Until I figure out what I’m doing with this site, you should just go to my tumblelog, which I’m actually updating regularly.

It’s about how we tell ourselves and those around us stories — to make sense of the world around us? Maybe not. We turn the people around us into characters in our stories, we try to make ourselves heroes, only to find other people have turned us into characters in their own stories. We change, they change, and we make up new characters and new stories. We end up with too many stories and no truth.

I have to watch the movie at least once more before I have anything more sensible to say about it. Well, I’ll watch this movie again and again for the rest of my life and never be able to say enough, because this is a story whose meaning can’t be expressed in a less complicated way than the story itself. It’s not an allegory to be deciphered and reduced. There are too few stories like this in the movies.

For now, anyway, the movie made me think of these passages.

Nietzsche, from The Gay Science:

Of the theater. — I had strong and elevated feelings again today, and if I could have music and art in the evening, I know very well what sort of music and art I do not want — namely, the kind that tries to intoxicate the audience and to force it to the height of a moment of strong and elevated feelings. This kind is designed for those everyday souls who in the evening are not like victors on their triumphal chariots but rather like tired mules who have been whipped too much by life. What would men of this type know of “higher moods” if there were no intoxicants and idealistic whips? Hence they have those who enthuse them even as they have their wines. But what are their drinks and their intoxication to me? Does he that is enthusiastic need wine? Rather he looks with some sort of nausea at the means and mediators that are trying to produce an effect without sufficient reason — aping the high tide of the soul! — What now? One gives the mole wings and proud conceits — before it is time to go to sleep, before he crawls back into his hole? One sends him off into the theater and places large glasses before his blind and tired eyes? Men whose lives are not an “action” but a business, sit before the stage and observe strange creatures for whom life is no mere business? “That is decent,” you say; “that is entertaining; that is culture.” — Well, in that case I often lack culture; for much of the time I find this spectacle nauseous. Whoever finds enough tragedy and comedy in himself, probably does best when he stays away from the theater. Or if he makes an exception, the whole process, including the theater, the audience, and the poet, will strike him as the really tragic or comical spectacle, while the play that is performed will mean very little to him by comparison. What are the Fausts and Manfreds of the theater to anyone who is somewhat like Faust and Manfred? But it may give him something to think about that characters of that type should ever be brought upon the stage. The strongest ideas and passions brought before those who are not capable of ideas and passions but only of intoxication! And here they are employed as a means to produce intoxication! Theater and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? — It is almost the history of “culture,” of our so-called higher culture.

And from The Birth of Tragedy:

For, above all, to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing must be clear to us. The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of this art-world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely pictures and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art — for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified — while of course our consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented in it. Thus all our knowledege of art is basically quite illusory….

And a long one from Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation:

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction’s charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer’s mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models — and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials — worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

This is the best song about Oxford commas that will ever be written.

Me and Blaqstarr found the image at the end from a Joy Division video and thought about the election and thats how people want you to see the world , black/ white , good/ evil, jesus/devil
for you the words are Obama vs Mc Cain for me its terror vs genocide

You want to know about voting. I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked in a huge underground night-club filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you ain’t allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch “Republican Party Reservation”. They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand new sexual organs you did not even know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That’s voting. You’re welcome.

Song is meh, but I guess the video is slightly awesome.

By the way, MTV MUSIC is the greatest web site of all time.