If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. —Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly, turn inward…hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction…this instinct for freedom forcibly made latent…pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within, and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself: that, and that alone, is what the bad conscience is in its beginnings. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals Them! In this article, I turn my attention to them. No, I’m not talking about a ..read more

Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Pubic domain. As we live a life of ease Every one of us Has all we need Sky of blue And sea of green —The Beatles, Yellow Submarine Comparing Georges Seurat’s much celebrated A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte with his somewhat less famous Bathers at Asnières, we are invited into a certain kind of dialogue, a contrapuntal reflection on the differences between idleness and leisure. Grande Jatte, with its affluent, middle-class figures, smartly dressed for a Sunday in the park, engage ..read more

Pompeii wall painting depicting a private family banquet or ceremony, 1st century AD. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. Photo: Theodore H. Feder, Great Treasures of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Abbeville, 1978) pp. 24-25. Public Domain. Part 2 0f 3 …the polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Romans, first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life… –Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition There is a rough parallel between the crisis of Roman society after the death of Augustus and present-day life…Romans began to treat their public lives as a matter of forma ..read more

Poker Night (from A Streetcar Named Desire). By Thomas Hart Benton, 1946. Whitney Museum. Photo credit: Sharon Mallerus, Creative Commons Attribution, 2.0, with no changes made. Weakened social capital is manifest in the things that have vanished almost unnoticed…the unreflective kindness of strangers, the shared pursuit of public good rather than a solitary quest for private goods. —Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone Where can we find the conditions for genuine self-renewal today? The unmasking of contemporary projects of happiness management as forms of “capitalist spirituality” tends to summon ..read more

Dr. Barry Kerzin, physician and Buddhist monk, meditates with E-E-G for neuroscience research. Public Domain. Today it is not unusual to hear talk about what brains are doing, wanting, and feeling. Psychology is very often how societies avoid looking in the mirror. —William Davies, The Happiness Industry Clap along if you feel, that happiness is the truth. —Pharrell Williams Neuroscience in Contemporary Culture I am driving on the freeway, listening to so-called “classical” music on the radio. The station interrupts the playlist to do its standard membership pitch. They refer to the statio ..read more

Affective disorders are a kind of captured discontent. —Marc Fisher Politics as therapy, changing the world one individual at a time, doesn’t make the world less brutally competitive and unequal, it helps people cope with these conditions. —Ronald Purser Mindfulness is actually establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. —Slavoj Žižek Self-Optimization & the Politics of Refusal If work today has really “got you down,” you are not alone. In the U.S., lots of boomers, well-past working age, chase seasonal retail, and wonder how they could have worked so hard and ..read more

Jack and Beanstalk, by Walter Crane (1845-1915). Public Domain. Among the most disappointing pandemic food shortages, at least for me, has been the perplexing unavailability of Japanese eggplants. At first, it was no big deal. But over time, I began to really miss having them in my quasi-Asian stir fry dinners. I would see them online on Instacart, only to be told by the shopper via text, “sorry, they don’t have any.” So imagine my delight, a few months ago, when Matt called excitedly from one of his shopping trips out of lockdown, and said, “I see some Japanese eggplants, I’m going to grab th ..read more

The Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971 (CC BY-SA 3.0) Talking to Tedd on the phone. It’s been a year in quarantine now. Solitary confinement. The boredom is crushing. Nobody does anything, and nothing ever happens.  We struggle for things to talk about. We discussed Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald for a good five minutes. We noted that the song, which drones on like a funeral dirge, is like 75 verses long. It’s impossible to remember the lines because three-quarters of them are about the weather. Also, in an apparent misguided ode to Longfellow, some of the lines are forced to ..read more

Vegan chocolate chip cookies. Photo: Kari Sullivan. Creative Commons, 2.0 What Anxiety Attacks Are Made Of Yesterday, the answer was sugar and spice and everything nice. I was having an almost perfect day modeling the new Zen. I try not to think on how the collapsing Western imaginary throws the Republic out with the bathwater. I am surrounded by cared-for plants and animals. I take time to compliment the sun on its transit. A light, California-Thai lunch, boosted with some borrowed Kaffir-Limes. A first twinge, when I realize that I really ought to call them Makrut. I water the tomatoes liste ..read more

Butterfly crocs. Image: Tedd Siegel, 2021. My Butterfly Croc Fetish Because I am appalled by people saying that they are willing to die to protect the functioning of the so-called free market, I am just now writing a blog article on abstract labor, the commodity form, and structural social domination. I am very clever, because I can almost understand Moishe Postone’s re-reading of the 1844 Manuscripts and Grundrisse from the perspective of Das Capital. But I am also frustrated, because my broadband connection went down a week ago, and ATT are a bunch of swine who don’t care that I now order al ..read more