their earnings on these ladies of the evening. (…)

The heyday of mischief and ill-gotten gain came to a cataclysmic halt on the morning of June 7, 1692 when an earthquake and tidal wave submerged the infamous city.

The disaster took 2,000 lives on impact, and 3,000 more lives were lost due to injuries and disease following the earthquake. Moreover, the catastrophic event drove history down to the depths of the sea.

{ Water Wide Web | Continue reading }

Experts are now applying forensic techniques to retrieve evidence from underwater crime scenes in an effort to uphold laws that protect coral life and other marine mammals.

Underwater crimes include events such as anchors tearing through coral reefs, spills, using bleach or cyanide to stun tropical fish for the aquarium trade and more.

{ Water Wide Web | Continue reading }

Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted

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{ Don Hudson | via this isn’t happiness | All you can eat buffet: Don Hudson gallery on flickr }

But in my heart it was so real

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{ Elkie Vanstiphout }

‘Grub first, then ethics.’ –Bertolt Brecht

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The idea that an individual has power over his health has a long history in American popular culture. The “mind cure” movements of the 1800s were based on the premise that we can control our well-being. In the middle of that century, Phineas Quimby, a philosopher and healer, popularized the view that illness was the product of mistaken beliefs, that it was possible to cure yourself by correcting your thoughts. Fifty years later, the New Thought movement, which the psychologist and philosopher William James called “the religion of the healthy minded,” expressed a very similar view: by focusing on positive thoughts and avoiding negative ones, people could banish illness.

The idea that people can control their own health has persisted through Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking,” in 1952, to a popular book today, “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne, which teaches that to achieve good health all we have to do is to direct our requests to the universe.

It’s true that in some respects we do have control over our health. By exercising, eating nutritious foods and not smoking, we reduce our risk of heart disease and cancer. But the belief that a fighting spirit helps us to recover from injury or illness goes beyond healthful behavior. It reflects the persistent view that personality or a way of thinking can raise or reduce the likelihood of illness.

The psychosomatic hypothesis, which was popular in the mid-20th century, held that repressed emotional conflict was at the core of many physical diseases: Hypertension was the product of the inability to deal with hostile impulses. Ulcers were caused by unresolved fear and resentment. And women with breast cancer were characterized as being sexually inhibited, masochistic and unable to deal with anger.

Although modern doctors have rejected those beliefs, in the past 20 years, the medical literature has increasingly included studies examining the possibility that positive characteristics like optimism, spirituality and being a compassionate person are associated with good health. And books on the health benefits of happiness and positive outlook continue to be best sellers.

But there’s no evidence to back up the idea that an upbeat attitude can prevent any illness or help someone recover from one more readily. On the contrary, a recently completed study of nearly 60,000 people in Finland and Sweden who were followed for almost 30 years found no significant association between personality traits and the likelihood of developing or surviving cancer. Cancer doesn’t care if we’re good or bad, virtuous or vicious, compassionate or inconsiderate. Neither does heart disease or AIDS or any other illness or injury.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { David Maisel }

‘Nothing is more attached to the past than our imagination.’ –Lia Magale

Have you ever watched a loved one stub their toe and wince yourself in sympathy? If so, you’ve perhaps unknowingly experienced a psychological phenomenon known as ‘embodied simulation’.

When you see someone making a gesture, be it emotional or physical, the regions activated in their brain are also activated in yours, creating a common network. Scientists think that this network is needed for effective communication of information.

What had not been shown before, however, was direct evidence of embodied simulation in between two people. A group of scientists, including Dr Nikolaus Weiskopf from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, have been working on this using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to directly investigate the workings of couple’s brains. […]

Analysis of the data showed that sending emotional information via facial expressions resulted in similar activity in both the sender’s and perceiver’s brains. Several brain areas showed common activity, suggesting that emotion-specific information is encoded by similar signals in both sender and perceiver. The results also showed that the part of the brain known to be activated when people fake an emotion in their facial expression, known as the ventral premotor cortex, was not activated during this experiment.

{ WellcomeTrust | Continue reading }

Ace in the face or what?

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Begotten is a 1991 experimental/horror film, directed and written by E. Elias Merhige. The film deals with the story of Genesis. But as Merhige revealed during Q&A sessions, its primary inspiration was a near death experience he had when he was 19, after a car crash. The film features no dialogue, but uses harsh and uncompromising images of human pain and suffering to tell its tale. It also has no music, instead, the movie is accompanied by the sounds of crickets, and occasionally other sound effects such as grunting and thrashing.

Plot

The film was shot on black and white reversal film, and then every frame was rephotographed for the look that is seen. The only colors are black and white, with no half-tones. The look is described in the trailer as “a Rorschach test for the eye”. Merhige said that for each minute of original film, it took up to 10 hours to rephotograph it for the look desired.

The film opens with a robed, profusely bleeding “God” disemboweling himself, with the act ultimately ending in his death. A woman, Mother Earth, emerges from his remains, arouses the body, and impregnates herself with his semen.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

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Antropophagus, released in the UK as Anthropophagous: The Beast and in the US as Anthropophagus: The Grim Reaper, is a 1980 Italian language horror film, directed by Joe D’Amato.

