Distempered

[distempered]

People pretend to have emotions, and they really feel nothing. I suppose that is being romantic.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

[distempered]

He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he was troubled by no conscience in that respect. He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

[distempered]

One thing I wonder sometimes is, how an artist can retain criticality if the art ends up looking or functioning similarly to the thing the artist is criticizing. Being subversive now doesn’t necessarily mean controversial, so it can be hard to distinguish if what is created is actually different from the system it is seeking to critique. I am unsure if being self-aware is enough to make it different. Additionally, I think whether it is actually subversive depends on a viewer’s understanding of what the artist is trying to subvert.

Lucy Chinen

[distempered]

At its best, contemporary graphic design is the jester in our midst, gleefully turning conventions upside down, jarring perspectives and taking on the traditional carnivalesque task of pointing beyond normal daily routine toward deeper truths. It falls to other media to take it from there.

Herbert Muschamp

[distempered]

Though graphic design is clearly a field of great importance for social activism, it is also a field in which the line between social responsibility and commercial opportunism is neither easy to discern nor easily blurred. What we're looking at, in this section, are sophisticated forms of propaganda, from both the corporate and the oppositional ends of the spectrum. This is not to suggest that both kinds of propaganda are equally bearers of truth. It is rather to question whether graphic design is a medium that makes it easier or harder to sort out truth from propaganda. Perhaps this is a medium that is useful only in purveying sensation. It deals with images, myths and emotions, not with the facts or arguments that might lead people to recognize a myth as false, an image as misleading, an emotion as manipulative. Unsurpassed at selling, it is less effective at putting into perspective the shortcomings of a consumer culture based on buy and sell.

Herbert Muschamp

[distempered]

Filipino graphic design is as over-crowded as the landscape of our country, which has the region’s second-highest urban population density rate. Here, minimalism can be understood as a sign of poverty, only surfacing when the designer does not possess enough technical or financial prowess for the addition of borloloy (lavish ornamentation), and fills the gaps with decorations that cost time and signify money. A white void might also denote a spiritual lack. There is no greater Filipino sorrow than being alone, and the singular focus—the whiteness—of minimalism can hardly be sold to a people whose idea of visual pleasure is an explosion of the colors and textures that constitute the experience of community. To us, variety is necessary to attract the eye and soul.

Clara Lobregat Balaguer

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His heart surged blood to his extremities as night enveloped him.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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If you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there's no end to it...

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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In the future, every day of the week will be a Thursday. We’re all working to the grave, and life will be one perpetual fast food job of the soul. The weekend? Gone. And we all pretty much know it in our bones.

Douglas Coupland

[distempered]

As clubs go, it seems, so goes Manhattan. Early-A.M. Manhattan is a convex mirror in which are reflected the fads, fantasies, fears, and forces of Manhattan by day. In its distortions, the recent history of the concrete isle can be made out. The rise and fall of gays as a fashion item. The dimming of Broadway marquees, and the budding of performance art. The sexual revolution that’s already jelled into nostalgia for an ancien régime, a monarchy of monogamy. The fascination with “after hours,” and with characters every bit as shady as Dutch Schultz, the thirties gangster taken up by a smart social set. The Art Boom. The real-estate market that’s rapidly become too tight to allow for much surreal estate. The extinction of disco bunnies and punks, and the stocking of clubs with yuppies—they’re the ones who dance around their briefcases at Networking parties at Palladium. And, most recently, the circling back to an elegant small-club etiquette reminiscent of the more conservative fifties.

Brad Gooch

[distempered]

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

[distempered]

She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

[distempered]

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

[distempered]

She hated everything. The library with its pile of books full of explanations about life; the school that had forced her to spend whole evenings learning algebra, even though she didn't know a single person, apart from teachers and mathematicians, who needed algebra in order to be happy. Why did they make them learn so much algebra or geometry or any of that mountain of other useless things?

Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

[distempered]

If for decades the figure of the student was synonymous with social rebellion, with a ruthless criticism of everything existing, this may have less to do with theories taught at the university than with a particular practice, a particular experience of living. Universities uproot students from their homes, from their familiar and entrenched place in a familial order, and place them in a context halfway between communism (collective living, eating, sleeping) and anarchism. On top of this there is all of the time, free from work and other demands; time to spend in clubs and social activities. There is something radical about student life, independent of the classroom, in the way in which it produces new experiences. . . . This side [of college life] is countered by the neoliberal restructuring of the university . . . The liminal moment of the university, that made the subject position of the college student anomalous, neither child nor adult, is being eradicated. What we see in the university [today] is a neoliberal production of subjectivity . . . the refiguring of human beings as ‘human capital.’ Everything that makes up the human individual, intelligence, education . . . can now be understood as an investment of time and energy that makes possible future earnings. Every class, every extracurricular activity, every activity or club becomes a possible line on a resume.

Jason Read

[distempered]

Hypocrisy has its own elegant symmetry.

Julie Metz, Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal

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If there is any single source of energy to combat the global disasters facing us, it is that created by outrageous, anarchic, antihierarchical, unprejudiced, explosive interaction.

Esa Saarinen