And who could ever say
That sports do not provide
Real world skills
[thanks, J, for image]
The best sky hook to date
And who could ever say
That sports do not provide
Real world skills
[thanks, J, for image]
Critique of Murderous, Blithering, Moronic Reason
Dear Peter Sloterdijk,
Hey, remember that book you wrote back in '87? That was a great one: funny, acerbic, rambling, sharp. I had wished for more like it.
Now, though:
"In an earlier day the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones--though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still."
You should have your fingers and mouth taken from you, so that you can neither write nor speak. You are an unconscionable jackass.
S a/o B
Fluffy, inertial, clumsy, and bearlike materialism (Bruno Schulz describes one version of the gesture in modern art)
"We openly admit: we shall not insist either on durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary, to serve for a single occasion. If they be human beings, we shall give them, for example, only one profile, one hand, one leg, the one limb needed for their role. It would be pedantic to bother about the other, unnecessary, leg Their backs can be made of canvas or simply whitewashed. We shall have this proud slogan as our aim: a different actor for every gesture. For each action, each word, we shall call to life a different human being. Such is our whim, and the world will be run according to our pleasure. The Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.
"Can you understand," asked my father, "the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mâché, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is," he continued with a pained smile," the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness."
The girls sat motionless, with glazed eyes.
(Schulz, "Tailors' Dummies")
For in all battles the eyes are vanquished first
"by means of terror and shadow of a ghostly army they cause panic, since no enemy can bear a sight so unexpected and hellish"
Tacitus, on the Germanic "ghost warriors" the harii. (Who, by the way, are what Simek calls "the obviously living armies of the dead," the historical, black-clad, flesh and blood foundation for the mythic conception of the Einherjar.)
Alternate histories of special effects, lightless guerilla warfare, the trompe l'oeil such that the night itself will rout the empire. A haunted house theater of operations / of cruelty.
Yes, that is a butterfly painted on my cheek, and yes, those are metal fingerclaw extensions
NYC in 1990, in the eyes of Italy in 1982, was just one of those years.
The gutter dwelling offspring of an Argento objects on the killer's desk tracking shot, The Warriors, and least heterosexual aspects of Mad Max.
Knives - and rollerskates - out...
Sursurrealism
Les barricadeurs sur
la police sur
la ville
(That is, if you want us, cops, you'll have to shoot at your a single phrase version of your fundamental fantasy first. In the Dresden uprising of 1849, so the story goes, Bakunin, proposed to hang Raphael's Sistine Madonna from the barricades, as he thought the Prussians were too cultured "to dare to fire on a Raphael." The French police firing on an American cop film - starring Richard Widmark, no less - is about as unthinkable.
For contemporary America: we must build movable walls composed of nothing but reruns of The Shawshank Redemption. No one will touch us.)
See for yourself pedagogy
When teachers talk about making sacrifices and throwing themselves, heart and soul, into their craft, call em on their bluff: demand that their bodies follow. This is commitment.
"It is really terrible, but it is part of education sometimes. Unfortunately, they must deal with it," she said.
Let's open it up for discussion, so to speak.
(appropriately, this story came to me from my adviser, who - for his own safety - should perhaps not be encouraging this line of thinking)
"It is important that an autopsy truly be the educational opportunity that it should be. The question is how much these students learned from the situation," she added.
"It is the story of Everyman: the reclaiming of Self. "
Amazon's evident hostility to my forthcoming book - or their attempt to help it reach audiences who otherwise might never pick up something about naked boys throwing themselves into fires for the good of the species - has led to a seriously unbelievable product misdescription.
"true success comes from following the heart's lead, and that the mind only creates form for spirit's creative manifestation."
As for how Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is to be confused with Dee Wallace's Bright Light: Spiritual Lessons from a Life of Acting is utterly, utterly beyond me. In fairness, I request only that her product description be swapped out for mine...
"The apocalypse isn't something that will happen one day: it's just the slow unveiling of the catastrophe we've been living through for centuries. Against any fantasies of progress, return, or reconciliation, Williams launches a loathing critique of the bleak present and offers a graveside smile for our necessary battles to come."
But sure, if by "spirit's creative manifestation," you mean the fall of 1,000 blackbirds, then yes.
"Since it only involved a flock of blackbirds and only involved them falling out of the sky, it is unlikely they were poisoned"
Only involved...
If you skin a wolf (Living mammals, gnawing mammals)
though it can chew very rotten meat and / newly born animals. It is nowhere common.
---
If you skin a wolf, coyote and a domestic dog, you / would be hard put to it to identify any one of them / even if you were an anatomist.
Confusion arises / from the fact that dogs in the wide sense of that term / have gone and head and developed what we may call / "nations" without changing in appearance very much.
To add to their charm, these little creatures make pa- / thetic whimpering noises when alarmed.
When seen alive its proportions are hardly / believable and must surely have been developed for / getting through or between things
and we would like to know more about it.
