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Fifteen Ways To Survive The Coming Collapse Of Civilization

Everyone knows that Western civilization (and probably Eastern civilization too) will collapse on December 21, 2012. The Mayans predicted it, and the Mayans have never been wrong. The question is: how will you survive? The answer is simple.

An Absorbing Errand

In essence the defiance is about using time and skill to elaborate on an expression of feeling — or an object — beyond the crudest utility, and, by doing so, to endow it with an energy, an attractiveness, an aesthetic that invites the interest and recognition of others, sometimes even after much time has passed.

Let The Bad Times Roll

As Ochs delivered the song’s most incendiary lyric — “Serve your country in her suicide / Find the flag so you can wave goodbye / But just before the end even treason might be worth a try” — McCarthy threw his arms in the air, and the crowd erupted.

Sunbeams

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

James Baldwin

Free Rent At The Totalitarian Hotel

I lived downtown in an apartment complex that, for its Second Empire facade, transient tenantry, and despotic manager, I had dubbed the “Totalitarian Hotel.” The manager, Mrs. Vollstanger, was a gouty old Prussian and always wore pearls and thick, embroidered white sweaters.

Water, Water Everywhere

Ran Ortner’s Love Affair With The Sea

If I could convey the ocean’s paradoxes, its ferocity and tenderness, in the same image, I could possibly awaken the viewer to a place where language drops away. By setting these massive, lush paintings in the artificial environment of the contemporary gallery, I intend to make it feel astonishing, to have an impact so immediate that it becomes what Kafka called an “ax for the frozen sea inside us.”

The Communion Of Strangers

Books lift us out of the smallness of the present and into history, out of the smallness of ourselves and into humanity. Most readers favor modern books, equating old with irrelevant. But just as a phrase in one’s native language jumps from a page of foreign text one is struggling to translate, familiar passions jump from the strange depictions of earlier times.