Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.
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Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
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Dear Signore Direttore,
Now I am a-tella you a story wot I was a-treated at your hotella.
I am a-comma from Roma as tourist to London an stay as a-younga cristan man at your hotella.
When I comma in my room I see there is no shit in my bed - how can I sleep whit no shit i my bed? So I calla down to the receptione and tella: 'I wanta shit'. They tella me: 'Go to toilet'. I say: 'No,no I wanta shit in my bed'. They say: 'You better not shit in your bed, you sonna-wa-bitch'. What is sonna-wa-bitch?
I go down for breakfast into restorante. I order bacon and egga and two pissis of toast. I getta only one piss of toast. I tella waitress, and point at toast: 'I wanta piss'. She tella me: 'Go to toilet'. I say: 'I wata piss on my plate'. She then say to me: 'You'd bloody not piss on the plate, you sonna-wa-bitch'.
That is the second person who do not even know me calla me 'sonna-wa-bitch', an why is your staff replying 'Go to toilet', is that a modern tella? I do no understand, Please tella me!
Later I go for dinner in your restorante. Spoon and knife is laid out, but no fock. I tella waitress: 'I wanta fock'. And she tella me: 'Sure, everyone wanta fock'. I say: 'No,no you dont understanda me, I wanta fock on the table'. She tella me: So you sonna-wa-bitch wanta fock on the table? Get your ass out of here!
How comma this cristian hotel tella the guest in such bad manner?
So I go to receptioneand ask for bill, I no wanta stay in this hotel no more. When I have paid the a-billa the portier say to me: 'Thank you and piss on you'. I say: 'Piss on you too, you sonna-wa-bitch, I go back to Italy'.
Direttore, I never gonna stay in your hotella no more, you sonna-wa-bitch.
Sincerely
Dicci Elgre
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Most of man's problems in the modern world arise from the constant and unavoidable exposure to the stimuli of urban and industrial civilization, the varied aspects of environmental pollution, the physiological disturbances associated with sudden changes in ways of life, the estrangement from the conditions and natural cycles under which human evolution took place, the emotional trauma and the paradoxical solitude in congested cities, the monotony, boredom and compulsory leisure
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If I was telling that story in a '50s style, it would have been a melodrama, ... a story of 'An innocent girl falls into the seedy, sordid world of bondage and then sees the light and is born again.' If I were telling it now in an urban, sophisticated way, you would have a story about a girl who is a free spirit, who does these lighthearted bondage photos, then she crashes and she turns to religion which would be the tragedy in the modern view, because it's so polarized now that people see any religion as representing the horrible forces of puritanism. I was trying to comment on the sad confusion surrounding sex at that time, present it in a complex way, and give her religion a fair hearing too.
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They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
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The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
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To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
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For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.
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What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.
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Music has often been compared with language itself, and the comparison is quite legitimate. While it combines easily with actual language, it also speaks a language of its own, which it has become a platitude to call universal. To understand the significance of the organizing factors of rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color and form, the analogy of a familiar language is helpful. Music has its own alphabet of only seven letters, as compared with the twenty-six of the English alphabet. Each of these letters represents a note, and just as certain letters are complete words in themselves, so certain notes may stand alone, with the force of a whole word. Generally, however, a note of music implies a certain harmony, and in most modern music the notes take the form of actual chords. So it may be said that a chord in music is analogous to a word in language. Several words form a phrase, and several phrases a complete sentence, and the same thing is true in music. Measured music corresponds to poetry, while the old unmeasured plain-song might be compared with prose.
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By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
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Every modern war has had its root in exploitation
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Sports
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The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.
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And of the other things death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
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The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
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Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
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For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them.... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.
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A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
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It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.
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We hear much of chivalry of men towards women; but ... it vanishes like dew before the summer sun when one of us comes into competition with the manly sex. Let a woman sit, weep, wring her hands, and exult in her own helplessness, and the modern knight buckles on his imaginary breastplate and draws his sword in her behalf; but when the woman girds up her loins for the battle of life, ready to fight like a lioness, if need be, to put food in the mouths of her children, let her select for her field the living-room or the cooking range.
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Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.
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I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.
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After my father had seen me in five or six things, he said, Son, your mother and I really enjoyed your recent film, and I must say that you're a lot like John Wayne. And I said, How so? And he said, Well, you're exactly the same in all your roles. Now, as a modern American actor, that's not what you want to hear. But for a guy who watched John Wayne movies and grew up in Iowa, it's a sterling compliment.
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How rich are we that we can look on these worlds with the perspective of modern science ... that we do not have to wonder as did former men whether stars are jewels hanging from celestial drapery or peepholes in the astral skin of creation!
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world
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