Tsunamis and other glitches
Dec. 26th, 2004 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm not blogging anything much today because I spent my high-yield blogging hours (between 9 and 11am) writing a piece about Berlin Wheatpasting that'll go up on Design Observer (if all goes according to plan) on January 3rd. [Ah, they've just told me it can go up tomorrow instead.]
I'm spending the day watching the awful pictures coming in from Sumatra and Sri Lanka; whole communities reduced to matchwood. A tragedy more epic than 9/11. This quake / tsunami double whammy seems to be the worst natural disaster in years, and, like the Lisbon earthquake back in Voltaire's day, reminds the pantheistic Panglosses amongst us that Nature is not always beneficent.
Well, I have to pack for a flight to London this evening. If you want a stimulating read, perhaps I could recommend GlitchSlapTKO, where Athens, Georgia / Nakameguro b-boy and blogger Bobby D has recently been typing stuff about Mishima's ideas about Japan, a way of thinking 'kept hidden under the leaves'.
Also recently on GlitchSlapTKO (which has been known to take pot shots at 'Clique Opera', and at times seems oddly obsessed by this blog), a brief imaginary conversation was reported (by a highly unreliable narrator) between 'Momus' and 'Aristotle'. It takes place on a Yamanote line platform. Momus is on his way to check out Harajuku fashions, Aristotle seems keen to get some 'hot sento action' in a shitamachi bathhouse (perhaps he'll be doing his art crit thing at SCAI the Bathhouse, a sento converted into an art gallery in Shitaya, Tokyo, also recently blogged on GlitchSlap). The conversation goes like this:
Aristotle: Well, frankly speaking, I really wish you'd tone down the anti-Platonic tenor of your blog.
Momus: [his feathers slightly ruffled] Really!?
Aristotle: Um-hum. I mean, sure...I've had MY little falling outs with Plato over the years and all, but you and I both know that Plato never intended for his timeless contemplations on Metaphysics, which were just honest inquiries in the realm of thought at the time, to be grossly misappropriated 1000 years later by the Fathers of the Church and poorly translated into Latin in order to shore up the rickety philosophical basis for monotheistic religions like Christanity.
Momus: Yeah, but they made me hate my body for years and years...
Aristotle: I know. I know. But it isn't HIS fault. Instead of lambasting him for the shortcomings of his interpreters, why not praise him for his lucidity and the honesty of his thought. After all, these are two things you seem to value in your writing, right?
Momus: ...
The real Momus would not have fallen silent at that point. He would have raised Plato's famous condemnation of artists. Plato thought painters were 'mere grinders of multi-coloured drugs' and called poets ignorant imitators and braggarts – flatterers, seekers of public approval, emotional con-men. If Japan were The Republic, a b-boy glitch-slapper like Bobby D would long ago have been escorted to the airport by Plato's philo-police.
I'm spending the day watching the awful pictures coming in from Sumatra and Sri Lanka; whole communities reduced to matchwood. A tragedy more epic than 9/11. This quake / tsunami double whammy seems to be the worst natural disaster in years, and, like the Lisbon earthquake back in Voltaire's day, reminds the pantheistic Panglosses amongst us that Nature is not always beneficent.
Well, I have to pack for a flight to London this evening. If you want a stimulating read, perhaps I could recommend GlitchSlapTKO, where Athens, Georgia / Nakameguro b-boy and blogger Bobby D has recently been typing stuff about Mishima's ideas about Japan, a way of thinking 'kept hidden under the leaves'.
Also recently on GlitchSlapTKO (which has been known to take pot shots at 'Clique Opera', and at times seems oddly obsessed by this blog), a brief imaginary conversation was reported (by a highly unreliable narrator) between 'Momus' and 'Aristotle'. It takes place on a Yamanote line platform. Momus is on his way to check out Harajuku fashions, Aristotle seems keen to get some 'hot sento action' in a shitamachi bathhouse (perhaps he'll be doing his art crit thing at SCAI the Bathhouse, a sento converted into an art gallery in Shitaya, Tokyo, also recently blogged on GlitchSlap). The conversation goes like this:
Aristotle: Well, frankly speaking, I really wish you'd tone down the anti-Platonic tenor of your blog.
Momus: [his feathers slightly ruffled] Really!?
Aristotle: Um-hum. I mean, sure...I've had MY little falling outs with Plato over the years and all, but you and I both know that Plato never intended for his timeless contemplations on Metaphysics, which were just honest inquiries in the realm of thought at the time, to be grossly misappropriated 1000 years later by the Fathers of the Church and poorly translated into Latin in order to shore up the rickety philosophical basis for monotheistic religions like Christanity.
Momus: Yeah, but they made me hate my body for years and years...
Aristotle: I know. I know. But it isn't HIS fault. Instead of lambasting him for the shortcomings of his interpreters, why not praise him for his lucidity and the honesty of his thought. After all, these are two things you seem to value in your writing, right?
Momus: ...
The real Momus would not have fallen silent at that point. He would have raised Plato's famous condemnation of artists. Plato thought painters were 'mere grinders of multi-coloured drugs' and called poets ignorant imitators and braggarts – flatterers, seekers of public approval, emotional con-men. If Japan were The Republic, a b-boy glitch-slapper like Bobby D would long ago have been escorted to the airport by Plato's philo-police.
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Date: 2004-12-26 04:19 pm (UTC)