In October 2015, following the passage of an anti-communism law in Ukraine, a Vladimir Lenin statue turned into Star Wars’ Darth Vader overnight. De-communist measures have long been synonymous with America’s pop culture missionary work. This image was a reminder that the aggressive-style political realism practiced by the Putins of the world has been outstripped…
Picktures and Pieces 11: “What Is and What Seems to Be” by Randall Auxier Here is an interesting image. I think you’ll agree. I’m glad that it exists. It made me laugh and laugh when I first saw it, several years ago. It was in a collection of funny photographs on one of those…
On January ninth, influential sociologist-philosopher Zygmunt Bauman passed away at the age of ninety-one. A central theme Bauman taught over the decades is that we should work hard to resist the tenets and dogmas of seclusion, loneliness, or independence of modern selves. Our Individual personal worth is, Bauman contended, so much more complex, interdependent, and…
Faustus had a superfluity of victuals and provisions, for when he desired a good wine the spirit brought it to him from whatever cellars he liked (the Doctor himself was once heart to remark that he wanted to make great inroads on the cellar of his Lord Elector of Saxony as well as those of…
Scientists announced on January 26th, the first successful human-animal hybrid. It is yet another confirmation that modern monstrousness has been unleashed. We are well into the epoch of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To be modern increasingly means to live within the blurred lines of the acceptable and unacceptable. Revealed in the new sapiens-pig species is that…
American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead writes in Modes of Thought: “If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken” (MT, 1938, 237). Unlike religious mystics who look to the upper regions of the “unspoken”, philosophers are tasked with going into the deep. As lovers…
Art at the Event Horizon by Randall Auxier I hear a new world is coming. I guess that’s always true, depending on the meaning of “new.” But this one is supposed to be, like, really really new –so different we can’t imagine it now. According to Ray Kurzweil, it’s about 29 years away, give…
The Fusion of Art and Life, or a Selfie in Prose by Randall Auxier I cannot stand to have my picture taken. I am told that my vanity won’t abide an honest depiction. The people who told me this weren’t nearly so eloquent in expressing the point as I was in that lovely sentence…
Therapy for the Self-conscious Genius by Randall Auxier Artists must be punished. So says our twisted culture. Better still, they must punish themselves. A happy artist is no artist at all, we insist. Among all the artists, especially in the world of the macho 20th century, the men must be violent, the women desperate,…
I Am Time, Destroyer of Worlds by Randall Auxier The air is electric. In moments the horrendous battle will begin. Our hero, the General Arjuna is hesitating. Something in him wants the battle, something else doesn’t. Krishna, the incarnate form of the Supreme God, appears and urges him to give the order. The discussion…