well, religion is a matter of faith, and to that extent people require conviction. most people need some kind of belief to an extent. fair enough.

the problem is when everything else outside of religion becomes a matter of faith and conviction, and the mind closes and has no room left for doubt. in other words, everything becomes religion. it's not a lottery prize, it's an illness.

you all seem like you think you know everything, no point picking out a specific individual lololol

i dont hold faith and conviction in a high regard.

i also dont believe in the need for belief. its just a story we tell ourselves because we are dedicated to the idea that nihilism can be overcome through denying it, because our beliefs must be stronger than reality because reality is only an expression of our mind or some other shit.

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but yes, that's EXACTLY THE PROBLEM. when they attack things outside of religion. they want to build up the symbolic power of their religion, so they need things for it to crush/undermine. science is the one they chose now because science is their biggest threat and they realize on a sub conscious level that it's going to fucking decimate them. they've been bluffing and playing for time. that's what the post modern era has all been about. failed attempts to put off the inevitable. the vain hope that this failure itself means something.

the idea of knowing everything doesn't make a lot of sense. however i have to admit to becoming very cognitively closed in recent years probably out of desperation.

i fuck up all the time. also, i make a lot of typos. and my social skills are subpar, as is my eye-hand coordination.

I know everything I know, except for what I forgot. :P

all cognition is based on ignorance

me neither, but in some critical situations it can give you powerful morale. i.e., useful even if untrue.


i've been reading your posts for quite a while and i still can't follow your idea of nihilism, etc. i wish you would define it in the most narrow way possible. i suspect that by this you mean that the universe is absurd and indifferent?

as for the need for belief, it's psychological. the mind can only handle so much. i think it's more or less like what aldous huxley said, that the mind needs to discard most perception and focus on what works in order to optimize survival. belief helps people keep their shit together. it has a function. william james justified religion on that basis.

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science is founded on doubt. i love science for that very reason. it's the perfect antidote to dogma--even if people who don't really understand the scientific mindset try to turn scientific knowledge into dogma.

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ha ha, movie thread!

everyone should go read scott bakkers threepoundbrain blog i keep quoting/plagiarising him in this thread

i think my idea is that if i can make it look like it makes sense to me then it will make sense to other people.

science is not founded on doubt, its founded on empirically verifiable knowledge. but it works because it does not deal with what we want to be true, and therefore unlocks a bounty of knowledge and technique precisely because it deals a right hook to our biases ability to interfere with our knowledge.

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belief - i think you are still playing ideological games here. noone has any need for belief whatsoever. you don't need belief to get out of bed and go get a sandwich. you need belief to socially report your glorious grasping to whatever folk psychological mythos of the self and its noble meaningful purpose you want to spout to look good to the other apes who will reward you with grains from the field and chants of your name.

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nihilism - yes the universe is indifferent to us and we have no good reason for existing at all and not killing ourselves. also perpetuating existence is a dubious prospect at best because all we are doing is pushing the date of our eventual extinction forward into time, which is also pointless.

i think that our culture has these subtle but all pervasive ideological manoeuvres. its like - commodity cool nihilism. its like the idea that by consuming and "participating" you are asserting your freedom FROM nihilism by denying it thus taking its potential threat away. but the trick is you are supposed to think that nihilism is a threat to your beliefs, but your beliefs can overcome it because everything is relative and therefore perspective trumps reality.

but the truth is that all human history - its all been nihilism. that's the fundamental field on which all human endeavour has been working in.

i think that once you truly understand nihilism you can view human affairs through a different lense. you can see beyond the need to believe or uphold any ideology whatsoever. i don't like using the word "freedom" because it has a lot of connotations in these times, but it is a sort of freedom.

also nihilism allows you to go beyond good and evil.

but i wonder what nihilism actually is? i mean, does it have a neurological coordinate? are nihilistic states of mind brought about by a specific neuro chemical/environmental state?

i found nihilism very powerful because there have been times when i adopted a totally nihilist perspective, and it helped me in business and life. i was finally able to accurately use information i ALREADY POSSESSED. like - that guy is not going to get his act together and get sober and be a good person. of course, beforehand i KNEW this yet it seemed i could not bring myself to properly realize it and factor it into my decisions. i could see peoples motives and make wise predictions on what they would do.

but of course, with this perspective comes the rational thought "well, why don't i just kill myself?" for a while I was able to sort of walk the tightrope avoiding this perspective.

i think nihilism might be a more accurate form of cognition, but we have an allergic reaction to it because it inevitably questions the point of pursuing our self interest at all. maybe its a kind of thinking that subtracts certain normal delusions that we have. maybe it allows us a perspective that is more in touch with the universe itself, because it allows us to factor in the uselessness of existence, and this seems to allow us a greater understanding of what existing things will actually do?