---
all forms of unpleasant hangers-on - a result of their / habit of following the large cats, making a special noise / when doing so, and then eating up most of the feast as / soon as the cat's back is turned.
for their appalling call which, in the case / of the Indian race is said to be "Dead Hindoo . . . / where, where, where?"
---
They will all interbreed with do- / mestic dogs, other jackals, or even wolves
there is a colossal mix-up of doggy creatures.
Hopping, gnawing, scheming
it is necessary to take a deep breath, metaphori- / cally, speaking, for this is the largest order
Vampire collectivity
"... and then, the bat that made the move, that came up and gave the hug, you'd see that bat try to lick at the mouth of the other bat. And if you have a good view, you can actually see the tongue of one bat going into the mouth of the other bat."
"Like they're giving each other a kiss?"
"Very similar. Yes."
"Yes. By regurgitating blood."
"these were adult animals feeding other adult animals food that they could have been eating themselves. That had not been described before..."
("And he'd do the whole starve her until dawn thing and put her back in the cage:
"She will go and beg from other individuals and weirdly instead of them saying to her, you're not my sister, bug off... what would happen is that they would hold still, part their lips, and throw up in her mouth.")
---
Voluntary associative mutual aid as extinction avoidance mechanism, for the period when large warm red-filled mammals disappeared very quickly.
---
"Because of this reliance on blood."
To be used for anything
Quand le Roy Pyrrhus passa en Italie, apres qu'il eut recongneu l'ordonnance de l'armée que les Romains luy envoyoient au devant ; Je ne sçay, dit-il, quels barbares sont ceux-cy (car les Grecs appelloyent ainsi toutes les nations estrangeres) mais la disposition de cette armée que je voy, n'est aucunement barbare.
[When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order of the army the Romans sent out to meet him: "I know not," said he, "what kind of barbarians," (for so the Greeks called all other nations) "these may be; but the disposition of this army, that I see, has nothing of barbarism in it."]
[When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order of the army the Romans sent out to meet him: "I know not," said he, "what kind of barbarians," (for so the Greeks called all other nations) "these may be; but the disposition of this army, that I see, has nothing of barbarism in it."]
(Montaigne, "Des Cannibales")
But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply themselves to anything.
(Marx, Grundrisse)
No Country for Old Men Or Somewhat Younger Men But Plenty For Teen Girls and The Libidinal Circuits of Shapeshifters
Those horses can't outrun Little Blackie! They're loaded down with fat men and iron! - Mattie
Yes, very well-crafted, finely minor tuned, restrained but old-school thrills. Excellent performances from young ones. The Dude routed through the Duke through whiskey back to a more murderous Dude. A meditation on revenge, coming-of-age, pluckiness, and the American Gothic.
All well and good and true.
And all leaving out the heart of the thing, which is a less restrained, prim and lusty as hell, near psychotic libidinal organization routed through and based on a shape-shifter's logic: Men into Beasts and Meat, Beasts ridden raw into Dead Meat and slithering out from Dead Men to poison the young woman who has left behind the company of men and women, boys and girls, exchange and trade and lawyers and swaps, for the grimier bestiary where The Beef wears leather, The Bad has the legs of a satyr, and a One-Eyed Rooster becomes the horse he has killed.
In a way, beyond its cleaving-close to Western heirs, its closer siblings are the weirder fair of "young woman discovering sexuality amongst senseless occurrences and things that keep changing species", a small subgenre consisting primarily of Neil Jordan's In the Company of Wolves, Jaromil Jireš' Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and a good half of all fairy tales.
In this instance, we might start with our most literal beserker, the syllable-gargling Bear Man, a dentist and hakwer of the dead (minus their teeth) and, in an initial sight gag, a bear who rides a horse (Ed Corbin on the role: "I got off of him [the horse] as much as I could because I felt badly for him. But mainly the horse kept looking back. You could see in his eyes that he was thinking, 'There's a bear on my back.'") He who needs no place to stay because he's got his bear skin, at once a Bear House and Bear Man.
The bad guy who does not speak but runs through a series of animal impressions, moving from the initially logical taunting of Mattie/Rooster by acting like a rooster to his incapacity to not respond to each situation with a set of bleats, moos, and grunts.
Rooster himself, who spends the majority of the film having a hard time being human and, in what might otherwise be a heart-warming touch, only becomes a "good person" by basically becoming horse.
LaBoeuf, the fancy civilized man, is degraded up or upgraded to "La-Beef," halfway between fop and hunk. The moment when Mattie - who, the film endlessly reminds us, is 14 and hence is supposed to not One Who Fucks in these kind of movies - first sees him on the porch is one of the more potently erotic moments I've seen in a while, from the very understated gesture of him putting his boots up on the railing, his face hidden from view, just a set of objects propped up for inspection. The fact that he took the empty room where she belonged compounds it: The Beef has been lodged, so to speak, in your bed.
