Jonathan

3 hours ago, Peter said:

I thought President Trump’s bid to buy Greenland was a spoof. But is it? A second, large meteor crater was just found under its ice pack. Coincidence?

I think Trump's probably been reading too much Clive Cussler, and is hoping to find ancient shipwrecks there.

J

https://images.app.goo.gl/mcu6uuSnxqmcAvJ1A

12 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Breitbart having a lot of fun:

CNN’s Chris Cuomo Threatens Violence After Man Calls Him ‘Fredo’: ‘I’ll F*cking Throw You Down These Stairs’

Michael

Heh. "“You’re a much more reasonable guy in person than you seem to be on television.” Lol.

J

19 hours ago, anthony said:

Gosh, what a sourpuss view of romanticism. And literalist. Lighten up and fly a little. 

Yes, Tony, I already knew that my applying Rand's method of judging art and artists to her and her own work upsets you. And, yes, her method is indeed sourpussery at its sourest.

J

23 hours ago, anthony said:

The consuming drive of the man was to create, in that, I agree with you that he was passionate - "excited" - about his innovative design for the building, hardly aware or caring of who the client was, the government.

No, he knew and cared. Re-read the novel. He knows exactly what a rip-off and fuck-over the project is. He is morally opposed to it, at least in thought. In action, he decides that the thrill of working on the project is worth joining in on ripping off and fucking over those who are being forced to pay for it.

Quote

Just to see it made.

Yeah, he adopted the principle of the ends justifying the means.

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What I take away about dynamiting it, was that for the purpose of art, her novel, a man's moral-values precedes and tops property rights.

That's just wrong-headed typical Tonyism.

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How else was Rand to make her crucial point, by having Roark doing anything tame, less dramatic and controversial? Simple creative licence.

And you'll be extending that generous attitude to all other artists and works of art, right?

Just like Rand did?

Heh.

J

On 8/8/2019 at 12:17 PM, ThatGuy said:

From Letters of Ayn Rand:

Is Wilder-Lane's review available anywhere that you know of? I'd like to read it.

J

Poetry, Wilder style:

Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man
Washed his face with a fryin' pan
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel
And died with a toothache in his heel...

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

There's an article that gives nine key themes in the manifesto that have nothing to do with what the lefties and anti-Trumpers are yelling about (and the overwhelming vast majority of what they are yelling about is not in the manifesto).

Nine Themes in El Paso Shooter’s Manifesto the Media Ignored to Blame Trump

The coverage of this by the mainstream fake news media and anti-Trumpers is a bad joke told by a smarmy asshole.

Michael

Thanks for the link.

An additional ploy us the erasing of Dayton. El Paso is being cited constantly by the press, but Dayton not so much. The shooter doesn't fit the Narrative. So, Dayton needs to be forgotten while El Paso gets hyped.

17 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Jonathan,

I've done a lot of study in creative writing and screenwriting. Some of your analyses remind me of the technical reason always given by the instructor (or even the director) when a plot hole in a famous film comes up: Because without it, there wouldn't be a movie.

 

Michael

13 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

There wouldn't be a novel without Roark fixing up Keating's work, Dominique being flat-assed stupid, and blowing up the housing project. Etc 

--Brant

and that was just an overture to AS

My criticisms here really aren't about the novel, but about the Objectivist Esthetics, and some of Rand's other bluff and bluster. C'mon, you boys know me. I like to apply a person's method of judging others to them and their own work.

J

21 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Jonathan,

Man do we get different messages from The Fountainhead.

To me, this is a book about the spiritual component of the prime mover of humanity...

No, I get that, too.

Recently you wrote a really nice post about the aesthetic trance. In The Fountainhead, Rand achieved that with me, and she succeeded in suspending my disbelief. My comments on the technical holes and deviations are post-trance analyses.

J

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Jonathan,

I don't know...

Lying to the bad guys?

What made them "bad guys"?

In Roark's case, what made them "bad guys" was the fact that they didn't like his work and wouldn't hire him. He was too independent for their tastes. They wanted someone who would be more traditional in his architectural designs. Such a mindset is unappealing to me, but it's not a crime. Someone's holding that point of view doesn't make them a "bad guy," and it certainly doesn't justify force, or property destruction.

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Punish other people? Instead of blowing up a building, didn't Ragnar Daneskjold sink ships, not just one but many? And how about that little detail of Dagny shooting a guard dead in cold blood?...  

Yes, but the difference is that Ragnar was opposed to government projects, and wanted nothing to do with them, where Roark was excited about working on the government project. Ragnar was retaliating with force against the initiation of force. Roark's dynamiting was the initiation force.

What would a truly Objectisist Roark have done instead? I think the answer is that he would take up the challenge, design the project for himself, show it to private investors, and convince them to fund it privately.

But, aesthetically speaking, that probably wouldn't be very exciting, at least not as exciting as blowing up a building and then having an opportunity for a emotionally powerful speech in a courtroom scene. 