 

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”- Kurt Vonnegut



This is my philosophy.

well, that too, but the basic scientific attitude is one of asking questions-- see? if you don't doubt anything you don't need to test anything. there is no science without an open mind. there is no science without question. and science DIES when it becomes dogma. science is always testing itself

you have to look at the origins of science to see the power of those doubts in their time. is the earth really flat? does the sun really revolve around the earth? is fire really phlogiston escaping matter? do some objects fall faster than others in a vacuum? is there such thing as a "life force"? is the atom really like a raisin pudding? is gravity really an attractive force? etc. etc.


i'm not playing games (i resent that accusation), but if belief didn't present an evolutionary advantage to the nervous system it would have gone the way of our amphibian tails (see fetal development).

just because belief can be useful (to many) it doesn't follow that it's either indispensable nor necessary. for example, belief that god ordered you to be fruitful and multiply will make your genes spread more which will spread the believing gene more.

this is perfectly compatible with the nihilism you espouse, as an absurd universe is neither in favor nor against belief. only our own drive to truth is against belief. or maybe it's a mutation. but that's our personal problem and it ends when we do.



but you don't need a "reason" to not kill yourself just like you don't need a reason to eat a sandwich. i mean you just live on and you just eat a sandwich like a good machine. actually, i think "a reason" is more of a prerequisite for suicide. except for lemmings which do it instinctively.


but just because something is pointless it doesn't mean that it has no value for me. in other words, something can have value for you even if it has no meaning for the great fucking universe. i mean the universe and i are two different people. if the universe wants to be absurd that's fine, i don't give a shit; if there is no god, it doesn't alter me; i'm fine being an orphan and i can still find value in things because this good machine that is me gives its value to me.


you mean purchasing as a way to get meaning? like "this is my brand!"-- that kind of shit?


if you mean that all human endeavo(u)r means nothing in the end then sure!

but i am not concerned with those questions because i do not require the universe to approve of my actions. i am not in the end. and yes i know my actions are absurd in an absurd universe. i still derive value from them though.

 

Castaway On The Moon:
Nothing short of a masterpiece - 8.5 - 9/10

thanks for this! and thanks for talking about movies again.

(this isn't on netflix yet but i've put it on my kweee. it predicts i'm gonna love it and it's usually right).

last was post was buried under oodles of crapola so i feel compelled to repost:

watched a bunch of things this weekend…

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP



i love watching michel gondry's movies because it's like getting inside the mind of a very imaginative child with awesome toys. having said that, i didn't like his main character too much because of his arrested development condition. i laughed a bit when i heard it was all autobiographical (in a way). poor guy! but a fun movie. first time i see charlotte gainsbourg, she has her dad's face and her mom's body and hairdo.

--

THE DAMN UNITED



i liked it, but this one needed to restore some deleted scenes, because the final print is incomprehensible without them. i wish they had the "extended version" option on the disc because what the fuck was that man doing in his office during the game? had he been sent off by the ref? was he shitting his pants? no? jeezus… fucking incomprehensible. good story and good characters (even though i understand much was fictionalized), and there's an extra on the disc about "the changing game" which as a nice addition.

LIFE OF PI



gorgeous, visually, and amazing story, i just didn't like the whole religious angle which is supposedly the backbone of the whole thing, but still, what a spectacle, fucking wow. only weird thing was looking at his CGI uncle with the weird body, the way his face moved was creepy as fuck. as for the rest, jeezus, tremendous visuals.

TREASURES IV: DISC 2

an unmitigated borefest. 11 minutes of fog moving off a hill "to teach us how to see" (thanks, professor). a fast-forward tour of new york in the 60s. some lady in a hammock, and jack smith making faces or giving a blow job to a balloon. the unlistenable "music" of angus maclise. a drag queen giving a blow job to a banana (more obvious please). 9 minutes of people in an escalator (clever-- but 9 minutes!?!?). 36 minutes of some other thing i decided to skip because no avant-garde anything should last 36 minutes (ha ha, no, i didn't have time to watch it and just wanted the next movie in the queue sent).

