Vitro Nasu

This is my introduction to Avital Ronell – very stylish and sharp.

I have seen Zizek talking about Ecology in front of massive garbage many times here and there but failed to see that
this was from a very interesting and entertaining film by Astra Taylor.

Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be.
Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor. (via)

Sunaura Taylor (Astra’s sister) and Judith Butler on the street of San Francisco.

Filmmaker – director’s interview

Going against the norm of “serious” documentaries tending to be depressing, Taylor here creates a film of substance that is nevertheless light on its feet. Neither the walking philosophers nor their conversations stop for a moment during Examined Life, so the result is physically and mentally energetic piece of filmmaking. And as the ideas in Taylor’s film are engaging and thought-provoking without being overly complex, we are left invigorated rather than bamboozled.

One of Taylor’s inspirations comes from Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Scott McLemee

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Astra was raised in a strange Bohemian family, she explained in this interivew.

Related links

Diderot shows up here: A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment. By Philipp Blom.

Diderot and L’espirit de Fance (previous post)

Mitsuo Aoki was my Professor
He was 95.

Professor Aoki introduced me to the writings of Paul Tillich, Soren Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Camus, Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others in his class at the University of Hawaii. He used to step on top of the podium and do the Zorba the Greek dance. His lectures were so moving that many of his students in class were often in tears. He was a Buddhist and a Christian and a cosmic dancer.

A Mystery to be lived

My First Age began, when in my birth, I very wisely chose my Japanese Buddhist parents. So some 80 years ago, I started life in a Sugar Plantation, on the Big Island in Kohala, in a village called Hawi.

He did work with Paul Tillich

Counselor on dying rejoiced in life (Obit from Star Advertiser)

The Rev. Mitsuo Aoki helped countless people, particularly cancer patients and their families, with his compassionate outlook on dying.
“He was sought out a lot for his wisdom,” said the Rev. Clarence Liu, chaplain of Hospice Hawaii. “He lived his dying in the very same way that he shared about it and talked about it. There was great integrity and great truthfulness in the way he lived his life.”
Aoki, a theologian, minister and college professor who founded the religion department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and served as an influential figure in the establishment of Hospice Hawaii, died Thursday at his Pohai Nani home in Kaneohe. He was 95.
Born in the plantation town of Hawi on Hawaii island, Aoki, known as “Mits,” attended the Chicago Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary.
According to longtime friend Rick Bernstein, who knew Aoki for 40 years, he was raised in the Jodo-shu Buddhist tradition and converted to Christianity in the 1920s. He was a recipient of Honpa Hongwanji Mission’s Living Treasure award and the Jefferson Award for outstanding community service.

Dying people are my people
In 1957 Reverend Aoki experienced an out of body experience when he had a car accident.

Gradiva Sketch I (1978)

Ubuweb indexed Gradiva (26 min.) Raymonde Carasco’s film is finally available to the world at large.

Step by step, delusions escape us like a snake between two stones. The solemn, ritualized repetition of a maiden’s foot stepping on ancient stones has been described as a synecdoche, a trope by which the part represents the whole. The whole in this case is W. Jensen’s novel Gradiva, immortalized by Freud, Bréton and many later French intellectuals like Jean Rouch or Derrida. It is a story about a archeologist who is entranced by the of figure an ancient bas-relief depicting the walk of a young woman from Pompei. Shot with the assistance of Bruno Nuytten (known for his work with Duras), Carasco’s Gradiva is a poetic construction about the fetishization of desire, one that seems to go against Freud’s reading: the gracious movement of the maiden’s foot is seen to be the object itself, not a mere referent, of male desire. ..-Eye of Sound (Read more Ubuweb)

Raymonde Carasco
In Memoriam: Raymonde Carasco 1933-2009 – Master of the Ethnographic Poem (Nicole Brenez)

How can cinema reach the poetic truth of phenomena, how should the sensual description of appearances and particularities be converted into such a ‘magnetic song’?
We must thus go back to the very origin of Carasco’s quest. She did not set out for Mexico in the late 1970s in order to rape and pillage the imaginary of the Tarahumaras, but rather to follow the traces of Antonin Artaud, to empirically verify the encounter between a sacred text of modernity and its reality. With the result that her research does not comprise a classical type of investigation (to hide, discover, expose), but an alliance of the senses: to enjoy the privilege of being there, to accept that that she will never see everything, to acquiesce in the gradual revelation of only a few traces, to grasp some movements, some signs that testify to the beauty of friendship, before pretending to understand anything – to share not the secret but the cult of the secret, the cult of mystery and trance.

