Gout /art and how my blog lost it's way/ New Top Ten Philosophers

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 I was given TO PHILOSOPHICAL  ideas and day dreaming as a child. My mother encouraged me to be me which I found very helpful along life's way. My father used to call me the professor even when I was in grade school. Sort of disparaging name as in the famous film The Blue Angel where "the professor" becomes a clown chasing after Marlena Dietrich .. European working class people like my Dad see professor as someone whose a sophist and a minor authority figure, an academic. Of course I just had a very active mind and imagination and I was very visual. I saw more than other people who were not looking. I knew something about the power pictures could have early on at  the art institute and all along the way. My father's teasing was persistent nagging as if he had a deep distrust for anything other than hard physical labor, work was all he knew. His son had turned into something his father had never encountered, an artist an intellectual and still all the wondering went on. Oh , gout report - Taking some anti-inflammation drugs I got yesterday that are the gout killers. It's a regime of steroid used for many different ailments and for gout outbreaks as the flyer states acute gouty arthritis, it's going to be very pleasant to have less pain after 6 weeks or more of this outbreak.  The gout was precipitated by the very medicine that eliminates the uric acids that cause attacks! Irony thy name is medicine like my mom's drug for Parkinson's Disease brought on her schizophrenia .. Oh well who sneezes at a cure (rrose selavey). Indeed if you can stay slim you are apt to fair better re-aging - skinny maybe chic but it's also more apt to avoid the troubles of the unskinny peeps. But then most of us go up and down in size ok mostly up for some.  I saw photos of myself when I got my BFA at the school of the art institute of chicago (1967) man I was very thin the grey suit was hanging off me like newspapers in the branches of a tree. What happened? Marijuana made me hungry? Sure but .. it's also a family trait my mom's weight was up and down many times. You go through a traumatic experience, painful, you lose some weight. You come back from the hospital a bit lighter sometimes a lot lighter depending on the degree of intensity of experience.

 Ponies or Panties - Do we have to choose?  Something about art working creates the opening for a sort of obsessive working even an over the top sort vision that takes considerable skill to create . It's not unlike Guy Debord's spectacle in the sense that art need be a spectacle to draw us into a different vision of things the way a movie let's us escape into the simulation of a novel or work of historical recreation. I've seen this mixing of words images ideas and various means to signify, signs, mottos etc. As if a new artistic language is created by works that combine elements of visual perception and ideas, images colors etc. As in a dream the various components are composed in the mind of the viewer the viewer creates the picture from the material the artist provides. Different desires different perceptions, as I used to say everybody sees the same things differently.

 New Top Ten Philosophers - Update - 1. Nietzsche - I like his intensity and that his philosophy is so personal reflecting a very messy situation in Europe and profound differences with the church indeed he sees the church as a very dismal institution like a life insurance company for the true belivers in the after life. And importantly that the Christian faith had tainted philosophy and science with it's make believe ethics, poor in this life pleasure in the next life ( and if their is no next life you don't know you don't exist and you won't know). 2. Heidegger This is a troubled choice but hey whose better to help us understand Nietzsche in relation to 20 th. century philosophies? His work requires a very intense focus, no pull quotes will suffice. 3. La Rochefoucauld - His maxims so great and most especially his thoughts on love. My copy of La Rochefoucauld is torn and frayed from use.  4. Kierkegaard - the writing about Jacob being sacrificed by Abraham is spell binding, what kind of G-d wants you to sacrifice your only son to him? An old mean ass Hebrew god who at the last has his angel stop Abraham's sword from killing him as if to say he was just testing Abraham!? Pretty intense test. 5, - Ludwig Wittgenstein- I submit my long sanity as a result of studying Herr Wittgenstein's philosophy. And the lithium too though that maybe part of why my kidneys are compromised. Wittgenstein looked at the mystical aspects of being from the point of view oif natural science. He located mystical speech as outside the framework of natural science. Indeed he disposes what can not be said as something we pass over in silence. The idea that this life we lead is already mystical that we exist at all is very unusual. Seeing the mystical in the everyday life is a very useful idea. 6. Heraclitus - Pre-Socratic, Nietzsche admired this group more than any other and Heraclitus in particular. The flux the constant movement in life led Heraclitus to believe everything was fire , fleeting moving changing. And it seems so that our life does flash by in no time. 7. Buddha - I used to say Lao Tzu but Buddha has moved up my list. Finding serenity and peace is the top priority, and dealing with the futility of trying.  8. Hegel/Marx - The dialectical method, the critique of the material world. The concept of  historical outcomes and the idea of actuality as the center of attention. The revolution is the result of historical forces and the outcome of history is not known . 9.- R. Crumb - This artist has inserted a long philosophical narrative into his comics over many decades. His position is very practical and dark ie. pessimistic. What I've learned from him is a sort humility about being an artist no matter how great you are you still live suffer and die. So you mind as well have a sense of humor about being merely human! 10. V. Nabokov - Like Marcel Duchamp Nabokov is a world unto him self. Inspiring and informative, his inquiries are so precise and so suffused with desire and risk. A truely philosophical writer like Russians before him only more into our age our issues our peculiar problems. One of those writers who always has something to say that is tangent to human desire and love.