_: January 2010

2010/01/30

2010/01/27

The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.
~ Federico Garcia Lorca

2010/01/20

Nick Knight negative positives

, originally uploaded by maquisin.

Dark Angel

Dark Angel, originally uploaded by MoodboardBlog.

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branding for a public

"Product design final project at Central Saint Martins - Skin by Chanel. While at first glance it seems bizarre and perhaps even more low tech on the surface than you’d expect for a “future tech” post… it really sparked some playful conversations on where skincare may take us in the future. But first, here’s his concept! It plays with the idea of skincare and branding ~ looking at the skincare market and how far people go to primp their skin, “Just as we can define ourselves through the brands of clothing we wear, or the brand of mobile phone we have, we can now define ourselves by the brand of skincare product we use. If you are using skincare by Chanel, you want people to know that your skin is by Chanel, in the same way that Chanel handbags have clear branding, why shouldn’t our skin.” In his design, in addition to your cleanser, toner, lotion, you can also leave a logo impression on your skin! Yes, the type that appears when you sit in short shorts on a rattan chair for example. It fades in a few hours, but you look pretty silly until then."

I find the "branding" accessory totally superfluous and, really upsetting, disturbing and 100% poor taste. I actually think this branding "solution" would DAMAGE the brand perception. But most of people that love to display brands publically are also not what you can consider a "refined creative type". Disturbingly obscene.

2010/01/19

sweet things

, originally uploaded by maquisin.

2010/01/13

Sapolsky on human condition and religion

Robert Maurice Sapolsky (born 1957) is an American scientist and author. He is currently professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, and by courtesy, Neurosurgery, at Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.[1]
Robert Sapolsky received his B.A. in biological anthropology summa cum laude from Harvard University and subsequently attended Rockefeller University where he received his Ph.D. in Neuroendocrinology working in the lab of Bruce McEwen, a world-renowned endocrinologist.

Sapolsky has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship genius grant in 1987[5], an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. He was also awarded the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Young Investigator of the Year Awards from the Society for Neuroscience, the International Society for Psychoneuro-Endocrinology, and the Biological Psychiatry Society. In 2007, he received the John P. McGovern Award for Behavioral Science, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

2010/01/10

Patti Smith Indicts George W. Bush

On nurturing creativity

Language and madness

In the disparity between the awareness of unreason and the awareness of madness, we have, at the end of the eighteenth century, the point of departure for a decisive movement: that by which the experience of unreason will continue, with Holderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche, to proceed ever deeper towards the roots of time — unreason thus becoming, par excellence, the world’s contratempo — and the knowledge of madness seeking on the contrary to situate it ever more precisely within the development of nature and history. It is after this period that the time of unreason and the time of madness receive two opposing vectors: one being unconditioned returned and absolute submersion; the other, on the contrary, developing according to the chronicle of a history.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization 212 (“The Great Fear”)

If there is something in literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice, to epos or to poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously isolating the bond that links the play of form to the substance of graphic expression.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology 59

There is no antagonism here between a true world and an apparent one: there is only one world, and that world is false, cruel, contradictory, misleading and seductive, deprived of meaning… such a world is the true world. We need deceit in order to conquer this reality or “truth,” that is, in order to live. The fact that deceit is necessary in order to live still has to with the terrible and problematic nature of existence… This faculty by which he rapes reality with deceit, this essentially artistic faculty in man, is something he has in common with everything that exists…

Nietzsche

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