Socialism and/or barbarism

and so we abandon ourselves and so we run desperately into any place and any company, sick and sound as rats

2012-02-02T06:25:00.000-08:00

New publication on recent times from Triple Canopy here.

IL SALVATAGGIO SELVAGGIO (A Letter to Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises)

2012-01-20T01:59:00.000-08:00

[S a/o B comes briefly out of hiding to share the following letter I am sending to the following men]

Dear Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises,

I was sorry to hear about the Costa Concordia. What a big fuck-up, a große Verhau, as Kluge would put it. A sad one to boot.

I saw that you tweeted that “our thoughts and prayers are with the passengers and crew” so I can tell that you’ve been thinking about it a lot.

The concern in the media has been, above all, with those passengers and crew living, dead, and unconfirmed, as it well should be. It seems a fair coverage, although I wish the Brits would stop gendering the wrecked boat: as a BBC correspondent put it, “because although she sits behind me looking fairly solid there, she’s not quite as stable as she looks. She’s sitting on a ledge and if she was to move not too far, there’s a danger that she could slide into very much deeper water. The authorities just couldn’t take the risk of having divers and other rescue workers on board if she was just that unstable.” The sad fact of a scuttled behemoth capsized just off-shore, guts bursting with marine-life killing fuel, may have certain elements that are funny. But it is not hysterical, at least in the sense of a late Victorian misogynist pathology.

I wish also that the horror of the situation could be described without the now-ubiquitous reference to it being “just like in Titanic” or to “a disaster movie.” I wish this only because the first is a disastrous, vile little flick whose name should not be spoken and because the second hints at something worse. I’m not speaking of the aptness of a Roland Emmerich film in giving us a visible manifestation of what it feels like to witness everything go to lurching, creaking hell. For The Day After Tomorrow certainly does that, albeit for unintended reasons. And however precarious our lives, we tend to envision an even keel that only rocks or runs rocky in the cinematheque and only for a prescribed duration.

Rather, what disturbs me, as I’m sure it disturbs you, is what this says about the brevity of our memory: after all, the Andrea Doria - that most Italo of Titanics - floundered and lolled onto its busted ribs a mere 55 years ago, and frankly, not as much has changed as we might like. It has since become the “mount Everest of scuba divers,” and it has been well and truly stripped by those reverse mountaineers, but 50 meters of water weighs less than the distracted fog that curses our memory.

I’m sure, though, that your memory has been leading you to think of Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga a lot recently, as mine has, because of what he wrote about the Andrea Doria. For one of Bordiga’s points is that a ship, much like a plagued city, is a space which is materially organized, structured, and reinforced around divisions of rich and poor, white and brown, men and women, consumer and producer, of value and worthless. And yet, in a moment of catastrophe, when the sea turns the hallways vertical and there are no elevators, those encrusted divisions are rendered null and void, except as quite literal barriers to escape or life: a luxury suite becomes barricaded by water, a modern glass table becomes an aquatic guillotine, insisted-upon private quarters become little jail cells inside a broken bathysphere. And so, as Bordiga puts it: “It was the same story with the rehabilitation of the great cities, from which, as Marx and Engels stated from the time of the gutter of Paris, Haussmann, the poor had and will have everything to lose and nothing to gain. The upper bourgeoisie was told by clever technicians and speculators that epidemics do not know class divisions, even in a rich man’s house one can die of cholera. So get on with it, Demolition Joe! So now when the ship goes down, so too do the first class passengers, half clad like the poor devils, hardly togged up in their dinner jackets.”

That is, when the ship sinks, one has a single choice: flee like rats or die like rats.

Of course, the questions follow, spelled out in headlines:

“How Could This Happen to a Modern Ship?”

“Have Cruise Ships Gotten Too Big?”

The proposed answer to the former seems to be that of “human error,” as the captain is accused of having fled, like a rat, and, worse, of having “buzzed the island” à la Top Gun. (It has been a bad week in the war of meat and machine, given that, having ruled out sabotage, the 2010 crash of an Ethiopian plane in Lebanon was just declared as the pilot’s fault.) As the official Costa line goes, the route was programmed and he made an unauthorized error. That is, he deviated from the correct line: he tried to be human at a time when such was ill-advised. The charts were right, and it was just bad behavior that ruined the good times for everyone.

The answer to the latter - have cruise ships gotten too big? - seems doomed to be: nah, not really. Because the fact remains that these were the exact same questions posed 56 years ago, the same debates, the same excuses. But firing a knife thrower doesn’t change the fact that knives are made, en masse, and that when thrown away, when made obsolete, they still stick around. They wait, sharpening themselves in the attic. They come back because they may be broken or dulled individually but not the figure, the blueprint, the ideal, which keeps its edge and impels cancerous-replication in its own image and with all the form-giving fire of industry. They get themselves made and remade. A cunning of reason applies to the construction of manslaughterous vessels: however gutted they may get, however wide a hole gapes their side or ruins their image, they will not pay the penalty of the universal. That will be paid by humans alone: those who drown and those who are said to have drowned them.

We might consider making things that can’t sink. One good way to do this is to not build boats. But there are landslides, and many houses are placed along the sea: once you open the door to non-sinkability, it’s hard to know where you reasonably stop. Or perhaps a boat made of water, but that seems far off. And certainly not ice, because much like fire, you can fight ice with ice, and certainly with rocks.

So maybe it’s better to recognize that accidents happen. Besides, it’s not as though the history of nautical movement has been predicated on the steady erasure of accidents. In his big study of the Mediterranean world of the 16th century, “microhistorian” Fernand Braudel looks at the way in which the stormy winter seas had long provided an obstacle to year-round shipping and, therefore, year-round profit. There were, of course, developments in shipping technology: more stable craft, faster craft, but the most significant technology had nothing to do with the shape of a hull or the loading of its ballast. It had to do with the rise of accident insurance, such that it became worth the while of merchants to send their products, and sailors, off to sea even when there was a distinct chance they would go down. And go down they did. Wreckage did not become less frequent, just better remunerated. For those who do not go down to the sea in ships, that is, for those who stay on land and take risks of a more pecuniary variety.

The Costa Concordia was hardly braving the dangerous waters (indeed, even now it leans toward the just out of reach coastline, as if pulled by a gravity that exists between things so large they desire to be mountains, not creaking vacation monoliths), but the point here - Bordiga’s point, in a way - goes further. It isn’t just that accidents happen and that the men of order who profit off disorder will learn to turn a profit all the same. It’s that they have to happen. Ruination and obsolescence isn’t a byproduct of capital: insofar as its project consists of the transformation of material practice and objects (that is, of human labor across time and of things worked on by that labor) into vessels of exchangeability, it therefore must renew this process. There is no other way. It has to build more, not because we need more buildings, but because those buildings are necessary as crystallized ciphers of exchange. And it must wreck them. Sure, a catastrophe, a plague, a swarm threatens to wreck also the divisions that structure cities, but that is not an exception. It is part and parcel of the transit of forced obsolescence and indifferent waste-laying.

It’s always hard to reconcile this as no one, not even the most nefarious mustache-twirlers, “wants” something like this to happen. Even with our little lapses, we generally intend the best. We reason, calculate, tabulate. We conspire. We watch our backs, and we sometimes have the backs of others. And yet we stagger forward across seas on which oil from a busted well below is burned. We build reactors, and they are upset when we barricade the railroads that carry away their waste. We make dolls that chew the scalps of little girls. We bury waste in a too-shallow grave and now you can’t eat the cheese. We throw away pairs of shoes and books, and we make more of them, and we don’t burn the ones that should be burned. We starve or are starved. We are surprised that rocks exist.

This brings us back to your specific unstable object, pivoting on its wound in the shallows. The ship surely can’t be used again. I doubt very much it will be patched up, retrofitted and recarpeted for its triumphant return. After all, cruise ships are already obsolescent. That is the pleasure of them: one gets to feel like one is in the first part of Titanic, and one never thinks that one may end up in the latter half. Or you feels like you are on The Love Boat, but only with the promise that you can, indeed, get off the Pacific Princess at some point, rather than the eternal recurrence of 12,948 minutes of naughty misadventures, unsurprising guest appearances, and unlimited buffet acess. And so, in their warmed-over obsolescence, one must tread lightly, I’m sure, and the last thing the industry needs is to be haunted by the specter of human error on its lumbering steed called MOMENTUM AND TONNAGE. So it can’t be salvaged, at least in the public eye.

Perhaps it will be sent to be scrapped in Bangladesh? That would be a real shame, though. To be sure, it might recoup some of the losses, ones that I am sure weigh heavy on you given that the high season of cruise booking is from January to March, such that this one unfortunate incident will cast dusk’s pallor over the whole year's fantasy of cruising in general. But we cannot patch up history, soldering new slabs of metal over a hole and slapping a fresh coat of paint, not to mention a new name, on what has showed itself a tool of manslaughter. And we cannot wipe it away, even if that wiping involves industrial-strength solvents applied by boys in south Asia.

As such, I write you less with a request than with an opportunity. I propose that you hand the wreck over to us to become the first-ever Museum of Salvage and Catastrophe (MOSAC). In so doing, we will christen the ship with a new name: IL SALVATAGGIO SELVAGGIO.

I’m sure the word museum gives you a bit of trepidation. After all, museums will be among the first to go in the insurrection: less because of the much-bemoaned separation of art and life than because they frequently include large indoor spaces with nice leather benches and surprisingly high quality bathrooms. Some may get excited about blowing off a little class war steam, and I imagine some pieces by Jeff Koons or Mark Rothko may end up worse for the wear. Yet a hostility toward museums is as relevant as a belief in their great importance: that is, rather silly.

Still, like the cinema used to be, they are on rare occasions a space to meet, talk, remember how wildly perverse Catholic ideology was and is, and learn to critique, if only through mockery. And for the most part, we get that what matters is the relation we have to things in the process of willfully ruining the relations of value and separation. And so, it may just turn out, that the proper relation, one that saves by scrapping the value still glomming on to the thing itself, will be that most derided of categories: the pretty, because the insistence on the pretty implies the devastation of the beautiful and its transindividual (in the bad way, in the sense of the commensurability of viewers) claims of being valuable. That is, the claim to have worth. Such that the most revolutionary attitude to most art, and to the spaces that crowd around them like so many post-austerity curvy Fortresses of Solitude, might be to say: it is damn pretty, but do we really need all the guards?

Our museum may be a little pretty too, if we play our cards right. What will we do in it, what will it look like? That depends in part on you, on whether you want to abandon it to us where it lies or whether you insist on removing it from the spot of its fresher scar. However, we can clarify one aspect of it: we can assure you it will maintain the theme of the oceanic and the disastrous. More than that, we plan to honor the ship by clarifying the specificity of its disaster and how that disaster clarified the obscure specificity of the ship. For the disaster, after all, was not that some died. Some may call that a tragedy or a shame, but it is not the specificity of this encounter.

The disaster was that it turned on its side. That it remained in the ocean but that it was no longer a boat. It became something else. A tomb, a trap. A series of pools, of caves.

When you watch the footage of the rescue, even if those filming don’t know how to really capture the aquatic uncanny and the shock to vision they are recording, you cannot but see the spaces transformed. Above all, by the fact that they have a new “floor”, a new angle”, their ceilings now their right walls. The line where the wallpaper met the paneling now tracks an arrow up to the ceiling. The swimming pool, with its retractable glass covering, now opens onto the sea, its ceiling first made a wall, then shattered by the urge of chlorine to become brackish, and it spills out. Doors become tunnels down, like flooded mines, or rectangular oculi through which to swim up.

In other words, the disaster is that it ceased to be a boat without having first been evacuated, discarded, cleared, cleaned, emptied of fuel, and scrapped of value. And now, finally, one can swim through a ship.

In accordance with the principles of salvagepunk, we believe that the core operation of salvage, however obscure, has to do not with scraping the last bits of value from the busted but with recognizing how that busting alone brings to light the specificity of a thing, the partial logic embedded in its whole, the buried holes, contours, properties, contradictions. Believing this, we see in the sinking of the Costa the visibility of what it deserved to be all along.

As such, we propose a few options for your consideration.

We drag it to shore and make of it free housing, criss-crossed inside by ladders, burrowing out new passages. It will, after all, have an oceanfront view. Its fuel will parcelled out over centuries, used only to feed the funeral pyres of the residents when they die and are sent out to sea on iron planks of Concordia.

We hack it apart to make sturdier rafts for those who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to try and find the means to live in Europe. The fuel is used to feed the motors that allow them to pass quickly through a sea without insurance or passports.

We drag the scuttled mass north, far north where it is colder. We cut further passages through its rooms. The water freezes. We skate through it, ice-dancing in a banal ballroom flopped on its side. We warm our hands around the enormous fuel-stoked fire that burns on the adjacent ice: the Flame of the Unknown Mutineer, which never goes out, in honor of all the unremembered who challenged commerce and empire on the seas.

Or perhaps, we go ahead and plug up that hole, carefully patch it with tons of metal, smooth it out, make it water-tight. We go ahead and scrap the inside of it, clean it up real right. And plant the whole thing upright, stern shoved deep, bow aiming toward the sun, in the ever-spreading Sahara and make of it a giant water tower. That fuel will be used to do all that fuel can do when it is taken from the leisure machines of the rich and given to those who need it: to power, to cook, to light, to weld, to fight, to heat the desert at night.

I wrote once that another world is impossible. And I also wrote that it is necessary, but only built from the gutted hull of this one.

What a fitting destiny for the Costa Concordia, having impaled itself on the sea, to open out its hull, halls, engines, kitchens, toilets, glass, pools, brass, and halogen to a different traffic. If a boat gets a funeral, let it be a funeral amongst eaters of the dead, a burial in the desert to become a brief, restricted, ridiculous, sad, and - thankfully - inadequate oasis in these years of simultaneous flood and drought.

Sincerely,
S a/o B

Changing a shapeshifter midstream (On the end of Socialism and/or Barbarism)

2011-12-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Those who have read or do read or do look at what has been been written, or photographed or arranged, for this project/not-so-alter-ego/archive may have noticed that it has of long late been added to with increasing infrequency. And that when it has, it appears more and more like a handful of pages ripped indiscriminately from a scattered pile of books, with no explanatory reconstruction.

There are a number of reasons I might give for that.

One of the more reasonable ones is a focus on other writing projects, loosely book-shaped, which, broken into the form of this thing, would make even less sense than its normal contents and would, I suspect, descend even further into an arcane personal mnemotechnic.

A second reason is the strange torsion that comes from having been away from California, and the US more broadly, for what has been the most striking political - and self-eclipsing of "politics" in the name and practice of the material, the courageous, and the difficult - sequence in a lot more decades than I have lived. We're largely accustomed to investment at a distance, where even word to gather and defend a space arrives on phones and screens. Still, the genuine fact of a continental and oceanic distance produces a thrownness, as well as a nagging set of questions about what would be "of use" to write or say, in the broadest sense.

A third reason is that I now live in a city where - barring my brief forays into teaching Neapolitans how to say, "I am old. You are drunk. We are old. We are drunk." - I do not speak any English, and my home tongue has come to feel as misshapen and unwieldy in my mouth as a shitty kiss. A dead language of sorts to be read and written but not spoken. And while S a/o B is not spoken but written, nevertheless, English and I are going through a "weird phase in our relationship." We are not, so to speak, on speaking terms.

All of these reasons are true, in their way. They are also false as explanatory devices for my relative distancing from this site, from what it was and what has been the alternately red, black, grey, blue, pink, gold, and neon orange thread of my thinking and practice of writing.

The far more adequate reasons have to do with what begins, certainly, as a particular relation to my particular uses of time and what, it seems, ultimately exceeds that relation, is caused by or captures some sliver of a sense of current modes of reading, writing, fighting, thinking, of trying to parse out this gorgeous and grotesque mess in which we live.

In short, it has to do with two forms of flattening and one of ephemerality which are necessarily linked to and bolstered by a form that tends to looks something like a blog.

The first flattening is a simple one, a visual one, even if its effects remain largely opaque. Namely, that unless one wants to get into the sheer insanity of dancing GIFs, colored fonts, and winking emoticons familiar from old school chat rooms and "jokes to brighten your day!" emails forwarded and promptly deleted, a blog flattens its material into a unified shape, slots it into a single scrolling stream. (Note: as a defender of communism as structurally a project of "bad taste," insofar as it is the flowering of the misuse of things, of going too far, of dwelling at the edges of the underutilized capacity of spaces, techniques, and material, I stand firmly in support of that insane frenzy of available styles. It's no accident that so fucking gauche and far left mean basically the same thing. The last thing we need is to shackle ourselves transhistorically to a cool minimalism. Ahem, Tumblr. Ahem, most of the design and layout that tends to get used for things "theoretical," "communist," "some hodgepodge of the two.") One may make slight modifications. But the same set of links, same background, same font, same time stamp, same address mark things that may be utterly heterogeneous. Things therefore get themselves blogged, a verb that acts on them, not just as the location in which they appear but in how they appear, in how they can be read.

The second, more pernicious, flattening is that produced by the internet as such, visual in the way that sand in our eyes is visible: the basic fact of what it means to read something in the same browser window that contains, on different tabs, someone's Facebook account, a recipe for pan-seared salmon, news about streetfighting in Syria, a shitty editorial from the Guardian, work email, plane ticket searches, mediocre - or excellent - porn, a wikipedia entry on Carlo Emilio Gadda, Anarchist News, Youtube videos of a panda sneezing. All things jostle for space and attention, and we are buffeted by a seriously tepid wind of distraction, with all the pleasures and low-level anomie it brings along. Even as I write this, I find myself quietly jolted by emails - an old friend, some spam, the excellent newsfeed from Anthropologie du Présent - which don't even have to announce themselves. We feel these things that ask us to consider them as we feel the hairs bristle barely on the back of our necks.

The ephemerality in question is Janus-faced, even if both faces are busy linking to the same webpage.

On one side, that of a reader. (And one is never "just a reader" on the internet: one is invited, made able, encouraged to comment, share, alter, cross-post, and, last but far from least, "like" something publicly, as if shouting in an agora, filled with many thousands of people, at the top of your lungs HEY THAT IS GREAT THAT YOU KNOW OF A DURAN DURAN SONG THAT I ALSO ENJOY OR PERHAPS I DO NOT BUT I LIKE THAT YOU ENJOY IT ALTHOUGH EITHER WAY WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS IS MERELY THAT MY APPROVAL WILL BE REGISTERED BY YOU AND BY OTHERS WHO PERHAPS DO NOT KNOW ME AND THAT AFTER ALL IS WHAT IS FRIENDSHIP IS IT NOT.) Things stick around, get remembered, have resonance, but because they are looked at - "read" is often too particular a word to describe what gets done - literally alongside, or briefly superimposed over, all those other instances of desired attention, they are ephemeral. They get shuffled away, they get buried, they jut a bit from the surface, get tripped over, brought back into circulation, return back to the lostness of sheer, dizzying quantity.

