Omnia Vanitas

Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. -Ecclesiastes 1:2
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Vanitas, -atis, f. (L)- falsity, unreality, deception, untruth, bragging, lying, vanity, worthlessness, frivolity

One of my favorite painting styles is the Vanitas still life, a medieval kind of symbolic art that captures the transience of the mortal life, the futility of material possessions, and the inevitability of death. Wikipedia article, I couldn't have said it better myself. Some examples:


David Bailly. Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols, 1651.

Oh great, this is cluttered, this is as messy as a dorm room desk, but there are always some things that I don't understand, so many different layers of complexity. The man holding a portrait of himself as an old man, for example. His expression is unreadable. What is he feeling? Does he know that he is going to die?


Charles Allen Gilbert (1873-1929). All is Vanity. This image is more popular in the optical illusions circuit, I'm afraid. I think this painting would be better if the mirror were broken.

An artist by the name of Alain Khadem has done some 21st-century retakes on the vanitas style to fit the "absurdities of our fast-paced modern life. I especially like the one with the Molotov cocktail, and Overacheiver/Underacheiver.

/absinthe.

Megalomaly

chronological anomaly = Anachronism

I was looking down my flixster queue and realized that I had several movies about Guantanamo Bay on it. In the future, hopefully, we'll look back on Guantanamo as a horrible relic of the Bush administration, or even think of it as a place like Auschwitz.

To think of it, a third of my life was spent under the Bush administration and wartime conditions.

Barack Obama: he completes us.

I saw this on the Daily Show when Obama first accepted the Democratic party nomination in November, and it's still as inspiring today, after the inauguration.

Engrish

Some Great Instructional Videos.

How to be Happy.

Step 6: Stop Dwelling.
Leading psychologist Sonia Lubamersky has found that the happiest people don't dwell on negative or ambiguous events. Furthermore, excessive introspection may sap your mental resources, making it harder for positive changes to occur. So turn off that Morrissey record and go outside!

How to Give a Man Hug.

Blessed be.

Happy holidays! A reminder of how small we really are, and how great His glory.



In this, the darkest time of year (in the Northern hemisphere, at least), stay warm, love one another, and go on doing good.

Cheers,
J

Marketing Hysteria 101

Create a problem. Bonus points if this problem is psychosomatic, caused by microscopic germs or other parasites invisible to the naked eye, or something that causes your skin to crawl and reach for disinfectant (ACME* Brand Ultra-Antiseptic Strength).

Create a product that solves this imaginary problem or tries to address it => $$

Examples of hysteria created by the advertising industry:

DUST MITES

RESTLESS LEGS SYNDROME

Soap the only way Tyler Durden would have it.

There's a new ad campaign by a major soap company that starts with D* that shows how most soaps leave an imperceptible scum or residue on the skin after showering, while D* doesn't. The ads show two different women using soap, one with D* and the other using a competitor's product, and then compare the two under a mysterious purple UV/infrared light. The competitor's soap leaves streaks of soap scum on the woman's skin after showering, while D*'s doesn't.

This ad campaign bugs me on a number of different levels because we shouldn't be using detergents on our skin.

Most "soaps" on the market today are actually detergents.

Detergents: harsh cleaning agents common to laundry detergent, shampoo, antibacterial liquid soaps, body washes, etc, that usually contain sulfates, artificial colors and fragrances.
Soaps: made in the traditional way from boiling animal fat and alkali (lye).

Detergents are better cleaning agents than soaps because they don't form soap scum in hard water, while fat-based soaps do. Of course, this is great for laundry, leaving your white clothes brilliantly white, or for scrubbing bathroom floors and shower walls sparkly clean.

However, detergents strip the skin of natural oils, leaving it dry and flaky, which is why I use oil-based, sulfate-free soaps as often as I can. I look for natural products with a high content of natural oils, moisturizers, and plant extracts. I've found olive oil soaps to be the best.

