You bet.
On the other hand, she still doesn’t know that I exist. 
An Indian guy called me a prat and a coconut, earlier, because I told him that posting a porn video in a political messaging group should be kept private and not shared… I wish he didn’t know that I existed. 
It seems that life and people, test some more than others.
[b]tiny nietzsche
sext: ready player one[/b]
Inevitable, wasn’t it?
hold your horses gently
Missed the point, didn’t he?
don’t talk to me before I exist
Or, for that matter, after.
me: it hurts when I paint
doktor: abstract expressionism?
me: no, my arm
Or both as likely as not.
I like my coffee like I like my mornings, cold and dark
That and a stack of pancakes.
give up in aisle three
If not the whole goddamn store.
[b]Mikhail Baryshnikov
When a body moves, it’s the most revealing thing. Dance for me a minute, and I’ll tell you who you are. [/b]
So, what’s the equivalent of that here?
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
So, what’s the equivalent of that here?
No one is born a dancer. You have to want it more than anything.
Nope, never did.
I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world… it pushed me to think of things bigger than lifes daily routines… to think beyond what is immediate or convenient.
Well, music and literature anyway.
No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
He’s that good, eh?
Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible.
What here we call virtually improbable.
[b]so sad today
if you need me i’ll be trapped inside myself[/b]
I know: Huh?
kind of in the mood for death
Maybe mine, maybe yours.
i like to blame myself for everything just in case
I’m for blaming others myself.
sometimes i forget i have depression and then it reminds me
Naturally as it were.
if you need me i’ll be taking things too personally
Like there’s any other way.
hello, my name is what’s the point?
Yep, there it is, right on the name tag.
[b]Robert Musil
It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. [/b]
Yo, Mr. Objectivist!
There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses…
Yo, Kids!
With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. … As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.
I know: it would have to be that way, wouldn’t it?
All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!
That is one way to look at it.
Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn’t take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.
We’re in there somewhere, right?
I am not only convinced that what I say is false, but also that what one might say against it is false. Despite this, one must begin to talk about it. In such a case the truth lies not in the middle, but rather all around, like a sack, which, with each new opinion one stuffs into it, changes its form, and becomes more and more firm.
We’re in there somewhere, right?
[b]John Cage
There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure. [/b]
Or three if you count the intellectual contraptions you find here.
Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
In other words, whatever that means.
The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
You know, among other things.
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
Oh, sure, that’ll make them go away.
The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away.
Our Indians or theirs, he wondered.
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
So, what are the odds it’s a true story?
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” Fyodor Dostoevsky[/b]
My guess: Man is still a mystery. Woman too.
“You can be sincere and still be stupid.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
Either that or, here, have a “condition”. 
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” Hannah Arendt
Unless of course it’s a little [or a lot] of both.
“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Unless of course it isn’t.
"Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?“ Søren Kierkegaard
Yo, dasein!
“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nope, never have. You know, yet.
[b]Terry Eagleton
Americans use the word “dream” as often as psychoanalysts do.[/b]
Should that concern us?
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
As well it should must be.
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
So, what’s that make the Old Testament?
The most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society.
Or, far more likely, the least compelling.
Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
Cheek by jowl, he utterly disagreed.
Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
What’s that make us then?
[b]Delia Owens
Kya wondered who started using the word cell instead of cage.[/b]
Anyone here know?
If only she could join in, belong to them. Kya knew it wasn’t so much that the herd would be incomplete without one of its deer, but that each deer would be incomplete without her herd.
I skipped that part myself.
The Barkley Cove graveyard trailed off under tunnels of dark oaks. Spanish moss hung in long curtains, creating cavelike sanctuaries for old tombstones - the remains of a family here, a loner there, in no order at all. Fingers of gnarled roots had torn and twisted gravestones into hunched and nameless forms. Markers of death all weathered into nubbins by elements of life.
My kind of oblivion, he thought.
I guess some things can’t be explained, only forgiven or not. I don’t know the answer. Maybe there isn’t one.
Let’s find it. You know, finally.
Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was…
And what will never be.
She knew it wasn’t Chase she mourned, but a life defined by rejections. As the sky and clouds struggled overhead, she said out loud, “I have to do life alone. But I knew this. I’ve known a long time that people don’t stay.
Worse [sometimes]: the ones that do.
[b]Karl Kraus
How powerful social mores are! Only a spider’s web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.[/b]
No, really, I get this.
If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.
No, really, I get this.
Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.
The rest as they say is history.
I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment to acquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education.
This reminds me of the things some here take pride in.
I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.
That’s something to aim for here.
Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.
Or, as the salesmen insist, tits.
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.” Jorge Luis Borges[/b]
Is this defensible?
“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.” Vladimir Nabokov
He means death metal of course.
Or rap?
“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.” Vladimir Nabokov
See, I told you.
“My criticism of Hegel’s procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.” Alfred North Whitehead
You know, as Marx did.
Well, as a materialist.
“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Let’s explain that to the Kids here.
“Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.” Rudolf Carnap
Yes, but only if you’re lucky.
[b]Wim Wenders
My advice is, don’t spend money on therapy. Spend it in a record store.[/b]
Remember them?