the singular wonderful exception to all this nonsense was george kuchar's I, AN ACTRESS, which had us laughing hard and we watched twice. george kuchar was indeed an amazing actress!



there was also the first segment of ken jacobs's "little stabs at happiness" featuring jack smith, which was pretty great and disturbing, but then he has to keep adding more and more segments and boring footage until you just want to kill him.

one thing i noticed in all or most of these people or at least a lot of them they were ivy league dropouts. correlation or causation?

plus:

RUSH


great mainstream movie, more intelligent than the average blockbuster, and good fun for when you're stressed out and need to sit in front of the tv with a beer. good action, great noise, good looking people-- the script is a bit manichaean in its opposition of "passion vs. reason" (but passion has its reasons/ but reason hides a passion, etc.), which is shallowly pleasant while the story unfolds but suffers upon later reflection (because it's a bit too obvious). nevertheless, apparently the movie has the approval of the main people depicted (cough cough), who collaborated with the filmmakers. good fun for weekends, parties, etc. watch with big speakers!

pic saved.

(=how can we not just by this pic run and watch that movie?)

ha ha, yeah, if you haven't, you should--it's beautiful

I was pretty underwhelmed by The Science of Sleep. I was hoping it would be much more surreal. Instead I got an art school educated romantic comedy. It is a little more than that, but really came off as a pablum date movie for twenty and thirty some things with memberships to Public Radio.

i don't know that it was a romantic comedy as much as an actual farce.

Either way, not my bag. I like Gael a lot, but couldn't love this movie.

it is in many ways a children's movie (overgrown children more exactly) so i can see why it disappointed you. i wasn't too crazy about the "drama" part either, except as an excuse for goofiness-- i like goofy shit.

my favorite parts were the animations and inventions and all the stuff he does with effects-- gondry has always been a special effects director, but he does the stuff manually instead of computers. e.g., the cellophane thing, or a city of toilet paper rolls (which his family collected ha ha ha). as i said before-- he's a very imaginative child. it's not really a movie for (or by) grownups.

Fair enough on that stuff but it's interesting that a few other people I know who really can't get into a lot of the Jack Smith kind of stuff don't just tolerate George Kuchar but really seem to like him.

kuchar is alive! his stuff is not an intellectual exercise and he tries to teach you nothing. he's sort of experimental by default, by which i mean that his ends aren't "experimental", only his methods. i wish i could get more of his stuff. and he does a GREAT film noir actress! damn, he blows that student out of the water--he's like a, i don't know, bette davis or something.

I know what you're saying, especially about some of the underground stuff, but I don't think there's anything remotely intellectual about Jack Smith, and I really don't think he wanted to make 'experimental' films at all. Not self consciously, anyway. Anger, Brakhage, Deren were thinking about stuff on that level but Smith seemed to be working more along the lines of outsider art.

i've only seen jack smith as an actor so far, it was someone else's movie-- i haven't seen flaming creatures, only bits of it. the stuff i saw him in belonged to ken jacobs and… someone else i forget right now. oh yes in chumlum. but the documentary about smith was very compelling-- for a lot of reasons too late in the evening to mention (i've had some rum). still, i might like the stuff he directed when i actually get to see it. as for the "acting", in the first part of little stabs at happiness, the "couple" with the "babies" where he eats out the dolls crotch, it was disturbing but great-- you know, some sort of dumb family scene and the baby gets violated-- it worked. but it was only the additions after that where i lost my patience with ken jacobs (not really with jack smith).

i do like maya deren actually. not all the time but i "get" her. and anger. not really brakhage (too abstract i suppose, and i can't look at it for too long). anger bores me, but he bores me the right way-- he bores me with an excess of style, i suppose-- but he has tons of style. i don't see his work as cerebral or intellectual-- i actually find it pretty raw. and that's what saddened me about mario banana (the andy warhol thing w/ mario montez)-- what could have been a sort of apotheosis of style (a la anger) becomes a kind of banana porn which yes, maybe it was supposed to be funny, but i found to be a waste of a great drag queen. i don't know, maybe i was too annoyed at the time. if it had been mario montez in a kenneth anger set it would have been something brilliant. was mario montez ever in anger movies? anyway, back to the rum!

What Happened to Kerouac?

