Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
It’s not that anyone is forcing us to humiliate ourselves; it’s that we’ve come to equate being known with being exposed.
Humiliation Rituals
Trying repeatedly to do something so potentially devastating requires being finely attuned to other people, tapped into your own ability for intimacy. And our culture of extreme individualism and extreme alienation, our culture of loneliness, doesn’t exactly make that easy.
Miriam Gordis • In defense of feeling
May 1, 2024
In defense of feeling
Miriam Gordis on “the loneliness economy” and evolving notions of romantic love. This essay was originally published in Small Wire.
Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in... See more
Mark Manson Quotes (Author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck)
Philosophy begins in wonder, and the art of it is to keep this wonder with you. Many questions are worth asking, re-asking, revisiting, rethinking. One must seek Knowledge, but be a little wary of finding it. Perhaps excessive, but one could say the idea of possessing knowledge represents a kind of complacency. This is what Socrates meant: Once you... See more
Simon Sarris • Long Distance Thinking
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.... See more
A quote from Man's Search for Meaning
On a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was talking about reading Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence early on and how unconcerned he is now with being new or original. He recalled a speech he heard by Brian Eno about his early ambient work:
It’s hard to explain, but it was very easy to be new at that... See more
Article
making-meaning and
We celebrate the fact that most artists today have a huge portion of humankind’s output at their fingertips at any given moment, but we rarely think about the fact that exposure and abundance can also become a paralytic. Eno said he wanted to hear a certain kind of music, so he had to invent it for himself. Who feels the need to make new music, when you can almost always call up music that is completely new to your ears?
Sometimes when I watch my 8-year-old making music, I note how unencumbered he is by musical history and how free he is of any need to be original. He is happy, for now, to make music that is a parody of what he’s heard, and in the parodying, he comes up with his own thing. It’s new to him and that’s what’s important.
In fact, this is the great gift of children: everything is new to them, and so it can become new to you, if you let it.
If your intention is to become a singer, Eugenio, then you need to sing and sing and sing some more. Whether or not you go into the studio when you have the chance is not really up for debate. It is your duty to yourself to do so. If you do not take these opportunities to sing, you may forever be that melancholy boy peering through the window of a... See more
Nick Cave • Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #260 - I’m 17 years old, and I don’t know if I want to record and publish an ep that I’ve...
Issue #260 / November 2023
3. Maintain a standard
Jalen yelled at me a few times for not getting my eyes on coach Jay Wright. We used to have this thing at Villanova: When the coach was talking, we would yell “eyes” so everybody would quiet down and look at him.
I was a freshman, so I didn’t really understand how important it was. Jalen really got on me one time. “Eyes, eyes,... See more
Jalen yelled at me a few times for not getting my eyes on coach Jay Wright. We used to have this thing at Villanova: When the coach was talking, we would yell “eyes” so everybody would quiet down and look at him.
I was a freshman, so I didn’t really understand how important it was. Jalen really got on me one time. “Eyes, eyes,... See more