Socialism and/or barbarism

When rust settles on a razor blade

In order to save functional architecture from moral ruin, a disintegrating preparation should be poured on the clean glass walls and smooth concrete surfaces, so that mould can settle on them.

- Hundertwasser, "Mould Manifesto against rationalism in architecture"

Conspicuous non-consumption

Object lesson from Ferreri's Dillinger è morto: the sign of being truly ruling class isn't just employing a private cook. It's employing a cook, throwing out her cooking, and slowly, deliberately making a meal yourself instead.

We are beasts locked in a stall, we have been cheated out of springtime

"Ladies' fashion! What a horrible chapter of our cultural history, laying bare mankind's secret lusts. Reading its pages, one shudders to one's very soul at dreadful perversions and unbelievable vices; one can hear the whimpering of abused children, the shrieks of maltreated women, the ear-splitting screams of tortured people, the wailing of victims burning at the stake. Whips crack, and the air is filled with the smell of roasting human flesh. La bête humaine...

No, that is going too far. Human beings are not beasts. Love in a beast is as plain and simple as nature intended. But we humans abuse our nature, and nature abuses the sexual urge within us. We are beasts locked in a stall, beasts refused their natural food, beasts who have to love to order. We are domesticated animals.

If we humans had remained beasts, then love would enter our hearts once a year. But our only barely repressed sensuality renders us capable of love at any time. We have been cheated out of springtime. And our sensuality is not simple, but complicated, not natural, but unnatural."

- Adolf Loos, "Ladies's Fashion" (1898/1902), a loopy essay that veers from the conservative, prudish, nostalgic for the natural, and misogynistic to something more uncommon and Kollontai-like, as in his calls for articulated women's trousers allowing them to bicycle quickly as the concrete step toward equality of the sexes. Add to this an attempt, as with Loos, to ascribe a grand historical narrative to particular questions of what material pants are made from , an insistence that the progress arrow always points toward stripping down to form's utility, and a number of turns of phrase that make your collar feel a bit tight (see here: "the green apple has exerted greater attraction than the ripened fruit").

Just plain Ø

Psychoanalysis is only worth a damn insofar as it lets itself be analysis without prescription, with noticing things and not insisting that it knows what to do with or about them them. As such, the basic mantra, especially when people take its concepts elsewhere, should be: Wow, you're fucked up. And I have no idea what you should do about it.

Proposal for insurrectionary wheatpasting technique

Design a poster. Make eight hundred thousand copies. The content is irrelevant. Wheatpaste two of them together. Add a third. Add a... ad infinitum until you have built a wall. Build more walls. Quietly push them into the street and arrange them so they look like a new housing development, a tax office. The state will take down your posters, peeling off one at a time, finding only one more beneath each time, trying to produce the bare wall beneath that doesn't exist. While they are busy doing this, get busy organizing new forms of life.

To a ditch near you

Steampunk. Dead, deader, deadest.

(telling when you have to ask someone to be inspired... rub against it, develop friction, there's a charge left, we swear)

On that note of a cryptic polka dot pistol buried in a white pillow: S a/o B will return shortly to actual thought, rather than its current arbitrary dissemination of images. Time is thee enemy, and lately, it's been mine as well. Been working on not-so-bloggable projects, politickin', and facing a storm of deadlines I brought upon myself. New work coming out shortly, though: first up, a piece in Film Quarterly on Marco Ferreri's Dillinger Is Dead and what it means to make anti-bourgeois film for a bourgeois audience.

For a good read, go check out Ben's great work on Farocki, which is goading me to get serious about trying to track down any and all copies of the films I can find. So those of you out there with nefarious underworld connections, bring a copy of Bilder der Welt und Inschrift der Krieges and name your barter-price. Thinking something like the mysterious box from Kiss Me Deadly...

Bang bang, you're decorated

Memento cari

The heart stone, the stomach's paper. And behind, no real curtains, just the shabby trompe l'oeil of nothing to hide.

hot lava snow rain and fog long-necked giraffes pet cats and dogs

Yes, this does exist.

"Fear" marks

Go "read" the snarkiest, most eating-its-own-tail Wikipedia "entry" ever.

The Chrysler Blob (automated production of formlessness)

One of the reasons that Chrysler has run into such financial trouble is that there have been some problems with the relay devices between the computers and the robot welders. When a problem develops further up the line, it takes a long time for the computers to tell the robot welders to stop. So the robot welders continue to make these welding motions, dropping molten steel directly onto the conveyor belt, even though there are no cars on the line, building up a series of equidistant blobs. It takes several hours for the computers to tell the robot welders to stop. At the rate of eighty cars per hour, a typical plant is capable of manufacturing approximately 100 of these blobs before the plant can be totally shut down.

[Laurie Anderson]

What happens when you re-order the verbs in Arthur Conan Doyle's sentences

A ventilator dies, a cord is made, and a lady who sleeps in the bed is hung.

Orgasmic entropy

A general depletion of simultaneous or spatially contiguous orgasm in capitalist nations.

Given that:

a) the near-total drop-off of visits to porn theaters, where strangers came together to come together, even if sometimes looking very straight ahead and not acknowledging their fellow watchers, or even to shops with viewing booths separated by walls but right next to one another, in favor of the atomized viewing of internet porn as a solitary activity and the cold light of the computer in a sleeping house, and

b) the non-take off of an orgiastic future - with all its relaxed codes of partnership, "fluid" sexuality, general upsurge in non-domestic sex as political and casual act - promised by parts of the sexual revolution, or even a general dilation of family values and all that comes with it,

it follows that now, 40 years after the start of the '70s, fewer people orgasm in reach, sight, or hearing range of one another. As for what, how, and who comes next, that's up for grabs.

Enthusiasm in the dark

Sex, which many enthusiasts thought they had invented in the sixties, here makes its appearance in the science-fiction film. The relationship between sex and science fiction, or, more to the point, its virtual absence from the genre, has always been a puzzle - explained, I would guess, by the fact that science-fiction writers constitute an authentic community of naifs, generally nervous of change, politically ultraconservative, eager not to think about what adults do after dark.

- Ballard, on Barbarella