My favorite is Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. At first, bathing with something enitrely oil-based may seem strange, but I've found that these products are just as effective as detergents. They don't leave any kind of "invisible" residue that I care about (yeah, that's the soap product market creating more hysteria so you'll freak out and go buy detergents) and in fact, I WANT the olive oil and plant extracts to stay on my skin and moisturize and nourish it.

This goes the same for shampoos, too. At first I was reluctant to use Dr. Bronner's as a shampoo, thinking that all of the oils would make my scalp oilier, but it cleaned just as well as my sulfate-based shampoos, and lathered well too. The only issue I had is that it left my hair with a coarse kind of texture, I guess the way nature intended, not with the polished, fake, shiny, smooth, silicone-coated sheen that that cosmoceutical marketing departments love to try to sell.

Use real soap, not detergent.

Some further reading:
Truth and Lies in Organic Personal Care
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics

SNL Lazy Sunday - Parnell/Sandberg

This really cracks me up.

How Hot Dogs are Made.

Are you disgusted yet?

Green Gifts

Timbuk2 Hidden Tote, Recycled PET Fabric.

Folds up into a zip-up pouch. Should've had one when I went to the market today! Also comes in a backpack style.

Grim Fandango trailer (1998)

I'm replaying this great film noir epic, and enjoying the lush Art Deco Aztec art.

The Illusion of Food

This is the title of a painting that my mind has not yet created, born of a quote of my brother's. It might also be the title of a diet book that no one has written yet (so is Eat Neolithic).

The illusion:


The reality, which is lost behind smoke and mirrors and the flashing neon lights of consumerism:


Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope everyone eats Neolithic on our day of gratitude.

Eating Neolithic

I'm reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (a follow-up to his successful Omnivore's Dilemma from a few years ago) and I'm awed. Some interesting points:

-The American Paradox. Everyone knows that the French eat a high-fat, buttery diet and drink wine and yet remain slim and have long lifespans (the French Paradox). On the other hand, Americans, the people most obsessed with diet and nutrition, have the highest rates of obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer (!).
-Our diets are precisely engineered. No other animal needs PROFESSIONAL HELP figuring out what to eat.

In order to avoid the slew of Western diseases and live healthier, longer lives, we ought to basically eat what we evolved to eat. (We haven't evolved responses to high fructose corn syrup, which has been around for about half a century, whereas the human species has consumed maize for thousands of years longer.) Eat what our Neolithic ancestors ate, he says. That means a diet of whole-grain, nonprocessed food, foods prepared according to cultural traditions that unlock key nutrients (for example, processing maize with limestone unlocks niacin), and nothing that ever passed through a factory or manufacturing facility. Would you eat something extruded through a nozzle? Squirtable Go-Gurt? Hydrogenated cardboard Pringles? Fluorescent orange plastic cheese? Splenda? Some other unrecognizable chemical compound that was made in a lab? This stuff is completely unrecognizable as food, but this is our post-industrial diet.

Neolithic or Paleolithic?
This made me think about whether a Paleolithic diet or a Neolithic one would be better.
Hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. Before agriculture, foragers would spend 20 hours a week acquiring food, and then have plenty of leisure time left over to shoot the breeze, visit relatives, make jewelry, weave baskets, play with children, and so on. With agriculture, cultivation of crops became crucial and people spent 7 days a week, 24 hours a day slaving away on a farm. Generally, the foraging diet was more diverse and higher quality nutrient-wise than an agricultural one based on few key crops and livestock, but it probably tastes terrible. Let's see what I can gather....Insects. Raw weeds and tough, fibrous leafy greens. Okra. Bizarre seasonal fruits like durian and mango and avocado and grapes and pears that grow only at the foothills of the most remote mountains in China, but have incredible antioxidant and nutrient properties. Crustaceans. Minimally cooked.

Taste-wise, definitely go Neolithic. I'll take some stone-ground wheat bread and home-churned butter and cheese any day. Soba noodles. Beancurd, mmm. The Neolithic diet sounds yummy and feels like home. It's been 10,000 years and we're still around! Don't eat any of that processed post-industrial garbage.