On the other side, that of a writer who writes publicly and immediately. The upshot of quick response brings with it a different kind of distractability: new information that keeps cutting into a line of thought, the distraction of something else that has just happened after the other thing that just happened, the sense that one has some "duty," if only to one's self and the phantom horde of possible respondents around which a self takes hold, to comment on things that fall in the rough arena of one's normal scope. The urge to write briefly and frequently enough to stay on course, the sense that what was relevant previously will now be of little interest to writer, reader, and everything between given that a new thing clamoring for our thought has stepped into the light.

These are all qualities which have been, and still are in certain ways or moments, both important and generative for me and many others. I have, as some know, a passion for the flat, the superficial, and the ornamental: I think that even aside from its fraught spatial metaphor, the very notion of depth - and with it, profundity, authenticity, essence separable from manifestations, transcendence - is one on which war should be continually made, as its friendly fire has consistently wrought terrible consequences for theory, practice, art, social relations, and daily life alike.

More specifically, the first kind of flattening involves both a saving of time (find a template that works and let's stop dreaming that every single thing that exists needs to be sexily designed to be worth reading!) and, far more importantly, a wrecking of the hierarchy of subject matter. Something may be longer or shorter, but it is still an entry in its own right, and therefore stakes a claim as being potentially equal to something extensive and well-thought through. For what I've done, this is crucial, less because some of the shortest things I've written (or small sets of images) are of equal if not greater import than things that go on and on and more because it simply makes it harder to tell. It goes a small way in busting the illusion of "substantive writing," which is, of course, something that matters enormously when it deserves to be substantive, but which should not hide behind its own bulk as a substitute for what is worth saying.

[accidents of continguous spaces]

The second kind of flattening further undoes, however slightly, the assumed importance of kind and scale and pushes further in another direction. Because we are intruded upon (or better, because we actively put ourselves in a situation in which our attention will be interrupted), it allows for a primarily banal but occasionally striking blurring of the lines drawn between genres and media of reading. Such that we may be reading Hegel, as some do, and suddenly we find ourselves watching footage from Yemen or a clip from a 1924 Swedish film, and - ever so rarely - these things cross-pollinate. And they get marked, embedded, and invested differently: the fact that I read an email from my mom while reading Max Nettlau or read Max Nettlau while reading an email from my mom means, improbably, that the issues at stake in one or the other may spark differently, the needed questions may find a content never expected, the structures discerned or concerns raised may find proof or counter-argument outside the expected ambit. I may not be able to tell Nettlau something of relevance - or, in the joy of friendship, something irrelevant, an imposition, an unwanted gift that reminds those we care about that we are constantly more than whatever we are at the moment of focused communication - that my mom wrote, given the unfortunate non-living status of Nettlau. But I can write to my mom of something Nettlau wrote, something that struck me, something I think that may move her.

As for that ephemerality, it is perhaps what was, and perhaps continues to be, the most important aspect of the form of online writing. Ephemerality is itself a slippery term and may designate far less than it appears to. After all, the material publication of a book, the construction of a building or a monument, the committing to film is no guarantee whatsoever that something will last. There have been plenty of those that did not last. That is ultimately the crux of Adolf Loos' attack on ornament, as off as I think it to be in certain ways: something too marked to its present will cry out for its dismissal or forgetting, if not outright destruction. And such is the properly ornamental stance of a blog, irrecuperably marked to and marked by the specific moments in which its posts emerge, and it points beyond itself to an understanding that what is ephemeral is not a consequence of its irrelevance but of its painful embeddedness. As such, it is a mode of occasional writing capable of registering how we do not understand occasions as "just occasions." We feel and think them as entire swathes of time, whole optics, tints that color our glance toward days passed or on the way. Even if we can only grasp partially at scrambled fragments, even if that is all we ever do, nevertheless, these brief occasions we read and pass through are the history of the present as much as an extensively researched study can be. The difficulty is only that we stay largely unaware that we are in the midst of reading this mosaic history: we treat it like the news, a keeping up with things, part of the morning, a check-up, a reminder.

I think all this is true, and I have spent just over the past three years trying to make sense and the most of it.

Giovanni Tiso, long one of the sharpest people to read and banter with me on the basis of what I write here, wrote something a few months back about my work. Fittingly, I meant to write a proper response to it and was instead distracted, in the middle of other things, busy changing physical spaces, excited about something else. What he wrote was frankly surprising to me, not because of any misprision (other than my wariness about the term "activist," but we'll let that slide) but because, in the mode of the best critical engagements, he hit on something that I had been long feeling, something that underpinned all my work, but that I had not been able to articulate.

Namely, that what my work had been "about" - other, of course, than communism, horror, cinema, mechanized dolls that eat hair, cities, chipping frozen shit off the undercarriage of a train, salvagepunk, bones, value, camouflage, desire, looting, apocalypse, dirty thunderstorms, Wile Coyote, painting, decomposition, cosmic ice theory, decapitation, montage, living labor, melodrama, misanthropy, noir, love, radiation, Rome, acid baths, swagger, banality, Keith Sweat, wolves, stupidity, dialectics, and wallpaper - was generic form itself: the material forms of thought and the conceptual forms of matter. As such, whether or not this has been "genre-defining," what I can venture from my end is an understanding, damn slow in coming, that not in spite of but because of the mix of materials assembled here, this project has been ultimately and always about the problem of genre. The spark-throwing problem of not defining but passing through a genre and all that sits unstably in the forms and matters it inherits and shapes, all that comes to be precisely because of that recurrent incompatibility. That is, genre doesn't describe what is: the very anxiety about what might be, and how it can be generated so as to be different enough to justify its existence yet similar enough to be processed and thought, is itself the generative action.

And in other words, that has been the axe on which I've ground, or found myself grounded, for a long while. For this has been nothing so much as, or nothing more than, a shapeshifter, one that was meant to muck about in the blurriness of information and thought we always confront. One which has aimed to enact that generative passage, less by taking that up as a topic than by doing it in the aggregate form taken by this long scattered mess of writing. I imagine the consequences of this - the fact that the "thread" of this ranges through relatively direct film comments, very indirect film writing, horror fables, micro-slabs of theory, political announcements, photographs, translations, extended critical writings - have been of interest to some and to the utter distaste of more. And perhaps some in between, who might have come "here" for thoughts on riots and have had to wade through fake postcards, theories of montage, unexplained film stills and likely stopped wading. For those who came for the fake postcards or reflections on montage, sorry about all the riot stuff, but they are, you know, important.

I have, at times, written explicitly of genre, particularly in the film vein, particularly through trying to make sense why the hell people don't recognize that much of what has fallen under the cultural industry mark of "genre films/literature" is much of the most compelling material we have to consider, tangle with, deploy, and enjoy. And not just because of the enjoyment that comes from things with fangs, repetitive plots, cleavage, car chases, disguises, musical numbers, witty dialogue, and lighting that has no rational explanation whatsover. Because beyond this, it's not in spite of its genre status but because of it that genre productions are - and I mean this deadly serious - the best cultural terrain to think through the lived structures of the world. And again, not because we can see "the market" and its forces more clearly in them. It is because the fraught terrain of trying to make something that will be understood as participation in a genre means that the fundamental problems of reproduction (of social relations, of labor, of gender, of politics, of race, of cultural tendencies, of religion, of the species) as such, all the blind going-on that is the cursed motor of society as such, are exactly the problems around which such a "genre production" will take largely absurd shape, over and over again.

An explanation of "what you do" is always less relevant than the actual texture of what it is that you do, especially when the need for such an explanation is a need felt only by yourself. Nevertheless, I have some urge to give some qualification of the 857 posts before this one. I had, as do others, some basic motivations behind writing like this: the desire to not limit public access to writing to what has to be paid for, the desire to not have to wait for some other institution or publication to deem something worth sharing, the desire to produce things to circulate amongst a community, the desire to not limit things to that community. None of that is particular to me. It's what we do, the most minor part of taking seriously the attempt to make things like theory, literature, art, and historical analysis worth a damn. The "public" is a cursed notion, existing only in opposition to the private and therefore with dirty hands in the perpetuation of such separation. It is, however, a notion that we would be idiotic to ignore.

What is more particular to the lines of thought knotted up here over a couple years has to do with divisions of knowledge and the idea of expertise. I am lucky to have very smart and very fierce friends. A consequence of this is that for every single thing I "do" or "work on," I know very well someone who does or knows that thing far better than I do. This makes me happy: it means I have friends worth having.

It also, however, speaks to a fundamental orientation to those things I do or think about. Namely, I am what is pejoratively called a dilettante. A nicer term is a jack of all trades. Or polymath. Or non-specialist. But I prefer dilettante. And if I am good at anything, it is only this: I am a skilled dilettante. The word's roots lie in delectare, to delight. To take pleasure in the things you think about. Which is, after all, a good point of departure: to not draw such a clear distinction between is worth thinking and what gives pleasure, while still trying to toss out the mid-ground category of what you happen "to like." The word also implies a scattered, shallow knowledge of many things. There are instances, of course, in which such a stance should be meant as perjoratively as it has been: i.e. when one starts feigning expertise on things far more complex than a dilettante's knowledge could allow, when one trots out for the thirtieth time a single quote beaten into memory that mimes the place of a relevant complexity. But when we put the stress not on the feigning (which is not particular to dilettantes, just to bullshitters in general, and yes, specialists can and do bullshit) but on the scattering, a different portrait starts to emerge. It is a commonplace to say that the world has become more complex. This isn't especially true. What is true is the staggering expansion of mobility, at least in terms of what gets reported or what can be tracked down, and of access to an increasingly massive set of knowledge, conjunctures, fields of thought, objects. Not to mention that every hour passed heaps on the pile of things to think about more information.

A mode of deep attention to particular fields and topics is necessary. It always spills its ramifications beyond itself. But so too another mode, which moves laterally, which is distracted, which is dilettante. It is something like a handful of broken glass thrown across a frozen river: mostly skittering, mostly catching nothing, occasionally latching on, occasionally learning something in this glide over what is frozen below. I have tremendous respect for, and benefit from, that mode of deep attention. I try for it on occasion. But this other mode is mine.

Such a mode would remain inadequate if it was not connected to practices. It would be the equivalent of a compulsive reading of Trivial Pursuit cards or marathon bouts of Jeopardy watching. For this reason, it has to do involve a learning and using of skills, trying to not limit ourselves to a field, an activity. Many years ago, Benjamin wrote of something similar in regards to the newspaper as a necessary medium and practice and the need to "master the competencies in the process of intellectual production":

But we will pose this demand with the greatest insistence if we—writers—take up photography. Here too technical progress is the basis of political progress for the author as producer. In other words:the only way to make this production politically useful is to master the competencies in the process of intellectual production which, according to the bourgeois notion, constitutes their hierarchy; and more exactly, the barriers which were erected to separate the skills of both productive forces must be simultaneously broken down. When he experiences his solidarity with the proletariat, the author as producer also experiences directly a solidarity with certain other producers in whom earlier he was not much interested.

This is, despite some caveats about the notion of "solidarity with the proletariat," still entirely relevant today, precisely because the pseudo-demotic nature of the internet as a site and tool of "intellectual production" has generated a sham version of it, a version in which the elision of boundaries between practices too often leads to nothing more than a glut of banality. Extended beyond the internet, this total picture results alternately in a terrifying storm of loggorhea and in the material publication of things of no interest whatsoever, which will come to constitute a real material interest (insistence that they get bought) and material presence (in the places of buying) that, at the end of the day, will come to constitute something that approximates interest.

But as always, such a sham version is not the reason to flee: it is the insistence that one has to dwell in that toxic muck and do it better. In some way, I understand what I and others have tried to do as a version of this refusal to not flee. Dirty hands are unavoidable. The question is dirty with what.

For the heart of all this, however, is a massive failure, a conservatism in which I have been a part, willing or otherwise. Namely, that this still constitutes something that I do, bound to my particular arrangement. I would like to believe that this is a consequence of not having chanced into the correct constellation of those with whom I would write/film/design/think well, despite knowing many without whom I can do none of these. I do believe that this will change. At that point, I will happily watch what remains of my more determinately individual practice wither away.

However, the fact remains that things get shared, taken up, used otherwise at cross purposes, made part of an us. And if we do not break the model of the individual author as much as we must, we can nevertheless still hold to fully working out the collapse of the hierarchy of those who get sanctioned as authors. We want to hold toward forms of distribution and production of modes that are free, stolen, passed around. The fact of its banality does not mean that it is not a material practice with a real future. And we can, as we build up the capacity toward that practice, equally commit to breaking that other hierarchy of who gets to write what and what gets to get read. Such is the task of working out one version of the collapse of separation by the full blurring, cohabitation, and dilettantism of modes, styles, genres.

Nevertheless, I find myself increasingly incompatible with the version or banner under which I was doing something along these lines. I have never undestood this as a blog, other than when it was just getting going and I was therefore indebted to, beneath the sign of, or traveling alongside other things that more resembled "blogs."

Now it is fully not, as I am ending it, ending this thing.

I could give further qualifications and reasons, but those will only be relevant and of interest if what follows shows itself to be substantively different. It may not. What matters is an attempt to become uncomfortable with what may have been a specific form developed here but which has come to feel too comfortable, too inherited.

As such, this blog will no longer exist as it has before. Two things emerge in its place, which address partially the increasing incompatibility between - at least - two modes in which I work.

First, starting in January, a new online writing project called The Noonday Shadow, at a new location, which will allow for much better incorporation of chunks of film. There will appear things that are, at least in their structure, closer to "essays."

Second, Socialism and/or Barbarism will no longer be a blog but a publication. Something between a series of books/magazines/journals/zines/posters. This allows for intended delimitation and proximity of certain materials and questions (i.e. small continuities across a single issue, more restrained echoes that may take shape) and for the chance to actually change the form in a way that works with, or usefully against, the issues at hand. Each one will be a collaboration with a different designer, a bit of amor fati in which I take my hands off and see what gets done with whatever I had in mind. (If you happen to be a designer who would be interested in working with me on this, get in touch with me.) They will be PDFs, as part of the understanding how we read such a thing differently. Some may take paper form. They will still appear on this site, starting in January.

Also here will be writings, should they happen, that seem important to be more immediately accessible and shareable, particularly regarding things of a political nature.

To all who have read what has been Socialism and/or Barbarism, a sincere and genuinely sentimental thanks for making my last years a lot better. I hope that this has, in some small way, occasionally done that for you. And hope that you will continue to read it as it mutates mid-stream. It will continue to exist for the rest of my life, in whatever form seems right, until the moment in which what it is we do together makes this all beautifully irrelevant.

Yours,
ECW

The only thing for a citizen to do to be of service to his country is to patiently wait for the day when he can cooperate in a material revolution

2011-12-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

A very short film.

For Carlo Pisacane, via Jean Vigo and a lost language of the steppes. The barbaric restoration of order. An insurrection rewinds like snow.

---

On a related note:

"There are some who say: the revolution must be made by the country. This there is no denying. But the country is made up of individuals and if we were quietly to wait for the day of revolution to come instead of plotting to bring it about, revolution would never break out. On the other hand, if everybody were to say: the revolution must be made by the country and I, being an infinitesimal part of the country, have my infinitesimal portion of duty to do and were to do it, the revolution would be carried out immediately and would be invincible because of its scale."

[Pisacane]

This is precisely the problem, even if the historical deck - and how it played out - is stacked against the pro-plotting line, at least of the relatively micro form of "plots." Because it is the basic split in question, the one that can be restated as:

we cannot bring about a revolution of "our" own accord [for if it lacks the scale of that mass of the infinitesimal, then it is nothing],

and a revolution does not happen of its own accord [for the set of objective conditions for which one might wait are themselves dependent upon individuals doing all those things that inflect and make up the infinitesimal, and profoundly difficult, portion of the duty; a duty which is itself dependent upon, and only able to be thought through and measured against that process on the scale of a nation; through and against the process of ceasing to be nations, ceasing to be individuals]

Even so, we still aim to conspire. Desperately, invincibly.

The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows.

2011-12-13T00:14:00.000-08:00

We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”

"one might reasonably view man's entire development and creation of civilization as a process of fortifying against wolves"

2011-12-10T10:26:00.001-08:00

Further evidence in the ever-swelling file of reasons to both loathe the state and a good portion of those who themselves loathe the state, albeit from "the other side."

Moreover:

In early November, Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, made his own political contribution. Thrilled at the testing of a drone aircraft manufactured in Montana, Baucus declared: "Our troops rely on this type of technology every day, and there is an enormous future potential in border security, agriculture and wildlife and predator management." A manufacturer's representative claimed his company's drone "can tell the difference between a wolf and a coyote." Pilotless drone aircraft used by the CIA and the Air Force to target and kill alleged terrorists now appear to be real options to track and kill "enemy" wolves.

A world more and more commonly knit by the cross-purposed use of murderous technics and all the absurd transpositions it brings about: wolves as terrorists, terrorists as wolves. Property is a sheep. Coyote citizens and lupine gangs. In that vile thought - a drone can tell the difference between a coyote and a wolf - we hear the real thought, the one carefully not spoken, booming in the heads of those who see "an enormous future potential": so you're telling me it can tell the difference between civilians and rioters? Better yet, it can tell the difference between white and not-white, can't it?

Recession proof

2011-12-07T15:17:00.001-08:00

A dry hell comes home to roost

2011-12-07T02:15:00.001-08:00

The gap between catastrophism and realism - already as minute and over-loaded as a tectonic crack - presses closer still. The further sense that aside from the flaws of any outmoded notion of universal civilizational progress, with the Occident leading the shining way, such a story has, if anything, reversed: it is in those areas of the world called backward that one actually reads the opaque signs of the future. If there is an owl of Minerva, it is Tyto capensis, and it has long been flying south, circling low over an expanding world of drought.

'Even the northeastern United States - a region normally omitted from any serious talk about domestic drought - is at risk, said Dorothy Peteet, a senior research scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

A series of sediment cores drilled from New York marshes confirm that mega droughts can grip the region: One spanned from 850 to 1350 A.D., Peteet said. And shorter, more intense droughts have driven sea water far up the Hudson River, past towns such as Poughkeepsie that depend on the river for drinking supplies.

"We're just beginning to map the extent, but we know it was pervasive," she said. "There are hints of drought all the way up to Maine."'

Hell...

2011-11-30T13:06:00.001-08:00

That atomic bomb called mass culture

2011-11-29T08:48:00.001-08:00

(A Miss Vie Nuove contestant. Vie Nuove was the weekly magazine of the Italian Communist Party. In other words, this is a PCI beauty pageant, which searched for "a healthy and robust girl of the people of typical Italian appearance")

Certainly something tremendous happened. We are all afraid of the atomic bomb, but that only could go off. This has already exploded.

Vittorio De Seta, on the post-war transformation of Italian working class culture.

Pasolini's "anthropological mutation" finds its post-nuclear fallout origin story. And the weirder of the politically-edged pop directors - Questi, Sollima, Germi, Bava, Corbucci - come to appear like so many Toxic Avengers, who went deep into the radiation zone of mass culture and brought back an unholy glow, one that neither the PCI nor its further left antagonists knew what the hell to do with.

