Truthfully, I’ve been in such a major slump lately with my shooting. And having to work several jobs just to pay rent / live marginally above the poverty line just confounds the issue. I realize this is the struggle of many young artists, and I’ll never accept it as some sort of excuse, but that’s where I’m at right now: completely grounded out.
Am I supposed to feel like I should defend myself here??
man, any punk/metalhead who is mad about kanye wearing a spikey jacket can shut it. you stopped being able to identify fellow punx on the street solely clothing like over fifteen years ago and moreover you can’t ‘appropriate’ a thing from a subculture full of white people that is 36 years old.
seriously, SHUT. IT.
plus the fact can that one can now buy studded-jean/leather everything at a forever 21 near year u, haha
Try-hards is the new normies.
“Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself an individual, in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; and as if through a troubled dream it hurries back to its old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are limitless, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart. Then let one consider what as a rule are the satisfactions of any kind that a man obtains. For the most part nothing more than the bare maintenance of this existence itself, extorted day by day with unceasing trouble and constant care in the conflict with want, and with death in prospect…
Life presents itself as a continual deception in small things as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little worth desiring were the things desired: thus we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises which vanish like optical illusions when we have allowed ourselves to be mocked by them. Happiness accordingly always lies in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain: before and behind it all is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. The present is therefore always insufficient; but the future is uncertain, and the past irrevocable. Life with its hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, little, greater, and great misfortunes, with its deluded hopes and its accidents destroying all our calculations, bears so distinctly the impression of something with which we must become disgusted, that it is hard to conceive how one has been able to mistake this and allow oneself to be persuaded that life is there in order to be happy. Rather that continual illusion and disillusion, and also the nature of life throughout, presents itself to us as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing at all is worth our striving, our efforts and struggles, that all good things are vanity, the world in all its ends bankrupt, and life a business which does not cover its expenses; — so that our will may turn away from it…
The way in which this vanity of all objects of the will makes itself known and comprehensible to the intellect which is rooted in the individual, is primarily time. It is the form by means of which that vanity of things appears as their perishableness; for on account of this all our pleasures and joys disappear in our hands, and we afterwards ask astonished where they have remained. That nothingness itself is therefore the only objective element in time, i.e., that which corresponds to it in the inner nature of things, thus that of which it is the expression…
…[O]ur life is like a payment which one receives in nothing but copper pence, and yet must then give a discharge for: the copper pence are the days; the discharge is death. For at last time makes known the judgment of nature concerning the work of all the beings which appear in it, in that it destroys them:
And rightly so, for all that arises / Is worthy only of being destroyed / Hence were it better that nothing arose.
Thus old age and death, to which every life necessarily hurries on, are the sentence of condemnation on the will to live, coming from the hands of nature itself, and which declares that this will is an effort which frustrates itself. “What thou hast wished,” it says, “ends thus: desire something better.” Hence the instruction which his life affords to every one consists, as a whole, in this, that the objects of his desires continually delude, waver, and fall, and accordingly bring more misery than joy, till at last the whole foundation upon which they all stand gives way, in that his life itself is destroyed and so he receives the last proof that all his striving and wishing was a perversity, a false path:
Then old age and experience, hand in hand, / Lead him to death, and make him understand, / After a search so painful and so long, / That all his life he has been in the wrong…
We feel pain, but not painlessness; we feel care, but not the absence of care; fear, but not security. We feel the wish as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it has been fulfilled, it is like the mouthful that has been taken, which ceases to exist for our feeling the moment it is swallowed. Pleasures and joys we miss painfully whenever they are wanting; but pains, even when they cease after having long been present, are not directly missed, but at the most are intentionally thought of by means of reflection…In proportion as pleasures increase, the susceptibility for them decreases: what is customary is no longer felt as a pleasure. Just in this way, however, is the susceptibility for suffering increased, for the loss of what we are accustomed to is painfully felt. Thus the measure of what is necessary increases through possession, and thereby the capacity for feeling pain…
In general…the conduct of men towards each other is characterised as a rule by injustice, extreme unfairness, hardness, nay, cruelty: an opposite course of conduct appears only as an exception…How man deals with man is shown, for example, by negro slavery, the final end of which is sugar and coffee. But we do not need to go so far: at the age of five years to enter a cotton-spinning or other factory, and from that time forth to sit there daily, first ten, then twelve, and ultimately fourteen hours, performing the same mechanical labour, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and that of millions more is analagous to it…