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Commit fraud? Didn't Hank Rearden commit massive fraud to get his divorce from Lillian? And how about all those government bribes?

I can come up with many, many examples...

Yes, there are many things in Rand's art that are not consistent with Objectivism. That fact blows a few holes in Rand's theories about art and aesthetics.

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I see it more in her early adoption of Nietzsche and later discarding of him...

I see her as not having quite discarded Nietzsche as much as she claimed, neither during the writing of the Fountainhead, nor during Atlas Shrugged. She never quite rid herself of old Friedrich. (She might have succeeded better had she given up on hating Kant, and actually studied and understood him).

J

17 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Jonathan,

Toohey knew.

Michael

 

EDIT: An added thought. The rigged system did not put Toohey on trial even though he orchestrated the whole thing as an intentional fraud on his side from the beginning.

Yeah, Toohey was a douchebag.

And Roark pretended not to think of him. And then he punished other people. And committed fraud.

Dont get me wrong. It's a fabulous novel. It's just that it has some holes. It doesn't say what Rand intended it to say. And it's not consistent with Rand's later philosophy, despite her claim that she always held the same beliefs.

J

19 hours ago, anthony said:

 

"...my purpose is *not* the philosophical enlightenment of my readers..."

Authenticity in romanticism - why it is Romantic "Realism". Roark made a mistake and is still, unparadoxically, his author's "projection of [her] ideal man". If he were always "perfect", always getting "perfect" results, a reader would find it hard to relate to him, and lose interest - he'd consider that mere sentimentalism, out of touch with tough reality as he knows it to be. Many readers need a character with guts, not scared to stick up for his/her convictions and values, at the risk of making errors of judgment and knowledge.

Mistakes and errors? Heh.

Oopsie, I blew up a building. Oh, well. Forgive me?

On 8/2/2019 at 6:04 PM, Max said:

There is nothing moral in Roark's blowing op that building. He made a serious error of judgment by surreptitiously helping Keating in designing that building, and therefore he would have had to bear the consequences when that went wrong. In spite of all the noble excuses for a "morally perfect hero",  this was just an unwarranted  act of scorched earth.

Roark also was wrong to commit the fraud of passing off his work as someone else’s for the purpose of subverting the owners’ right not to hire him. And his courtroom speech was irrational as hell:  He tried to claim that he had a contract with the people from whom he specifically and intentionally hid his participation in the project.

i think a typical reader can tell that Rand hadn’t yet worked out her philosophy of Objectivism while writing the novel.

4 hours ago, merjet said:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” - Atticus Finch

Sounds like something Ed Gein would say.

22 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

An awkward tense pose is a Rodin thing, isn't it?

Rodin's sculptures often present people like that. 

(Oddly enough, in a discussion I had with Michael Newberry years ago on the old SoloHQ, he was not too approving of Rodin. Yet here I see him doing the same thing as Rodin constantly did. I wonder if he's aware of this? I bet he picked it up without noticing, which happens a lot with artists in all areas...) 

He would take the above to be evidence of your inferior soul.

22 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I'm rambling right now...

Thanks for rambling.

Your comments, in conjunction with Newbsie's having fixed the "claw," brought to mind Diane Arbus's photo, Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., and its specific "trance" effect:

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2001.474/

Pretty creepy, and intentionally so.

Not as creepy, though, as certain O-vish works which were intended to be joyously romantic and not creepy at all.

J

On 3/20/2015 at 2:55 PM, william.scherk said:

Michael, do you see the same defects as I do? I see hip dysplasia and several other apparently broken bones. I'd say your modeling of the human form/anatomy is significantly off...

Newbsie has revisited his painting, Counterpose, and has fixed part of it.

Billy, he calls you an "uncharitable person" for having brought to his attention the reality of his difficulties with human anatomy. Or at least I assume that he's referring to you -- put perhaps I'm misremembering who pointed out the claw hand while we were all helping to mentor him.

Here he is from Facebook:

 

Made a change to a 29 year old work, Counterpose, oil on linen, 36x42”. As soon as I finished Olympia I revisited an older work stacked in my studio unsold. It’s one of my favorite paintings with a wild composition, intense color theory of yellow light and purple shadows, contrasted light and dark, and an intensely torqued pose. But the other day I saw that the forward hand should be elegant rather than square-like. An uncharitable person once said “claw-like.” I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, perhaps because the theme was the tension of conflict/contrast? Anyway I arranged with @georgieleahy to pose for the hand reference photo, and I dove in with tweaked the hand, extending the fingers, a much more graceful, natural, and inviting gesture, which coincidentally goes fantastic with the other hand. I’ll check it tomorrow to make sure I’m happy with it. Oh, so weird to revisit the color scheme, very intense colors of pure red, orange, yellow, and purple. #art #colortheory #revisit #figurativeart

 

32 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

...The corners of his mouth are turned down in a sneer or grimace.

