How much of a difference does pushing really hard at something matter?

I think in the current culture where hobbies become side-hustles. Something is considered wasted, if isn't done to serve as a stepping stone for something else. The thought that there could be something else becomes an impossibility.

Derek Silvers Relax for the same result hits a similar note as something I wrote about taking a pause. Where relaxing becomes a form of resistance.

updated: 2022-09-14

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How countries slip into Fascism

• Toni Morrison

  • Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
  • Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
  • Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
  • Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
  • Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
  • Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
  • Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
  • Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy-especially its males and absolutely its children.
  • Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
  • Maintain, at all costs, silence.

• Umberto Eco, qualities of Eternal Facism

  • The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
  • The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
  • The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
  • Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
  • Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
  • Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
  • The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
  • The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
  • Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
  • Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
  • Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
  • Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
  • Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
  • Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

My camera is like an invisibility cloak. It makes me more free

Teju Cole's books have always been hard for me to entangle. They are pictorially and thematically dense. This article gave me an insight into his work, as well as photography as a medium.

The associations, though, are often not entirely clear. A photograph of a telegraph pole on a deserted street in Selma, Alabama prompts a memory of a dream Cole had about crossing a street but never arriving at the other side, which, in turn, calls up a quotation on consciousness and time by the French phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

He talks me through a photograph of a ship’s foghorn, white with a gold rim, resplendent against a backdrop of Lake Brienz in Switzerland, the mountains rising out of the sea in the background amid glowering clouds. The fragment reads: “I opened my eyes, What lay before me looked like the sound of the alphorn at the beginning of the final movement of Brahms’s First Symphony. This was the sound, this was the sound I saw.

Interesting tidbits about John Berger, whose book Understanding a photograph I am now reading.

“I actually asked John why photography was not part of his practice,” Cole says, “In his case, to photograph a subject was to foreclose some part of what he could write about it. He saw it as an interference in his writing faculties.

Berger on photo-collage

And, Chris Marker, whose San Soleil I saw in an early parenting daze when feeding K. at 5am.

In his great film, Sans Soleil, Marker moves between zooming out and watching the flow of life and zooming in to look at the pattern of the details of everyday experience. He is not telling you one thing about a place, but allowing it all to come in and making the connections visible.

And, there in lies the crux of photography as a medium — its watching the flow of life and patterns of everyday experience and making the connections visible.

MosFilms, once the premier studio in the USSR, has been putting up some of their best movies on YouTube. For free.

A large playlist of their movies

Anna Kareina

I watched Solaris on here a few years back. It is such a gift!

Been using drafts to dictate thoughts and notes for the last two days. It has been a substantial improvement to my capture workflow.

Incredible how far dictation has come along. ^[1]

An accessory cloud can often be seen just above Mount Teide’s summit. tweet and youtube video

----- For us in aviation lenticular clouds means bad news. It is the sign of stable perpendicular to the height of the mountain while unstable and less stable layer at the under and over it. It causes severe turbulence on the lee side of the mountain.

----- The mind blowing thing is that the cloud's visible shape is stationary while the air is moving "through" it at high speed. Condensation and vaporization happening continuously at the cloud's edges.

Started reading The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald and came across the words, "dog days".

Apparently, the term "dog days" comes from a star.

(thanks wikipedia!)

The dog days or dog days of summer are the hot, sultry days of summer. They were historically the period following the heliacal rising of the star system Sirius (known colloquially as the "Dog Star"), which Hellenistic astrology connected with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck. They are now taken to be the hottest, most uncomfortable part of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

A few lines later, he does mention the dog star.

certain ailments are more likely to beget us under the sign of the dog star.

Read Derek Sivers's article on short urls. I might be old school but, I do like those nice, descriptive urls. I do see his point on making memorable links.

I might do the short urls on notes. If I can figure out how 11ty does multiple permalinks in the data cascade.

Austin Kleon wrote about wrestling and politics inspired by photographs taken by Lourdes Grobet.

Reminded me of Pa. Ranjith's Sarpatta Paramparai. In the backdrop of 70's Madras, we have two warring wrestling factions. Ranjith's uses our expectations of a sport biopic and turns it into a riveting look at politics and caste of the era.

“Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle,” Barthes wrote.

On this Hillside, Richard Long, 1972, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

Came across German artist John Heartfield twice this week - an openculture article and John Berger's Understanding a Photograph.

His work is intriguing but, what caught my interest was Berger's dissection of what makes a good photo-montage.

The peculiar advantage of photo-montage lies in the fact that everything which has been cut out keeps its familiar photographic appearance. We are still looking first at things and only afterwards at symbols.

But because these things have been shifted, because the natural continuities within which they normally exist have been broken, and because they have now been arranged to transmit an unexpected message, we are made conscious of the arbitrariness of their continuous normal message.

Art must deny in order to answer question in its own terms. It is lies that can be qualified as useful or useless; the lie is surrounded by what has not been said and its usefulness or not can be gauged according to what has been hidden. The truth is always first discovered in open space.

Redid my home page. Pared it down to something less noisy.

An old instance of my home page

Found a musical corner of are.na. Love how there is always so much to uncover within it.

Standing on the balcony, looking into the bedroom. P. and K. are getting ready for bed. The best show in the world happening right in front of me.