On The Edge

"Thematically, film noir examines the role of the individual within a diseased modern society. The issues of noir films are alienation, entrapment within a powerful industrial system, paranoia, fatalism and inevitable doom of mankind. In a sense, one can argue that film noir is a psychological examination of modern man’s existence. And along the way it thrills the audience. Film noir forces the viewer to think and grapple with its themes. Viewing a film noir is not a passive experience, rather, it is active and sometimes quite disturbing. The characters of noir live on the edge and take the audience along with them."
~ Tony Kashani, "Film Noir Form and Content," from Chapter 12 of Deconstructing the Mystique

Nothing to Be Done

From Giorgio Agamben's Profanations:

Each of us has known such creatures, whom Walter Benjamin defines as "crepuscular" and incomplete, similar to the gandharvas of the Indian sages, who are half celestial genie, half demon. "None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading its qualities with its enemies or neighbor; none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence." More intelligent and gifted than our other friends, always intent on notions and projects for which they seem to have all the necessary virtues, they still do not succeed in finishing anything and are generally idle [senz' opera]. They embody the type of eternal student or swindler who ages badly and who must be left behind in the end, even if it is against our wishes. And yet something about them, an inconclusive gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain mathematical boldness in judgment and taste, a certain air of nimbleness in their limbs or words -- all these features indicate that they belong to a complementary world and allude to a lost citizenship or inviolable elsewhere. In this sense, they give us help, even though we can't quite tell what sort of help it is. It could consist precisely in the fact that they cannot be helped, or in their stubborn insistence that "there is nothing to be done for us." For that very reason, we know, in the end, that we have somehow betrayed them.

[as quoted at Ads Without Products]

Music #5

More oldies...

"It Don't Come Easy," Ringo Starr

"Feelin' Alright," Joe Cocker

"The Look of Love," Dusty Springfield

Called By Other Names

"Quid ergo amo, cum deum meum amo?"
~ Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book 10 (Chapter 7)

.OOOOOOO.

"[Jacques] Derrida was intrigued by Saint Augustine, a fellow North African. With Saint Augustine he asked, 'What do I desire [love] when I desire [love] my God?' This question has no certain answer but it is worth asking because it opens up expectations and possibilities for God's action. Derrida compared his mother with the mother of Augustine, Monica who worried about their children's faith. He writes, '...my religion about which nobody understands any more than my mother who asked other people a while ago, not daring to talk to me about it, if I still believed in God ... but she must have known that the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I rightly pass for an atheist, the omnipresence of what I call my God in my absolved, absolutely private language being neither that of an eyewitness nor that of a voice doing anything other than talking to me without saying anything, nor a transcendent law or an immanent schechina, that feminine figure of a Yahweh who remains so strange and so familiar to me..' (Derrida in 'Jacques Derrida' p.154)."
~ John Paolini, "The Possibility of God: An Essay in the Philosophy of Religion" (2003)

Wasted

"No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. All the better, then, if he could have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music-hall comedian."
~ T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

Music #4

Oldies...

"Buy or Beware," Mellow Candle

"The Nitty Gritty," Gladys Knight & the Pips

"Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again," The Fortunes

The Metaphysical Organ

"The process of making sense of the world is closely connected with the word. Speech is the metaphysical organ of man. And yet over time the word grows rigid, becomes immobilized, ceases to be the conductor of new meanings. The poet restores conductivity to words through new short-circuits, which arise out of their fusions. The image is also an offshoot of the original word, the word which was not yet a sign, but a myth, a story, or a meaning."
~ Bruno Schulz, "Mityzacja rzeczywistosci"
("The Mythologization of Reality," transl. John M. Bates)