London, July 11

1896

They're holding umbrellas up
to keep the soft ash away

While they watch
their city burn down

Block by block
by block by block

The thick eyes glaze over and it chews, it chews

Fragment in hostile commodity history:   



"GRIFFITH, Ind., Dec. 27— A battery-operated Cabbage Patch doll that can chew had to be taken apart piece by piece this week when it munched a 7-year-old girl's hair up to her scalp and would not let go."


They had no off-switch, no way to go in reverse.  The pure drive to eat beyond nourishment, gnawing blankly at her owner's head.

Aerial anarchists! (Or the vanished doom of the great city, plus bomb-heaving dogs)

To be remade immediately: Aerial Anarchists, from 1911.

"There is currently no known surviving footage of this film and all information is based upon the original catalog synopsis. The film contains scenes of a bombing and its aftermath throughout London and features prominently the bombing of St. Paul's Cathedral and a railway disaster in which a train is seen to leap into a chasm."

For a sense of how it likely looked, watch Booth's The Airship Destroyer (1909) from the same series:



[Three notes on this.

One: identical to the arc of nearly every contemporary disaster/war film.  i.e. Your dad won't let us be together, even though we have enough lust for each other to put down our tennis rackets while strolling.  Now there is an unnamed threat to the planet/the West/capital/nation.  They have bombed your house in their campaign of aerial terror.  Luckily, I am a misunderstood engineer, even if that fact has led to an absence of social status which has previously prevented us from consummating our love.  I have been working on something that now is our only hope.  It kills the invaders.  Now we can be together, as we should have been all along, the exceptional promise of extinction having served its temporary purpose of laying waste to social convention.

Two: attackers from the sky have a strangely EZLN look to their headgear.  The black stain spreads wider through the films, evidently.

Three: terribly prescient about warfare to come, from indiscriminate carpet bombing of non-military targets to the fact that the "airship destroyer" in question is, for all intents and purposes, a pilot-less missile or self-destructive predator drone.]

Next to follow: The Anarchist and His Dog, 1907.

"An anarchist makes advances to a woman. When these are repelled he throws a bomb at the woman and her gentleman friend, but his dog retrieves it."

Our proposed  re-version:

A bourgeois gentleman non-friend makes advances to an anarchist woman.  Her dog throws a bomb at him and retrieves his bloody wallet.

[thanks to A for the death from above rabbit hole]

Please send me some of your blood

Erik gave me this book, and it broke my head on a plane.  The red mist settles with no magic left.  I am going to make a film of it when I get a camera, a cave in the woods and an army hospital.  Or just a camera.

S'ì fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo

"... Finally the older worker, a quiet, almost timid railroad clerk-statistician, concluded with vehemence: 'If I had the power?' Then he quoted Dante, an old Italian poet: 'Se fossi foco brucerei il mondo.  Were I a fire I'd burn the world.'"




[from the old Seeds in the Snow BR history.  Oddly, the line isn't from Dante, far as I can tell.  It's a version of the line from Cecco Angiolieri ("S'ì fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo"), who had a had a correspondence with Dante, evidently not on the best terms,  i.e.:

Dante Alighier, i' t'averò a stancare 
ch'eo so lo pungiglion, e tu se' 'l bue  


Dante boy, I'll simply wear you out:  
since I'm the cattle-prod that drives your ox.


Whole sonnet worth quoting (not my translation below, bit formal, though still basically a misanthropic rap boast, especially by the end)


S'i fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo,
S’i’ fosse vento, lo tempesteri;
S’i’ fosse acqua, io l’annegherei;
S’i’ fosse Dio, mandareil in profondo.

S’i’ fosse papa, sare’ allor iocondo,
Che tutt'i cristiani imbrigherei;
S’i’ fosse emperator, sa’ che farei?
A tutti mozzarei lo capo a tondo.

S’i’ fosse morte, andarei da mio padre;
S’i’ fosse vita, fuggirei da lui;
Similemente faria da mi’ madre.

S’i’ fosse Cecco com’i’ sono e fui,
Torrei le donne giovani e leggiadre,
E zoppe e laide lascerei altrui.

If I were fire, I'd burn up the world,
If I were wind, I'd storm it,
If I were water, I'd drown it,
If I were God, I'd hurl it to the depths,

If I were the Pope, I'd be please d
To harass all the Christians,
If I were Emperor, know what I'd do?
I'd cut everyone's head right off.

If I were death, I'd go to my father,
If I were life I'd flee from him,
And I'd do the same for my mother,

If I were Cecco as I am and have been,
I'd take all the young, graceful women,
And leave the ugly and lame to others.

London we are the black wall
we are the spilled and hemmed

we are the undevelopable
London we are not a torch yet

but we are still rats and our snapping jaws
never rehinged after that day

London, July 7

Oakland, we do mind dying

35 years later.  The location changes, but all can be said, beyond words, is Oakland, we do mind dying.  Got baited breath from a continent and an ocean away.  Rage, Oakland, deliberately against any deliberations, furiously against what will apologize only when it's scared of what it deserves.

Day in London (all objects: roughly half Islamic ornament, half things in newspapers, one unfortunately named Caribbean take away, and none of the people who made it good)

Phantom stillness

Yang Yongliang, from the Phantom Landscape series.  Mountains composed of overgrown skyscrapers, traffic fields, the lyrical stacked up from the crystal remnants of new primitive accumulation.  Mist blur, over the built up and too big to slow and think and not fail.  Looked at this in the British Museum today, at the end of a long line of Chinese prints.  We were quieter than before.

Die Uni brennt!

Eurozine reposts my ghost-rider piece on California and communisation, along with a host of compelling articles on university struggles, Bologna accords, zones that rarely get much attention from us on these issues (i.e. Romania and Russia), Nina on Rancière's "utopian rationalism," and philistines. Check the batch here.