Congruency

Our innate need for congruency distorts the world around us. After all, is it possible for me to partition my life into manageable pieces without a figure in the carpet connecting otherwise unrelated events? Does my own imagined narrative clarify or cloud my identity?

I grasp at ideas of personal and external progress - hoping to find some deterministic pattern in history and American zeitgeist. If we throw ourselves into the future, towards some concrete goal, how then can we remain capable of capitalizing or coping with unforeseen change? Conversely, without goals, without integrity, and with the sacrifice of imagined individualism is there anything at all?

Within each imagined community, the totaled sum of our shared histories must be decoded as deterministic for any measurable sense of "progress" to be felt. I believe that with a loss of shared National responsibility (primarily the loss of a shared sense of what the "other is"), the disenfranchisement of large-scale National Institutions and the degradation of entrenched social identities* it is hard for "progress" to be measured, and therefore felt.

The American identity ("the American dream") is not dead, it does however lack congruency with its past iterations - which is essentially the same thing.

*Great from a human rights standpoint, horrible for social cohesion

A viscous silence

drapes the furniture

in an afterglow

Waves of warm complacency

come calling

after their absentia

.

Work yet

but not yet

not now

not yet

yet not after

after the afterglow

New Philosophy

The new philosophy calls all in doubt;

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply and all relation.

Prince, subject, father, son are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he has got

To be a Phoenix, and that he can be

None of that kind of which he is but he.

-John Donne

New Danger

Barak "Black Eagle" Obama

‘Ask a Crow,’ reports Dr. Lowrie, ‘whether he would have security as now, or danger as of old, and his answer is – “danger as of old . . . there was glory in it.”’

“The inferiority of our age in such respects is an inevitable result of the fact that society is centralized and organized to such a degree that individual initiative is reduced to a minimum.” – Bertrand Russell

Boredom and frustration are the lynchpins of blue collar life. Security, safety and structure breed these things – and are to some degree responsible for the psychic degradation of Americans. As pointed out by Mr. Elvis Costello (and Louis C.K), we live in paradise; it therefore seems a paradox that there is such a lust for escapism.

There is no such ‘danger as of old’. Where is the new danger, the new glory?

In the effective system of modern culture, perhaps the new danger is in individual initiative and deviance. The new danger is social stigma, and political inexpedience – in a word: irrelevance.

Reptiles of the mind – bred in the standing water of assured opinion and norms-are the new danger.

French Perspective

Though it seems that everyone in my Newsfeed is up to something far more exciting than what I am doing, these pictures of Monaco and Monte Carlo (via the wandering eye) remind me that we're all just a bunch of ugly peasants.

Georges De la Tour

Saturday's Girl

Spent the day sketching classic nudes. I think those Hellenists had Mila Jovovich in mind when they carressed these epic figures out of the living rock. As a boon to all members of the male persuasion who were 13 when the Sixth Element came out, Mila recently posed naked for Purple Magazine.



Here's the rest of the photoset.

"It was restoring a mysterious world the didn't exist anymore, or never existed, but inspired a mood about dressing and desire." -Ralph Lauren

With one week until the official start of spring, my mind is primarily preoccupied by reinvention and renewal. March is a transitional month in meteorological terms - but also a month that hopefully brings transitions within. It is a good time to re-appreciate and reevaluate your ideals, and your identity.

That's why I'm spending this tempestuous evening with Ralph Lauren's hardcover cv and listening to the Clientele's Bonfires on the Heath. Good mellow retrospection.

Heavy Weather

Jake Davis Test Shots: Tanya Romero from Jake Davis on Vimeo.

Under the weather - LA

A Fresh Breeze

From the Tate collection - A Fresh Breeze by JMW Turner.

Self-Help

Q:Have you noticed all these new nonfiction books on “happiness”?
A:It’s an industry. It’s really frightening. People need to read a book on how to be happy? It’s completely an American thing. Can you imagine people in Naples sitting on a bus or in a trattoria reading a book about happiness?

The above quote, from an interview between Mr. Charles Simic, former Poet Laureate of the United States, and Deborah Solomon for the NYTimes magazine.

We Eastern elitists are brought up to seek out meaning and purpose through education. To an increasingly degree (and I find this spiriting), the scientific method and the trappings of academic investigation are being used to analyze ennui and perceived personal failings. Decried by Simic, these new nonfiction books are setting out, in unromantic terms, pathways and practices that carry the promise of socially sanctioned states of success (pardon the alliteration). Focus and discipline are two qualities that are lacking in many people’s lives (myself included) – in my experience, discipline (in the form of social prohibitions and punishments) and focus (in the form of a lack of social mobility) are at a premium in European countries like Italy.

On average, Italians work 250 hours less per anum than their American counterparts. Why is this? In my opinion, those extra 250 hours represent the presence of a uniquely American insecurity – one derived from our unparalleled psychological independence. To a large degree, our success or failure is entirely predicated upon effort and education. Which is why we anxiously poor over nonfiction books which promise a better Way – and why we will never be content.

Thank God for that.

When a young blogger's fancy turns to love...

Ah springtime - a time for men to slough of the winter's accumulated ill-will, and robe themselves in pastel and khaki resplendence.
That wasps nest in Botticelli's Venus and Mars (see it there to the right of Mars' head) is most likely an homage to the Vespucci (derived from vespa, the Italian word for wasp) family whose patronage made this work possible. The theme is clearly that love, in this case personified in Venus (but you knew that already), has the power to temper the warrior's wrath. though it seems more likely it was the influence of Bacchus that brought about Mars' rather undignified sleep. Similarly, if we are to believe that Mars sleeps on account of love - he has dropped his guard with his head next to a wasps nest (here most closely representative of patronage/money - now what, pray tell, does that say about love?).
In any event - the sun is shining so satyrs be damned.