And to this world, to this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is; to this world it has been sought to apply the system of optimism, and demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. But an optimist bids me open my eyes and look at the world, how beautiful it is in the sunshine, with its mountains and valleys, streams, plants, animals, &c. &c. Is the world, then, a rareeshow? These things are certainly beautiful to look at, but to be them is something quite different. Then comes a teleologist, and praises to me the wise arrangement by virtue of which it is taken care that the planets do not run their heads together, that land and sea do not get mixed into a pulp, but are held so beautifully apart, also that everything is neither rigid with continual frost nor roasted with heat; in the same way, that in consequence of the obliquity of the ecliptic there is no eternal spring, in which nothing could attain to ripeness. But this and all like it are mere ‘conditiones sine quibus non’ [conditions without which there is nothing — ed.]. If in general there is to be a world at all, if its planets are to exist at least as long as the light of a distant fixed star requires to reach them, and are not…to depart again immediately after birth, then certainly it must not be so clumsily constructed that its very framework threatens to fall to pieces. But if one goes on to the results of this applauded work, considers the players who act upon the stage which is so durably constructed, and now sees how with sensibility pain appears, and increases in proportion as the sensibility develops to intelligence, and then how, keeping pace with this, desire and suffering come out ever more strongly, and increase till at last human life affords no other material than this for tragedies and comedies, then whoever is honest will scarcely be disposed to set up hallelujahs…”
- Arthur Schopenhauer, selections from “On the Vanity & Suffering of Life”
(Source: philosophicalsociety.com)
“New York is such a monolith that it’s pointless to have an opinion about it. It’s like bitching about the weather. It certainly won’t accomplish anything, and it certainly won’t make you feel better about what you didn’t like. New York has a couple of characteristics that are undeniable, and one of those is that it’s a magnet for assholes who couldn’t get any attention at home and decided that the problem wasn’t that they weren’t interesting but that there were all these squares around them in Dubuque or whatever, and they need to go to some big cosmopolitan city like New York where people will appreciate them. So if you can imagine that scenario playing out within every city in North America, and every one of those assholes with an opinion slightly outreaching his ability getting on a fucking Greyhound, you end up with a pretty good description of what’s annoying about New York is that it’s full of people whose self-image just ever-so-slightly outstrips their ability.
I studied painting in college under Ed Paschke, who is dead now. He was a brilliant, brilliant educator. He was one of the only people in college who actually taught me anything. I mean, I learned a lot while I was in college, don’t get me wrong, but not a lot of it was academic and not much of it was taught to me. It was primarily stuff I learned on my own. But he was one of the few people that actually taught me anything. But at one point - and he was the first person to make me aware of this: of being in New York - he described it as the “catch-all of runners up.” And I think that’s probably what annoys me about New York when I’m annoyed by it. Whatever they’re doing at the moment, that’s not really them, in their minds. Like, I’m working in this bookstore, but I’m not a bookstore clerk: I’m a writer. Or like, I’m working in the restaurant, but I’m not a waiter: I’m an actor. There are all these people who are not the thing that they are doing at the moment, and therefore, feel demeaned by every second of their existence. And the chip on New York’s shoulder is the thing that keeps everything on the ground there. It’s the massive weight that causes all of the gravity that happens in New York.
Having said that. I’m going to do that English thing: ‘Oh, he’s such a cunt. [Fake British accent] I mean that in the nicest way. [Laughter] I mean this in the nicest way really but he is just such a cunt, you know. Really I just want to murder him, I mean I love him, but I just want to murder him.’”
- Steve Albini, sharing his feelings on New York with Alex Tween
“Humanity is a petrified fiction hiding from zero, a purgatorial imprisonment of disillusion but to be stricken with sanctity is to bask in death like a reptile in the sun. God is dead, but immeasurably more importantly, God is death (except ‘God’ means the facist asshole of the West). The beginning of the secret that is death (= 0) is immense.
From birth we are brain-washed into conformity with the cage, taught to accumulate, to shore ourselves up, to fear madness and death. Trapped in a constricting tangle of language routines we tread a narrow circuit in the maze.
We are told that chance will not take care of us, and that it is difficult to live but work and seriousness are slums of delusion the garbage-heap of individuation has no worth. What is called life at the outer edge of patriarchy is a bleak box of lies, drudgery, and anesthesia blended with inane agony what matters about the outside of the box is not just that it is the outside of the box, but that it is immense what matters is the abyss, the gulf. They want us to fear death so much, but we can inhabit it like vermin, it can be our space, in our violent openness to the sacred death will protect us against their exterminations, driven insane by zero, we can knot ourselves into the underworld, communicate through it, cook their heavenly city in our plague…”
- Nick Land, selection from The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism
