Jusqu’ici, sur la terre, tout le désordre a résulté du fait que quelques-uns ont voulu mettre de l’ordre et toute ordure du fait que quelques-uns ont voulu balayer. Comprenez-moi, la véritable malédiction, en ce monde, c’est l’organisation, et le véritable bonheur, c’est l’inorganisé, le hasard, le caprice.
[...]
Sauces are liquids that accompany the primary ingredient in a dish. Their purpose is to enhance the flavor of that ingredient—a ortion of meat or fish or grain or vegetable—either by deepening and broadening its own intrinsic flavor, or by providing a contrast or compleemnt to it. While the meat or fish or grain or vegetable is always more or less itself, a sauce can be anything the cook wants it to be, and makes the dish a richer, more various, more satisfying composition. Sauces help the cook feed our perpetual hunger for stimulating sensations, for the pleasures of taste and smell, touch and sight. Sauces are distillations of desire.
[…]
In addition to their heightened flavor, sauces give tactile pleasure by the way they move in the mouth. Cooks construct sauves to have a consistency somewhere between the resitsant solidity of animal or plant tissues and the elusive thinness of water. This is the consistency of luscious ripe fruit that melts in the mouth and seems to feed us willingly, and of the fats taht give a persistent, moist fullness to animal flesh and to cream and butter. The fluidity of a sauce allows it to coat the solid food evenly and lend it a pleasing moistness, while the substancial, lingering quality helps the sauce cling to the food and to our tongue and palate as well, prolonging the experience of its flavor and providing a sensation of richness.
Colophon says Bootleg/250…
* very nice publication i came across at Publish And Be Damned this afternoon. Mono.kultur issues contains one single interview and is designed by a selected designer. Very interesting.
This is a work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is taking place today in man’s outlook.
To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain nw values.
[…] This stance is not contradictory: Dj-ing is writing, writing is Dj-ing. Writing is music, I cannot explain this any other way. Take Nietzsche, for instance, whose brilliant texts are almost musical. Obviously, you feel the rythm inside a great poet stanza, but it’s there within the great philosophers’ paragraphs as well. So many media and cultural techniques of interpretation coexist – reading, watching, listening, surfing, dancing – that this textual/sonic synaesthesia demands a great deal from us. Yet in pop culture, that deadly inertia I mentionned earleir can put a stop to the idealism of coexistence. people can become so unreflective n their usual media-habits that any kind of systemic renewal takes a long time to succeed.
(…) The feeling that members of one species deserve special moral consideration as compared with members of other species is old and deep. Killing people outside war is the most seriously–regarded crime ordinarily committed. The only thing more strongly forbidden by our culture is eating people (even if they are already dead). We enjoy eating members of other species, however. Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and—according to recent experimental evidence—may even be capable of learning a form of human language. The foetus belongs to our own species, and is instantly accorded special privileges and rights because of it. Wether the ethic of ‘speciesism’, tu use Richard Ryder’s term,. can be put on a logical footing any more sound than that of ‘racism’, I do not know. What I do know is that it has no proper basis in evolutionary biology.
(…) This explanation is based on the misconception that i have already mentionned, that living creatures evolve to do things ‘for the good of the species’ or ‘for the good of the group’. It is easy to see how this idea got its start in biology. Much of an animal’s life is devoted to reproduction, and most of the acts of altruistic self-sacrifice that are observed in nature are performed by parents towards their young. ‘Pepretuation of the species’ is a common euphemism for reproduction, and its undeniably a consequence of reproduction. It requires only a slight over-stretching of logic to deduce that the ‘function’ of reproduction is ‘to’ perpetuate the species. From thisit is but a further short false step to conclude that animals will in general behave in such a way as to favour the perpetuation of the species. ALtruism towards fellow members of the species seems to follow.
This line of thought can be put into vaguely Darwinian terms. Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the ‘fittest’. But are we talking about the fittest individuals, teh fittest races, the fittest species, or what? For some purposes this does not greatly matter, but when we are talking about altruism it is obviously crucial.
(…) I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. A am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.
(…) If you want to know something else about beauty, what precisely it is, look at a history of art. You will see that every age has had its ideal Venus (or Apollo), and that all these Venuses or Apollos put together and compared out of the context of their periods are nothing less than a family of monsters.
(…) ‘The basic teaching error of the academy was that of directing its attention toward genius rather than the average.’ (Bauhaus)