Image by Carasco

Tutuguri – Tarahumaras 79
Raymonde Carasco and Régis Hebraud

Tutuguri – Tarahumaras 79
Ciguri 99 – Le dernier Chaman
Raymonde Carasco, France, 1999, 16mm, VO fr / OV fr, 65′

The words of the last of the Tarahumara shamans alternate with Artaud’s texts about Ciguri, the higher plane of consciousness they access through peyote rituals.

Robert Aitken 1917 – 2010

Robert Aitken dies at 93; American Zen master
Aitken, one of the first Americans to be fully sanctioned as a master of Zen Buddhism, emphasized a path to enlightenment through social action. (LA times)

D T Suzuki and Robert Aitken

The story of how Robert Aitken came to Zen is remarkable in itself. Aitken was an undergraduate student at the University of Hawaii when he decided he needed a break from studies, and he took a construction job in Guam. So it was that he was an American civilian in Japanese-occupied Guam when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. He was taken into custody the day after the bombing and spent the entire war in civilian prisons in Japan.

One of the guards loaned Aitken a copy of R. H. Blyth’s book Zen in English Literature and the Oriental Classics. Aitken read the book several times until the guard took it back. But then Aitken was moved to a new prison, and his cell mate was — R. H. Blyth. Blyth was a student of Zen who had been teaching English in Japan when the war began, and so he also spent the war in Japanese prisons. So it was that Aitken’s misfortune became an opportunity, and he and Blyth had long discussions about Zen.

Aloha Roshi (Diamond Shanga)

A memorial ceremony and celebration for Robert Aitken will be held at Palolo Zen Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Sunday, August 22 at 10 AM.

Port Bou
Border crossing resting place

On Truth
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help. Walter Benjamin

Berlin Childhood

Walter Benjamin (W.B for dummies on youtube)

Three great philosophers were born on July 15.
Wlater Benjamin 15 July 1892
Iris Murdoch 15 July 1919
Jacques Derrida 15 July 1930

Derrida and Iris Murdoch

Speech is blind :On ‘Echo And Narcissus’ (Derrida on youtube)

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch

Summer Interlude, Missing Dahlia, Iris Murdoch and Jacques Derrida (previous post).

“Everything I despise about English life is in her,” Elias Canetti declares.

Javier Marias has a new book Your Face Tomorrow. – Stephanie Merritt welcomes the third and final part of an extraordinary work by a great novelist of our age
Marias talking here on video.

3quarksdaily –

Marías’ writing creed “I progress as I digress” underlines the importance of literary speculation in understanding the world around us. The urgency that drives Marías’ large novel in the absence of dramatic incidents flows from these often poignant meditations on history and ethics. They can be summed up in the words of another anglophone Spaniard George Santayana who said “those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” (Via)

Javier Marias (previous post)

Problems of Life – Wittgenstein from Beyond the Pale (Tom Clark’s blog)

The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more, too.
(1929)
Don’t play with what lies deep in another person!

The face is the soul of the body.
(circa 1932-1934)

The House of Wittgenstein

Call Him Andean Jones
Adventurer, pilot, senator—and the man who found Machu Picchu -Hiram Bingham III
Hiram Bingham III

Hilberg
Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.

Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.” (From the Nation)

Thrill of the Chase the Truth about Gandhi’s sex life
With religious chastity under scrutiny, a new book throws light on Gandhi’s practice of sleeping next to naked girls. In fact, he was sex-mad, writes biographer Jad Adams
Father and Son (previous post)

April 16 update:
1178 BC; The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War.

