To think is to combat erosion. #ॐ
20220202
Ville Haapasalo is more valuable for Finnish national defence than a F-35A Lightning II fighter jet. #ॐ Relationships keep peace.
Finns are the biggest consumer of coffee globally on a per-person basis – But we are not actually drinking coffee: We are drinking tea, in the shape of coffee. Cafeterias serve coffee in samovars. Big heated pots stands still for an entire working day and the drink is served too hot to taste, mixed with milk and sugar before serving. This makes our coffee taste like not-coffee. It’s bitter, weak and served in jugs – Consumed to keep warm. We are wasting valuable resources, expediting global warming while at it. All this just to proof that we are culturally different from Russians.
The saddest thing is that we are wasting good ingredients for our not-tea. The President brand for example, a blend of African and South-American variants, is a great for slowly brewed drips – When the beans are roasted lightly. But to survive a day in Finnish-Samovar Coffee pots without turning bitter the blend is often roasted dark which removes the earthly, borderline grasslike tones from it (I think the blend has some yirgacheffe in it). It makes no sense to prepare fine variants of coffee to be spoiled by trying to incubate them in a samovar. At best the drip coffee served in our cafes tastes like americanos, so why not go straight for espressos?
Our coffee culture is tea culture. Joining NATO is a bad idea. Putin is an ageing dictator and things are not looking good but NATO is not a peace organization. The only route for peace is a route towards peace.
20211029
In the contemporary milieu, the idea of being negative is either regarded as a destructive mentality or else defeatist fatalism. But, at least in passing shades, negative emotions can hold great power. There resides in negativity the seed of critical thought and a beneficial duty to engage with one’s internal feelings.
The Art of Negativity – On Rejecting Positive Thinking (2021) Enis Yucekoralp. The text draws a link between capitalism, positivity and the “Likes” which social media devices employ. There is a determinism at play in positivity… As if things would “get to” or need to “go towards” to exist or feel good to be meaningful! I’m reminded of a previous claim that bitterness is in fact an emotional response of class awareness #ॐ. This is framed in a sentence: “Judgmental bourgeois attitudes towards revolt and protest necessarily represent hegemonic support for the status quo”. The text brings forth a useful concept: “toxic positivity”, which is deployed to against the stagnative argument that “negative emotions are inherently ‘bad'”. The author identifies trades of “cultist optimism”, which approaches critical world-views as a sin. Also loving the critique of “wellness capitalism” (Yucekoralp is citing Audre Lorde).
… the English Romantic poet John Keats formulated a concept, one which he termed ‘negative capability’. At root, it describes a propensity for living in the midst of mystery; or, more accurately, the power to accept enigmas and uncertainties with an open mind free from the imposition to hunt down order and clarity. His very use of ‘negative’ is not meant derogatively, but to represent absence in a more abstract sense – the positive potential of ‘being without’ something. In this case: knowledge or certainty.
Wellness capitalism is the symptom of a much more corrosive condition; as if more consumption were the answer to healing the wounds of capitalism. In reality, the promises of ‘mindfulness’, ‘positive mental attitude’ and ‘healthy living’ pledged by the industrial wellness complex are exposed as just one more arrow in the quiver of exploitation.
We should work to destroy ourselves nicely, not only to maintain the current but to destroy it! Authentic movement and authentic drunken slumber can possibly be equally healing. Authentic Drinking (or getting fucked up in other ways) was recently discussed with Leena and Heini.
20210927
An entertaining talk by Jaron Lanier How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It (2018). Not digging the naturalist vs. political human rhetorical device but forgiving it thanks to an acute description of addictions in social media. They are asking journalist to quit social media, to step out of the loop of addictions in order to engage in candid discussions about big tech and how they seek to alter behaviour. Also digging the analysis that we are not witnessing an emergence of far right political power, we are witnessing the emergence of cranky old people who are fuelled by social media engagement algorithms (which reward rapid responses that biased comments provoke). Lanier argues that voters align with cranky political leaders because they feel humane and are provoked, mortal and moody just like the rest of us. The behaviouralism/algorithm link feels like an interesting trail to follow. Inspirational oversimplification: Algorithms impose a mechanical world-view. #ॐ
20210908
Fluxus scores are performance as aphorism. #ॐ Artist-researchers like them because: Its text (a quote can fill a paper), they are short, its techniques are canonized by popular artists (no need for introductions), it requires specialization to interpret (but is revealed simple, even un-intelligent in close reading), scores are forgiving (gaps in the text get filled with performance know-how and gaps in the know-how get filled with text). They work on all fronts of artist-researcher life: On paper, seminars and as art. Scores are optimized products of presents knowledge industries.
Anything longer then a paragraph is gray-literature.
Social revisions without communism are like care in the context of art. #☭ Send a a resignation letter to Left Alliance and a message to SKP to announce my eagerness to join the party. I don’t want to feel better – I want to do good.