[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
YACHT - Shangri-La
“Well if I can’t go to heaven, let me go to LA.”
The Decemberist’s “Calamity Song” video is a surprisingly literal presentation of the YDAU Interdependence Day Eschaton scene from Infinite Jest. I was impressed by the attention to detail — Otis’ computer is even running Pink2 — and Colin Meloy is an entertaining, if quite not a convincing, Michael Pemulis. But it wasn’t as gripping as I wanted it to be — I couldn’t make myself feel the tension on the court. Is a four-and-a-half-minute music video too short? It took DFW several hundred pages to get to that point. (And if you haven’t read the book, do, but probably don’t bother with the music video until you have.)
(And I really wanted to see Otis’ head get stuck in the monitor…)
Update: Lol, the director actually mourns that he couldn’t end the video that way.
Seeing even a portion of the beloved novel brought to life was “like a weird dream fugue,” he said, though he reluctantly accepted that his video could not end as the passage from “Infinite Jest” does, with a child’s having his head crashed into a computer monitor.
“They’re all flat screens now, and you can’t put your head through a flat screen,” he said.
link (nyt)
“ I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. ”
Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (via mfoucault)
(via katrinaashley)
Mostly I just want to point out Professor Noam Chomsky’s excellent use of the word “uncontroversially” below.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
To be sure, a glance at http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ is sobering, but I don’t think that word means what Dr. Chomsky wants it to mean. ;p
Anyway, I don’t have very much to say vis-à-vis the legality of bin Laden’s assassination except to say that while we all know that assassination isn’t any kind of policy tool and if I were in charge of the US budget I probably wouldn’t have spent as many millions of taxpayer dollars on his head as we have, I’m having profound difficulty conjuring much sympathy for bin Laden’s fate. I’m cheered that people are willing to ask the tough questions about due process and international law because I think they’re important principles, but — and this is my American speaking — in this instance, I really just don’t care. I certainly don’t think bin Laden’s assassination was unjust or, well, surprising, and the relatively muted outcry seems to suggest it wasn’t exactly incompatible with American foreign policy goals.
(Source: guernicamag.com)
It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.
Success is always built on shifting sands, though. [via, ironically, everybody]
A 22-year-old North Vancouver man has said he is facing a death sentence because B.C. will not fund the only medical treatment that could save him. Garrett Shakespeare’s red blood cells have a protein deficiency that causes his immune system to attack them, but the drug to treat it effectively costs $500,000 a year.
We’re somehow going to have to get more comfortable, as a society, spending utterly absurd amounts of money on biologicals and being taxed accordingly (my entire annual Canadian tax liability, both federal and provincial, including HST and my Medical Services Plan premiums, would cover maybe a couple weeks of treatment for him)… or accepting some alternative.
“
Yeah … sort of, um, who do I live for? What do I believe in, what do I want? I mean, they’re the sorts of questions so profound and so deep they sound banal when you say them out loud.
I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid… . That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.
Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuagable by outside stuff… . And that our particular challenge is that there’s never been more and better stuff comin’ from the oustide, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.
I think it’s probably assuagable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin’ yourself.
It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.
”
David Foster Wallace, typed out by hand (just so you know) from “Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.”