A protest against that which will outlast the collapse of capital

2011-11-29T01:11:00.001-08:00

“It’s like a friend telling you that he will stop smoking in 10 years,” said Jochen Stay, spokesman for the anti-nuclear body Ausgestrahlt (Radiated), which has mobilised protestors against the shipment.

“You are not going to congratulate them just yet.”

Germany, like the rest of Europe, has no permanent storage site for the waste, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years.

RIP Ken Russell

2011-11-28T16:27:00.001-08:00

Thanks, you big-hearted, wide-eyed bastard.

Funeral note: The narratives about the "stuffiness" of British cinema - which Russell allegedly and actually helped rupture - are largely a consequence of people who have actually watched very little of that cinema. See here three of my loves - Gainsborough melodramas, Ealing comedies, and Hammer horror - as prime counter-evidence to a story about the alleged dominance of kitchen sink realism. That tale of dominance has about as much truth as declaring Italian neorealism as the primary touchstone/inspiration/wet blanket against which Italian cinema responded: it is true for certain audiences (such as the kind who think that directors like Russell "cheapen everything they touch", as Pauline Kael put it) and it structurally reinforces itself as such over time, but it has never actually been the case.

What someone like Russell did - and does, because films do not become past tense because their director dies - was to make the kind of films that had been made before but to take off their blinders and belts, to give them the full room to breathe that they had long been panting toward. To peel back the wet blanket veil and not restrict ornate set pieces to a space through which one passes, but to hang out in them, to scream and make a racket, to wrestle with it and get sweat on the carpet, to let the eyes embedded in the breasts glance around, to stand shoulder to shoulder with Witchfinder General and declare that if one wants to make a historical film about a dark past, one better make damn sure that film is as darkly ornamented, lurid, and self-contradictory as the very history it faces then and now.

Anonymous letter from Cairo

2011-11-25T14:39:00.001-08:00

[Anonymous letter from a comrade in Cairo. Crucial. Please share and spread widely.]

Dear friends,

I am since 4 days in the middle of shooting and nerve gas, here in Bab El Louq square, 5 minutes behind Tahrir square, close to the Ministry of Interior. Right out of my window, I can see the fire of the guns and the gas cartouches and the motor cycles that take the injured out of the battle bringing them to the field hospitals, one after the other... hour by hour, day and night...There is shooting and this strange nerve gas all the time and at around 10:30 p.m. yesterday night the shebab were attacked for one hour by 30 unknown uniformed special forces in black with different live ammunition and gas, no street lightning at all, the scene only lit up by the fire of the guns, the dim light of the moon and some strange phosphoric light at the end of the street leading to the Ministry of Interior. After an hour, they reconquered Bab El Louq square where I am living with nothing than stones and unbreakable determination and solidarity. Into the face of the shooting and the attacks onto their bare bodies, the shebab were shouting into the night "hurriya" (freedom) and "madaniya" (civil state)... not "ilsamiya" (islamic)... In parallel, Tahrir square full with a millioniya (a million-man demonstration) was attacked at least twice during the night with a nerve gas which you cannot see or smell. I saw with my own eyes how people collapsed suddenly around me. As far as I understand, it's not clear yet from where the gas was coming - from an airplane, the metro air condition below the square or thrown from above the roofs of the surrounding buildings. It's war against the population, it's incredible, it's a crime. Me myself am full of gas and mentally and motorically slightly but continuously disoriented, respiration tract burning. I am deeply shocked. Whoever needs to understand: the Egyptian shebab will never give up, none of us will give up any more. This is about holding on to your remaining or may be first becoming a human being again.

Below a video of the Egyptian campaign "Occupy", a call to all Egyptians and everyone who understands that this is not about Egypt alone, that this is about the fight of all of us for freedom and for a future for everyone in this world to substitute the logic of accumulation and theft and the oppression needed to enforce it, a call to join the open-ended demonstration and sit-in in front of the Egyptian embassies all over the world starting at 3 p.m. next Friday in your countries. The video is in Arabic and English, the middle part is English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZb6pJrZWR4&feature=player_embedded

Try to follow the news on the non-mainstream media (facebook and blogs) and the news on Al Jazeera, for those who speak Arabic preferably the Arabic version.

Also for those who speak Arabic below the link to one of the most important TV programs in Egypt after the revolution, the sequal that was broadcasted before yesterday. In it, the hosting journalist Youssri Foda gives space to three of our injured comrades to speak as well as to the well known journalist Bilal Fadl. The dentist Ahmed Harara, the blogger and activist Malek Mustapha and the photographer Ahmed Abdel Fattah of the Egyptian daily al-masry al-youm all lost their eyes due to deliberate shooting from close distances with what we call khartouche ammunition, a projectile with between 13 and 16 small bullets of different sizes, made of either hardened plastic or metal. Fired at close distances it can be lethal and if targeted at eyes, the eyes are destroyed. Ahmed Harara is a close friend of mine. He lost his right eye during the first revolution on 28 January 2011 and 4 days ago he lost his left eye. He will be forever blind but he went back into Tahrir square, right after his operation in the hospital. In the TV program you will see the young officer who fired the bullet and you will hear the voice of a shooting officer proudly reporting to his superior that he managed to get another eye...it was a premeditated campaign... targeting the eyes of the activists. But their response is to go back to Tahrir square, the square of liberation, because a shot eye is better than a broken eye as Ahmed Harara says in the program. They are not blind and they put everyone in front of the necessity to take position, no more lies, no more evasion. This is expressed very bluntly by the journalist Bilal Fadl in the program. The program also gives a good concise context of the events during the past month leading up to this second Egyptian revolution

part I with Ahmed Harrara and Bilal Fadl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbp_KEnVwqQ&noredirect=1

Part II with Malek Mustapha and Ahmed Abdel Fattah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0HNsO84asU

Warm greetings to all of you,
Anon

Beat the colour world with the black wedge

2011-11-25T13:06:00.001-08:00

--

As part of a spectrum so hypersensitized, black takes on a new, its full, chromatic stock... it takes on life, substance (the shiny black of satin is played off against matte velvet), it acquires the value of an ethical symbol... it inserts itself like a wedge into a colour world

(Michel Caen, on Fisher's Brides of Dracula)

--

"Is it blood?" asked Étienne, at last venturing to question him. Bonnemort slowly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "It's coal. I've got enough in my carcass to warm me till I die. And it's five years since I put a foot down below. I stored it up, it seems, without knowing it; it keeps you alive!"

(Émile Zola, on labor)

Urgent From Tahrir

2011-11-25T01:20:00.001-08:00

[this is from two days ago. It is still extremely relevant. Further news emerges about use of nerve gas and live ammunition. From here]

We are in the midst of a decisive battle in the face of a potentially terminal crackdown. Over the past 72 hours the army has launched a ceaseless assault on revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and squares across Egypt. Over 2000 of us have been injured. More than 30 of us have been murdered. Just in Cairo alone. In the last 48 hours.

But the revolutionaries keep coming. Hundreds of thousands are in Tahrir and in other squares across the country. We are facing down their gas, cudgels, shotguns and machine-gun fire. The army and police attack again and again, but we are holding the lines, holding them back. The dead and wounded are carried away on foot or motorbikes and others take their place.

The violence will escalate – for WE WILL NOT MOVE. The junta does not want to give up its power. We want the junta gone.

The future of the revolution hangs in the balance; those of us in the square are ready to die for freedom and social justice. The butchers attacking us are willing to kill us to stay in control.
This is not about elections or a constitution, neither of which will change the authoritarianism and violence coming down around us. Neither is this is about a so-called “transition” to democracy that has seen the consolidation of a military junta and the betrayal of the revolution by political forces. This is about a revolution, a complete revolution. The people demand the fall of the regime, and will stop at nothing short of that to achieve their freedom.

Foreign governments are paying lip-service to ‘human rights’ while they deal with the junta, shaking hands and legitimizing them with empty rhetoric. The US is still sending $1.2 billion in military aid to the Egyptian military. The army and police rely on tear gas, bullets and weapons from abroad. No doubt their stock has been replenished by US and other governments over the last nine months. Stock will run low again.

We ask you to take action:

Occupy / shut-down Egyptian embassies worldwide. Now they represent the junta ; reclaim them for the Egyptian people.
Shut down the arms dealers. Do not let them make it, ship it.
Shut down the part of your government dealing with the Egyptian junta.

The revolution continues, because we have no other choice.

From Tahrir Square / 22 November / 14:00

Mosireen, Comrades from Cairo, Defend the Revolution

RIP

2011-11-25T00:52:00.001-08:00

She died the day before Thanksgiving, near where I was born. Then I stood in an Umbrian town, perched high on volcanic rock, where it has been since the Etruscans, where there is thick the smell of woodstove in cold air that I know from where I was born, and where I stood listening to the highway at night as Italians hurtle up and down the A1. These distances and what crosses them.

Hearts and arms

2011-11-21T12:52:00.001-08:00

The fundamentally reductive structure of the news means that all will be reduced to a series of verbs, nouns, adverbs, and occasional adjectives, with static frames to hang a stone in the air.

The fundamental structure of social upheaval is not linguistic, and it is not iconic. It is bodily, in all that entails: how we run, how we get turned around, how we stumble, how we sweat, how we leak. It is indexed, not to programs but to these things called us. It is as messy and incoherent as these fleshy days of ours always are. It just brings that to the fore. That is its tremendous specificity.

We believe that these are specific days.

The gold bugs toil quick and remake the earth

2011-11-21T11:28:00.001-08:00

Gold, that solid universal substance in the proximity of which miners become fops, fops become ladies, rivers fill in, buildings arise and fall back into the earth, millineries emerge to clothe miners, fops, and ladies, painted words dissolve themselves like Dante's thieves, ships in the fogged night rise out of painted words.

Infamy

2011-11-19T09:31:00.001-08:00

That, by the way, is pepper spray, onto the faces and bodies of a university's students as casually as though watering a garden with pesticide. Some of these students were hospitalized for chemical burns.

Read this and spread it widely. It is tremendously important.

In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis...

"the ultimate contagion machine"

2011-11-16T03:06:00.001-08:00

Here

For the appropriate soundtrack for the reading of these diagrams, play the two tracks below simultaneously (the second set at half volume) and something like the thudding crystalline spheres of financial orbit in the age of implosion may start to emerge. Because, like the above, it simply doesn't work.

Indian Summer / splattered windows

2011-11-15T02:34:00.001-08:00

As always, the spambots that comment consistently on my writing produce prose of more subtle grammatic slippage - words chewed up somewhere down the line of a thought - and disjunction adequate to the slippery mess described than either news sources or I could ever do, with all our opposite attempts of clearly stated obfuscation for the former, and obscure clarity for the latter.

The atmosphere suggested a dress rehearsal for the production of "Revolution. Musical" On a warm afternoon, Indian Summer, black-clad anarchist splattered windows Whole Foods. The general strike began in pantomime. One of the audience started to sing, "protest".

[particularly good is the singular "anarchist" which makes it sound like the substance that is splattered against those windows rather than what does the splattering. (The windows were just dripping with anarchist this Indian Summer.) And then someone clads the whole mucky thing in black and someone starts to sing a song that has only one word.]

The poetry of the future will be written by algorithms employed by the mongers of "human growth hormone," dick enlargement pills, bulk office furniture, and identity theft, written not in the nights after work but in the very process of the sheer stupefying attempt to come across as if human.

GI Joe Vs Carlo Cafiero

2011-11-14T16:05:00.001-08:00

(Until 2'54", that is. At which point we're just back to the gold standard, backed by luxury good reserves. Hell, it was good while it lasted.)

in less than a week buying and selling have been replaced by rioting and looting... and you can't reestablish order until you print new currency.

Yeah, what did you?

2011-11-07T12:17:00.000-08:00

Yeah, what did you?
Yeah, what did you?
What did you bring me, keep me from the gallows pole?

Friends, did you bring me the silver,
Friends, did you bring me the gold?
What did you bring me, my dear friends,
Keep me from the gallows pole?

Yeah, what did you?
Yeah, what did you?
What did you bring me, keep me from the gallows pole?

The Road to Hell is Paved With Silicone

2011-11-07T08:13:00.000-08:00

In my house there's only one thing made of silicone.

The tree.

Further evidence that an anti-civilization position is not a choice. It is just an attentiveness to what our world is, its baffling self-baring of the heights of alienation and yes, you just can't make this shit up but yes, this shit still is made and that's where we're hung, tongues out, cruxed between that make and made. And so we don't choose to hate it, all we to do is turn ourselves up slightly, aim the eyes slightly above street level, or we put ourselves down, an ear to the street, and there we catch a bare rumble, a murmur from that dumb forest of silicone which has no birds in it, which has no roots but weighs all the same, and their needles do not fall, and their branches never droop yet their proximity to a cozy roaring fire will soften the polymers barely, open its substance a bit to let the polysiloxanes breathe, its backbone whispering ⋯-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O-⋯ out into the rooms of the living.

And how one cannot want to let flourish its total, utter decomposition is utterly beyond us.

2011-11-06T07:33:00.000-08:00

Listening to J. Stalin in the negative city

2011-11-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

I have seen a few things in my life, and I have taken photos - inconstantly - of a few of those things. Few have heretofore made me as happy as this.

I'm starting a series of "dispatches" from Naples. They will not be Roman Letters 2: The Lachrymose South, in large part because they are not to a series of ones, single letters, singular friends and comrades. But insofar as my life is a void of structure, these will perhaps produce a fleeting illusion of continuity across it, if only - likely only - for me.

They are titled Listening to J. Stalin in the negative city. Henceforth LTJSITNC.

J. Stalin is a rapper from West Oakland. (So named because, "he was short like me, but he was always smashin' on everybody.") "The negative city" is one of terms used to describe the immense Neapolitan sottosuolo, the underground. Not the underground as in "the metro," but the sprawling web of Greek and Roman ruins, cisterns, tunnels, roads, evacuated markets, empty grain containers, walls, and junk heaps that lie beneath - and mirror - the world built above it. A good 60% of this lived, teeming, leaning city stands on top of this other one.

The other day, when I was down in this other one, breathing air that is neither older nor newer, neither stale nor fresh, looking at Nike Air footprints in beige dirt, I was listening to J. Stalin. It made some degree of sense.

A Pervert's Guide to Provocative Agents

2011-11-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

"Police responses are not, in general, decided by individual police witnessing specific events, but by senior police and political leaders deciding how to deal with the protest as a whole. If the police attack protestors, it’s because they’ve decided to attack protestors, not because of anything the protestors did (this is also why worrying about police infiltrators is usually pointless; police may use provocateurs to stage-manage their intervention, but the form of their intervention is decided in advance and is independent of what either protestors or provocateurs do)."

Here

By the way, small note on the pervy libidinal economy of the internet and the pre-selection of content...

... there is no way to google image search "agent provocateur" without receiving results that are almost entirely from luxury lingerie ads.

Adding the word "police" calibrates the results to include the standard "use of circles to illustrate how you can, in fact, tell a cop by his shoes", but also to include a very Night Porter falange of lingerie models and a woman in bra and panties standing in front of a custom "Agent Provocateur" pink and black Police mini.

+ "anarchist" gives the more familiar results....

while "+ communist" treats us to a first result of a champagne cork popping off. At least it got something right.

+ "liberal" mainly shifts the optic toward the "non-West," plus the amping up of the spittle-rain of Tea Party hysteria.

But, more seriously: what "agent provocateur" truly indexes is the quintuple notion that

a) as Voyou notes, the fantasy that there is not already a state game plan in action, as if - notwithstanding the genuine, and vicious, decisions that get made on the ground on the basis of a general predisposition to treat people like that, such as the now-infamous of throwing of a flash-bang grenade into a crowd of people surrounding a man who would require brain surgery - the police were a neutral substance that responded solely on the basis of a catalyst such as "property destruction."

b) that there is a predetermined object - a "protest" - that already exists, that is capable of being "ruined." The clusterfuck of predictable media condemnation and predictable "left" infighting over the minor chaos of Rome a couple weeks back entirely confirmed this: the discourse centered around the idea that there was a perfectly good demonstration and a few shits - "bad apples", of course, as if the harvest were ripe, untainted, yet subject to the transmission of decay - who went and spoiled this safe, edible, lovely thing. What this implies, then, is a conception of a protest as something that "everyone" knows damn well how it should go: a set number of hours, the expected quantity of chants performed and flags waved, and a return home at the end, having put in a good day's work. The echoes of labor time are far from incidental. And who could blame some for wanting to ruin it?

c) conversely, that a situation itself neutral, undecided, not agitated but capable of being provoked. A slim beam of contingency.

d) the correct assertion that there do exist, at times, agent provocateurs.

e) the incorrect notion that there are not amongst us who, God for-fucking-bid, might not wish to be provocative, that we might not want our days to end up exhausted, excited, confused, gutted as an abandoned building, taken over by something bigger than ourselves, blown away by how previous lines of adherence came apart, uncertain of what has or what may come to pass.

Splinter cell

2011-11-02T04:04:00.001-07:00

Self-portrait as a thief of relics

2011-11-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

Thou shalt not offer to take another person’s place, or help out unless you’re not paid to do it ... blood transfusions aren’t paid for.

2011-11-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

What kind of strength is it you mean?

Well, where people don’t know how to say what they think or even think what they think but think it somehow. They live through it and take risks and make choices for it and learn to cope with what they feel but can’t think. It’s very powerful and very inarticulate.

You mean this strength is more genuine because it’s not just intellectual?

I wouldn’t say the intellect is non-genuine, except that rationality offers merely theoretical possibilities, so many slick outs and slick ways of manipulating people. And English working class culture is very non-manipulative. Rough, but not so manipulative.

In what sense?

In the sense that it was traditionally based on loyalty and bloody-mindedness. There wasn’t a sense of intricacy. Even solidarity was erratic. But there was a kind of non-performance principle. Never work too hard because that would be dropping your fellow workers in shit. The Working Class Goes to Heaven [1971] has it. It’s what Ealing comedies should have been, if they’d had more sense of the man in the cloth cap. The British cinema got it briefly — Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [1960], a few others — then lost it again. The Man in the White Suit [1951] discovered it, from a middle-class angle. One could summarise a proletarian Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not strive too hard, or jump through more hoops than you have to. Thou shalt not offer to take another person’s place, or help out unless you’re not paid to do it ... blood transfusions aren’t paid for. Thou shalt not expect good treatment. Thou shalt always look for the catch, for what the other person gets out of it. Thou shalt contemplate defeat, but not change yourself to avoid it. Thou must become accustomed to always being outtalked and made to look a fool and put in the wrong ... but Thou shall not be moved ... Oh, and don’t be downhearted. Something like that.