Plot

A group of tourists arrive on a small Greek island, only to find it almost completely deserted. It seems that the only person still alive there is a blind girl who does not know what has happened to the rest of the island’s town, but is terrified of a man who she describes as smelling of blood. (…)

They find a diary inside an abandoned mansion, which tells of a man who was shipwrecked with his wife and child. In order to survive, the man was forced to eat his dead family. This act drove him insane and he went on to slaughter the rest of the island’s inhabitants. (…)

Almost the entire group is killed until only a few remain, but one of the survivors manages to overpower him and stab him with a pick axe to the stomach, and before he dies, in one final act of insanity, he attempts to devour himself, by chewing violently on his own intestines.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Thanks Caitie for the inspiring discussion }

re descartes’s idea of substance, jeff koons’s vacuum cleaners, barthes’s accident, etc: strunk and white, elements of styles

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{ ‪The elements of style‬ | Google Books }

‘The earth with yellow pears, and overgrown with roses wild, upon the pond is bent.’ –Hölderlin

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Ecodefense is a historical artifact. It be argued that it is the most contro­versial environmental book ever published; more importantly, though, it is a key exhibit in the legal history of freedom of the press in the United States.

Several years ago when Australia banned the importation and sale of Ecodefense, it was not possible for the United States to follow suit-because of the First Amendment. Instead, the United States government spent several million dollars, employed a small army of FBI agents, and entrapped a number of citizens in 1987-89 in an effort to suppress publication and distribution of Ecodefense.

We at Abbzug Press believe that the Bill of Rights is like a set of muscles-if they aren’t exercised, they atrophy. Therefore, it is our patriotic duty to defend the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and publish a new Third Edition of Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.

{ ZineLibrary | Continue reading | PDF }

The foolish one of the family is within. Haha! Huzoor, where’s he?

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In the history of inkblots, the experiment of Hermann Rorschach [1884-1922] is the most famous moment: a controversial attempt to establish a scientific personality assessment based on ten standard Rorschach inkblots. Then comes Andy Warhol, who in the 1980s reconnects inkblots with the art that came before. He did these huge, very sexual, strange, hieratic paintings which he called ‘Rorschach Paintings’ - although they were, in fact, entirely of his own invention. At the opening a journalist asked him what they meant and Warhol - in that amazing, neutral, “I’m a mirror” way of his– said, “Oh, I made a mistake, I got that wrong. I thought the idea was that you make your own inkblots and the psychiatrist interprets them. If I’d known, I’d just have copied the originals!” (…)

there have been inkblot tests around for ages, but in the 19th century they took over from silhouettes as the parlour game, partly due to a German doctor and poet called Justinus Koerner, who was a friend of the German Romantics and was interested in the nascent science of psychology and such things. He’d write endless letters, and he doodled in them, and started playing around with inkblots. He was the one who worked out that you could make inkblots symmetrical by folding them over.

{ The Browser | Continue reading }

related { Rorschach Test – Psychodiagnostic Plates: The ten inkblots + Decryption }

image { John Waters, Director’s cuts }

I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers

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The authors analyze a multimillion dollar, three-year field study sponsored by five firms to assess whether enabling skipping of advertisements using digital video recorders (DVRs) affects consumers’ shopping behavior for advertised and private label goods. (…)

The predicted DVR effect is tightly centered around 0, suggesting that the data have sufficient power to identify a true null effect.

{ American Marketing Association | Continue reading }

Possible, sooth to say, notwithstanding far former guiles

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“Most thought is unconscious. It doesn’t work by mathematical logic. You can’t reason directly about the world—because you can only conceptual what your brain and body allow, and because ideas are structured using frames.” Lakoff says. “As Charles Fillmore has shown, all words are defined in terms of conceptual frames, not in terms of some putative objective, mind-free world.”

“People really reason using the logic of frames, metaphors, and narratives, and real decision making requires emotion, as Antonio Damasio showed in Descartes’ Error.” (…)

People Don’t Decide Using ‘Just the Facts’ (…)

Don’t Repeat the Language Politicians Use: Decode It

{ Explainer | Continue reading }

photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }

And how could I endure to be a man

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{ Tattoos by Thomas Hooper | more }

All those wasted feelings for something I no longer have

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and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, 18, 1914-1921 | Continue reading }

photo { The statue’s head on exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair, 1878 | Wikipedia }

‘Things are naturally contrary, that is, cannot exist in the same object, in so far as one is capable of destroying the other.’ –Spinoza

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Michael Hartl says it’s time to lose pi in favor of a new symbol: tau. We asked him to explain why pi has to go.

Hartl is the author of The Tau Manifesto, which argues that, quite simply, pi is wrong. He’s also a physicist who has previously both studied and taught at Harvard and Caltech.

So what is tau? Well, simply enough, it’s 2*pi, or 2π.

{ io9 | Continue reading }



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