New posts from jordanlee.life
Marion Milner's Creative Confrontations by Akshi Singh in Parapraxis
I’m glad to have recently learned about the mid twentieth century psychoanalyst and theorist Marion Milner who specialized in creativity and blockages and I loved this article by Akshi Singh exploring the idea of how creativity “de-idealizes” the self and forces a deep look at ugliness and destruction along with the beauty.
For Milner, both love and work are steeped in risk and danger, presenting terrains where the boundaries of the self are breached, convictions and certainties surrendered, and where destructiveness, aggression, and shame are close at hand. It isn’t Eros versus Thanatos here, love versus evil and destruction. No, for Milner destruction and evil are part of love.
📚 Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
Based off of the BBC show of the same name, this book contains four written essays and two photoessays. I was expecting a sort of Art 101 type of text, which I would have welcomed, but instead I got something deeply thought-provoking and politically radical. I kept being surprised at how contemporary this work from fifty years ago still feels.
The first essay draws heavily upon the work of Walter Benjamin and his ideas of how our relationship to the image changes in the age of mechanical reproduction. Then he moves on to the nude and the objectification of women in European art which feels indebted to Simone De Beauvoir. The second half of the book critiques European oil painting as obsessed with possession, status, and objects and draws a line straight to our current moment of being inundated with ads as our main way of interfacing with the visual.
A line about advertisements stuck out to me, that as a form it is incapable of showing pleasure-in-itself since it would defeat the point of creating desire. He spells out how deeply destructive it is to be surrounded by these images that stir up envy and convert political activism to individualistic daydreaming. It is kind of unbelievable that the BBC funded this, it almost reminds me of Adam Curtis.
🎵 Ruth Garbus - Profound (Orindal 2026)
I try to check out everything Orindal releases and was rewarded by the new Ruth Garbus record which has a wide-open quality vacillating between the childish and, yes, the profound. Lyrically and musically I feel privileged to be let into this rich inner world
Although I recently enjoyed (and posted about) Neil Postman’s work, I thought Rob Horning made some valid critques here: The postman always rings twice
The parameters within which technology should operate must be established collectively, politically, but mounting moral panics about new technology results only in a withdrawal into individual soul-searching. The point of tech criticism should not be to confirm our powerlessness but to clarify how to better distribute the power that technologies put at our command.