kradeelav | Entries tagged with quotes

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

― Martha Graham (via

queenlua )

It was clear that the Texans’ interpretation of the ceremony differed from my own. My lasting impression was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed to be trapped in their college years. I wondered whether the Bohemians shroud themselves in secrecy for reasons no more sinister than that they thought it was cool.
I remembered something that my Bilderberg deep throat had said to me on the telephone one Sunday evening shortly before I set off for the Grove. He said that far from being fed up with hearing wild conspiracy theories about themselves, many of the Bilderbergers actually thoroughly enjoy it.
He also said that, in all honesty, neither Bilderberg nor Bohemian Grove attract the calibre that they used to. The current members are getting older and older, and the prospective newcomers – the world leaders of tomorrow – don’t seem all that interested in getting involved.
“Let’s face it,” my deep throat had said to me, “nobody rules the world any more. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.”
“Maybe,” I said, “that’s why you Bilderbergers love to hear the conspiracy theories. So you can pretend to yourselves that you do still rule the world.”
- Them: Adventures with Extremists

not many books make me laugh out loud three times in the acknowledgements alone lmao

One thing you quickly learn about [extremists] is that they really don’t like being called extremists. In fact they often tell me that we are the real extremists. They say that the western liberal cosmopolitan establishment is itself a fanatical, depraved belief system. I like it when they say this because it makes me feel as if I have a belief system.

- Them: Adventures with Extremists

#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)

(good tag essay that hit on what bothers me about disney-era SW stylistically)

> I think we should pick up that language quirk where evanglicals say they're "called by god" whenever they commit to a poor decision. incredibly powerful cognitive technique. I'm feeling Called to drink this red bull even though I just took my adhd meds like ten minutes ago

(lol)

"We may sometimes assume that a translation provides a window onto the original, but just as often, as Derek Walcott says, “to translate is to betray.” An old Italian pun—traduttore, traditore / translator, traitor—reminds us that the translator who connects two people always stands between them."
"Translation, divination, sacrifice, theft, and more: these are the connecting /not-connecting arts, and each is therefore well figured as the artus that is a flexible joint or the boundary that is a permeable membrane. To say this is, in a sense, merely to restate the old idea that tricksters and their actions embody ambivalence, but it restates it in a language that makes it clear why we may call the tricksters who practice these things artists in an ancient sense and their creations works of art."

- Trickster Makes the World

"So now it is urgent to defend love’s subversive, heterogeneous relationship to the law. At the most minimal level, people in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it. Reactionaries are always suspicious of difference in the name of identity; that’s their general philosophical starting-point. If we, on the contrary, want to open ourselves up to difference and its implications, so the collective can become the whole world, then the defence of love becomes one point individuals have to practise. The identity cult of repetition must be challenged by love of what is different, is unique, is unrepeatable, unstable and foreign."

In Praise of Love

"Of course [technical skills in art] matter. You need appropriate technical skills.That's why I'm saying good enough is good enough. I was explaining this during the break that, you know, I just want to make sure everybody gets a chance to see it. You start out here [at the bottom] right? You struggle through learning, you get here and now you're good enough at - say what I've been talking about today. You're good enough. It doesn't mean there isn't somebody better than you, somebody on- on Instagram you admire, somebody in history that you love, somebody blah blah blah. That's irrelevant.

Good enough is good enough. It doesn't mean you're the best. The best has nothing to do with it. It's a red herring. As soon as you're good enough and good enough by the way, is pretty good - you want to diversify. So you're going to [branch out] from here and you go OK, character design, environmental design, narrative structures, composition, color theory, stylization, etc. What learning how to draw gets you is the chance to do all of that. Well, provided you have the wit to realize you're now good enough. You don't have to be the best, right?

But you do have to try to learn something new."

- Will Weston

copy/pasted from a server. iykyk.

> trying to finish "trickster makes the world" - very good if dense book on trickster mythology across the world and history. this little excerpt feels like it hits at the centre of a lot of my complicated feelings on me drawing (__redacted___) art.... thought of us a bit too.

