Posts I like
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The Devil's Ponies
Our Reverend Slaughter has crafted a most entertaining video inspired by a crackpot comment he received. It deftly captures the...
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Can’t. Stop. Watching.
This stunning gif, is the work of davidope.com
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Join my upcoming project Nothing... -
The Holy Cross (In hoc signo vinces)
Erwin Blumenfeld - 1967
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“The Ten Commandments”
Keith Haring - 1985 - (panel 8)
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“The Ten Commandments”
Keith Haring - 1985 - (panel 10)
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“The Ascension of the Ego From Ecstasy to Ecstasy,” Austin Osman Spare, 1910.
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My heart goes out to the Blogger team — especially their support folks, who are dealing...
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Antonio Damasio on the neuroscientific implications of the "self"
(submitted by rebelbookmusic, thanks!)
If you’ve ever once thought about the...
Christopher Hitchens was a tart-tongued speaker and perceptive journalist whose secular classic GOD IS NOT GREAT will stand as inspiration for generations of faith-free people. He lived fully and thought deeply — an exemplar for fellow individualists. He will be remembered.
“She’s young, she’s in high school, she’s sexually active, she’s taking drugs, she’s crying out for help. … Well damn Cooper, that really narrows it down, you’re talking about half the high school girls in America!”
“When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Blood Ties” (Wiezy krwi)
Katarzyna Kozyra - 1995
The first version of the Blood Ties photograph was presented in 1995 in response to the war between Christians and Muslims in Bosnia.
Four years later, Blood Ties 2 was created in response to the war between Christians and Muslims in Kosovo. The intention was to bring into focus the violence and suffering inflicted on women by the clashing religions.
Each of the panels features a naked woman – the artist herself and her disabled sister (with an amputated leg) – on the backdrop of a red cross or crescent surrounded in two panels by cabbages and cauliflowers. The women themselves are posed to appear as casualties, connoting surrender, fear, vulnerability and hurt; an impression underscored by the non-commercial realistic nudity of the female body and the disability of one of the sisters.
Blood Ties 2 was to be exhibited as public art on 400 municipal billboards in the major towns of Poland as part of an outdoor gallery project.
The Catholic Church protested the blasphemy and allegedly unholy usage of religious symbols. They interpreted the women as menacing and not as victims.
Only the bottom two panels were eventually allowed to be displayed on a few billboards, but the pictures had to be modified so that the cross and the crescent became indecipherable. The antiwar message was consequently lost.
Concealment of the billboards was a benchmark example of stifling public debate of women’s rights in the context of religious claims. It was the first post-communist example of religious norms with heavy-handed pretensions to universality, taking precedence over the civil rights and autonomy of individual citizens.
A short video about my business cards.
Shot on a Panasonic Lumix GH2 with a 20 mm - F/1.7 lens, voice over recorded with a Samson C01U.
“Corruptio optimi pessima: no greater cruelty will be devised than by those who are sure, or are assured, that they are doing good.”
How one becomes what one is
I never had a TV when I was young. While my friends used to spend hours and hours watching He-Man or soap operas, I used to read newspapers and books. Lots of them. The classics. The best-sellers. The philosophical treatises. The forbidden (including many books about the ‘occult’, a subject which fascinated me for a long time). I also used to go through my father’s classical music collection quite a lot; he never liked modern music of any kind. I did not listen to pop, I listened to Rimsky-Korsakov. My image of a star was Herbert von Karajan, not Michael Jackson. My obsessive reading made me a copywriter — and a good one at that. This is how it all started: from books and newspapers, consumed voraciously, day after day, throughout my teen years. I would not be what I am today if I had owned a TV set.
Even though I did not have a telly, I had access to computers and technology in general quite early. My father was one of the early adopters of the internet. In the beginning of 1994 we got our first dial-up access to the web, after a few years playing with the local BBS. Not only a huge amount of digital data became available, but new means of acquiring books became accessible — namely Amazon. From 1994 onwards I was able to easily get books in English, a new language, a new challenge and a new universe of information.
Apart from becoming an ad copywriter (or a Madman, to use the term popularized by — oh the irony —, a TV series), I decided to study History, receiving my first degree in 1995. A few years later I completed a postgraduate course in communication theory and journalism. All subjects related to my years spent gathering information.
Anyway, this is the story of my first intellectual endeavours. This is why I am more intelligent than the average John Doe. People don’t like to brag about their own intelligence because they are mediocre themselves — or they are conditioned to accept their fellow humans without criticism (the hypocrisy of egalitarianism, particularly strong in the Scandinavian lands). It’s comfortable to be ordinary, to be stupid, to behave exactly like your neighbour. Fortunately I can dismiss this kind of comfort. I’d rather be a black sheep than a role model in any given society.
