Social Darwinism Tends Towards the Good

I was astounded by the sublimity of this vision [of social Darwinism in business], whose implications spread far beyond the business sphere. Thinking back to my first discussion with Riley, I wondered if this weren't the answer to the question he’d proposed: How was the Christian to reconcile the existence of evil with the unconditional benignity of God? Or, alternatively, how did the Taoist reconcile the existence of what was not Tao – which represented an affront to its essential nature, even contradicted it – with the primordial unity of all things in Tao? Was it possible that this was the answer? If so, then on both counts the objections were based on a simple narrowness of view. Once the Great Whole was seen, objections flew away like chaff. Evil, then, was the crucible in which the good was tried and proved. The unnatural was the fever which the body suffered internally to purify itself and become well again. The sores and the corrupt places of the economic world, as of the larger, were where the Tao had sent the legions of its influence, its platelets and leukocytes, its antibodies and white corpuscles, to eradicate diversity’s failed experiments, devouring the excesses of the blood. Diversity was necessary to insure the greatest possible perfection, and if it created a few monstrosities as well, then it also provided for their destruction by natural selection. That was the miracle! Everything was tending towards the good!

- David Payne, Confessions from a Taoist onWall Street, p. 577

The Sustainable Curator

Brain Pickings highlights Hans-Ulrich Obrist's ideas on curation, where he expands upon the standard idea of a curator adding meaning to art through selection and arrangement to make a fascinating point about the curator as a sustainability pioneer:

"...the incredible proliferation of ideas, information, images, disciplinary knowledge, and material products that we all witnessing today. Such proliferation makes the activities of filtering, enabling, synthesizing, framing, and remembering more and more important as basic navigational tools for 21st century life. These are the tasks of the curator, who is no longer understood as simply the person who fills a space with objects but as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results.
[…]
To curate, in this sense, is to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to enable conversations and relations. Generating these kinds of links is an essential part of what it means to curate, as is disseminating new knowledge, new thinking, and new artworks in a way that can seed future cross-disciplinary inspirations. But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the 21st century.
As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern human societies find themselves today in an unprecedented situation: the problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now being joined and even superseded by the problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus moving beyond the object as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older, unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us towards this crucial importance of choosing."

The Who: "Live" in Sweden!

Dangerous Minds points us to this great video of The Who lip-syncing five of their early songs on Swedish TV in 1966. My favorite part is that nobody even pretends to play Nicky Hopkins' clearly audible piano parts.

I've been listening to a lot of The Who's early songs recently. In particular, the "Deluxe" version of the My Generation LP which contains a treasure trove of old covers and alternate takes of this earliest incarnation of the group, where pop music (or "Maximum R&B") still dominated their sensibility. I love the power and joy in these old songs! My favorites of the rarities are "Daddy Rolling Stone" and "Leaving Here," although I still can't get enough of "A Legal Matter." It's been a revelation clearly hearing all of the dense power of John's diving bass lines and the controlled chaos of Moon's drumming.

When Your Intentions are Zero

"...everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration [art], when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical."

- John Cage, in Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, "An Interview with John Cage," TDR, 10, No. 2 (1965), p. 65.

Dada Quotes

Two quotes from Hugo Ball’s diaries.

“In their childhood, men envision such a clear ideal of themselves and their world that experience is bound to let them down later. They find out unexpectedly, and the shock of it is usually so great that they never lose a certain sensitivity about it. Someone who has the power to enhance man’s store of dreams can become a savior. the wounds that men die of lie in the area between dream and experience. That is where the graves lie from which they are raised.”
- From Flight Out of Time

"The dadaist fights against the agony and the death throes of this age. Averse to all clever reticense, he cultivates the curiosity of one who feels joy even at the most questionable forms of rebellion. he knows that the world of Systems has fallen apart, and that this age with its insistence on cash payment has opened a jumble sale of godless philosophies. When fear and a bad concience begin for the shopkeeper, hearty laughter and gentle encouragement begin for the dadiast. "
- From Dada Fragments

Football Hurts Your Brain

I've known for sometime that I would be, at best, uncomfortable with my sons playing football when they got older. Now, I think i'm going to prohibit them from playing at all:

This link is to a TERRIFIC Frontline episode on high school football, and it has a segment on brain injuries. The most frightening part is a team of doctors who set out to do a study of changes in cognitive functions of high school players in the hours and days after a concussive head injury. But there weren't any significant episodes in their first couple days so they decided to put their time to use by doing some baseline studies of cognitive functions of the players before any injury.

One of the things they learned was that there was a measurable decline in cognitive function just from the ordinary helmet-to-helmet impacts on every play, even when there was no concussion suffered by the player. They tracked this group of players for several weeks of practice, and measured the decline in their brain function - thinks like short term memory, pattern recognition, etc.  The concluded that the cumulative effect of all these sub-concussive impacts of the brain on the inside of the skull lead to the same conditions as a concussion.

Scary stuff. h/t the Dish.

Age as Genre?

This arrogant article about how normal adults shouldn't read fiction marketed to Young Adults won't do anything combat the impression that the New York Times is elitist:

Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong. I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

This is the worst kind of lazy thinking. Note how he admits that he doesn't know what he's bashing, only that because it's labeled as "Young Adult" it's not worthwhile to him. This really raises my hackle. First of all, it's the worst kind of literary snobbery. Has Mr. Stein even asked himself who labels a book as YA or not? I certainly don't want anyone making these decisions for me. For example, knowing the kinds of excellent fiction that are disparaged as "science fiction" when one could make a very strong argument that they should be marketed as "regular" fiction (Stephenson and Gibson, to name just two), makes me wary of trusting any booksellers to label what i'm reading. Secondly, it's a bit stunning to think of the excellent books that he'll miss under this line of thinking: off the top of my head, he's miss out on The Chocolate War and The Catcher in the Rye along with countless others.

Personally, I enjoy ripping through a YA novel now and again. I recently ripped through L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time in a few days and found it highly enjoyable, both as a good story and also as a fun nostalgia trip back to the kid I was when I first read it. I also continually get meaning out of Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth when I pick it up every few years or so. It's good to look through the eyes of a kid now and again!

For a better argument against Mr. Stein's writing, see Alyssa's good breakdown. What are your thoughts? Do you avoid YA books, find them a "guilty pleasure," or actively seek them out?