Nice archival interviews with Burroughs, Hunke and others, learned a few things abt "Kerroway" that I didn't already know, and an hilarious segment with Neal and Ginsberg. High reccos for those who like any of the beats

oh no.

rip alain resnais

ARGO



i needed something from the redbox, and this was there, and it wasn't half bad! actually it was pretty good, even considering i don't like affleck much. the rest of the cast was pretty great though-- john goodman and alan arkin were particularly entertaining to watch. good/fun spy movie. good also that the start of the movie acknowledges the us intervention in deposing a democratic leader and propping up the shah in iran. anyway, highly watchable entertainment, if you're into this sort of thing.

oh shit! i just realized. fuck!

i will always remember him for this:

If you didn't like Chumlum I can't see you being into the films Jack Smith actually directed. They're variations on the same kind of thing.

I don't think Anger ever worked with Mario Montez or anyone from the NY underground scene. I imagine he saw himself as 'above all that'. The West Coast scene seemed far less shambolic than the East Coast's. There's a certain professionalism to Anger and Deren's stuff - technically at least - that you won't really find in most of the stuff coming out of NY at that time.

Europe After The Rain

Excellent documentary on Dada and early Surrealism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpNJDBJOkFs

really? i was looking forward to much more. the documentary about him made him look quite fascinating--him as a person. and i have a friend who is a huge fan of his movies. i'll have to try anyway because sometimes a small change makes all the difference.


a pity, cuz mario was better looking than anais nin, ha ha. and what you say about production values is very true, now that i think about it.

THOR-- THE DARK WORLD



this one was pretty stupid. thumbs down. terrible dialogue and direction so the performances are blegh. structurally terrible-- a bunch of minor characters with nothing to contribute except being part of the decor (silf, the musketeer guy). villains that look like teletubbies (see picture). "worlds" that look right of a xena set. heavy london "product placement". just too fucking obvious and ponderous and meh. even the jokes sucked--like they were trying to channel joss whedon and failed. not completely unwatchable, but not really watchable either. maybe only loki was interesting. the rest not at all. it's like it was written by too many people and each did a bit.

To be fair there's a massive cult of personality surrounding him. I have a friend who's a massive underground film fan and even he admits that Jack Smith is probably more interesting than any film he made or appeared in. I'm not sure I agree with that completely but there's definitely some truth to it - which is a key difference between him and Anger, who's just as eccentric and fascinating as a person but whose films still manage to stand up in their own right. It's possible to appreciate a film like Scorpio Rising without knowing anything about who made it. I'm not sure the same could be said about Flaming Creatures.


Anger was brought up in Hollywood and his family worked in the industry so he had access to equipment and crew that nobody on the east coast had. Same for Deren, whose films were shot by her husband: a well respected and future oscar winnining filmmaker in his own right. The NY underground seemed more like a subculture, with film playing no bigger part than say poetry or music or theatre, whereas the west coast seemed far less like a scene and more dedicated just to making films.

Robert Schunk, I was reading some astronomy magazine with an interesting article about increasing discoveries of objects orbiting our Sun in the Kuiper Belt, and how these objects are all effected particularly by Neptune's gravity. Some folks are suggesting that it could be evidence to support an entirely new cosmology for planetary formation. New "discoveries" of Jupiter (and larger) sized "planets" orbiting much closer to their relative stars than where our gas giants also are a part of this. Current theories suggest planets formed at or near their current places, with the gas giants around the middle and the rocky Earth-sized planets nearer the sun. New theories suggest that possibly the gas giants can form nearer to their stars and then move out. How does Neptune play into this? If Neptune is a gas giant that formed nearer to our sun and then moved outward later its gravity could have attracted the 200 or so planetary sized objects in the Kuiper Belt. I thought this ridiculously interesting, it essentially flips the planetary formation model of the past 50 years on its head!

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily...iper-belt.html

No, not talking about Neptune's orbit, talking about how Neptune's gravity effects objects in the Kuiper Belt.. been reading the link I posted and a couple of other things I searched..


This is what I'm talking about..


Part of the evidence of gas giants forming further in the solar system is the reality that we currently find them further away in the solar system. But if they can move? The "hot Jupiters" are potential evidence of them moving inward, and some of the solar orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt may be evidence Neptune's migration outward. If Neptune migrated outward, it can flip the zones around a bit. I'm not saying these giants formed near the stars, but some evidence possibly suggests nearer than previously thought, and also, if Neptune is moving outward clearly it formed closer than its current location.


Do you ever even read my posts or just trash talk them blindly??
I never said they orbited Neptune, I was talking about how Neptune's gravity has a measurable effect on their orbits around the Sun.


But thanks for being a total prick about it.. Its always nice to talk with you :(