- Raymond Durgnat, 1977

[A strange stumbling onto a previous mention of a rather particular lineage I've been drawing forth between Ealing and Petri, between Teflon white suits and the bestial mutter of a busted worker. Namely, that of a) anti-Stakhanovism and refusal of work, b) stubborn inarticulacy, c) the problem beween class as relation and as status, d) sabotage, willed and unwilled, and e) the repetition of what can't help but go on, and what will, at best, wind up naked, without a finger, contemplative, or all three, while meanwhile the blood keeps getting let and no one is getting a transfusion.]

A Very Neapolitan Halloween

2011-10-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

"Young Jesus."

(Halloween, otherwise, is rather unremarkable in Naples. Sure, there are bands of kids in weird outfits walking into businesses or up to pedestrians and asking for free goods - "treat" - with the threat - "trick" - of violence or mayhem. But that is, after all, what they call a "daily problem" or "the informal economy" here. It's as year-round as the fire-crackers, which are, for the record, as daily as bread. Were one to record every small explosion across the city in real-time and stream them together, the sound of days would be that of a rusty gatling gun, rumbling on from dawn to dusk and back again.)

Wolves Were Thick In Staging Days

2011-10-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

Rome (Buildings go up and down meanwhile light goes diagonal; Held frames that hold heads that speak; Abandoned swine deposits; Rubbish art)

2011-10-28T00:41:00.000-07:00

--------

Komsomol

2011-10-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

From the other day in Rome. Fuchsia skirt, rifle training, frolicking half-dressed half-defined figures in the distance, and a dead-eye stare smashing of the fourth wall.

[Musical accompaniment thanks to Cartographies.]

No future

2011-10-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

Here's hoping...

Oakland

2011-10-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

This. (See also this and this.) General strike called for November 2.

In addition, for any who might fret about those perfectly good barricades - those fences put up to keep people out of a public space and torn down by those same people in retaking that space - going to waste, don't worry. They were put to much better use:

Arguably the least expensive (excluding the whole massive militarized mobilization and war being made on a populace in a time of the drastic cutting of social services part of things) installation of "public art" in America. Not to mention, it is both minimalist and repurposed. No wonder the city of Oakland is so hot to claim that they support the goals of the Occupy movement, all possible evidence (including both the attack and the fact that it is fundamentally impossible) to the contrary.

To all back home: whatever part of the body - thoughts are too diffuse, heart is too easy, too central, too stupidly trodden - is adequate to say is with you in full, across these oceans and continents.

[Note: I am far too far away to give any adequate account, but in case you haven't been following, get info at Occupy Oakland (here and twitter here). Some initial footage rounded up here.]

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. (Letter of Solidarity From Cairo)

2011-10-27T04:56:00.000-07:00

[via comrades in Egypt - please share widely]

To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, yourcomrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice fromyou about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call“The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations takingplace all around the world, its foundations lie in yearslong struggles by people andpopular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egyptand others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and theunchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that hasmade a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of governmentincreasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our citiesand homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to thecasual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally,that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustmentpolicies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank andIMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off anddismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign foodeven. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt andother countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase inpolice repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home toyou as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken bypersonal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of thepublic sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austeritystate now even attackthe private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of forecloseduponhomeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forcedthem on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experimentwith the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask themfor that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces ofpublic practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands offaceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to thesespaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, whobuilt these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable?Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed anddisciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proofenough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every dayin tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaceswithout being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spacesare fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live incities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible,exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. Wehave and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world,particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered theworst .

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “realdemocracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in theoccupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the termdemocracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, becausethere is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating whatwe can no longer wait for.

But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whetherthrough the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments orthe more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anticamping lawsor health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of ourcities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind itwould have us do.

We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said thatthe Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us,nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the policeto defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission; 99police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all ofthe ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected,officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and liveammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, andwe had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.

If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we willsurely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” withfetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have beenoverjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was noother option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested,tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten anddead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building,because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are sovery precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and donot stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keepdiscovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discovernew ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure inwhat you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, andfrom Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for whatyou are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.24th of October, 2011.

A thousand times

2011-10-23T02:56:00.000-07:00

Should ever one require a measure as to if a situation has truly opened the floodgates, if the social fabric isn't strained but rent, if the clarity of who is supposed to comport themselves how is obscure, if we have left behind a simple face-off of easily divisible forces, if, in short, the shit and the fan can no longer be told apart from one another, then this should do nicely. If it looks like this, the answer is: yes, oh yes, indeed.

A thousand times more heartening than a thousand pictures of property aflame.

L'angolo sterminatore

2011-10-23T02:42:00.000-07:00

I wanted to say only that I cannot be defined as a communist. Not an intellectual, not a communist. (Petri interview translation)

2011-10-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

Below, my translation of an interview with Elio Petri from 1979 He is asked three questions: are you an intellectual? are you a communist? why write a book on Elio Petri today? I've translated the answer to the second one. With two long notes below, on the problem of pieces and on what it would mean to "flank" the working class.

[The interview, in Italian, comes from: Alfredo Rossi's Elio Petri. La Nuova Italia. 67/68. Luglio Agosto 1979.]

Are you a communist?

Can I say that I am a communist? Sincerely, and at this point I don’t see how I can get by otherwise, I cannot say so, and not only because none of the communist chapelles [note: “chapels”, in French in the original] would take me as a communist, neither the old nor the new, but because, based on my old experience as a militant, to be a communist means to accept a discipline of the party, to sacrifice in some way one’s own subjectivity to the discipline of the party and to live minute by minute for the party, and I do not accept that.

I should add: my life is that of a bourgeois more or less anxious, more or less split, who as a youth was a militant [note: ha militato, “had militated” literally] in a revolutionary party, who saw the fall of revolutionary hope, who saw the degradation, with this fall, of the entire society in which he lived, and who no long succeeds in identifying himself with anyone of those forces that call themselves communist [note: his comments bear the sense also of those who try to hearken to an older notion of communism, to tag themselves onto that lineage], of which there are plenty, that are of a fratricidial nature and that continue to scuffle amongst themselves over the old theoretical problems as if they wanted to close their eyes to the new ones, unable, in any case, to generate new theory and even to recognize the dead part of the old.

If I refuse to sacrifice or to mortify my subjectivity, if I refuse any discipline, if I live like a bourgeois, what communist am I? One may say to me that there are many communists who live like me, if not worse, and who do not doubt that a communist must live differently. But what can I do if people don’t want to look it in the face and see it exactly how it is? I believe that a Marxist, or simply a progressive, who lives in a capitalist country, or even in a socialist country, is destined to live in pieces [note: see note 1 below] that “hold together” with difficulty. The conservatives are whole, because in their iron determination to conserve the world as whole as if it had no contradictions, they don’t suffer scissions, they don’t fear incoherence, and, above all, they are justified in their double, triple, or quadruple morals, which are proper to the things they want to conserve. In a conservative you won’t find even a glimmer, however faint, of a progressive instance. Meanwhile, it’s said, in a progressive there are quarreling and unwieldy pieces of reactionary ideology, not always clearly individualizable as such, that render the progressive’s inner consciousness similar to a miserable District Court or a verbose and inconclusive meeting where there are clumped together all those from the Red Brigades to the saragattiani [note: the saragattiani were the democratic-reformist group of the PSI opposed to a unified PSI-PCI front], and further, to the catholics, and futher, let it be said, sometimes to the fascists.

I am not saying that this state of schizophrenia is not preferable - for those who want to stay in their own time and live it and suffer it - to the monocultural and monospiritual whole of the conservatives.

To be progressive and to do nothing means, however, to brood over the unconscious desire to change nothing. To live as a bourgeois and to declare oneself revolutionary means to express with one’s own comportment not just a state of simple bad faith, but something more, the adhesion to the values of bourgeois society and the latent desire to render vain any research into new comportments.

The list of contradictions and “pieces” could stretch to infinity.

I wanted to say only that I cannot be defined as a communist. Not an intellectual, not a communist.

Those are two things that I wanted and could have been, indeed, even if I maintain that the two words clash with each other, that an intellectual cannot be other than a supporter of workers. [note: see note 2 below] On the other hand, and this I say not only as my own excuse, I do not even belong to that vast group of intellectuals and petty-bourgeois who since ‘44, in Italy, if not in Europe, flattered themselves with the right to represent the interests of the working class, knowing nothing of popular or working class reality, invading all the left parties and also the extraparliamentary groups, recommencing one more time the phenomenon of petty-bourgeois mimicry.

But what am I, then? I come from a family of workers, poor, if not impoverished. I chose instinctively to side with the workers. Circumstances brought me to make cinema. Which circumstances? The hundreds and thousands of films I watched and loved. The fact that the poor partake in boxing, pop music, or cinema. The fact that to make cinema didn’t require us to have a degree. The fact that the cinema was, in those times, popular art. I took a certain path, helped by a certain luck. I always strove to not deny myself, but I don’t know if I succeeded. In fact, I believe I didn’t. Now I live in a social strata higher than that from which I came. In this regard, I did succeed. Is this all? Perhaps yes. Perhaps there is little else to do. But perhaps no.

---

note 1:

The notion of pieces - pezzi - is crucial for Petri. Consider the pezzi in The Working Class Goes to Heaven. The contradictions of labor, and resistance to them, are organized around “piecework” and the shift from a durational salary tied to time worked and the general output of the factory toward individual rates, with the promise and threat of, respectively, bonuses and fines for going beyond or sinking below that rate. (Ultimately, the arc of the film - in the partial victory of the strike - is a return to the assembly line and that durational salary, with a new hell of a generally set rhythm and an accompanying cacophony that drones out the capacity to talk, argue, and distract one another.) Lulu, the protagonist-antagonist, cuts large rods of metal into smaller pieces. He distracts himself by thinking of, in increasingly rapid sequence, the piece he cuts and the ass of a coworker: un pezzo, un culo, un pezzo, un culo, pezzo, culo, pezzo, culo, pezzo… He loses a piece of his finger when trying to work too fast. The list goes on. If the problem of the “fragmentation” of the working class is generally an obsession of communist thought, in that film, Petri - the disavowing thinker and disavowing communist - makes it a veritable structuring principle.

Up to a point: because despite the fragmentary montage of the film’s opening, which is itself tied to diagetic content (waking up, falling asleep, waking up), the film “holds together.” It has a stable storyline, and it progresses unidirectionally across that line and its own duration. The same actors continually play the same parts and stay in character, even if those characters, especially Lulu, are a savagely inconsistent bundle. The question, in short, is the degree to which the film’s form is adequate not only to a general problem of fragmentation but, more specifically, to the shift that constitutes its main narrative arc. That is, given that we see, at the end, that little has changed other than a missing finger and a “successful” strike, the most substantive change is that of the rhythm and organization of the factory, the form in which labor-power is employed. It’s no surprise that the film uses the same remarkable Morricone score throughout, including at the end when we have shifted to a different model of labor, because it remains ultimately as unable as the dueling political factions to address the real question at hand, the form taken by the production of commodities, the structuring of time, the reproduction of social relations, and, perhaps most importantly, what falls entirely outside that optic: that which cannot be easily figured under the sign of labor hours, especially the “women’s work” of raising kids, soothing one’s near-psychotic partner after a day in which both parties have worked, and the maintenance of commodities already bought and owned. What will be of ultimate interest is not a pointing out of the fact that the film does not address these things, in part because it actually does.

Rather, the question is: why does the address not interfere with the general structure and local forms of the film, and what happens “in place” of that interference? For the moment, let us note only that the answer may be the same to both: repetition happens, that’s why.

note 2:

the word translated as “supporter” is fiancheggiatore, which implies a “flanking,” as if intellectuals can only - or should at best be - a flank of the main forces composed of the working class. This particular military dimension is crucial, as it differentiates this position from other common “military” conceptions of the intelligentsia: as an avant-garde paving the way, as generals dictating tactics in accordance with a long-term strategy, or as “secret agents,” either in the sense of those who infiltrate the bourgeoisie and spread dissent or those who “pass” for workers and spread their ideas from the camouflaged position of being “just another rank and file laborer.” What Petri advocates is something closer to covering fire and, perhaps fittingly for his description of those who are fractured by the contradictions of leftist thought, those who absorb some of the blows and may come apart in the process. In this case, they would be the troops who bear the brunt of that special ammunition known as ideology, who try to turn it back on the enemy.

The Black Wake

2011-10-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Black Wake

The product of my combined love of DJ Screw and Jackson Mac Low, or rule-based generative procedures more generally. The first New Pessimism club banger.

(Also, the continuation of black metal - because, frankly, you can only talk so many times about an abyss before it becomes more of a yawn than a void and before it is filled right up - by other means. To go from Blacker Than Darkness to All Black Everything.)

Dress dress

Suits suits

Shades shades

Boots boots

Truck truck

Coupe coupe

Blow blow

Flutes flutes

Card card

Jewels jewels

Party party

Bag

Fry fry

Throw it throw it

In a

Bag bag

Black black

Black black

Black black

Black black

Black black

Black guns

Guns guns

Black black

Black black

Black black

Black black

Party bag

Black black

Day day

Throw it in a body bag

I heard a Fly buzz - and then it died - The Stillness in the Room Was nothing like the Fly - Sputtering out in the Wine where I Drowned Him

2011-10-21T00:57:00.000-07:00

Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia About Fine Dining)

2011-10-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

Utopia,

Even now it is rather hard to speak of.

I have no idea what they were talking about. Before I left, I mean, they said, here Snake, here are some biscuits, here are your glucosamine injections. Don’t eat the meat Snake: it probably is man, or at best dog, and in any case it probably won’t be very fresh and if it is, well then you’re damn sure it’s man! Here are your protein suppositories. These other things are vitamin patches. You can wear them on your thighs. That way you don’t taste them. Your cigarettes contain an experimental combustible compound of omega-3, horny goat weed, and electrolytes. They’re gonna burn a bit slow but they taste like acai or that’s the story anyway and you’re lucky we still give you anything that even looks like a cigarette after what happened. Those other boxes that are really cigarettes are for barter only. Maybe you can buy the island from those savages? Ha oh man, we’re kidding Snake and that’s in poor taste anyhow. But seriously don’t touch the real smokes. Because we’ll know. We just will.

Well, you know what they didn’t know jack shit. Because if they did well then I wouldn’t have sat down to an authentic Venetian meal would I? I think they don’t know much as is. There are loads of people here, whole boatloads. They are still talking about the architecture and who did what to what buttress and when was a saint and they still put their tongues in each others’ mouths from time to time, and when they do that, they still look to the side to hope to see me looking so they can say, oh yeah what if this was the hole in the middle of your skull that I was lapping at, lapping at like a sloth, shhlp shhhllp, trying to steal little pieces of to bring back to mine? And they still go out to eat.

And I found the place. You know it’s the real deal because the waiters weren’t too nice, which would mean that it was just for tourists only, and they weren’t too asshole, which would mean the same thing, a big puffy bravado so everyone can feel like they’ve had an “Italian experience” and make a scorecard of restaurant service across the continents when they return to their hotel rooms and take their walking shoes off to let those stinky dogs rest and even put them up on the crinkling bedspread, without even washing them first. No, they just were, and more than that, there were honest white tablecloths, clean and starched. I hated the thought of getting wine on them so I stuck to beer. I know, I know.

There might have been a menu but I did not take it because I saw what the others were eating and I knew what I would be too, it’s what I dreamt of, risotto al nero di seppia, risotto with little tendrils and slices of cuttlefish and the whole thing black, filled up with the ink of the thing that is cut up. I’ve been having this recurrent nightmare, but not at night, just awake while eating in which I am utterly convinced that I am going to bite down on the fork, that I am to shatter my teeth even though the whole time I am saying be careful! that’s not food, that’s a fork and this time it smelled so delicious that I actually stopped worrying about what was going to happen when I put the laden fork in my mouth. When they brought it out to me - I had already finished a beer and made that face while pointing at the empty bottle to say that I will drink another beer, please - I swear even the steam was black, clinging to the corners, whole snarling wraiths of it.

And my god was it good, and hot, and the inky grit was rough on my teeth, so when I caught my reflection in the almost fogged window I grinned and it looked like I had no teeth just a hole in my head. And I haven’t been drinking here - you know - and it kinda went to my head, because I felt like those old Japanese women, or not that they are old, but they are young in an old time, Ohaguro it was called, and this was a different standard of beauty and I was the prettiest here with these black choppers. And after that anxiety about the fork and my teeth, that constant grinding fear, it was a relief to get to pretend that I didn’t have anything that could touch metal. So I showed em big to everyone, bared my teeth and I think I was kind of dancing a bit in my chair, they were grinning back those missing grins at me, all of us toothless as babies or old women, and even the waiter laughed a bit even though he sees this every night of his cursed life.

This one face I kept looking toward because it wasn’t quite right, he was smiling too but it was as if someone had painted a perfect copy of his face on top of its face, so that it had feedback, a slight tremor, and he was sweating through his gray polo shirt a bit. And then I noticed that he really was shaking, and that it started at his shoulder and went down his arm to his hand, which was under the table in his lap, and he kept that mirror smile fixed on me as his hand was working away down there.

He was grunting a little bit.

And I just couldn’t believe it, I knew just what he was doing, there with that sick smile on his face, that sheen of pleasure, just going to town on himself here, and I said loudly, really sir this is a family restaurant! We are all trying to eat, every last one of us!

He didn’t seem to hear me but he shuddered, a rattle, and there was a clatter on the ground, and I looked and saw that it was his dinner knife and it was all red, and just then he brought his hand up to the table and in his hand was a large chunk of his thigh that he had sawed off loose and ragged, the fat bright as days, and he dropped it right onto his risotto and, tears in his eyes, panting, he said

Man can’t be expected to live on ink alone!

I thought I was going to be sick and raised my hand to cover my mouth and my hand too was red. And I could not look down because I could feel the raw ache in my thigh and I did not see my knife on the table where it should have been, and none of us could, all of us dawning on what we had been doing, our black teeth clenched and we did not feel much like eating anymore and there is a movement to the door.

And I am not even a thing that has been thrown to the garbage heap and I am not even giving this thigh meat to someone whose children are hungry even thought they are already blackened with death. I am not throwing myself in the pot. We are just making a godawful mess, all of us, we don’t know how to cook, just to make slices and how.

And how is it that to write this means that we end in red again, that one more thing else has been cut, as if this city was a film but it is not, I cannot let it be. Or how that I cannot see the white tablecloth which was the first stark thing I’ve seen in so long other than the black ink, which was also very dark. Or that I can’t see either because, frankly, there is a blood everywhere.

The rain just started up again, delicate. The canals shimmying in their little percussions. I’m eating a cigarette under what I think should be called an awning.

And really I do miss you like I would miss a piece of me that had been taken away and I’m not saying that because I think there is actually a substantial piece of me that has now gone missing, although just like missing you I don’t want to look down and see because only then will it finally be gone.

Still, sorry about all the mess. I hope you can read what I wrote through it.

Love,
Snake

Black Dogs

2011-10-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

Bear prole shopping, or History is the incapacity of our thought to grasp that one day we too may find ourselves eating a police horse, raw

2011-10-20T01:41:00.000-07:00

Wariness of "videos of animals doing things considered roughly human and therefore considered 'adorable'" temporally on hold, because the great thing about this?

