Was the decline of poetry in the eighteenth century
partly due to the popularity of coffee? and how about
the "Enlightenment" as a coffee phenomenon among
the intelligentsia?

An age poor in individuals is an age rich in devotees--
which does not make it an "age of faith" to live in
(though afterwards it may be called such): such believers
are faithless to themselves and to each other; that's what
every age of faith is really like.

This continual violent shaking of city life passes for
stability because it makes things easy, relieves a lot of
hard choosing through its robot rounds & routines, but
stability is something else.

Until there is social justice it's no use kvetching about our
personal injustices. But we can still strive to be more just
ourselves. How do you increase your desire to be just? Not
intellectually--by empathy.

More than i want social justice, i want a land where i don't have
to hate.

I'm not interested in making art that's "passable" nowadays
and it annoys me when mine is judged as a failed attempt
at that-- --but my whole life is judged so, too! (e.g. by potential
employers)
  This doesn't incline one to objectivity.

My father, now in his seventies, is learning to play the clarinet.
For some reason i am irresistibly reminded of that moment in
Plato where Socrates tells his friends who have come to be with
him on the last day before his execution, that he has had a dream
in which he was told, "Socrates, practice music." And so, that's
what they find him doing when they get there...

"In the video documentary 'Aftermath' i made about the '84
convention protests for cable there's a bit i used over & over like
a leitmotiv of this real blankfaced suited droid riding down the
escalator at the Republic Bank, just as the War Chest Tour gang
swarmed in, & he wasn't reacting at all. Well, the first day i worked
there, i got out by the same escalator & i didn't recognize it till
i arrived at the bottom & looked up. This belongs alongside Goethe's
riding past his old self & the second time he experienced it as the
old man he became...except i have failed to be enlightened...