Odysseus by Arnold Böcklin

Odyssues by Max Beckmann

Coen brothers claimed never to have read Homer’s poem. “O Brother Where are Thou”

Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87

How the Great Howard Zinn Made All Our Lives Better by Harvey Wasserman

Bill Moyers Interview (3 parts)

Howard Zinn turned to comics 9 pages of comics here.

Howard Zinn was in People Magazine (Vitro-Nasu People)

Interview with Professor Howard Zinn
(Includes a video of On the Stupidity of War)

Light bulb and Lemon by Josef Beuys

Josef Beuys at Mary Boone We are the Revolution – Jan 9 – Feb 6

Laurie Anderson

Birthday of John C Lilly January 6, 1915 and Allan Watts January 6, 1915.
They were both Capricorn with moon in Virgo. (scroll down)

John Lilly birth chart (Capricorn rising)

Alan Watts birth chart (Sagittarius rising)

Interview with John Lilly

Let me say how I got to work with dolphins first. I was floating in the tank for a year and wondering, who floats around twenty-four hours a day’? I went to Pete Shoreliner and he says, “Dolphins. They’re available. Go down to the Marine Studios in Florida.” So I did, and I immediately fell in love with them.

Lisa Lyons was adopted by John Lilly (I thought she was his girlfriend.)

Through the center of Mandala (New agish John Lilly on youtube)

Youtube loves Allan Watts (many clips out there)

Taoism: Wisdom of the ridiculous

Music and Life

Alan Watts died an alcoholic (revealed and reconsidered)

Alan Watts was a flat-out genius of a philosophical entertainer, and this video segment, along with the other segments comprising the entire video, are more impressive and inspiring to me than all of the words I’ve ever heard uttered by Ken Wilber, Thich Nhat Hanh, Krishnamurti and all of the other spiritual sages I’ve ever heard in person or on “record” put together, with all due and genuine respect to these remarkable persons in their own right.

Kepler Optica

Johannes Kepler December 27, 1571 – (his horoscope shows a different birthday.)

On Kepler

Koestler and Kepler; the perfect fusion, a review Written by Devin Mcintosh.

“The Watershed” by Arthur Koestler is a magnificent piece of literature that is unique, yet well organized and informative of the life and works of Johannes Kepler. Koestler does a great job in showing how the modern world-view was slowly replaced by the medieval world-view and how science has progressively advanced.

Johannes Kepler saw himself as a hapless lap dog from Arthur Koestler’s most delightful book, read the excerpt from my previous post. (Kepler is always attached to Arthur Koestler in my mind.)

Arthur Koestler Man of Darkness (NYtimes)
Koestler’s Big Week, he read 3 reviews of Koestler’ new biography.
Louis Menand: The Road Warrior (the New Yorker)

Koestler wrote in German (the original language of “Darkness at Noon”) and English. He spoke Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, and French, too. (Hebrew gave him trouble; characteristically, he blamed the language.) He was, in his own phrase, the “Casanova of causes,” from Zionism to the campaign against capital punishment, and he donated generously to many of them. He maintained lifelong relationships (including the occasional feud) with the writers, scientists, and political activists he met in the various places he visited. And he was a social and sexual torpedo. Academics generally avoided him, but he socialized and debated—alcohol, generously administered, was a necessary lubricant and invariably made him obstreperous and sometimes violent—with nearly everyone else in midcentury intellectual circles, from George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre to Whittaker Chambers and Timothy Leary. He was married three times, and he had literally hundreds of affairs. He was the sort of person who records his liaisons in a notebook.

Claude Levi Strauss
Portrait by late Irving Penn

UNESCO pays tribute after death of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss

“His thoughts changed the way people perceived each other, striking down such divisive concepts as race and opening the way for a new vision based on recognition of the common bond of humanity.

