Tuesday, July 27, 2004

We cherish the progress in civilisation since biblical times and long before. But there is a needed and, indeed, accepted qualification. The US and Britain are in the bitter aftermath of a war in Iraq. We are accepting programmed death for the young and random slaughter for men and women of all ages. So it was in the first and second world wars, and is still so in Iraq. Civilised life, as it is called, is a great white tower celebrating human achievements, but at the top there is permanently a large black cloud. Human progress dominated by unimaginable cruelty and death.
Civilisation has made great strides over the centuries in science, healthcare, the arts and most, if not all, economic well-being. But it has also given a privileged position to the development of weapons and the threat and reality of war. Mass slaughter has become the ultimate civilised achievement.
The facts of war are inescapable - death and random cruelty, suspension of civilised values, a disordered aftermath. Thus the human condition and prospect as now supremely evident. The economic and social problems here described can, with thought and action, be addressed. So they have already been. War remains the decisive human failure.
---This is an edited extract from The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time, by JK Galbraith, published by Allen Lane.

Thursday, July 08, 2004

Cause all I really want is to be with you
Feeling like I matter too
If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago
I might be here with you

Tomarrow we can drive around this town
And let the cops chase us around
The past is gone but something might be found to take it's place
Hey Jealousy
---Hey Jealousy, Gin Blossoms

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

The whole point about cinema, surely, is the close-up of the human face. Huge images such as the Sphinx, Mount Rushmore and the colossal statues in Greece and Rome established the sense of wonder to be had in gazing at magnified physiognomy, but until the movies, such depictions were rare. Even in vast paintings - of battles, landscapes, coronations - the human beings tended to be no more than twice or thrice our size. But Greta Garbo's inscrutable face was hundreds of times bigger than that of those who read their own thoughts into it. Therein lies the wonder of the movies.
---Widescreen, an article from the prospect magazine in UK
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crown of stars.
---W. B. Yeats

Monday, July 05, 2004

"Cosmetic surgery is a kind of democratic solution to an undemocratic problem: the uneven distribution of beauty..."
---article in The New Atlantis, The Democratization of Beauty by Christine Rosen
"All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song."
---Pablo Neruda, 1971 Nobel Prize acceptance sppech