For a bear, there is no substantive difference - that sacred, fêted difference - between a corporate supermarket and a locally owned grocery store. There are places with doors unsubstantially secured and there are places with things to eat, and from time to time, those places are one and the same.

And if one wants to talk about a motion concerned with la vita nuda,

[Note on that vita: this may be taken in one of two ways. Either as the debased asymptote of the last century (not a reduction to a preexisting something but a trending toward a dominant form), or as a horizon, a horizon in the sense of that point where the ongoing ground (politicized "natural life") takes on a discrete and countervailing form, a visible edge. That is, the horizon where material necessity + declining access to those materials + collective rage + a weakened and increasingly hysterical security force means that the concern with bare essentials (food, housing, medicine, care, tools, water) becomes not the limit case but rather the only concern - a discernible line worth moving toward and worth taking - capable of breaking the locks between those who hypothetically stand opposed to one another and of breaking the locks on supermarkets and banks. It precisely does not imply that a reduction to struggling for those essentials means that anything will automatically come of it other than continued misery. Only the fact that as those things are a lot harder to secure on your own once labor-power isn't paying its expected dividends, it opens up the space and need for other forms to develop, and there's no doubt that if they do not involve a whole mass of people, then they will be nothing.]

then, and this is no joke, one would be well advised to not entirely laugh this off.

Not to ward off a certain warmth in the heart that this can't help but bring about, for it is, after all, a bear cub rampaging quietly in a produce section. But to let there be something here worth dwelling with, that is: yes, but that reaction of OMG cute! means also that there is something too proximate, too aligned to a shadow falling over these years, a shadow that is a counterfactual and asks merely,

and if this were a human?

And if this were a human doing so, hungry, unable - or unwilling - to go through the proper circuits, while pictures are snapped by shoppers on iPhones, hauled out by the scruff of her neck by some grinning cops, that warmth that starts in our chest would be not be there, no, it would be as though the trapdoor beneath our guts on the gallows swung open... and whatever one could have called cute will, after all, be left hanging.

What else is left, though, what remains in our genuine smile at the cub, is the nervous realization that there have been other moments in the history of capital in which one passed quickly from smirking afar at the goings-on to becoming that desperate subject struggling to go on or get by. (Therein the utter importance of a certain trajectory of horror literature in relation to thinking the history of human misery: not because it depicts things bestial or debased, retrograde or inhuman, infernal or machinic, but because - and think here of Cornell Woolrich's Nightmare Alley and its mouth full of hot chicken blood or Ballard's tales of those who are dimly aware, like the psychiatrist who has been reduced to a doddering imbecilic pseudo-father by the woman he tried to "cure" - of having once been the one who laughed at those in such a condition. Because those tied to and broken on fortune's wheel remember damn well what it was like to look at the poor bastards mangled below.)

That is, one rarely expects or anticipates that, indeed, one will be tearing apart - handful by handful - a police horse for food during a riot. (See 1919, Austria.)

And it is the crossing and rending of that distance - from one who recoils at the thought to one who is discovering just how tough it actually is to tear apart a horse, from a given us before our laptops giggling at a little bear tumbling over some cabbage to a forming us hurriedly stuffing all available produce that involves necessary minerals into backpacks, from the destruction that simply happens to the negation that must be articulated, laboriously, savagely, carefully - which has sometimes been called the real movement of history.

And no, it isn't much fun at all.

Proposal to handle the Eurozone underemployment crisis

2011-10-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

“This seems to be the secret of the Austrian national economy. How often do we hear someone say when there is a fire: ‘Thank God, now there will be work for people to do again.’ In that case I know a splendid solution. Set fire to a town, set fire to the empire, and everyone will be swimming in money and prosperity.”

Adolf Loos

Stains of gray

2011-10-19T12:41:00.000-07:00

this afternoon:

The real reason I moved to Napoli is not the fact of its "historic quality," that it is a working port, that I live on a street more than two millenia old, that I do not speak English here, or that everything that technically may be deep-fried is, in fact, deep-fried.

It is because I have never been anywhere else that has this many different textures - painted, chipped, hewed, repainted, tape reside left, shat upon, igneously formed, pissed upon, peeling, fading, dust covered, polished, etched, stuccoed, pasted over - in such a constrained zone.

If form is - and I believe it is - nothing more than the gradual accretion of ornament (that non-necessary "surface modulation" that is overly indexed to its precise historical moment, given that is an "addition" to the external appearance of material, and, if you are Adolf Loos, is therefore a stain on the timeless, a threat to form's eternality, and therefore cries out for its destruction or erasure), then this city is the permanent, obstinate revenge of ornament.

As such, it feels like home.

Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia On Moving Fast Over the Water)

2011-10-17T17:18:00.000-07:00

Utopia,

I’m sorry this is going to be so brief, as in just a bit, I’m going before the Tourism Bureau to present my proposal to revamp Venice. I’m all nerves, hot stones in the gut, but I got a clean shave, I know my material, I’m feeling sharp.

And they have to take my idea. They just have to. Because sure, I know what some of the others are talking about: better access to potable water, proper burning of corpses in a single quarter of the city, knife-free zones, killing those birds, hydroponic permaculture. And I’ll admit, they really should do something about the corpses, which, I suppose, would also have a positive effect on the whole water that can be swallowed without coming back up problem. And I shouldn’t even think that because when I think my lips tend to move and they will see and join forces to propose to Take All Corpses Out Of The Water Supply - TACOOTWS, they even have an acronym! But christ, I heard one of them going over his notes, his lips fluttering silent too, to try and reopen some of the old guild workshops and to make new masks - with “organic materials” - to sell as handicrafts. He swears that we could get a Fair Trade certification, like we were chocolate or bees, and I am neither, and that we are still a World Heritage site so double-whammy. And this woman is promising that restarting Carnevale would be “just the ticket - a dazzle of mystery and romance to show that Venice has still got it.” Yeah, got it like the plague, we got it.

But I got it. I know what’s going to change the whole game. Because what do you think when you see all this water, these tight twisting back alley canals, the wide-open spaces of the Grand one, all this rippling sheen, this shimmer surface? When you see those dim tools putter around on those gondolas, sweating, their hands blistered into claws? When you see how long it takes to get from place to place and how you’re supposed to respect tradition but what does tradition mean when it has necrosis and when what we all really want is the future, the future throwing up a hell’s spray, the future the way that particles of water in the air make - yes, I dare to say it - a rainbow, the future's wet, the future joyous, a bit American even, unwept, the future that roars into view, throwing out a big wake with a big grin on its face?

Because that’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Jet Skis in Venice.

I mean, what else is there to do here? Maggiore or minor, it’s not gonna matter, because these things don’t need more than a half-inch of water to run, hell, you can gun up over the stones if you got enough speed, they’re great for fishing, and on that note, if we did still want to do something about the soggy bodies, I mean someone should, they are full of holes but not holes that make something sink, and there is the problem of the eyes that remain, but if we wanted to get rid of them, just hook em, hook em up to a hot Polaris and it is on. But mostly, just tearing all over, hauling big loads, doing some jousting, running the waves dog-tired past the breakers. Just letting ourselves live, and live with something fiberglass and howling between our legs. For once.

And this place will never be the same. Down with the funereal pomp, that dirge of lapping waves. I want them drowned out in the sound of what runs them. Once they take my plan, there will be no sound anymore, just flash and burp, throttles floored, and the canals full, teeming as if we were birds and birds were painted hot green.

But what really matters is what I’ve been dreaming since I came up with this plan and I think I came up with it, a whole scheme not to better the city, because I do not need this place, I do not need this wrecked bilge pump, but I want it just to lay the groundwork for my big dream. Which is you and me, queen and king of this swamp, the ones who brought the end of sound to it, who brought the new days, and everyone knows it, and we’re riding only the best, a custom painted, gondola black to mock the past but it is not all black because there along the side, there’s a growing neon, and the black is burned out with color, airbrushed flawless, a hunter orange off-set with purple accents, and written across it in double cursive, black and gold, is LA SERENISSIMA. Yes. And we sit above these words on this four-stroke Sea-Doo RXP-X, 260 horsepower, and at first, we’re barely using them, we’re chugging along real slow, a little time to ourselves through San Polo, and then we’re there in front of all of them, shining, bottle of champagne in your hands, we’re puffing bud, a little hazy now so that it looks as though the water was half-sand half-water and no glare, it’s all polarized. And they are high-fiving us as they roll by, no one’s got a machine like ours but fuck it they’re happy I brought them this gift, ridded their world of the floating coffins and the day is good the weed is good, and you’re looking beautiful and sometimes I make us jerk forward just a bit so you scream and hit me playing a bit and then you put your arms around me tighter.

But we’re leaving all this behind, and I’m opening up the engine which is happy to finally let itself go, and we’re whipping under the bridges, like a tranche, the arching plume of spat water behind us doesn’t even have time to fall, it hangs there, a barricade in the river, made of river and the sun caught it just mirror right and there they stood, facing their own faces, their ache bodies hung in the light. But we, we’re not there, and we can hardly be seen, we’re too fast, they can’t even read the back of my shirt where it says IF YOU CAN READ THIS, UTOPIA FELL OFF and they couldn’t anyway because you’re clutching hard to me, not a sound now, and we rip past the Academy, the Leoni, Maria de la Salute, Dogana di Mare into the channel, where the water past Giudecca joins it, colder, and we barely touch any of it, we are a stone that we have skipped ourselves. And are curving just around Lido out to the open sea so that we follow the line of every ferry that runs through here but how there are none now, they are there just as shuddering brief images of themselves, white hulks, and it does not matter anyway, because there are those who wave when they see you pass and there are those who do not know what it is to wave, do not know what it is to see, do not know how it is to be held, and who do not understand the fact of this hurtling speed that touches so little. And behind me you too shudder and I do not know what kind of shuddering sound it is and when I turn back to be sure that yes it is laughter I cannot help but see that even you are not there and there is no one at all to read my shirt or to laugh that the sea lasts a long time, whether or not you run across it like a stone.

Love,
Snake

As a chicken in a glass house

2011-10-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

The ending:

Then:

Then:

Then.

But my dear friend

2011-10-17T03:30:00.000-07:00

---

2011-10-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

Lettre Ouverte À Ceux Qui Condamnent Le Pillage

2011-10-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

Pour ceux qui lisent le français... les gens excellents de Le Réveil ont fait une très bonne traduction française de "An open letter to those who condemn looting". Une grand merci à eux.

["Il y a eu beaucoup de destruction à Londres ce dernier temps. Des bâtiments et des voitures ont été démolis et brûlés. Rien n’est en train de se construire. Il n’y a ni plan directeur, ni projet, ni programme. On ne parle que de négativité sociale, et cela est démontré dans la destruction d’une portion de ce qui existe. Cela démontre une haine : une haine de la police, d’une ville qui les expédie et les ignore, des vitrines qui protègent des objets trop chers à obtenir, des ordres qui vous disent de vous débrouiller et de l’arrestation que vous subissez quand vous tentez de le faire, de tous ceux qui les regardent avec suspicion quand ils les croisent car ils portent des capuches et ont des visages foncés.

Mais ce n’est pas une négation à proprement dit, même si c’est une partie du processus. La négation, plutôt, est la suppression des relations qui soutiennent un ordre donné comme il est présenté. Les relations telles que la propriété, la loi et la valeur. Ce n’est pas une oblitération, pas une destruction totale, mais le positionnement de tous sous le doute et la cri- tique, très souvent d’un ordre très matériel. (La propriété se montre très résistante aux arguments, même s’ils sont très bien formulés). C’est un bain d’acide : il ne privilégie rien, il supprime la cohLrence qui excuse l’existence des choses pour les voir comme elles sont, et voir ce qui reste, ce qui tombe, ce qui a empoisonné tant de personnes depuis si longtemps.

C’est cette différence, cette mince différence, entre la destruction et la négation qui constitue tout ce que nous avons dit jusqu’à maintenant. La destruction arrive. Elle n’arrive pas sans se faire prier, pas automatiquement (il y a des individus qui prennent des décisions réelles pour la réaliser), mais c’est un fait constant. Ce qui est rare, c’est de saisir – oui, « de manière opportuniste » - ses émergences visibles comme une occasion nécessaire d’étendre cette colère et ce chambardement au-delà de ses éruptions à une pensée de négation réelle, vécue, soutenue. Une négation est, en effet, construite, à partir des liens qui prennent forme subitement lorsque les relations précédentes qui gardaient les choses à flot – le commerce, la police, le transport, le travail – se voient vaciller."]

Roma

2011-10-16T03:03:00.000-07:00

1. Pessimists

2. Light

3. What happens when the walls of a crowded corridor are made partially of glass

4. Ghetto birds and ruin birds

Continuity graffiti

2011-10-14T15:03:00.000-07:00

[from Corbucci's Compañeros, 1970]

Double match cut : on action (with two seconds removed, in the way that match cuts function not just to stitch together a dangerously proximate world, but also to shave crucial seconds of passage through zones of alleged non-interest) and on graffito.

As far as I know, there has yet to exist a film that fully enacted the latter - not just graffiti, but single visual or sonic elements from one shot to another than does not remain the same element for the whole film, other than continuous music/narration or following single characters - as a principle of continuity editing across its entire length. There are brief spells. Hammer's Frankenstein series makes it a nervously recurrent tendency. Or, one of its better applications, infinitely better and stranger than the infamous match on pupil --> shower drain in Psycho that launched a thousand theses on the gaze and violence, in Black Sunday where we match from a dead witch's empty eye sockets in which eyes push out toward us onto a reverse tracking shot from the dark cavity of a French horn from which a goofy, tooting sound pushes toward us and pushes us away into a raucous tavern. (Black Sunday is, like Psycho, from 1960: Bava may have adored Hitchcock and sparked off of his films, but here the spark is a gorgeous joke that takes the wind out of the master's sails, a flawless piss take that could not - for reasons of simultaneity - have seen the material off which it riffs.)

But those are brief spells, split instances that point out all the more how much continuity comes to mean of action (that is, across a thinkable unity of time) or of location (that is, across a relatively consistent unity of space: see here the sitcom, which ramps this up toward unfathomable stretches of time, all joined not by the continuity of gags and catch phrases, but the same camera positions in front of the same sets, the same carefully placed "random stuff on the coffee table").

To do it otherwise would mean a form of both immense focus and of committed distraction, keeping up the thread across instances while routing that thread not just through the same element but through a wandering eye and ear.

That is:

a man talking on the phone

CUT

a phone being made in a factory, on a molding press with the word SYSTEMS visble

CUT

a textbook on systems theory on a desk with visible wood grain

CUT

that same wood grain from an identical mass produced desk in another country, on which a hand is busy writing, in scratching pencil, A man talking on the phone

CUT

A rabbit is scratching at the wall of its hutch. Such a wall may or may not be wood.

[Should one desire to get all Oulipian, as one does, delineate a set of six allowable "connections": visible words, sonic element, pattern/texture, gesture, object, and location. Roll the dice. Such dictates the form of matching to follow. One should aim to still, against this, develop something that takes on a thinkable shape across it. Because a throw of the dice will never abolish chance, sure, but it may sketch a picture of those relations - the simultaneity of shit luck and absolute accordance, that is: the very feeling of history - that always seem to escape our attempts to nip and tuck them together under the sign of something that resembles a very good film.]

Disenlightenment

2011-10-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Victory - our victory - is beautiful

2011-10-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

I am starting to translate texts from Italian. The translations will likely be loose, shoddy, or both, at least for a while. First: a short text from Marco Ferreri on Don't Touch the White Woman! In what follows, though, at least part of the roughness has to do with Ferreri's willfully - as far as can be discerned - choppy prose style.

And yes, he uses the word "Redskins" [Pellerosse], and no, he's not an outmoded or unaware racist. See the film in question: the whole thing is an exercise in ventriloquism and mimicry, taking up not just the moves of the genre but its axial ideas, throwing them consequently off axis and into a large hole in Paris. One of these ideas is that of Pellerosse.

Three further points:

1.

While Ferreri and Pasolini make rather uneasy bedfellows, there's something in common here, regarding the emphasis on the transhistorical - or, in this case, "eternal" - quality of highly particular historical instances. In Pasolini's case, this involves:his slum pastoralism; the alternately beatific/innocent/hot/suffering/scruffy quality ascribed to the sottoproletariato as an anthropological and nearly physiological trait across time (and leads in part to the dangerous ascription, from those bodies, to poverty itself of those qualities: "So that our bodies, if its fated that they no longer live out the innocence and mystery of poverty"); his sharp understanding of the periphery of Rome as a remapping of the Roman Empire of two millenia back in contemporary micro-form, with the ex-colonial subjects of the imperator now condemned to live and die in the suburbs; and, more generally, the tendency to read "class" not as a relation but as an enduring property. (Note to future: I have spoken elsewhere, not here, but with voice, on this aspect of Pasolini. I will do so here when it takes a more legibly written form.) All this is of interest insofar as it indicates, first, one of the general problems of trying to find historical resonance without drawing a single narrative with an arrow pointing our direction, and second, something that I am noticing especially in Italian writing and cinema when trying to deal with those especially particular incarnations of the dispossessed. As for whether or not this is "good", whether it provides a way to sketch a communism that is not identical to the negation of capitalism or whether it tends to function as a sort of theodicy: that is up for debate.

2.

Further index of temporal strangeness at work: Don't Touch the White Woman! came out at the start of 1974. It is largely about "Indians" in a metropolis, in Paris. In 1975, in Rome, the "Metropolitan Indians" came into being - namely, the loose group of autonomists that went by the name Geronimo. The genesis of that - so the story goes - involves the desire to "leave the reservation," to get gone from the pseudo-home of the city's restricted zones and ghettos and to bring war to the wider orbit. I have yet to find out if, in fact, the film had been a template of sorts, acknowledged or otherwise. But things circulate, in orbits rarely as small as we assume.

3.

One thing, though, is certain: è bella la vittoria - la nostra. That much never changes.

---

Why Custer at Les Halles, in Paris, in 1973?

From the point of view of the spectacle, Paris’ Les Halles represents an ideal setting in which to tell this story, the story of a genocide. A fin-de-siècle scenario on the warpath. An enormous hole at the center of this scenario. It makes one think of an arena in which they killed slaves and around which there was an empire that destroyed and rebuilt itself. A mobile setting for an eternal story.

The houses, the buildings that would be knocked down and replaced by skyscrapers. The landscape changes, but the struggle of oppressors against the oppressed remains the same; it’s immutable.

But why make it a question of genre? Why Custer at Les Halles? Why does an image stimulate an idea? I'm searching for a significance to this stimulus. The image of this hole in the middle of the city reminds me of the images of the gladiator’s ring, the deserts of the Dakota, the piazzas in which police throw tear-gas bombs.

Why a western? Because, in my opinion, we live in a western climate. [literally: “un clima da western”] Because the western was always the enormous trap into which we’ve fallen, ever since we were kids.

