June 5, 2012 collection

Women’s dress style in Moscow: the couture of controlled exposure.

If women are NOT the better half – God help us!

The trivialization of the day.

Consumerussia.

Someone could do an essay on the history of “looks” in people’s eyes in the past 20-30 years, using photos, films, memories, etc., and tell much about the changes in Russian psychology.

(On a Russian national holiday:) Thousands out walking, but most clearly now knowing whereto or whyfore.

Actually, we should rename days at work off days, and days off from work, on days!

If man is indeed a being of two worlds, no wonder he is confused.

Why be worried about a rumored missing God, when there are so many entertaining distractions. (Sermon theme in Consumption Cathedral.)

Obviously, communism was replaced by the consumerism it rejected.

The fact is that most people are asleep in the culture and society in which they exist. They are unreflective, and even unconscious of this -- and their status as humans sub specie aeternitatis eve less.

The disenchantment of monsters and demons.

The death of God...but also of the death of devil, angels, demons, even monsters. It was truly a historic massacre.

Can there be a clothing style so bad no one would wear it?

In the Soviet time people needed God to give meaning to their closed lives. Now there are so many other things to do.

The reality or illusion of “God” seems quite irrelevant to most Moscovites now, and who needs any damned eternal questions?!

Walking mostly unguarded in public, rich, why does no one try to rob me of my gold in ideas and insights?

That woman’s taste in dress is so bad I wish her face didn’t indicate it was not done as a stylish antistyle.

If the word “God” refers to nothing, and every single place on which it is written were to be a hole, it would be as if there had been a great plague of book worms.

April 29, 2012

Alexander von Humboldt observed the natives not perhaps much differently than I still try to do the Moscovites. Indeed, if I could better bear in mind that I am rather in a dormant human society – be that by nature or nurture – I might be less often annoyed and bored by the common natives.

Sometimes it seems quite clear: the higher the heel, the lower the level.

Those who don’t notice they are in a crowd.             

     

If their psyches are as awkward and motley as “their” style of dress and deportment…

April 17, 2012

Amongst aspects of the sleep of day in which most people are, how much they copy each other, and that smokers are addicts, are two.

Simply stated: Russian have revealed themselves en masse as dormant “spirits” to the culture, superficial lifestyle and ‘values’ of external ‘man’.

Ex material lux? Ex dei lux? Ex nihilo lux?

Irretrievable street alcoholics seem unable to escape enough that they do not sense to hide their bloated faces.

Xristos voskres?

Have zoologists attempted to determine whether apes ‘look down on’ others with disdain or astound for their bad habits?

Living personally “free”, ie, as they wish, is assumed an adequate ‘end’ by most persons.

The fact that I am trying to gather as many brilliant, priceless, jewels, gems, diamonds and gold of ideas and insights as possible is irrelevant to those who would try to rob, tax, or imprison me, were these possessions physical.

In post-Soviet sum: common Russians have succumbed to consumption rather than culture, and that as conspicuous as they can afford.

Shopping as narcotic. Anesthetic.

Are the acts of humans in fact less predictable than those instinctive in animals?

Studying the real history of un-, semi-, and conscious ideas, feelings, mores, and such, by and in which peoples live, allows one to partly untie, cut, fray, and feel our psychic marionette strings.

April 8, 2012

Man does not live by bread alone. Shopping helps.

After one has journeyed thru natural and social scenes romanticized by one’s self, then the societas cognita and terra cognita leaves one barren (“disenchanted”) and one longs and searches for nobler days.

Will the ideas of contemporary astrophysics, cosmogony and  -logy, etc, prove any more true to fact that Columbus’ belief of his discovery of “Eden” in South America?

Whither “fall in love”? Rise? Jump? Back into? Slide?

Two men in a room…a table covered with books. One man has read none; the other all. If silent…what then distinguishes them? (And at death? And thenafter?)

An attentive, discerning observer in the subways of NY, London and Moscow could gain much insight into their respective “unexamined lives” above.

For those less troubled: religion is the latte of the people.

Stopping to smell the roses is all well and good, but my nose has never sensed very well.

Afimoll, Moscow, Sunday April 8, 2012: The window displays like church icons, murals and tapestries, exemplifying less why to live than how to dress. Outer style, not inner way. Changed visuals for simple souls?

Post-Soviet teen fems now freely can try to find themselves in their cameras, magazines and shopping, rather than the literature, arts and music of the Soviet days. Something is lost, something is gained.

Living personally “free” (ie, as they wish) is assumed an adequate “end” by most persons.

Thoughts on observations on Moscow streets

People imagine they are cool when they are being smoked by tobacco.

Is it not already so for me that is it of more unpredictable interest whether that stray dog will return and eat the big sausage I saw him bury deep in a snow pile, than what most Moscovites will do next?

High-heeled wound-up dolls on Moscow’s streets. A public catwalk sale. Some taking their bodies our for the show.

With the dissolution of the Russian-Soviet social mores, Russian teens are swamped in their own self-centeredness. But they are barely to blame.

Ant-Social Thoughts February 2012 Moscow

Thoreau in his philosophic view of a meaningful life asked if a telegraph line to Texas was an improved means to an unimproved end. And what of smartfons, tweetings and instant messaging? A mean end?

If Russian ‘leaders’ had any integrity and honor, they would be ashamed; thus, understandably, they are proud.

What can be thought by/about all those who are aware they are wearing fake brands?

Most are unhatched eggs. 

History ends not with a bang, but with a mall.

A pathetic note: The most despondent days of hours are those during which any Meaning to being and search seem uncertainly absent, apparently absurd, mocking(less)ly without end.  :-)

The world: a global shopping mall.

MO$COW, RU$$IA

The majorities imagine they dress themselves.

One advantage to Russian society and culture after Soviet ideology was widely seen as a failed ideological system was that most people had something in common they disagreed about. Now they can not even disagree about the same things.

Amazing that only some 3 and ½ of my lifetimes ago Napoleon was in Moscow.

Though asleep, we dream we are, not, in many ways.

Putin predictably said to his crowd “We love Russia!” Better if he had said: ‘Let us make Russia worthy of loving’. But that would be expecting too much of politics.

Upon what real foundation are Hegel’s views taken more seriously than, say, Shirley Maclain’s or Stanislav Grof’s?

Every tourist thoughtlessly satisfied with the “nice time” they had wherever – be it Egypt, Bali, Greece, Thailand, Florida,…helps flatten the world, and histories and cultures.