Home

Some Random Things

When I came home on Wednesday night, there was a vehicle illegally parked on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. It looked abandoned. The model? A pretty new Power Wheels, I'd say 2007 or so. How very curious --children these days leave their CARS behind.

The next day, as I was leaving the house early in the morning, I saw that it had been pushed to the curb and piled high with garbage bags. I guess no one wanted a free Power Wheel, or maybe it had belonged to the pediatrician's office next door and didn't work anymore.

Yesterday someone left a message on my answering machine saying that they had my tickets for the INAUGURATION (!) and didn't have my phone number or mailing address so they looked me up in the phone book and found my number. Hehehe

World's Deepest Cave -Tian Xing, China

Top 10 Best foods for your face

1. Avocado - niacin (vit B3)
2. Mangoes - vit A
3. Almonds - 150% DV Vitamin E
4. Cottage cheese - selenium (antioxidant w/Vit E)
5. Acerola Cherries - vitamin C
6. Oysters - Zinc
7. Baked potato - 75% DV copper
8. Mushrooms-Riboflavin (vit b2)
9. Flaxseed oil - 2.5 mg omega 3s
10. Wheat germ - biotin

Introversion or Sleep?

Me time or sleep time?
Computer/brain/books or bed?
Daydreams or night dreams?

Do you know anyone who actually gets inspiration from sleep? I mean real, night-time, restorative, REM sleep?

Unlike Einstein, whose dreams gave birth to his ideas...

Most of my inspiration comes during the day, when I'm quietly introverting while in the shower or while I'm cooking dinner or out for a walk/run. Not so much while I'm DEAD in my BED. Sleep is mostly out of exhaustion for me, and I rarely get the kind of insights and ideas I get that from intuiting during waking life. Most of the crazy overachieving people I've known for my whole life have slept very little, and yet had the most brilliant ideas and produced some of the most wonderful work.

And so it comes to pass for people like me, who spend several hours a week commuting to work while juggling classes and languages and several other hobbies and such, to make a choice between staying up late introverting and real sleep, dream sleep, beta-wave sleep.

Do I stay up and write for a bit, reflect, study my various thingers, enjoy art and music and be imaginative, connecting with my intuition, or do I let my brain rest? Do I go to sleep? Sigh. After using my brain as a G4 processor during the day, the very least it deserves is some fun. (How about a nice sonata, at least?)

The very worst thing I could do during my precious introversion time, of which I seem to have very little these days, is bombard my brain with an overload of sensory information. No TV and online shopping! Restless internet surfing and TV just make me feel more restless and make me stay up longer doing NOTHING. Repetitive computer games like Pet Salon and Emperor, which are pretty management/detail/strategy-oriented are pretty bad too, and they whittle away your introversion time.

Some tips to spur your creative imagination, from this website:

1. Behave like a child while learning: Be curious about every thing what you learn.
2. Start reading novels, create Mind Maps, Draw some pictures and colour them.
3. Day Dreaming: Dream at least for 5 min daily.
4. Use your right part of your Brain: Right part of the brain has the ability for creative thinking. Practice some exercises which makes improves creativity imagination.
5. Think creatively for day today problems you have and try to find alternate solutions.

Don't forget to BREATHE DEEPLY!

Fight Club - This is your life.

I post this because my life feels like this, and because this embodies the sentiment of a generation of wage slaves.

Insomnia

For six months, I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere.
The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.

IKEA


It used to be that when I came home angry or depressed, I'd just clean my condo, polish my Scandinavian furniture. I should've been looking for a new condo. I should've been haggling with my insurance company. I should've been upset about my nice, neat flaming little shit. But I wasn't. The basic premise of cyber-netting any office is make things more efficient. Monday mornings, all I could do was think about next week. Can I get the icon in cornflower blue? Absolutely. Efficiency is priority number one, people, because waste is a thief. I showed this already to my man, here. You liked it, didn't you? You can swallow a pint of blood before you get sick. It was right in everyone's face. Tyler and I Just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone's tongue. Tyler and I just gave it a name.