The western expresses concepts in a manner that's simple and elementary: God, Nation, Family. I take up these concepts and crack them up. [“li faccio scoppiare dal ridere” - more literally: make them burst with laughter]

La Grande Bouffe was a physiological film. This is a film of sentiments and ideas. It therefore had to be frankly comic. Today one can speak of sentiments and ideas only in a comic manner.

One can speak of surpassed concepts only in an irreverent manner.

Les Halles are the Western [Ferreri capitalizes “Western” here - not elsewhere], they’re a setting of a western. The old frontier - what was that? At the time of Custer, a century ago, they were already demolishing the old edifices that resembled the Pavillons de Baltard.

It isn’t the Dakota that makes the western. Westerns are also ideas. Since the western brought us ideas, why not bring ours to the western?

For in the city, don't there exist the same elements we find in a western? At every street corner, don’t the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry circle up?

When I think of the Redskins, I think of the proletariat and the subproletariat left to be crushed and humiliated.

The work of destruction against the Redskins was an ethnocide, the destruction of a people of a nation.

The funny thing in this film, in this story, is that those who believe themselves strong, rather than speaking of genocide like we do, speak of the “right of conquest.” And this becomes truly comic when the conquerors are crushed, because the conquered themselves speak of the right to resistance and to victory. It’s this that happened at Little Big Horn and that will happen, I hope, everywhere tomorrow.

Victory - our victory - is beautiful.

To sit on a throne of teeth, graced with a crown of teeth: Notes on opportunities blown and missed

2011-10-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

[for purposes of auto-archiving, pasting in full. This piece appeared first at The New Inquiry.]

This has been a summer of blown opportunities, at least insofar as cinema allegedly devoted to taking those opportunities goes. There’s been a sheer blowing, one that evacuates any sense of weight that might mark a difference between one possibility or another: see here the hot glassy wind of irrelevant unmaking and particle effects that constitutes the relevant narrative arc of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. That at least knows how to puncture holes in everything, even if the holes are barely compelling and hardly ragged.

At the least, it was both committedly awful and the source of one of 2011’s crowning moments of lolled-tongue stupefaction, as a giant chthonic robot worm, bristling with circulating razors, simultaneously encircled and penetrated Chicago’s Hudson Tower. It strangled it in two, like a burrowing python or chrome bolas, while characters inside shouted a lot and dodged sliding office furniture.

More though, there were opportunities that simply did not come. And if they did, they were resolutely shoved aside. See, for example, nearly the entirety of the new Conan The Barbarian. I saw it all wrong, perhaps: sober as sand, at early dusk with the sun still hazy outside, in the mood for something that understood pleasure.

But all began well. Its properly exploitation first minutes gave precisely what we didn’t have: a particularly giddy, bright drunk of motion and axes. For those minutes feature – in rapid succession – an battlefield birth by C-section, a young boy hacking off a few heads while keeping a raw egg unbroken in his mouth, and an excruciating aria of hack symbolism regarding how steel needs both fire and ice.

(Another tendency shaping recent mainstream film is the obsessive’s need to over-explain, to both show and tell, and to do both at extreme length: if one can use the 1982 Conan to help gauge the further banalization of pop cinema, then consider the difference between the two sword-forging scenes. The version from two decades ago seems nearly elegant, Bressonish, in its old-fashioned reliance on images and semi-deft editing to show the process. In comparison, that is, to Ron Perlman in barbarian/bear disguise explaining how steel must be tempered with fire and ice at the same time, while in the same screen time we watch a sword get dipped in a trough of fire and ice. In case we missed the point, immediately following, he tells young Conan that he has too much fire and not enough ice. As this occurs, he knocks him – because he’s too fiery, see? – into a frozen lake. It’s fair to assume that one or the other – the laborious explanation or the hammy diagesis – would have been plenty. Instead, the film, and we with it, groans beneath the weight.)

Exploitation films are, taken generally, those that fully enact generic modes, premises, or single concerns (cannibalism, sex, motorcycles, samurai, werewolves, gladiators, pimps, a combination of all seven) and make of the attendant contradictions not a damning incoherence but a true joy and technics. Their massification is by now an old story, as we’re in the midst of a long stretch of years when films costing $90,000,000 try their damnedest to necromance some of the lost aura of films that either “didn’t know better” or didn’t have the capital to do anything about it otherwise. Conan is one such film. It reloads a cult classic and marks itself as a especially pulpy incarnation of a diffuse lineage that runs through Italian peplum (sword and sandal movies), sword & sorcery tales, D&D thrown into a Creatine lab vat with MMA and parkour, and a distinctly ‘80s version of the fantasy aesthetic that features a lot of big biceps and bigger hair.

Yet while Conan bares its beefcake, splatter, and consummate idiocy, it nevertheless botches nearly every instance it could actually exploit. It hacks its ankles out from beneath itself, and the resultant blood sprays no noteworthy patterns. Case in point: the story revolves around the reconstruction of an evil mask, at once antlerish and tentacular, with which our evil warlord can resurrect his evil dead wife and proceed to rule, evilly. And indeed, he collects the requisite pieces and prepares dark dominion. What, then, is the result, when he dons the all-powerful relic, at the veritable climax of the film? The mask wiggles its limp tentacles a bit. That is all.

This is action-fantasy film fundamentally structured as mediocre straight porn: a hunk of male flesh tries to stay center screen while doing hyper-masculine things for a prescribed duration of time, with the promise that the ending will be big, messy, and somehow related to the previous buildup. But Conan can’t even allow the highly limited pleasures of that. We’re left then, not with pulped froth but with turgid misogynist melodrama, of the variety that spends a whole lot of time talking about what people would like to do to one another while constantly restraining that from ever coming to pass. For a film that gestures toward necrophilia, incest, pec oiling, and shape-shifting, it ultimately delivers one genuinely kinky moment (young Conan watching his father’s face get splattered with “molten sword”), plenty of stabbings, one brief hetero sex scene – of the blurry genital-obscuring objects in the foreground 1984 Cinemax variety – and a good 30 minutes of lamentations about a dead father.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes comes closer to throwing open the libidinal floodgates. I, for one, cannot disavow the particular corner of the spectacle that involves apes outflanking the San Francisco Police Department on the Golden Gate bridge and getting away with it. But it’s there on that foggy bridge that the film works itself up to the moment for which we’ve waited, the truth of the film: a gorilla pins a riot cop to the ground, finally about to do with those big canines what big primates are good at doing. He is going to tear the throat from an officer of the law.

But no. Caesar, leader of the ape insurrection yet still tortured about the sanctity of human life because James Franco is very kind and has that smile, stops him as if to say: no, we don’t do that. We don’t kill. And if we do, we only kill in that bloodless way favored by films trying to keep their MPAA ratings down. Encourage them to crash their cars à la Blues Brothers, bring about mayhem in which other objects are technically responsible, let gravity drag them off a bridge, or throw multiple things toward them such that they are “knocked out” much as PG-13 katana fights involve an excess of smacking enemies on the head with the handle. But kill? With hands, with mouths? No, no.

And so the gorilla merely roars at the cop. He has his species-enemy pinned to ground, and he yells at him. Yes, it’s a given that censors, studios, and a fair number of audiences will not permit any depiction of violence against the police that would – because it will – excite spectators: such is one of the few remaining permanent taboos in mainstream cinema, roughly on par with onscreen pedophilia. But the film goes to baroque lengths to bring itself to that occasion, to hint a path between the thick fang and the thumping bare neck. It goes even further to refuse to actually draw that crimson line. If one wants to venture a reading of the ideological bent of this film, a small frenzy of which have circulated, it shouldn’t lie in the particular modulations of the apes, in what they say, in how they are anthropomorphized, racialized or, gendered, in the fact that their leader holds up a bundle of sticks to make a fasces point about solidarity. It won’t be found in periodizing the differences between this remake and the previous incarnations. It doesn’t reside in the battle with the police as such or that the furry subaltern speaks, uttering the master’s language (“NO!” – a snarkily proper choice of word if you’re going to hijack “the language of the Father”) as the marker of the uprising’s start.

And above all, it won’t be found in the obvious point that it is, nominally and substantively, a film “about” insurrection, that takes rising up (“aperising”) as its content and arc. What is relevant lies only in the forms into which this chunk of time is poured and in this restraint and withholding, in the violence that does not happen, the limits that it imposes on itself, as it still polices its own actions once police are incapacitated. (The film’s tagline “Evolution becomes revolution” should actually read “Evolution becomes revolution becomes managed social democracy.”) And more than this, it is independent of the specificity of violence, its agents or targets. For the form of denial is the real content at hand. Turning back when the time is right, denouncing that possibility of exploiting the one true possibility built slow over an hour and a half, and longer, over a century, the long history of cinematic memory exploited to make such a moment hang before us and not come off. There are no lessons to be learned here: there is only the dulling danger of lessons imposed.

Still, such films are blockbusters through and through, and one might say that to even approach that unfinished finishing move is really something for poppier entertainment. But adjudicating a general realm of what may or may not be possible “in mainstream culture” is not, and cannot be, a generative game for thought. It leads only to a sloppy balance sheet of what we already knew about the strict logic of profits, the infrequent exceptions to that, and the very frequent recuperation of those exceptions. As such, we’re infinitely more likely to see and say something compelling if we begin with particular films, their specific sets of proffered expectations and follow-throughs, their store of inherited moves, and their peculiar restrictions. Joyous a sight as it would be, we’re not surprised that He’s Just Not That Into You lacked a significant quantity of jump cuts, nine-minute tracking shots over grey Romanian villages, neo-Expressionist set design, or an unstoppable plague ravaging Baltimore. To ask after them is a counterfactual dead-end fated to pile up against the same wall: It wasn’t that kind of film because there was no way that it could have been. It would not have been the same film it was had any of those elements been present, hence the question asks only: Why is there not another film that exists?

However, there are films that shape and code themselves, and are shaped and coded by producers, distributors, and marketers, as being ones in which just those sort of things happen. As such, what is worth asking after, not just with cinema but toward all cultural productions, are the highly particular exceptions, slippages, surges, fuck-ups, or, most peculiar and rare, flawless functionings of a film in terms of the relations – economic, generic, stylistic, and social – according to which it came to be and without which it simply wouldn’t be.- Of the films that cost a lot to make and that I spent money to see this summer, the remake of 1973’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark goes the furthest in blowing its chances. Although technically directed by someone named Troy Nixey (a comic book artist and director of a short film that is pretty much Hostel with a heavy dose of monogamy and keys instead of humans), it is “presented” by, and intended to fall beneath the name of, Guillermo Del Toro. If anything, it represents the full extension of Del Toro into a discernible franchise and banner, complete with discernible – and requisite – tendencies, going so far as to provide the second “Del Toro” film in the space of three years to feature small, swarming “tooth fairies,” however wingless and furry they may be in this iteration.

In casual terms, I’m a “fan” of Del Toro. I’ve always lacked the subjective structure of a real fanboy and hence that specific relationship remains opaque to me. When it comes to thinking about films, shot angles, directors, cinematographers, themes, formal techniques, genres, characters, and so forth, there are those that I love fully, those that are “comrades” in how they articulate a similar loathing of the world order (yes, a camera angle or editing pattern can be a comrade or an enemy), those that exert a perverse fascination, and those that matter not a whit to me. The last of these is a large group.

The “Del Toro film” – the whole swarm that goes by his name and which certainly includes him as a distinct writer and director – fits into none of these. Quite simply, I dig them, and less simply, I take them as a sometimes fellow traveler to whatever swarm makes up my own thinking, watching, and writing. More specifically, aside from our shared interest in monsters, certain genres, and teeth, Del Toro is a sharp and funny man who, importantly, actually loves this stuff. (And he seems to love in the crucial way that such a love doesn’t make one a sycophant of one’s own taste but rather attentive to its histories, its off-shoots, and modulations.) Besides, he’s part of that tradition that’s into “showing the monster” – as he put it once, trying to avoid the tendency of bad erotic fiction to “call a sword that which is not a sword” – and, better, which understands that "the monster" is not a vivisection as such nor is it necessarily something that vivisects.

This is perhaps an unnecessary caveat, especially as I have little interest in taking films or their producers, directors, cameraman, sound editors or actors “to task” via critiques that will not remotely affect their practice. (We’ll be harder on them when we squat their mansions in Malibu or hack Regal’s digital projectors to replace their films with those of Jia Zhangke or Ida Lupino. Until that more material critique, there’s literally no point in saying Roland Emmerich, the people have spoken: that pixelated blood is on your hands!) Therefore, if we aren’t talking a practical theorization of what, how, and with whom we want to watch without having to route it through the sham agora of the megaplex, then critique and theory will be addressed to ourselves.

As such, we might begin with that outer layer of “our side” of the circuit: official reviewers who, for the most part, are merely the industry as such in front of a not-particularly dark mirror, mouthing the words already spoken, adding adjectives, mentioning who performs admirably, shitting on the films there to be shat upon. Without getting into the minor modulations of opinion or their final judgments of the film, one thing becomes quickly evident: the limits of the striptease or porno understanding of cinema, however it may be pertinent to certain films such as Conan. For in the case of Don’t Be Afraid, a lot of the reviews seem concerned with showing “it” – that is, “the monster”, the small ape-fairies out to tear the teeth from the mouth of children – too soon (“the haunted house-style story is hampered by his desire to show them off”) or not showing it soon enough (“What they're after is clear from the film's gruesome prologue; what they look like is withheld until long after we have ceased to care”).

If we need further evidence of the commonness of this erotic spectacle understanding of film, Roger Ebert is, as always, very good at accidentally laying bare what’s beneath how we figure our responses: “This is a very good haunted house film. It milks our frustration deliciously.”

[Side note: He’s also increasingly good at dropping idiosyncratic/hallucinatory speculations in the midst of otherwise straightforward reviews: “You wonder how long life can be sustained on an all-teeth diet. Now that Bill Clinton is a vegan, let him try that for a while.” Yes, I do wonder that. But why Bill Clinton, and in what way are teeth vegan? Consuming nothing but the part of the body that another creature uses to consume food is one of the more strikingly un-vegan things imaginable.]

But whether the milking of Ebert’s frustration is delicious or not, what no review will fully touch is another question, insofar as reviews are concerned with the degree to which films are adequate to the expectations mutually agreed upon – the kinosocial contract of sorts – through individual life spans of film watching and a messy century of global film production. At times, reviews can be wowed by what “exceeds our expectations” or is “better than we could have imagined.” And we are all equally familiar with the tired or worried invectives: “x film is staggeringly stupid and it therefore assumes a stupid audience, my god let that not be true, at least not to the level decreed by Cats and Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore”; “x film indicates a trendline according to which popular cinema is getting worse and more concerned with Taylor Lautner sliding down the side of a glass building than with building up convincing characters.” As for the first concern, yes, we are that stupid. As for the second, just because The Ipcress File is a smart and subtle film does not indicate anything about the 230 nominally similar films from 1965 that did not see the light of day again until torrent hunters started sharing them. Many of them are neither smart nor subtle, and they may be remarkably good for precisely that reason. Apply that logic of selective canonization to now, and the historical judgment becomes far trickier.

The line of thought worth pursuing, to flee the delimited zone of the review, is not the success with which we get shown what we came to see, but the extreme restriction of what it is we may have come for, all the more in the films that trumpet their capacity to do this. As we said, applying this in general is not compelling. However, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a film about imagination, and not just as subject matter. It passes a subjectless judgment on what constitutes the inventive and spooky, from that Proustian magic lantern revolving in the little girl’s room to the hissing voices that come through the heating system, from what they will do if and when they get their hands on the kid to what it means to be a fucked-up family. It firmly inscribes itself within a couple traditions of horror.

First, there is the “fantastic” Del Toro world, the love child of a Dungeon Master’s Bestiary and Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, equal parts lovingly hand-detailed carapaces and sad-eyed dark-haired adolescent girls (here named Sally) tempted to flee their familial and political situation for something more magical. Second, especially in this film, there is a gesture to “Weird” horror much in the way that Tarantino gestures to Monte Hellman in Deathproof: they talk explicitly about Arthur Machen (during the requisite trip to the archive), and the house belonged to “Emerson Blackwood” (read: Algernon Blackwood). Machen and Blackwood are major figures in the history of English-language horror literature, both prolific writers in the early 20th century.

But more interesting, the film’s background subject matter – architecture and design – finds itself doubled in the relation of the film to the haunted house movie and other lineages to which it aims to hearken back. Because, after all, the grounding narrative at hand is one of “restoration”: a self-impressed architect (Alex, played by Guy Pearce) has sunk his money into restoring the manor, with his interior designer girlfriend (Kim, played by Katie Holmes), of an artist-naturalist (Blackwood) so that he can get on the cover of an architectural magazine and sell the house to someone for a lot more money. The entire concern, then, from the diagetic world to that of the film as a whole, is: how does one restore what has gone to shit, decayed, or been forgotten? Of course, the operative cinematic fantasy is that the very act of restoration is capable of unearthing some of the magic, however murderous, that was once there, as if the sheer fact of labor and refinishing will crank up the old generic engines and let the nasties loose once more.

Yet there is another aspect of restoration present, and it is interior design: not architecture as such, not the design and construction of forms, but the redressing, repolishing, and regilding of given surfaces in accordance with an enormous set of internal restrictions about fidelity to the original, all to produce the illusion of it never having changed in the first place. An enormous investment of time, money, judgment, and intellect is poured into the erasure of time’s passage. The wager is that you can add new stone from the old quarry, and it can mean what it meant to those who ran, laughed, looked, painted, and died on and beneath that stone. The house itself is, like its film, a remake.

It might be seen as rather unfair to attack the Del Toro enterprise. After all, as things go in popular cinema, he is “on our side”: not politically, but as mentioned, in that his name marks an actual care for these things, and those things are, more often than not, monsters climbing from a gaping hole who are certainly more compelling to stare at than Sarah Jessica Parker’s yawning maw. Shouldn’t we celebrate a film like this for at least making a move in the right direction? Perhaps remonstrate it a bit for the way in which they doesn’t taking the chances it could, and focus our real negative energy on popular cinema that is immediately “objectionable”? Isn’t this a bit like slapping the hand that feeds you, even if the food isn’t quite as good as it could be?

No. One should always slap the hand that holds out food and, at the last minute, replaces it with Katie Holmes, some loud noise, and an ending that is exactly calculated to be just the right balance of eerie yet still sentimental. Such that the child is indeed finally capable of expressing her love for the surrogate mother and the surrogate mother can be slightly creepy yet without constituting a threat to the family tricycle composed with her as the necessarily absent third wheel.

Because this is not an imaginative film, even if it is about imagination. It is not a film that revels in exploitation, in seeing what can be done with the chances it proposes. It reveals dully instead, not with the long Lewton withholding of the monster, but in mobilizing that showing of the fairies as a blind to occlude a follow-through that might actually have been worth watching. That is, much as critics took the bait of laying their praise or dejection solely on the chronometrics of when we get to see the furry beasts, what is forgotten is that this mode of appearance may be, and in fact is, a real hiding. A battering of chance. The very category of judgment itself is rendered identical to the internal aesthetic judgments of the film: will we see them, will they come at the right time, and will they look decent? But for a film that claims to be worth being seen because it arrives under the sign of inventive and imaginative cinema, a cinema that enacts a restoration in order to polish some sharp corners not seen for many years: for that, we can indeed say, seriously, is that all?