NYtimes obit

The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

These Swaihwe masks, and the right to wear them in profane ceremonies, belonged exclusively to a few lineages of high rank, were transmitted by marriage, and brought luck and facilitated the acquisition of wealth.

Swaihwe Mask
Claude Levi – Strauss, The Way of the Masks (La Voie des Masques)

Sontag on Levi-Strauss

What journalists are saying - (The Atlantic)

Berkeley graduate school audio lecture

Claude Levi-Strauss at 100 (Previous post)

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Piranesi from National Gallery of Art

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Fireworks by Son of Piranesi
The Girandola at the Castel Sant’Angelo, ca. 1783
Francesco Piranesi (Italian, 1756–1810) and Louis-Jean Desprez (French, 1743–1804)
Etching with colored washes

The Dark Brain of Piranesi by Marguerite Yourcenar
(M.Y is known as Madame Bibliotheque – I would like to read her essay on Prisons of Piranesi’s etchings)

Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

The raw material of Piranesi’s designs consists of architectural forms; but, because the Prisons are images of confusion, because their essence is pointlessness, the combination of architectural forms never adds up to an architectural drawing, but remains a free design, untrammelled by any considerations of utility or even possibility, and limited only by the necessity of evoking the general idea of a building.

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This discussion must have taken place at this Farmhouse.

Huize Piranesi
The history of Huize Piranesi is the transition of a farmhouse where the peasant family and their livehood used to live together under one roof, into a family house with space for performances.
In the beginning of the seventies, the house welcomed the philosophers Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, Leszek Kolakowski, Arne Naess and Karl Popper.

Farmhouse build on the inspiration of Piranesi.

Matt Janovic

From what I could see, Chomsky kicked his bald ass all over the stage.

John Haber

Nice pairing. Two totally annoying know-it-alls that I’ve learned something from.
I do have to admit that the clip shows Foucault at his most dogmatic, while Chomsky is actually asking for support for creative activities outside his usual focus. Foucault focuses so much on established government institutions, as makes sense for his great work on the Enlightenment, as if Obama had more power than the banks too big to fail, that he could drive me to become a dogmatic Marxist.

(The above from Facebook discussion on occasion of Giovanni B. Piranesi’s birthday – Oct 4)

Happy Birthday Kate Millett – Sept 14, 1934

Millett’s deeply personal autobiographical works, including Flying (1974), Sita (1977), and A.D. (1995), reveal the difficulties she has faced in her public and private life.

Sexual Politics was circulated before the publication of her thesis.

Kate Millett is an artist and a feminist.

See her with her sculpture from Feminist Art movement

Time Magazine 1970 on Kate Millett

Her book Flying (1974) tells of her marriage with a Japanese sculptor and her love affairs with women.

Fumio Yoshimura Sculpture

Yes she has lost mind once – Her Loony Bin Trip.

“Not since Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has the literature of madness emitted such a powerful anti-institutional cry.” — Washington Post ADVANCE PRAISE “The forced incarceration, the mental anguish, and the sheer humiliation of ‘going mad’ are made real in Millett’s detailed and passionate narrative of her own experiences.

“The Basement” was disturbing but I had to read it.
Here is a review of the Basement by Duncan Mitchell

Happy Kate by Hyder in 1994.

Her homepage is here. – AN INVITATION TO THE WOMEN’S ART COLONY/FARM

Of course she went to Iran.

In 1981 Millett published Going to Iran, which was a new journalistic account of a trip she made to Iran in March 1979 to address Iranian feminists on International Women’s Day. The Shah of Iran had just abdicated, and the Ayatollah Khomeini had not yet fully consolidated his power. Nevertheless, Millett was soon expelled by the fundamentalist government for her feminist views. The chronicle is recorded in the rigorously honest style of her earlier works. (via)

The Return of the Troublemaker

Society has lost its patience. So why isn’t she more downhearted? She smiles and says it’s because she is having too much fun. “I love making trouble. It’s a wonderful job. You don’t get paid but you have a lot of adventures.”