Creative mobility in this world requires, at crucial moments, the strategic erasure of ethical boundaries. They lose that mobility who cling to beauty, or who suffer from what the poet Czeslaw Milosz has called “an attachment to ethics at the expense of the sacred.” When the pilgrim Tripitaka insists too forcefully on righteous action, his Monkey guide goes home sulking and the pilgrimage collapses. When Monkey persuades him to leave his unseasoned and abstract sense of shame behind, they cross mountain after mountain.

"Perhaps it would be better, then, to say that those who work the edge between what can and can’t be said do not escape from shame but turn toward it and engage with it. They wrestle with it; they try to change its face; they kill it in one form so as to resurrect it in another. Hermes is a shameless speaker in the Hymn, but that poem regularly refers to him as the Slayer of Argus, as if to remind us that he doesn’t simply avoid shame, he faces it and fights it if he has to."

- Trickster Makes the World

"More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens. At its obsessive extreme such attention is the beginning of paranoia (all coincidence makes “too much sense”), but in a more capacious mind it is a kind of happy genius, ready to make music out of other people’s noise. Either way, the intelligence that takes accidents seriously is a constant threat to essences, for in the economy of categories, whenever the value of accident changes, so, too, does the value of essence."

- Trickster Makes This World

"I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country…. What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls."

LeGuin, a "Left Hand" Commencement Address
- (via ayjay)

"am I metaphor given penuma, the wind of life, animated from sheer power of will? Am I delusion and psychosis simmering deep inside a broken shell?"

> file under quotes that go raw af, from the greentext bridget forcefem tupla
(god i sincerely love the internet <3)

"I suppose it is good for the soul to be hurt and perplexed perpetually. I know at least that I miss you damnably: that is a good fixed star."

x

Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away⸺you know?⸺from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood.

James Baldwin This morning, this evening, so soon

Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none. Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother. Studies show the mother we have in mind isn’t the mother that exists. Mine says: What the fuck are you crying for? Studies show the baby monkey will pick the fake monkey with fake fur over the furless wire monkey with milk, without contest. Studies show to negate something is to think it anyway. I’m not sad. I’m not sad. Studies recommend regular expressions of gratitude and internal check-ins. Enough, the wire mother says. History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner. Before we mopped the blood we asked: Lord Judge, have I executed well? Studies suggest yes. What the fuck are you crying for, officer? the wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?

— Solmaz Sharif, “Social Skills Training,” published in Buzzfeed

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— What People Really Look Like

to pretend that horrible people cannot make good art is another way to conflate beauty and talent with integrity and morality. the works of monsters are best examined with knowledge of the author in mind but art is not inherently reflective. human beings are creative, and habitual liars- it'd be stupid to pretend art must always be a portrait of its creator

- via detectivehole

Heller: Dissent does have this positive implication as protest against injustice. But what is good dissent and what is bad dissent?

Glaser: If we characterize dissent as being mere disagreement we easily lapse into the eye-of-the-beholder argument: Is my view equal to your view? What is a good act as opposed to an evil act? You can get very Talmudic and convoluted in this ancient philosophical argument. But I think that there is some sense of righteousness in dissenting opinion, and that is generally the reason that it comes into being. We do know that, inevitably, powerful institutions begin to oppress those who have less power. This seems to be as fundamental a characteristic of the species as fairness. So in response to the whole notion of unassailable power, dissent is a positive response and, as the button I designed says, “dissent protects democracy.”

Heller: But as you have noted, dissent also protects undemocratic ideas. We are in political milieu today where fundamentalists have transformed their dissent into power to overturn laws and social contracts that we’ve accepted as part of a liberal agenda for much of the mid- to late twentieth century.

Glaser: Again, it all comes down to the difficulty of deciding what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, which is never an easy question. But we do know that there is, at least, an ethical core to the idea of dissent, and that dissent is very necessary because of the institutional instinct to move toward a totalitarian position—that authority, whatever its source, religious, political or academic, always attempts to marginalize people and movements considered to be deviant or not congruent with their objectives.

- design of dissent

krad

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