Mayo pre 9/12 repulsion, acceptance, Lyotard

"I am a deeply superficial person."
-Andy Warhol

Further into the depths of Post-everything dread, the death rattle of Art lingering only in echo, the collapse of system and substance and symbol, civilization imploding all around as society feeds back unto itself. Meaning has been asked to take a seat on the bench.

I am beginning to find comfort in the Surface again. Firmly remaining casually transfixed by the normalcy of my environment. It is ideal to keep a passive eye on this world that we recreate perpetually. To comprehend yet remain untouched. To embrace the Plastic, to truly love the banal.

I find intense comfort in heavy repetition in music, in the relentless drone, drift and thud of the post-urban, ur-lullaby. However, I demand freshness and new ideas in all other forms of media, insatiably devouring books, magazines, film, still images... And the texts we read/write by assignment have set a higher bar for "pleasure" or "non-required" reading, Derrida, Sartre, and Kierkegaard are recent acquisitions. I finally have the mind-set for John Cage's "Silence" after a four month exile on my bookshelf.

Yet all this deep diving still leads me back to the warmth and void of Warhol's images, a current favorite being Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, a collection of black & white still frame close ups of people doing next to nothing. Edie Sedgwick's amphetamine gaze decompressing my head and pulling me further away from concern and care.

"Realism, whose only definition is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that of art, always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch."
- Lyotard (pg. 41)