The more opinions you have, the less you see.
Here? The blind leading the blind. Right, Kids?
I sometimes feel fiction is the ideal preservation for real memories. Fiction is such a good place to keep things.
Until it becomes indistinguishable from lies.
Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed.
Or reinforce the conception that things are shit and can never be changed.
Whoever came up first with that saying a picture is worth a thousand words didn’t understand the first thing about either one.
Let’s explain what that means.
The beautiful image today means nothing. It’s worth shit. In fact, it’s almost as if it has the opposite effect, because you’re just like everything else out there.
So, does that bother you?
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” Fyodor Dostoevsky[/b]
Believe it or not however there are exceptions.
"Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.” Rudolf Carnap
Name that tune.
“Despite their pretensions, all of them, the “Fourth International,” “anarchists”, and “ultra-leftists,” are but historical memories, minute scabs on the wounds of the working class, destined to be shed as the new skin readies itself in the depths of its tissues.” Cornelius Castoriadis
Tell that to Donald Trump.
"Revolution does not mean torrents of blood, the taking of the Winter Palace, and so on. Revolution means a radical transformation of society’s institutions. In this sense, I certainly am a revolutionary.” Cornelius Castoriadis
Me too. Once. And look at the world today.
“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ll bet that’s still true.
“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense.” Philip Roth
On the other hand, does that?
[b]Martha Graham
The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.[/b]
Why do people say things like this, he wondered.
Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
Next up: Some women.
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
Unless, of course, they either do or do not act on it.
People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.
Mystical enough for you?
A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.
Biological imperatives as it were.
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
And philosophers?
[b]Stefan Zweig
Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?[/b]
Ignorance is bliss?
In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd … It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.
So, is this true? And how about checkers?
…for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.
If he does say so himself.
Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
So, how fateful was yours?
Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love.
He doesn’t take the words right out of my mouth.
In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.
You come to understand this a decade at a time.
[b]Werner Twertzog
If only the coronavirus could be killed by automatic weapons in elementary schools.[/b]
Only one way to find out.
The judgment of history does not bring back the dead.
You know, literally.
History does not repeat itself, but cliches do, by definition.
Gotta love those definitions!
Never admonish a despot about lies and cruelty, for they are the rewards of power.
If only [so far] historically.
I perform my own stunts. And I am my own ancestor.
Can you say that?
No, Chief Brody,
We do not need “A bigger boat.”
We need, instead,
A more comprehensive
Eschatology.
A bigger soul in other words.
[b]Eva Green
Most of the women in film are there to be beautiful to the man.[/b]
Well, none of that here thank god.
I’ve always felt a bit weird, very shy.
No, we don’t expect you to understand.
I think British men build up the idea of us French girls having some magic extra sex appeal so much, they lose their heads. I can’t really understand the whole thing - but it makes me laugh. It’s such a cliche to think all French girls are well dressed, elegant, sophisticated and sexy. Some are utter slobs, I promise you that.
That’s good to know, right?
I didn’t know about the Bond girl thing. I was approached very quickly, boom, boom, boom, it happened.
Reality. Not much you can do about that.
I’m worried because of my mother, she’s going to see my performance and she’s quite hard. She’s going to see me naked. And my Dad, woah. Yeah, they’re going to see me like a woman, you know?
Reality. Not much you can do about that.
At the end of the day, I choose something that makes my heart beat, that I can relate to, that’s very complex, or human.
I’d hoped she’d say that.
[b]Mikhail Baryshnikov
The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep.[/b]
Hey, like we do with words!
Well, some of us.
Your body actually reminds you about your age and your injuries – the body has a stronger memory than your mind.
Among other things [here and now]: “no shit”.
I am not the first straight dancer or the last.
Probably true, isn’t it?
I cannot stand authority.
And he is still around not to.
A country like Belgium, or socialist countries in central Europe spend more money on art education than the United States, which is a really puzzling thought.
Let’s deconstruct this. You know, if it’s still true.
I don’t drink milk, and I don’t eat bread, pasta or rice. But I eat a lot of meat, chicken, fish and salads.
So, what does this explain?
[b]Existential Comics
Conservative politicians are already talking about banning TikTok of all things, because it is “controlled” by China. Imagine when a billion Chinese nationals are on every website defending their government. Free speech in America means only our propaganda is allowed to exist.[/b]
So, is this worth resolving?
“A lot of bad things happened in the early years of the Soviet Union, so we should never try communism again.” — people from a capitalist country that was founded on genocide and slavery.
So, is worth resolving?
Watch out, the far left is indoctrinating our youth with radical ideas such as “actually, it’s bad for people to die because they can’t afford health insurance” and “what if a handful of billionaires didn’t control everything?”
On the other hand, the class struggle…it’s back: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=195848&start=25
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the fact that people were mean to you on the internet does not constitute a crisis in the principle of free speech.
Except here of course.
Most people’s lives would change a lot more dramatically if they could vote for who their boss is, rather than vote for who goes to Washington.
Hey, how about here?! 
Ever wanted to give up all your possessions and live the life of simplicity, like Thoreau?
Well, my brother did just that. Ten years ago. And he still is, living off as little as $3000 a year.
Uh, good for him?