“You can not prescribe to a symbol what it may be used to express. All that a symbol can express it may express.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein to Bertrand Russell. 1919.
Culturewatch
Human Comedy
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece on black stand-up comedy, “Unlikely Heirs: The Comedic Children of Cosby,” that places contemporary comics in relation to Bill Cosby, including ones who are not easily seen as being in his tradition. In the course of limning the Cosby aesthetic, McInnis highlights two little miracles performed by Ali Siddiq.
I discovered Siddiq after he was already a sixteen-year vet of comedy on two episodes of Comedy Central’s This Is not Happening, “Mitchell” and “Prison Riot.”
In both episodes, Siddiq tells horrifying stories about prison life, but I was unable to stop listening or laughing. Y’all know that I don’t do blood or gore. I don’t like violence in reality or art. Thus, I don’t watch horror films or films with graphic killings. Yet, I was captivated by Siddiq and couldn’t figure out why.
Wali Ali (Ghetto Existentialist)
It’s all in Siddiq’s big eyes which signal his gift for noticing. His most expressive feature enables him to enact felt surprises that define his art.
Trouble in Mind
Monk (68) and Monk in Europe (1968) are streaming at Pioneers Works film site until June 28th. (Click on titles to watch now.)
Getting Your Gun Off
They don’t call themselves the Proud Boys for nothing. Post-teen to middle-aged men gather in the woods. They dress in camouflage. They are armed with the latest in assault weapons. They carry knives. Are they protecting their right to bear arms, as the NRA would have them believe, or are they assembled to mimic a pubescent rite of passage? The symbolism strikes me as too potent to ignore.
“Wide Awake at the Banquet”: Pierre Hadot & Ancient Philosophy
“Hadot deserves to be far more widely known. In the Anglophone world, he is usually eclipsed by Foucault, who was his colleague at the College de France and a great supporter of him, although, as you have probably gathered, Hadot did not agree with Foucault on many issues.”[1] Professor Peter Brown
In Praise of Philosophy
What follows is a compaction of Merleau-Ponty’s first address to the Collège de France after he took over the Collège’s chair of philosophy. Pierre Hadot commended Merleau-Ponty’s tribute to Socrates.
Do Good Things
I’ve been thinking about writing and activism—which one is “better” for a person to do, a person with limited time and energy, a person in a pandemic, a person living in a country where basic voting rights are not at all secure. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it like this—as in one or the other. Except for the obvious fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, even a strange pandemic day, and everyone I know is exhausted and demoralized. What “should” people do? I’ve been thinking about that.
“A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication”
Among the distant ancestors of Onora O’Neill’s A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication (Cambridge University Press) is a work by Plato, the Phaedrus, in which Socrates expresses misgivings about telecommunications technology.
The dialogue is not usually understood in just those terms, of course. But the technology that gets Socrates wound up is the written word, which allows a message to be stored and retrieved, minus the context in which it was created or the nonverbal signals that go with proximity to a speaker.
Mindful Keil
to be in the now can stop pandemics
to be in the now
means not to be in the know
in the very long term we will all be covered with snow
Mobile Soul
https://youtu.be/sztxZR3ag50
Jordan Poole is impossibly fast on the court where his athleticism goes with a sweet touch (he’s the best free throw shooter in the world), genius passes, and stop-start gambits as flashy as his eye-moves above.
The Depp Heard Trial
She fears abandonment, his mom abused him.
Love twists into bitter repetition.
There’s always a deeper layer of pain,
a wound beneath the urge to hurt.
Blade
Hunter Harris and the rest of us who laugh along with her may need help at the Pearly Gates. Until then, though, bless Ms. H. for failures to forbear such as the following…
Normalize Being Hot And Not A Poet
Kacey Musgraves’ boyfriend, Cole Schafer, is a poet (derogatory). The poetry is not what I would describe as “good.” He appears to be releasing more of it:
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Hoping this is a promise!
False Memory
For members of my generation, tales of the Mustang they should have hung onto are almost as heartfelt as those of the Mickey Mantle cards their mothers tossed. So nothing about Maggie’s story surprised me, until her assertion that hers was a ‘63. “The first Mustang was a ‘64 ½,” I told her. A couple days later, she came back to the café and asked, “Did Pontiac have a Firebird?”
Indeed, Pontiac did – but it debuted in 1967.
Butt Beautiful
Back in the day, the New Yorker was set to run the following letter in praise of an article on women’s basketball, but it got squeezed out. Still seems on point so…