The lesson at the end of the day is that the powerful are judged not by their ends but their means. If you deny people legitimacy then they will come back and defeat you.

Ai’s insistence on the permeability of art and life is more than a principle of avant-garde art, now almost a century old (Duchamp’s Fountain was exhibited in 1914): it is a necessity for the making of responsible art in China today. In Ai’s case it extends even to his constant interaction with the police and other official authorities. The artist and his friends, acquaintances and assistants are under regular surveillance. Just as relentlessly, he and his supporters film those who film them, confront those who confront them (even to the extent of frequently visiting police headquarters to complain about the surveillance and about provocative behaviour by police). Before Ai’s disappearance, these films were placed immediately on his website, along with detailed commentary.

Ai Weiwei's digital coverage of his own experience as an artist undermines a repressive government and its ideology, offering a point of view, if only temporarily, which simply would have been inaccessible in a pre-Internet age.

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

HYMN CXXIX. Creation.

1. THEN was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
2 Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.
That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
3 Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and form less: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.
4 Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.
Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.
5 Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then, and what below it?
There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder
6 Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
7 He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

The Rig Veda on Origins, likely composed between 1700 and 1100 BC. Unlike the very strict, black-and-white, and consequentially limiting origins accounts, which form the foundation of the Judeo-Christian belief system, these verses seem humbler, more sensible, intensely considerate of the lack of material evidence needed to formulate a cohesive theory at the time.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

This short film uses found digital video of people dropping their cameras, deftly stitched together to maintain continuity. It also evokes a wonderful sense of shared humanity. Winner of Vimeo's 2010 Experimental Award.

Presented with Kinetic Typography by Rogers Creations

From our high window we saw the towers

with their bands and blocks of light

brighten against a fading sunset,

saw them at any hour glitter and live

as if the spirits inside them sat up all night

calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up

to steep their tops in the until then invisible

yellow of sunrise, grew so used to them

often we didn’t see them, and now,

not seeing them, we see them.

The banker is talking to London.

Humberto is delivering breakfast sandwiches.

The trader is already working the phone.

The mail sorter has started sorting the mail.

        . . . povres et riches

        . . . poor and rich

Sages et folz, prestres et laiz

Wise and foolish, priests and laymen

Nobles, villains, larges et chiches

Noblemen, serfs, generous and mean

Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz

Short and tall and handsome and homely

The plane screamed low down lower Fifth Avenue,

lifted at the Arch, someone said, shaking the dog walkers

in Washington Square Park, drove for the north tower,

struck with a heavy thud, releasing a huge bright gush

of blackened fire, and vanished, leaving a hole

the size and shape a cartoon plane might make

if it had passed harmlessly through and were flying away now,

on the far side, back into the realm of the imaginary.

Some with torn clothing, some bloodied,

some limping at top speed like children

in a three-legged race, some half dragged,

some intact in neat suits and dresses,

they straggle out of step up the avenues,

each dusted to a ghostly whiteness,

their eyes rubbed red as the eyes of a Zahoris,

who can see the dead under the ground.

Some died while calling home to say they were O.K.

Some died after over an hour spent learning they would die.

Some died so abruptly they may have seen death from within it.

Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue.

Some were asphyxiated.

Some burned, their very faces caught fire.

Some fell, letting gravity speed them through their long moment.

Some leapt hand in hand, the elasticity in last bits of love-time letting—I wish

I could say—their vertical streaks down the sky happen more lightly.