And we will not be saying that to the film. We will be saying it to ourselves, in the dark, in distraction’s half-light. For like the films with which I began, what emerges in the place of a film really gunning it and actually letting itself be what it trumpets (that is, spooky, weird, unsettling) rather than what it involves (that is, hissing voices saying Come play with us… in a supposedly creepy way for the 1,284th time in horror film), is again that intolerable, eternal restraint. To take one example, the fairies let themselves get sabotaged by allowing Daddy and Future Step-Mommy to live long enough, because, just like Caesar urged the gorilla, no, we don’t do that sort of thing, we just knock them out, even though we have plenty of knives and we have tried to kill before. It is further dressed up with the camouflage of arcane “rules” to be followed, such as the claim that the fairies only take one child per generation. Of course, the film does not remark upon how its own rules are entirely incoherent: the film opens with the previous owner Emerson Blackwood searching out more teeth for the fairies immediately after they have just taken his son. Nor does it let this rule-breaking devolve into a chaotic glee or darker negotiation: imagine a version with teeth, so to speak, in which Alex kidnaps someone else’s daughter (or simply tears the teeth from her mouth) to feed to the fairies, to bind them to the pact, and therefore to leave his own daughter untouched. No such luck.

The point, of course, is not to say Dear Hollywood, stop making these films, they are inadequate! It is only to use its inadequacies to illumine and texture our own. And in this case, the very uselessness of such an injunction to make different renders clear the absent conditions in which it would make a grain of sense to say that. That is, if we had the capacity to

1) Make the kind of films we want to watch (Including ones that involve small hairy fairies storming across 19th century carpet as if the Winter Palace lawn to tear the pearly whites from the skull of an asshole architect who also happens to be Guy Pearce. And no, I don't think that desire is limited to a retroactive creation based on "that is what is available to us," because it isn't, other than as a deferred moment.)

2) Shift what it is we want to get out of the cinema (I, for one, think it will be a long time before I lose the desire to see those teeth pulled from that skull. I cannot possibly be alone in this.)

3) Impose our will on Hollywood (We force Paramount to permanently defund and publicly lash Tom Dey for Marmaduke. Michael Bay directs Transformers 4 with handheld camera, a hacked copy of iMovie 6, an amateur cast, and a strict adherence to Dogma 95 rules, all at gunpoint. Wes Anderson is “strongly urged” to remake La Terra Trema in black and white with an all-Limp Bizkit soundtrack.)

Sad as it is to say, the realization of any of these capacities seems a long way off. The first involves, to a certain degree, a flight into other media. Certain things can be done more cheaply and otherwise, via the much-touted capacity to shoot and edit digital video. But the very fetishization of that carries a whiff of redescribing necessity under the guise of petty rebellious freedom: yes, we can pull a lot off without the studio apparatus, but that indexes all the more the gap between the effects one is capable of producing. Such misprision is largely the point of that insufferable piece of tripe called Super 8, that pretends to celebrate amateur efforts (ah, nostalgia for kids just making movies, not for money but love, wide-eyed!) while declaring them utterly inadequate through the material fact of its cool $50 million budget.

It’s for this reason that a simultaneous celebration of what cinema can do with a renunciation of continuing to put up with the Hollywood circuit may involve, above all, a double flight into other media and into other subject matter. It is extraordinarily costly to film tentacles erupting from the earth and reaching across the universe to wrestle the sun. It is very cheap to write that, although of course, the grammar of film and the grammar of prose will never be the same thing. It is also cheap to film a conversation between two people. The continuing disaster of capital may involve an increasing reallocation of modes and figures of thought to media capable of being adequate to them. A cinema adequate to its time, and insistent on not remaining as such, may now be one that doesn’t bother trying to “depict” the end of the world or anything so grandiose. It may burrow into its impoverishment and see what it locates there.

That’s a greyer possibility, but it arises out of the greater impossibility of the third option mentioned above. (I may still harbor dreams of being the Official Juche Theorist and Programmer for the DPRK, but the offer is not forthcoming.) The mode of social upheaval building in the U.S will bear no possible resemblance to certain moments of the last century, in which the development of a socialist hierarchy complete with Commissars of Culture and centralized cinematic planning was occasionally plausible. This does not mean, however, that we should flee from the thought of intervening into the circuits of reproduction that both subtend and are generated by Hollywood, taken in its widest sense. We have as much say about the economy as we do about the cinema, which is, and always has been, part of the economy. In both cases, we relate to it as one relates to an earthquake: you can shift your weight, but the disturbances of plate tectonics are the consequences of a set of tensions, relations, and drifts that entirely dwarf any illusions we might have about consumer choice.

Yet this is not to say that interference – not with “the economy” or “the cinema” as such, but the social relations on which they turn and which they reproduce – on all fronts has ever been beyond our reach. Its modes of transmission and dispersal are indeed not reducible to any single instance (a film, a cinematheque, a production company), but any critique that won’t take on the material occasions in front of it is not critique: it is just cowardice and obfuscation. A megaplex is as flammable as a mortgage office. Not to mention, it may well be a space more worth saving, at least until they cut the power.

The second option – change what we want to get out of the cinema – seems at both a long shot and a feeble solution. After all, you don’t choose your desires as you might choose an adventure. And moreover, the very notion that we just need to “think differently” about how we relate to that leviathan of capital called the culture industry smacks of those terrible notions of “prosumerism,” making sustainable choices, or, worse, “raising consciousness” without razing material edifies, as though it had ever been possible to substantively alter general structures of thought separately from the transformation of daily conditions. As such, a full version of this – the transformation of wanting itself – seems to requires the fulfillment of those other two conditions: the full takeover of cinematic productive capacities by ourselves necessarily indicates the coming-to-a-head of the kind of social chaos in which it might be possible to guarantee that other version of Transformers 4 gets made.

However, there is another sense to it, one that does have to do with a present relation. The questions behind these notes are those of negation: how do we negate without simply destroying or turning away from? How do we go to the movies without thinking either that they matter or that they are irrelevant? How do we do so together, rather than before the baleful dusk of a laptop? How do you wreck slowly, persistently, pointedly, with the double awareness that the effects won’t be seen quickly and that they will never be seen if they aren’t constantly, diligently, furiously enacted?

I have no general answer for these questions, as we shouldn’t. For negation is at once a care for, and an equally attentive loathing of, the concrete, a fine-grained attention to peculiar cases and an attack on how the general freezes itself in the guise of the particular. And so let me speak only of this particular film, of the limits it points up. Namely, that the thought of “negating” the inadequacies of this film cannot be a thought that says: “ah, it missed its chances, if only Del Toro didn’t have to answer to Hollywood”; “ah, it is just pop shit, it always would be, what did you expect, you should attack your own silly interest in it”; “ah, it’s pretty good actually, what should be negated is the apparatus surrounding it, its qualities could be free from it”. All of these are negations concerned with cutting what is of value free from the mold of banality that shapes and traps it, such that what comes loose – us as an audience, certain weird turns, the negative space of the empty cinema – can be taken as a grounding point while tossing the rotten bits to the curb.

But negation is not always made of razor wire. It is also a thick liquid, a pouring in and crystallization over what is to be negated in full, in all its complexity. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler raises the figure of the pseudomorph (“false form”), a mineral compound that does not produce its own shape:

“But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind.”

Being Spengler, he meant this in a terrible way, and the figure appears as a way to attack the inadequacy of “the Arabian culture” as pseudomorphic (“All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile practices, and instead of expanding its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.”)But it should be taken otherwise, just as that earlier figure I raised – that of ornament, of wallpaper, of surface modulations that do not build forms from scratch – should be as well.

For if we want to complicate, misuse, and exploit a relationship to popular cinema, and particularly to films like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, it should be a pseudomorphic relation, letting our thought swell into the forms that we may loathe. Not taking these films as finished things to be judged as good or bad, as adequate or not, not as objects of critique to be scrutined, analyzed, sniffed or cheered at. Rather, merely as a texture of the given over which our watching, thought, care, and hatred necessarily pour and form, a set of inherited forms to be overwhelmed in the process of making an occasion for thinking. An occasion for negation to mimic, to take on shapes it otherwise would not, before outstripping them. In this way, the “distortions” and contradictions of the given form become raised to the level of ornament’s cartography, of pattern, of that which can be at last detected and traced. And then begins the harder work of another kind of negation, one that eats away at all that appears solid, including its own growth.

It’s in this way that the counterfactual, a consistently suspect form of historical thought, comes to be of real importance. Of course, we have no interest in saying, oh, wouldn’t it have been cool if it ended this other way? Too bad it didn’t! Maybe next time… Rather, to negate this film correctly is to let it be nothing but a set of details and stoppages, little restraints and clusters there to be noted precisely, taken up, and put to use elsewhere. Films will be recognized as inadequate not by their abjuration but by our extension of them, our outpacing, our saying this film is a belittlement of imagination precisely because it does not do any of what we are about to propose. As long as find ourselves capable of doing that, then we’ll go to the movies. We’ll leave them better for it, because we leave with more to say to one another than when we entered, having sloshed ourselves into and spilled out of those shapes. When this is not the case, then may the cinema perish.

In that spirit, five counterfactuals to end, not to say wouldn’t it have been cool but to say, let’s flood that basement.

One.

Sally does not end well in this version. In version one (The Horror of Family as The Horror of the Couple), Kim – the step-mother to be – has no interest in becoming the surrogate mother of a problem child. And just as in the final version of the film (when she is about to be killed by the fairies, she calls out Sally! as thought to remind them of their younger, tastier target), here too she is more than happy to sacrifice the Third to keep the Two running smooth and bedding down. She now stands at the front of the open fireplace grate in the basement, having just heaved the dark-haired youngster down the deep hole like a sandbag, falsely weeping as Alex rushes down the stairs. Oh baby, I tried to save her. I know you did Kim, I know. They get back to restoring the house. It looks great.

In version two (The Horror of the Family as The Horror of the Career), Alex is very committed to the success of his architectural project. He really wants to be on that cover. His daughter is a distraction. Why, after all, did he leave her with her mother in the first place? He knows about the fairies, has for a long time. The fairies, in fact, help with the restoration at night. They have very delicate tiny hands for doing filigree work, even if they are extremely pushy about wallpaper choices and prefer tones that are too muted to really make an impact on today’s critics, especially in the autumn light. But they have made it clear to him that if they are not fed his daughter’s teeth, they will undo all of his work and make completion impossible. They prove this one night by carving a surprising array of very unpleasant four letter words across an entire span of extremely expensive mahogany parquet just laid down. His workmen are more than a little confused about this littlest of graffito. It is a very difficult decision. He doesn’t know what to do. Sally wanders down to the basement again. He’s watching her there, talking to herself. No father should have to make this decision.Cut to final sequence of film: the restoration is finished. And boy, does it look great.

Two.

Sally, having been the only one downstairs when the groundskeeper was viciously attacked and having been implicated previously in the razoring of Kim’s wardrobe, is understandably suspected of having tried to kill the old man. She is, after all, not quite right in the head. The film goes to lengths to indicate that this is unjust, that they cannot understand. We see her talking with the creatures. She turns the light off, and they creep onto the bed, nimble as spiders, chittering through their bat teeth.

However, she is still alive the next morning. In her hair, there are amazing delicate braids, twirled in a tiny, complex weave. She seems to be a model child now, and even helps out around the house, gives Kim nice hugs, “accidentally” calls her mommy one time while snuggling up drowsily to her.

The house is nearing completion. Sally has made a lot of little friends in the area, really come out of her shell. She is having a birthday party, surrounded by twelve grinning little girls, scrubbed clean and beaming. She asks her dad and the adults if she can give them a tour of the house. He’s proud of his work, sure, honey. She leads them to the basement, which has been spruced up, repainted. The dappled light falls through the arched window on Kim’s new wallpaper, which features rabbits winding through the briar. Cut to close up of the fireplace grate. It does not seem held on by any screws.Let’s play hide and seek! Sally cries. I will go hide! All of you close your eyes and start counting!They cheer. They do love their new friend, and they put their hands over their eyes.

Sally climbs the stairs. She bolts the heavy, nearly soundproof door from the outside.Downstairs the girls are counting. Their little teeth, bright and small as bleached baby corn, catch that dappling light. They hear a slight clank as the grate door falls off. There is a rustling from the fireplace.

Sally, her mouth full of very straight white teeth, is grinning. After all, it feels good to keep up your end of the bargain. She is going to go get some more cake.

Three.

The fairies as almost anything other than those who just say We’re hungry, Come play with us, Give us teeth, Turn off the lights, et bloody cetera.Replace audio track with any of the following options:

Creepier, although technically less threatening demands: Give us body hair… Shave it off, put it under the pillow! You’re not using it anyway!

Banal: Reset the router!

Pushy (as mentioned in Alex as monster of design version): No, no, don’t use the puce carpeting! We hate that faux cheer! Use the taupe! Restraint, give us restrained taste…

All of which to be followed by an even more elevated level of violence that is not causally linked to their incessant talking. (See immediately below.)

Four.

They actually pull some teeth.

Five.

Everyone has gotten it wrong from the start. Yes, they want teeth. Yes, they are invading the house, where Sally uses her Polaroid to scare them away with the light and, as a byproduct, capture their images.Sally is dragged down the fireplace. Kim and Alex made it just a bit too late. Kim is shrieking. Alex tries to look stoic, fails. The house is now empty, abandoned, and as the film (much like the filmed version does, with Sally and Alex returning to leave a drawing of them as a happy family, which floats through the house down the fireplace, where we hear a pseudo-Kim conspiring with the fairies), a love letter from Daddy and Step-Mommy is carried through the empty house down the hole.

This time, the camera follows it, winding slow through the dark. Gradually, there is enough texture on the walls to make it clear that the vertical tunnel is beginning to tilt toward horizontal and widening out. What we took as grime is, in fact, intensely detailed wallpaper, full of ornate arabesques and bold ogees, hypnotic, tattooed. We cannot tell if it is fully repeating or always different. But it is punctuated, every so often, by something hanging on the wall, as the camera turns to face more directly down its length. Hung at regular intervals, in responsibly Scandinavian natural ash frames, are the Polaroids taken upstairs: fairies leaping from the shelves, fairies dragging knives across the floor, fairies perched on Sally’s shoulder as they both scream into the camera. Fairies giving a thumbs up. Fairies with their arms around one another, tongues deep in one another’s mouths.

The camera swoops magisterial, glacially through the hallway and opens out into an cavernous room, focused low onto a oddly patterned floor. It seems almost to be made of ivory. Oh. It is a mosaic of teeth, buffed and polished, turned sideways and jammed together. The camera tilts up, onto an enormous set of patent leather shoes. It cants up at the enormous form before tracking backwards over the ground previously traversed, inch by inch. And there sits Sally, on a throne of teeth, graced with a crown of teeth.

3 X 6 Hours

2011-10-13T04:47:00.000-07:00

"---"

2011-10-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

No wealth no ruin no silver no gold

2011-10-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

I'll fix your feet til you can't walk
I'll lock your jaw til you can't talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim

---

(Oh the young, the rich or poor
Hunger like me you know
No wealth, no ruin, no silver no gold)

2011-10-11T02:00:00.000-07:00

We weren't kidding when we said occupy everything.

(As for the 99% of wolves in the area, however, their sympathies are, as of yet, undecided.)

Pe' nuie na ca chiagnimmo o cielo e Napule

2011-10-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

da cui

Briefly:

1. For those who don't know, I moved to Italy a few days ago. I live in Naples now. It is excellent. Although it is a difficult time to not be in the States, I'm very glad to be living more in the collapsing Euro-zone area of those I already know and those I have yet to meet. If you're in either of those categories and are anywhere near here, from Greece to Scandinavia to Spain to Portugal to France and et cetera, stay in touch or get in touch, and I hope we can meet up soon.

2. To friends and comrades back home busy fleshing out that swelling map of Occupy X sites and busy making those sites mean something fierce and real: good luck, take care, and do what needs to be done with no apology or hesitation, what's needed to be done for a long damn time.

E

There is space in the streets (Oct 1929 - Oct 2011)

2011-10-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

2011-10-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

No matter how you stars want to shine
First apply on the proper dotted line;
We're sure to renew your permission
For shining or writing or extinction.

October 1930

Escape From Venice (2nd Lt J.S. Foster's First Interview with Marira Bentsson)

2011-10-04T15:14:00.000-07:00

First Interview. 3:22 AM. August 14, 2025.

2nd Lieutenant J.S. Foster: [Ruffling sound as he sits in the chair.] Testing, testing. [On the recording, a “THUMP THUMP,” as he taps the microphone twice.] Are you comfortable?

Marira Bentsson: Yes.

2nd Lt JSF: I see you have a soda, that’s good.

MB: Umm-hmm.

2nd Lt JSF: Did the man outside get it for you? [Pause] You, you like grape flavored? I mean, I bet you didn’t have that on the island, did you? Or anything fizzy?

MB: Well, a few months ago, someone found a can of Coke that wasn’t opened. Some people thought that was pretty cool.

2nd Lt JSF: I bet you did. Did you taste some of it?

MB: No, I hate that syrupy stuff.

2nd Lt JSF: Isn’t this grape stuff sweet… Never mind. [He coughs. He reaches across the table and turning the straw in her soda back to face her.] So. Do you mind telling me how old you are?

MB: I thought all of you died.

2nd Lt JSF: All of who?

MB: All of you who didn’t let us leave.

2nd Lt JSF: Well, I never said I did not want you to leave. That wasn’t my choice. That was the decision of a lot of people. It was very complicated.

MB: But didn’t you all die? When the movie started?

2nd Lt JSF: When the… no. Do you mean the people in the boats?

MB: Yes. All of you. In the boats. And in boots. You don’t have boots on. What are those things on your feet?

2nd Lt JSF: Look, it doesn’t matter what I have on my feet. [Pause.] They’re called loafers.

MB: Are they comfortable?

2nd Lt JSF: Uh, yeah, they are.

MB: You don’t tie them up?

2nd Lt JSF: No, they just sort of slide on.

MB: They are ugly. I bet they don’t even stay on when you run. But it doesn’t matter. I bet you own those boots.

2nd Lt JSF: Which boots?

MB: The ones that the soldiers wear.

2nd Lt JSF: Yes, I do. I am a soldier too. Does that bother you?

MB: So why weren’t you there with the soldiers?

2nd Lt JSF: Well, I was here, sort of monitoring the situation. I was talking to the soldiers who were coming to help get you and the others off the island.

MB: And then they died.

2nd Lt JSF: Yes. And they died.

MB: When the sea rained. All of them?

2nd Lt JSF: Do you know how old you are?

MB: I’m about 19.

