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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“The aesthetics of the bourgeoisie demand that their art should be valued to the degree of its appeal to human and aesthetic universals rather than to the specifics of the here and now: even though some art may be 'realistic' and refer explicitly to the details of the everyday, the middle-class 'appreciation' must be able to look through these to the 'universals' underlying them. Relevance to one's immediate social context is not a middle-class criterion for the evaluation and enjoyment of art.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Aesthetics, Media Class, Univeral vs. Particular
“It is the social system that makes violence popular, not the 'baseness' of the citizens: the roots of violence are to be found in society, not in individual morality. So it is predictable that the movement to eradicate violence from our screens would be led by middle-class moralists. By 'blaming' social violence on television they avoid having to consider the uncomfortable idea that it might be their own position of social privilege that actually provokes most violent and criminal activity among the disadvantaged. Television and the apparent gullibility of its 'mass' audience become convenient scapegoats upon which to displace the social responsibility of their own class position.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Class, Mass Audiences, Media, Media Wars, Scapegoat, Television, Violence
“Relevance is discovered or produced by the reader; it is the moment and process of production in the cultural economy that takes the text beyond its role as commodity in the financial. Popular discrimination, then, does not operate between or within texts in terms of their quality, but rather in the identification and selection of points of pertinence between the text and everyday life.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Defining Quality, Relevance, Relevant, Thought Catalog
“Popular discrimination is concerned with functionality rather than quality, for it is concerned with the potential uses of the text in everyday life.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism, Popularity, Populism, Virality
“It isn't enough to pick a path — you must go down it. By doing so, you see things you couldn't possibly see when you started out; you may not like what you see, some of it may be confusing, but at least you will have, as we like to say, 'explored the neighborhood.' The key point here is that even if you decide you're in the wrong place, there is still time to head toward the right place. And all the thinking you've done that led you down that alley was not wasted. Even if most of what you've seen doesn't fit your needs, you inevitably take away ideas that will prove useful. Relatedly, if there are parts of the neighborhood you like but that don't seem helpful in the quest you're on, you will remember those parts and possibly use them later.”
— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc
Tagged: Experimentation, Failure, Keep Moving, Wrong Is Right
“He didn't notice a single face as he took a seat. He saw neither teacher nor students, and was aware only of the heavenly light in the room, an orange glow from the autumnal foliage outside. The room seemed full of a sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly light as air, which he breathed in. Time slowed down, and in his left ear the ringing of the cosmic Om started up clear as a telephone. When we suggested these details had been laced with the same THC in his blood, Trip Fontaine thrust a finger into the air, the only time his hands stopped shaking during the entire interview. 'I know what it's like to be high,' he said. 'This was different.' In the orange light the students' heads looked like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor. 'Every second is eternal,' Trip told us, describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of him, for no apparent reason, had turned around and looked at him. He couldn't say she was beautiful because all he could see were her eyes. The rest of her face — the pulpy lips, the blond sideburn fuzz, the nose with its candy-pink translucent nostrils— registered dimly as the two blue eyes lifted him on a sea wave and held him suspended. 'She was the still point of the turning world,' he told us, quoting Eliot, whose Collected Poems he had found on the shelf of the detoxification center. For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.'”
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides: A Novel
Tagged: Marijuana, Om, Trip Fontaine, Blue Eyes, Eternity, Flashback, Love, Descriptions of Perfect Love Ecstasy
“Numbers are important. Number of users is important. So are lots of other things. Different services create value in different ways. Trust your gut as much (or more) than the numbers. Figure out what matters and build something good.”
— Evan Williams, Medium.com
Tagged: Analytics, Numbers, Trust Impulse
“It is not reality's problem, however, that it has immeasurable processes. Rather, it is the problem of scientism, which limits nature to the measurable.”
— Ede Frecska, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
Tagged: Measurements, Reality, Science, Scientism, The Philosophy of Science
“Travel across great distances in outer space may not be the only way to reach worlds that are different from our own, seemingly remote in time and space. Moreover, it may be unnecessary to restrict this search using methods based upon a view of reality limited to what is physical and measurable. It is perhaps this one-sided vantage point that has removed us from potentially unlimited nonphysical realities. We can challenge this limitation intellectually, scientifically, spiritually, and, most important, practically. Establishing—with a sober, altruistic intent—reliable and generally available means of contact with these different levels of existence may help us alleviate some of the pressing issues we are facing on this planet in this time–space continuum. It even may be that the information and resources we gather in these noncorporeal realms are more important to our survival—and ultimately our evolution—than that which we obtain via strictly physical means.”
— Rick Strassman, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
Tagged: Evolution, New Dimensions, Progress, Space Travel, The Necessity of Matriarchy, NASA’s Avant-Garde
“The things we see with the aid of a microscope, for example, are utterly alien, but because they are perceived in a state within which most of us exist most of the time, we can validate them consensually. In the case of a microscope, however, we are dealing with an extension of our senses via hardware. In the DMT scenario, the wetware of the brain is modified, leading to the opening of other realms. These data are harder to validate because, at this point, they are very difficult to share in the same way as traditional data.”
— Rick Strassman, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
Tagged: Microscopes, Observation, Seeing Seeing, Wetware