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“Vivir es enfrentarse a problemas, así que hay dos opciones: sufrir o buscar el lado positivo”.
- Emilio Aragon (2024)
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Productivity
"Capitalism assumes that the best possible form of anything is efficiency and productivity. And humanity is not about productivity and efficiency!
We weren’t put here to be productive elements for an employer, and yet we have somehow turned a method of economic distribution into not only our political system, but our entire social foundation.
There are tremendous negatives coming out of that, which we’re trying to grapple with.
We’ve known this for a while, but the positives of trade and expansion have distracted us for a very long time; and now you’ve gotten to a point where, inevitably, you begin to have blowback."
by R.S.A. Garcia (2024, via www.fivebooks.com)
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Economy
"The days when the economy was dominated by agriculture are long gone. Those of industry are nearly over. Economic life is no longer geared chiefly to production. To what then is it geared?
To distraction.
Contemporary capitalism is prodigiously productive, but the imperative that drives it is not productivity. It is to keep boredom at bay.
Where affluence is the rule the chief threat is the loss of desire. With wants so quickly sated, the economy soon comes to depend on the manufacture of ever more exotic needs.
What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices.
The economy is driven by an imperative of perpetual novelty, and its health has come to depend on the manufacture of transgression."
by John Gray (Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals, 2002)
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Hoy
"No nos alcanza el tiempo, o nosotros a él, nos quedamos atrás por correr demasiado, ya no nos basta el día para vivir apenas media hora."
by Julio Cortazar (Salvo el Crepusculo, 1985)
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Pagani
"Non hanno né sacerdoti né vescovi, non sanno che cosa sono il peccato e l’inferno.
Non hanno né i sacramenti né i dieci comandamenti, però pregano l’Onnipotente, onorano i genitori e gli anziani, mantengono la fede e la parola data a costo della vita, rispettano l’ospite come qualcosa di sacro, considerano le donne uguali agli uomini, e insomma sembrano più cristiani dei cristiani."
by Carlo Vecce (Il sorriso di Caterina, 2023)
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"mi canto es por llegar a ser fibra que vibra y no una cifra
que brilla escrita sobre un ordenador"
Sharif Fernandez (A Ras de Sueño, 2010)
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ZGZ
"Los puentes del río, mi casa y tu barrio.
Las torres que se alzan y las que tiraron.
En los soportales te estaba esperando y ahora en mis sueños te sigo escuchando.
Me había jurado no echarla de menos, estaba intentando huir del pasado.
Amores y odios, quién sale ganando a miles de adioses que no he superado.
Ofrenda de flores subida en tus brazos.
Somos inmortales aunque nos vayamos.
Princesa guerrera, aunque hayas cambiado te sigo queriendo después de los años.
Somos inmortales aunque nos vayamos."
by Amaral (2024)
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Selfish
"Evil, in as far as he had experienced it, was always selfish.
It was always just an extension of the most stupid behaviour of the infant playground:
‘It’s mine because I say so. It’s mine because I take it.’
Belongings, sexuality, life."
by Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, 2010)
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Body & Mind
"...and once again love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch, because you’ve got a body & mind to exercise, and that is your lot, to exercise & use it as much as you can, never mind whose got a better or worse body & mind, but stretch yours as far as you can."
by Sylvia Plath (“The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath” 1982)
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Enough
"We waste a lot of energy on past and future when present is all that’s guaranteed. We push for more—but really, we need to find our enough.
Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough.
Treat time as your ultimate currency—it’s all you have and you can never get it back.
Spend it wisely, with those you love, in ways you’ll never regret."
by Sahil Bloom (2024)
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"We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it."
Seneca (4 AD –65 AD)
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Los Amigos
"En el tabaco, en el café, en el vino, al borde de la noche se levantan como esas voces que a lo lejos cantan sin que se sepa qué, por el camino.
Livianamente hermanos del destino, dióscuros, sombras pálidas, me espantan las moscas de los hábitos, me aguantan que siga a flote en tanto remolino.
Los muertos hablan más, pero al oído, y los vivos son mano tibia y techo, suma de lo ganado y lo perdido.
Así un día, en la barca de la sombra, de tanta ausencia abrigará mi pecho esta antigua ternura que los nombra."
by Julio Cortazar (Salvo el Crepúsculo, 1984)
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Life
"I finished high school. I graduated from a Big Ten university. I moved to an apartment in the city. I got a job with air conditioning and health insurance and casual Friday. I found a partner. I bought a car. I got a better job. And then a better job.
This is fitting in, right?
The next promotion. The next raise. The next job. The next car. Getting married. Having children. Buying a house. The next job. Saving for retirement. Buying a better car. Buying a bigger house. Saving for college. The next job. College. Retirement. Grandkids. Death."
by Scott Mayer (In Fitness and in Health, 2022)
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Elegancia
"La elegancia, tan necesaria y, sin embargo, tan ausente en todos los ámbitos de nuestro día a día, es una cuestión de actitud que no tiene nada que ver ni con el servilismo ni con ser flojo ni, desde luego, con lo ampuloso ni con la exhibición de la opulencia.
La elegancia no lleva necesariamente corbata ni un reloj caro. Puede ir en zapatillas de tenis y llamarse Rafa Nadal.
No es incompatible con la verdad ni con ser firme en las propias convicciones, pero sí con algunas formas de expresarlas.
La elegancia es discreta y respetuosa; es medida y contenida; conoce la grandeza de la renuncia en favor de otros y acepta la contrariedad con diplomacia y espíritu positivo; infunde confianza y serenidad y, sobre todo, es templada y ajena a todo exceso."
by Javier Blanco Urgoiti (Burkina The Revist, 2019)
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Eladio
"Hay cigarros que se sueñan, pero no como una fórmula matemática.
No se presentan en medio de las brumas del descanso con su detallado desfile de porcentajes ni como una receta de cocina pormenorizada en una lista de ingredientes, cantidades, procesos y tiempos.
El sueño es un sabor, uno concreto, uno que para ser soñado tiene que ser distinto y nuevo, que se aparece veteado de matices que activan la lengua dormida aquí o allá: una punta dulce en el extremo; la larga y sustanciosa presencia de un elegante amargo en el paladar; la viveza insensata de la pimienta; la caricia cálida y pueril de la canela; la perspicacia insistente de un rastro salino; un cítrico delicado y punzante en los lados de la boca…"
by Javier Blanco Urgoiti (Burkina the Revist, 2019)
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Pop
"A concept rock album about a fictional Edwardian military band, featuring musical styles borrowed from Indian classical music, vaudeville, and musique concrète, its sleeve design including images of Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, Carl Gustav Jung, Sir Robert Peel, Marlene Dietrich, and Aleister Crowley?
That’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, one of the biggest selling records of all time.
How about a record exploring the perception of time, mental illness, and alterity, described by one of the band members as “an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy,”?
That's Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which has to date sold around 45 million copies worldwide.
Kraftwerk sang about machines, railways, technology, and the new-dawn hopes of Europe after the war. They looked like young intellectuals on their way to attend a political think-tank in Brussels or a scientific conference in Geneva.
Bowie borrowed from mime, kabuki, the Beats, Andy Warhol, science fiction, high fashion, modern European art, and theater. He created personae and atmospheres that served as a refuge in fantasy for misfit teenagers, temporary flights of imagination from life in some godforsaken 1970s new town.
The potential to construct yourself in the image of something you’re not has been one of the traditional promises of pop music. “Insufferably over-fashionable, lavishly over the top, dreadfully dilettantish, finely eclectic. Pop can be so many things.”"
by Dan Fox (Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, 2016)
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