2nd Lt JSF: [He notices she is straining forward against the snug wrist and neck restraints to reach her straw with her mouth. He pushes the can closer to her.] Sorry, I hope that is better. You said “about”?

MB: Yes. About 19.

2nd Lt JSF: You don’t know how long you have been on the island?

MB: No.

2nd Lt JSF: How old were you when, when the island was closed off?

MB: I was 7.

2nd Lt JSF: That was five years ago. That means you are 12 years old.

MB: I don’t feel 12.

2nd Lt JSF: What is 12 supposed to feel like?

MB: I guess like this.

2nd Lt JSF: [Pause, as he stands up and takes two steps to the right.]I want to ask you something, if you can remember a long time back. Can you remember back what happened at first?

MB: Umm-hmm.

2nd Lt JSF: [He clears his throat, and sits back down.] When did you start skinning the dogs?

MB: When I was 7.

Uccellacci e uccellacci che mangiano cadaveri

2011-10-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

The noise would diminish, he would fall asleep, and then there would be more screaming boys, more clanging shutters. It was a highly traditional uproar perhaps, but Venice seemed to have an unhappy aptitude for combining only the worst of past society with the society of today. What might once have been falcons, had become hawks, and were now carrion crows.

(R. Aickman, “Never Visit Venice”)

Carta aberta aos que condenam as pilhagens

2011-10-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

Portuguese translation of "Open Letter to Those Who Condemn Looting" now printed from Edições Antipáticas. Launch and debate tonight. (Unfortunately cannot join, given that my lack of being in Portugal and inability to speak Portuguese.)

We still call it... I mean, you know how things are.

2011-10-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

the esteemed guv'nor

Quick object lesson in the functional American logic of public and entirely electable racists:

The campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas found itself on the defensive on Sunday over a report that he had hunted at and taken guests to a West Texas camp with a racially charged name that his father, and later Mr. Perry, had leased.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that at least seven people it interviewed said the name for a portion of the property, N-----head, was visible on the rock at the entrance “at different points in the 1980s and 1990s,” and that a former worker said he believed he had seen it as recently as three years ago.

From this perspective, this seems to be "bad" for Mr. Perry or someone like him. It is not the kind of thing that a presidential type has known about him. As such, he and his ilk are out to claim that, "Perry’s father painted over offensive language on a rock soon after leasing the 1,000-acre parcel in the early 1980s."

[Ray Sullivan, Perry’s campaign communications director, issued a statement soon after Cain was asked about the camp on both the ABC and Fox morning programs.

"Mr. Cain is wrong about the Perry family’s quick action to eliminate the word on the rock, but is right the word written by others long ago is insensitive and offensive. That is why the Perrys took quick action to cover and obscure it," Sullivan said.]

But wait...

The revelation was one more challenge confronting the Perry campaign just as it was left reeling from his comments during a recent debate in support of granting the children of some illegal immigrants in-state tuition at Texas state universities, remarks that he later retreated from.

It is also "bad" for him to come across as the type who treats poor brown people semi-decently, which would include the scandalous extension of that bargain known as in-state tuition.

This new scandal, then, is no threat whatsoever. It is a boon. Because it allows one to say

a) No, no, we painted that over, because we know that isn't acceptable

(see, liberals! how could they think we're so barbarous? Remember that thing I did about tuition? And you won't mind if I have to back-pedal a bit on it, because politics can be sort of partisan and... well, you know how things are.)

b) But it is still there, under the paint

(don't worry, conservatives: we know that it's important to put a new coat of paint over certains things to, you know, keep up appearances. But don't you worry. We're still the kind of people who own property, who hunt on it, and who call it... well, we don't have to spell out for you what we call it. I mean, you know how things are.)

Three crime scenes

2011-10-03T06:40:00.000-07:00

6:40:45 PM

6:42:43 PM

6:44:44 PM

And it is undeniable that while the gulls had heard nothing of the missing poodle, camera, or toddler, and even while their alibi stood up as straight and true as the line of their polygraph tests, still, still there were those footprints.

The Sgt. remarked how They looked like those old dance-diagrams that could be drawn on the ground for you to follow with your feet, all double-steps, arrows looping back on themselves.

Sure, Sgt, muttered Inspector Neras. Just like that. Provided it is a dance where you slaughter a pig in the middle.

The Sgt did not bother to restrain his thick, mushy smile when the reports came in the next morning of a missing pig.

And there had always been that fact of the music.

Rolling hunger strike in California prisons

2011-10-02T23:28:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile...

Something that is guaranteed to receive far less media attention than those Occupy Wall Street Brooklyn Bridge arrests, yet which is arguably far more important, desperate, and powerful: the 12,000 prisoners now on hunger strike in California. This concerns the organization it takes to try and concretely modify the hell in which you live, however you can do so, and with whatever tools you have. In this case, the only tool at hand is your continued existence as such and the prospect that your death, when combined with others, would cause some problems for the institution that tries its damnedest to reduce you to a technically continuing existence, and nothing more.

The demands are simple: to have the chance to be more than just technically existing, breathing, consuming, aging It is a threat of sabotage - the problem (mere existence) becomes the very thing turned back upon itself - at the most fundamental of levels, being fought out in the worst place possible in this country.

Numbers released by the federal receiver’s office show that on September 28th, nearly 12,000 prisoners were on hunger strike, including California prisoners who are housed in out of state prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma. This historic and unprecedented number shows the strength and resolve of the prisoners to win their 5 core demands and is a serious challenge to the power of the California prison system and to the Prison Industrial Complex in general.

Prisoners are currently on strike in Pelican Bay State Prison, Calipatria, Centinela, Corcoran, Ironwood State Prison, Kern Valley State Prison, North Kern State Prison, and Salinas Valley State Prison. Throughout the last week prisoners at California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, Pleasant Valley State Prison, San Quentin as well as West Valley Detention Center in San Bernadino County were participating.

The receiver’s office and the CDCR begin monitoring prisoners who have refused food for 72 hours or for 9 consecutive meals. Representatives of the hunger strikers have previously stated that this will be a rolling strike, allowing prisoners to come off strike to regain strength. Because of this, numbers will likely fluctuate throughout the duration of the strike.

Info here

Demands to be treated like something barely approximating the minimal degree of decent treatment of another living being here

If you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store (And why no one should ever listen to Naomi Wolf about "protests")

2011-10-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

Two brief notes on the alleged occupations of streets, Wall and otherwise.

1.

Things are starting to get the tiniest bit messy. Good.

Big cheers to those who know that's what it means and takes. And to the messy spread of it to other places, to other "issues" (read: capital, state, and - for old time's sake - church; jail, immigration, unpaid labor, policing, foreclosure, access to medicine) that have nothing to do with "Wall Street greed," as none of this has much to do with that in the first place.

Scorn and loathing to those wee katechons who restrain, who make nice, who tell you to sit down. Whose breath reeks of the word peace as if they've long been drinking from the toilet.

But a brief comment, one that applies not to those who got picked up on that bridge but to a whole lot of what has been said about this?

No one should not let oneself "get" arrested. There is nothing sexy, useful, or sacrificial about doing so. It is a waste of legal fees, time, and zip ties, and it renders protest recognizable in an old-fashioned, familiar, and therefore irrelevant way. (And not "old-fashioned" in the Barcelona 1936 way, for example, which would be quite another story.)

If one thinks that 700 people getting arrested makes a splash, try seeing what happens when 700 people don't get arrested, despite police efforts to the contrary. See what happens when a video is released of forty people un-arresting someone successfully. See how that will change the stakes in the way that a mass arrest never can.

But if you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store and use the cash to buy needed materials for those protesting. That is literally more useful. And hell, you may even get away with it.

Do not sit there and wait for it. Do not listen to others who tell you to do so. If you see someone people to do so, shout that person down.

[Case in point, someone like Naomi Wolf.

Who writes:

"please protesters, I can't say this enough: DO NOT MARCH. SIT DOWN or stand with linked arms. DO NOT MARCH. I have studied protests for the last fifty years -- the ones that ended in state violence (they always win) are short and the MARCH. the ones that brought down regimes are LONG and STOP TRAFFIC and involve SITTING DOWN OR STANDING STILL WITH LINKED ARMS. They take patience. "

Well... In response to her, adopting her preferred typographical choices for ease of comprehension:

DO NOT LISTEN TO LIBERALS as their historical moment has passed and CONDEMNED THEM TO IRRELEVANCE. Stop traffic, yes, but there are many things that stop traffic other than your own BODY. They are highly worth considering. Many of them may be found in or directly alongside those roads on which the traffic moves. It's what we who have "studied protests" typically call BARRICADES.

We know the Gandhi-ish examples she likely has in mind. Those bear no connection to the state of affairs in the US today. One shouldn't confuse recent instances of "protests without high death counts" and "peaceful protests": they are not the same thing. A single example refresher on said point ("Unlike previous protests, there was no large scale police crackdown. The parliament was partially burned during the protests.").

And if she thinks that what happened in Egypt, or the Arab Spring more broadly, was "peaceful" or related to "SITTING DOWN OR STANDING STILL", she has simply no sense of what went down, the risks people took, and the steps they took (i.e. sharing information, choosing not to just "stand still" or "sit down" and take it, not going back to work) that made those risks worth taking.

And in case our historical memory is as SHIT as Wolf's, let's recall that the "protests" that "brought down regimes" recently, or come anywhere near doing so, are ones that a) threaten to, or do, bring their economies to a halt, b) cease to draw a clear line between the political, the social, and the economic, c) defend themselves, d) do not sit down and wait for the very state violence you mention, e) recognize that insofar it is serious, it will end in state violence one way or the other, and f) leave behind that entire terrain of "march", "sit down", and "protest" and begin doing things closer to what the words "occupy", "assemble," "riot," "get very seriously organized," "barricade," and "halt" actually mean.

P.S. And remember, it's we're gonna run these streets tonight, not we're gonna stand very still with our arms linked on these streets tonight. It's the streets will run red. Not that the streets will sit down, red.]

Become enormously, allergically suspicious of the word "peaceful."

And above all, do not sit and watch others get arrested while waiting your turn. Do not let the taking photos (even if they look like they'll be very good) of that act take the place of stopping that arrest, even if it means that the subject of the photo - someone being pinned and hurt by a number of men - will cease to exist. In this case, it is the absence of a picture will be worth a thousand words. For when people speak of "a critique of separation," of the problem of a fundamental divide between seeing and doing, this is the sort of thing they have in mind.

And for once, they're totally right.

Here's to a grease fire

2011-09-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

["Research":

]

[encoded obscenities: the lingering dissolve from the baseball game onto the slang hangs over a college-aged man talking to two college-aged women, such that while the correct research gives him "oolie droolie" and "solid sender", we have just read - and do not stop reading - "two ply poke" and "bob the apple."]

Then the dissolves come unstuck and the words hang, not as things that have been heard but as injunctions (clip the mooch!)...

... and descriptions that goad on the described.

Further proof that the difference between mainstream film and its experimental counterparts is not a difference in kind and rarely has been. It is merely a difference in

a) quantity of filler, against which the dissolves, nonsense speech, and drooling is off-set, and

b) location of that filler: in the film itself, padding it out to 2 hours and 17 minutes, like caulking padded around one little razor or opening, or as the entire negative space surrounding the film (read: the social relations of everyday life; the social relations of cinema), as if what we watch was a very small and quite temporary black hole burning in a sea of fat.

So, here's to the re-cutting of all that has heretofore existed. To a little padding where it's missing, to let a razor breathe from time to time. To less of it overall, to those little holes chaining together.

For here is, too, a grease fire.

Vista 1-2-3

2011-09-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

If you stood here at dawn you might be the first person in the country to see the sun's first rays

Vista 1

Vista 2

Vista 3

Later Cadillac founded Detroit, inspiring the name of the prestigious automobile

Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia About Difference)

2011-09-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

Utopia,

I’m writing you from hiding, because I’m hiding I have crouched down and pulled a wet version of a cardboard box over myself, right beside a short metal pole, and I am breathing very quietly. To be perfectly honest my pen may give me away and then where will we be. Like dragging a dead car across tin foil. SCRITCH SCRITCH

But I’m not hiding because it’s loud, I’m hiding because I just killed a man, he had sweet soft jowls, his hands were full of rope, just like a cartoon of an old-fashioned sailor, yeah, but he recognized me, that big dopey face opening and then darkening and I saw the mouth start to come open to say SN… And he did not finish his word because I killed him and then I got inside the box.

But I’m not hiding because it did not say a name, I’m hiding still, still here and still as all, because nearby someone is playing the harp. There must have been a very nice harp left somewhere because this is no janky bit of twine and stripped buoy parts, it’s the real deal. And before I saw that man I heard the harp, I said to the guy playing it, I love that song! because he was playing Debussy’s “En Bateau”, which is very fitting because this is a city about water. He said, yeah, I bet you do. It’s killer. And now I was gonna say to him, hey play that more, did you see what I just did to that guy, play that Debussy, but he never stopped playing, and I am hiding because I truly cannot tell you if he ever was playing Debussy or if he is playing Jimmy Buffett’s “Stranded on a Sandbar”. I get convinced it’s the Buffett, and that’s fine, because the Debussy was good when it lasted, and it was different, it’s still good that way, it’s like milk totally surrounded by glass that’s sitting next to milk that is just sitting out and smells like it. And then I’m saying, no, it’s definitely still the Debussy, I was such a fool, a real ninny for thinking of Buffett, I’m in Venice after all, Venice where one most certainly does not think of Jimmy Buffett or any music that is made for people in shorts who play songs about people who wear shorts and smoke weed and just talk about smoking it and crumple their dicks in their hands and do the same with puffy dying birds and lead business seminars. Buffett does not have four hands! You do not think of Buffett in Venice, in fact it is impossible to think of him here, the canals block it out, like moats do. Because Buffett never makes the music water and vice versa, he’s never played a note that shook itself off and drunken slid back in amongst the rest of them, without shivering. Buffett just writes songs about all that. He wants to tell you, I have heard there are those who do not crumble puffy birds, dying or not. This song is a war on them.

But I’m not hiding from anything, I’m hiding because there is no more difference anymore. There is no more difference between “En Bateau” and “Stranded on a Sandbar” then there is between a city and a fog these days, between a bear chock-full of maggots that aim to conspire to rise and fall like a bear’s chest and a bear. There used to be a difference. A difference between dicks and birds. It was plucked out by the century. Between my left eye and where my right one used to be. Between a day with a few clouds and a night with many things on fire spaced at very even intervals. Between a city and a fog that is shaped like a city.

If I don’t make it home, at least you will know exactly what happened and just what to tell them, and you should know also that I always thought there was a difference between you and a century and I do not even care if that is true or not because it does not matter to have difference but it does to have had you.

Love, Snake

But negation is not always made of razor wire.

2011-09-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

A long piece from me at The New Inquiry on cinema, counterfactuals, riot police whose throats remain intact, the limits of criticism and of the films critiqued, sword-forging, restoring old houses, forcing Wes Anderson to remake La Terra Trema in black-and-white with an all-Limp Bizkit soundtrack, pseudomorphism, and, above all, more compelling uses of teeth.

Good evening, everyone, and here is the latest news from Athens: Good night. (Also, watch out for floating torch lamps. We've had reports they're heading west.)

2011-09-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

A briefest of evening news. A very long commercial break.

(Note on the alarming autophagy of all things spectacular: the pre-broadcast video features a happy gathering of young people raising what look like flaming rocks to the dark sky. In a time of forthcoming civil war, it appears that if you can't beat them (i.e. anarchists), then "join" them. By "join", that is, we mean "make sure they are smiling, well-buffed yuppies with sexy hair and that they do not touch the things - those Ikea molotovs - that are burning as they rise upwards magically to touch nothing, like banks or cars. No, just to softly illuminate the night. You know, just like hope. Or something.")

Weep me deadly (Il nuovo caso Matarazzo, 3)

2011-09-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

1952.

A nun is crying very hard, near hiccuping, because outside where it is brighter, they are carrying her son in a coffin and she just threw flowers down on him, they fell surprisingly fast, flowers she borrowed from the feet of a stone Mary and she then apologized to Mary. It's the end of a film. The word that tells us so comes from the depth of the frame, glowering just before her, terminal, and growing in size. But the closer it gets to the surface, the further it gets from having any excuse to participate in that depth, any more than the names that spelled out who spent money and picked out costumes could touch the stone quarry they obscured. And yet the more the word swells, the more it does interfere and cast, the more it glows, making those tears flare and shine, hot as radiation.

But this is not an ending, after all. It is merely a halfway point, three years before it is picked up again, in 1955. Then the story opens up once more, to burn a whole lot faster and stranger this time, doubling her into a desired knockoff played by herself and impregnated by the same man, three years before Hitchcock will do so. Building its pitch to the shriek of ending high above another courtyard where this time this nun will try to stop a women's prison riot by appealing to every mother everywhere ever.

That same year, another ending, another opening, further west, by the water.

Hot as tears.

2011-09-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

For the record:

May 2008.

The parole board in the state of Georgia spared a convicted killer from execution hours before he was due to die by lethal injection on Thursday and commuted his sentence to life in prison.

At Thursday's hearing, his lawyers presented a dossier of evidence attesting to his remorse and good behavior in jail, according to local media reports. The lawyers also said he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction at the time of the crime.

This in a case in which there was no doubt about the evidence and the man in question pleaded guilt.

The man in question, for the record, was white.

Treno Popolare

2011-09-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

for Sav

1933.

2011-09-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

RIP

This place where we live, it gets worse and worse, and it stays exactly the same. At the same time. And on and on and on and on.

Awry

2011-09-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

In a little less than 4 hours, the state of Georgia is going to inject a man with enough poison to kill him, despite already having kept him in jail for 22 years, despite being entirely unable to prove his guilt, despite recanted testimonies and allegations of police pressure on witnesses, despite appeals, despite protests.

But until protests stop being protests and start literally, materially, physically halting the normal functions of the state (for yes, this is a very normal one), we cannot be surprised in the least that things like this happen and that they will continue to happen, ad infinitum. Saddened, yes, furious, yes. But surprised, no.

And honestly, that blood's on our hands, if we ever think that we did all we could have done about it.

Today is a disgusting day.

[Addendum:
Good intentions aside, this is a sterling portrait of irrelevance:

Wendy Gozen Brown, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, said that Troy Davis would want the protests to remain peaceful.

"In this type of situation, there's always the potential for it to go awry, with certain groups, angry rhetoric. But Troy Davis would want people to keep fighting peacefully, for him and for, as he would put it, all of the other Troy Davis's out there."

This is very simple. If it does not go awry, then nothing changes. (Awry means "crooked or turned". Wry means "turn." Something that is awry has taken a turn. Something that has not gone "awry" has continued to exist the way it was. It has remained the same.) And all the "other Troy Davis's out there" will precisely continue to be "Troy Davis's" in that they also will get jailed and will get executed, despite whatever flurry may or may not occur on Twitter.

To speak the word peaceful in relation to the execution of a man is unconscionable.]