Maybe You Can Owe Me
Architecture in Helsinki
Architecture in Helsinki, “Maybe You Can Owe Me”
November 2011
October 2011
“But today’s real hallucinatory action takes place in the computer. Among the computer works, Jimmy Joe Roche’s Electric Piss Test really stands out. It’s a fractured, dissolving, collapsing video that occasionally swims to form a coherent image only to lose it again in a burst of interference. But the interference is digital – the boiling pixels, fritzing fragments and machine greens and blues that are revealed when an online clip or digital TV broadcast breaks down. It suggests that the ones and zeroes that are the stuff of the modern world, far from being hard-edged and rational, are a hallucinatory soup as potent as any chemical experience. But it’s almost more disturbing when an image appears and the brain scurries to comprehend it. You sense the horrible possibilities inherent in the manipulation of reality that has become routine.”
—Icon Magazine, Review: The New Psychedelica
This is very good.
“A “lifelong Democrat,” Fink can sometimes sound like a populist, which he is not. While he does not believe that the government bailout in 2008 was “fair”—“everyone benefited, but a few firms benefited disproportionately”—he also roundly endorses both Paulson and Geithner, who, he says, “will come out in history as two of our best Treasury secretaries.” Part of the public’s rage at Wall Street today is driven by the need “to externalize the enemy,” he says. “But I don’t like pointing fingers, because I feel it was the culture of America that was guilty. We were living fat and happy and the whole system was one of excess speculation and leverage. Maybe, getting back to knowing your risk—as happened to me at First Boston—we should have all been asking why people were making so much money.”
—Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow, April 2010
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Reality
Get drunk, be vulnerable. Good by yourself or with others.
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“Anny made the most of time. When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were only exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one. I remember one of those terrible evenings. I was supposed to leave at midnight. We went to an open-air movie; we were desperate, she as much as I. Only she led the game. At eleven o’clock, at the beginning of the main picture, she took my hand and held it in hers without a word. I was flooded with a bitter joy and I understood, without having to look at my watch, that it was eleven o’clock. From that time on we began to feel the minutes passing. That time we were leaving each other for three months. At one moment they threw a completely blank image on the screen, the darkness lifted, and I saw Anny was crying. Then, at midnight, she let go of my hand, after pressing it violently; I got up and left without saying a word to her. That was a good job.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Nausea”
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Listen
Björk, “Venus As A Boy”
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Fiona Apple, “Shadowboxer”
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“Van Norden is mad, of that I’m convinced. His one fear is to be left alone, and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for himself. ‘I try all sort of things,’ he explains to me. ‘I even count sometimes, or I begin to think of a problem in philosophy, but it doesn’t work. It’s like I’m two people, and one of them is watching me all the time. I get so goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself…and in a way, that’s what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one second like I obliterate myself. There’s not even one me then…there’s nothing…not even the cunt. It’s like receiving communion. Honest, I mean that. For a few second afterward I have a fine spiritual glow…and maybe it would continue that way indefinitely-how can you tell?-if it weren’t for the fact that there’s a woman beside you and then the douche bag and all the water running…all those little details make you desperately self-conscious, desperately lonely. And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap…it drives me nuts sometimes…I want to kick them out immediately…I do now and then. But that doesn’t keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There’s something perverse about women…they’re all masochists at heart.’”
—Henry Miller, “Tropic of Cancer”
