Few encounters have been as momentous for me as the encounter with Japanese aesthetics. Behind the alluring facade of haiku, kimono, & cherry tree, lies a conceptual system quite at variance with our own & one which, after being understood, leaves you forever dissatisfied with the shoddiness of thought that has gone into Western canons of beauty. We seem to have never quite gotten beyond Aristotle & Longinus; & all the prolix theories of the 20c put together cannot help bridge the chasm between advanced art & everyday life, whereas in Heian Kyoto we find a worldview that culminates its most spiritual expression in pouring a cup of tea for friends & in shaping the letters of a note to a loved one. No wonder once the blinkers were taken off, the horse ran wild--we had no essential connection with either our past or our countrymen, & the best religious impulse most artists ever came up with was to blow it all off as irredeemably bogus.

Just take this one idea: that every thing born in time carries the imperfections like a fingerprint of the forces that went into creating it. Is this not a definition of “style” that transcends both imitation & originality? And isn’t it time we gave up all those sticky dualities, half-acquired with the very words, half-effaced by the fumblefingers that snatched them? If all that is left to Western Art is the political mind-set of team sports (& what else does all this talk of “movements” amount to?), then it is high time as well to have done with games; time indeed to remember what we are here for.

Not enslaved; stupefied with the distractions. We could throw off these overlords any
time we wanted to. And oneday we'll realize this, & like the Soviet Empire, our own
house of cards will cease to exist as such. But everyone will be here. Only a stupidity
will have actually perished.

Think of it as a kind of national Gastric Bypass Surgery: all the food goes into someone
else's stomach.

"If one considers so-called "intelligence" as part of defense, approximately two-thirds of the American tax dollar goes to the generals. That naturally leaves very little for anything else, which is why the U.S., in terms of infrastructure and general well-being, is the Banana Republic of the industrialized nations, with 25% of its children living in poverty, the worst education system, the worst mass transit, no socialized medicine, the highest rates of illiteracy and infant mortality and teenage pregnancy, homeless millions, and small cities that look as though they've just been through the plague." --Eliot Weinberger

Listening to: Revolver.