His nostrils are flared.

His eyebrows are bunched closer together than when relaxed, which is mostly a sign of anger.

His throat is tight and we all know what that means.

Grimace is his predominant baseline countenance...

I don't ever want to become like Yaron Brook. I prefer to be happy.

 

You'we just a wacist Twump apowogist, and a wascawwy wabbit, so I expected you to tawk twash about the hewowic Bwook.

J

Shwill, angwy Bwook is in cwassic Peikoff mode, demanding that "Twump apowogists" nevew use the wowd "Objectivist" to wefew to themsewves, because Bwook owns Objectivism now, and you are not an Objectivist if you disagwee with him.

Way to go, Elmer Fudd. You make Trump look calm and reasonable -- and even truly Objectivist -- in comparison.

J

2 hours ago, Max said:

 

Why? Suppose you can...

There are other means of establishing position other than knowing "where his feet are."

All of the entities in the space, including the moving ones, not only cast shadows, but receive them as well. You're only considering a few of the shadows. Try accounting for all of them, and see if you can discover how doing so provides the information that you've claimed doesn't exist in th image.

There are also reflections in the space, and other indicators, such as the height of the camera's viewpoint and the relationships of the entities to the horizon line, and all of the information that such information can tell us.

And there's more. Scale of common objects, proportional falloff of lighting, shadow distance softening/spread, etc.

J

3 hours ago, Max said:

That picture (I didn't know then it was a still of a video) does not contain enough information to predict where the shadows of the walking people would fall on the wall behind.them.

False.

3 hours ago, Max said:

When I later saw the video and other photos, it became clear that the tall man (whose shadow was supposedly  "missing") was walking farther away from the wall than for example the small woman who followed him, just as I had expected.

I suspect that you're misidentifying either the number and positions of lights in the room, or whose shadows are whose, or both, and also maybe the depth of the room and the variations of its surfaces.

J

18 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Jonathan,

I had a specific reason for using that word and I borrowed it from audio processing for cleaning up sound and mixing (which I know more about). I knew they used this word in image, and I skooched it over without looking it up, thinking they used it in the same way. I just now looked it up for image, though, and it is the wrong word. In sound, artifacts don't have to come from compression.

So I don't mind using a different word at all.

Any suggestions?

I don't know. Maybe keep it really broad. "Phenomenon"? "Effect"?

J

Would you all mind choosing a different word than "artifact"?

Thanks,

J

On 7/25/2019 at 1:10 PM, Max said:

There is just not enough information in the picture to predict where exactly shadows should be seen.

There's an overwhelming over-abundance of more than enough information. And that's just in any single frame of the video. Consider all of the content of all of the frames, and there are multiple, layered, redundant means of determining whether or not any entity, attribute, action or effect seen in any frame conforms to reality. The space, the objects within it, and the motions are all precisely measurable.

Then add all of the visual information from other cameras at other vantage points...

Each participant on this thread who has commented on the visual evidence is right about some things, yet wrong about others. The issue is not that the visual evidence is insufficient, but that none of you has the technical knowledge to be making any conclusions, or to be dismissing anyone else's observations or concerns, or to be throwing accusations of kookiness or conspiracy theorizing at anyone who thinks that something in a photo looks a bit odd.

J

On 7/22/2019 at 9:13 AM, anthony said:

I don't argue with that. J's work is actually quite suited to romantic realism, what I've seen. But the making of art and the thinking about it can often be distinct from each other, self-contradictory and conflicting - his thinking is what I simply call the empirical-mystical mode in art. From what i can tell from artists and art critics etc.,, that's universally been ~long~ educated into artists and their following from some early philosophers and religionists. IE. The work of art "transcends" reality and minds. Which is why he hasn't taken on board - and tried to understand - the reality-consciousness-consciousness mode which, simplistically and broadly, constitutes the "Objectivist Esthetics".

Okay, so I’m an empirical-mystical thinker, but my art is “quite suited to romantic realism”? How is that possible? Doesn’t an artist's work reveal his naked soul, his sense of life, and view of existence? Doesn’t his style "project his psycho-epistemology and his view of man’s consciousness"? If I’m a misguided follower of early philosophers and religionists, and "haven’t taken on board the reality-consciousness-consciousness mode” (it’s so nice, Tony says it twice?), shouldn’t my art necessarily reflect my fucked up mindset, and be decidedly anti-romantic-realist? C’mon, there must be some sort of saving means of condemnation of my art, no? My work MUST contain something like "bleak metaphysics” or “revoltingly evil” something or other.

11 hours ago, anthony said:

Setting the tone for a fruitful debate.  ... and "meanings" are what you, not Rand, put into viewing art.

To repeat, objectivity starts at knowing what you are seeing - not mind-reading the artist, second-guessing him. Only then - one can see what he sees, and be affected by his vision or not.

You don't get "objectivity and rationality", so farewell. 

Buh-bye.