Category: General
Pining for a God
When I was younger, Friday nights were filled with divine silence. My family became less and less religious as I grew up for some reason, so it is the earlier days that are filled with the kind of memories I am thinking of. I too, young and impressionable, was filled with a God that emptied…
Derridan différance: Lessons in meaning, and the pursuit thereof
Jacques Derrida is a leading figure in 20th-century French thought. His work, controversial and enthralling, spread through much of the world at the close of a century unlike any other–one packed with war, institutional transformation and a deep reformation of societies everywhere. The sceptical outlook as reaction and in its own right, that fills much…
Musée des Rêves
The Charnel House, a Picasso painted in 1944, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, “a cry against war and a cry of horror.” Somewhere in those same galleries, Dali’s Persistence of Memory lies melting and melding time in an abstract expressionist wail of concern and consoles–clocks melting in “a Surrealist meditation on…
Netizenship: Pass Go and Collect -200
It shouldn’t, and probably doesn’t, come as a shock that one can buy a passport. With 12 months and $700,000 to spare, the Schengen Area is your playground. $150,000 and 4 years and you’re good to frolic down under. It’s programs like these that remind us that for all the talk of globalization and a…
Letters to Milena: The art of copycat
Good artists copy, good artists steal! Pablo Picasso We might argue, fight, and writhe and roll our eyes at copycats. Yet a certain gesamtkunstwerk to the well-copied allows it a fighting chance. A chance to be more than a slavish reproduction, a homage; an act of love even, to the original. I was reminded of…