She spends the night instead with the wheezing, sheet-stealing old woman, and wakes to find LaBoeuf in her room now, watching her sleep. After being out-talked by her, as are all men, women, animals, and stones in the film, anticipating his later biting of his tongue and thereby producing an actual, rather than figurative, speech impediment, he makes the loose-threat/come-on/deflation that he was thinking about stealing a kiss from her, in spite of her age, but given that she "withholds her sugar," he may need to spank her instead. She responds that "both would have been equally unpleasant," which, given the rest of the film, is to say: perhaps not very unpleasant whatsoever. His spanking fetish continues, and with it the sharp discomfort of the film at the prospect of their potential fucking, when he throws her to the ground and smacks her ass before switching to a cane. That these men don't understand Mattie, to be sure. That the slack jawed gape of Rooster and the manic ass fixation of The Beef is a reasonable and yearning extension of those who are men but are not so human, to be equally sure.
Bodies are full of snakes: the bodies of these bears and roosters and cows and girls, they are themselves made of other bodies. It just takes the whole being dying to reveal themselves as such, a papery frayed shirt opening over a eaten away chest to coils of what should be intestines but which unfurl, rattle, and bite you.
And which motivate the final churning climax of film's hungry looking and touching, as Mattie is bitten by a rattler, Rooster cuts a wound on top of the puncture and sucks the poison out, before taking her on horseback through the night to find a doctor, galloping endless. Coupled with a near precious aestheticism (the snow falls slow, bodies are dark and flat, the sky is massive and navy, heads loll in poison fever, the horse's sweat swine), it is a sequence of pure exertion and exhaustion of the heart, as we watch and listen a horse, carrying a man poisoning himself to death and a girl poisoning herself to death with snakes, be ridden to death across the empty plains.
The horse itself was already a transference: in conversation with the young black stableboy who is the one who knows horses, she names the horse "Little Blackie", as she swaps out a human for a horse in anticipation of her overall abandonment of the younger set for the older men, an imbalance that persists to her narration at the end, where she is alone and "old enough," but Rooster was already too old enough, leaving her with a corpse to bury and prevent from becoming snake.
The horse, that bearer of her withdrawal, collapses in the night. Rooster shoots it. And in the ultimate transformation in a film riven, impelled, obsessed, and confused by them, he picks her up and begins to heave himself toward their destination, swapping himself out for horse, a man who is a rooster who is a horse, the blood straining.
He collapses with final steps in sight of the cabin where the doctor lives and draws his pistol. And yes, he fires a shot in the air to call their attention, with a weary smile and comment about getting old.
But how can we not imagine how the film deserved to end, with Rooster drawing the pistol as he drew it on Little Blackie, because they shoot horse, they do, and putting it to his own temple and blowing his brains out the other side of his skull, putting himself down to become not man, rooster, horse, dog, bear, not even a tangle of snakes, but meat to freeze in the night.
And Mattie picking herself up, the next in the chain, picking herself up like a corpse, to break herself like a horse, to continue that heaving drive to a fire that burns somewhere that is not here.
The Second Trojan Horse
A city was under siege. It was a messy, rotten, idiotic affair. Those inside the sturdy walls, built from the compressed rubble of past cities, were safe. They had nothing but time to kill. Deep-seated water fed the fountains. Plenty of food.
Then the rats got into that food, carrying a septic stain with them, and many of the besieged died, and their bodies became accidental weapons against their ex-neighbors, lovers, citizens, strangers. But they were shoved against those walls, pressed into them, until their bodies became intentional defense, and the living got used to the bacteria and got stronger.
Then those attacking them from outside started lobbing fire in. They didn't care what remained of the city to take, if it was nothing but that strange 17-sided exterior wall made of all the other cities that were there before. They wanted to scorch it out from within. But those inside took the fire and applied it to the bodies of the dead, that infected building material, and made it dark and hard. It shone like wet coal. Blackened even the teeth.
Then there was a giant wooden horse left outside the gate. Its enormous flat white eyes straight across from the sentry patrolling the wall-top. It was sturdy, with deep hammered nails and thick trunk-spoked wheels and painted chesnut with black accents. A large red ribbon around its neck on which hung a red card. Inside it said: SORRY. No one was around to say about what, but it was assumed to be about the months of murdering and clattering at the walls that wouldn't come down.
They decided to bring the gift inside. Troy had fallen 9 months prior, and although they weren't nearby, word had gotten around. They knew very well about the Trojan horse. It seemed their besiegers, having departed from closer to Troy on their long march, had hoped their lead-time beat the spread of the news. The besieged decided to play dumb: why not bring the hollow horse inside and close the gate, so those hidden outside could not see, and then they would lance their spears into the horse, they would take their axes and hew it to chunks, they would saw it to bits and do the same to the warriors hidden stealthy inside the hollow? And then at nightfall, when the plan dictated that those inside were supposed to creep to the gate and open it for the returning army to slip in, they would indeed open the gate and wait just there, to welcome their attackers into a waiting nest of blades and arrows, and finish the whole thing once and for all?
They wheeled the creaking thing inside and shut the creaking gate.
They stood around it and set ladders against it, looked over its uneven joints and sagging belly, its long flanks and piles of brush tied together and pegged to the ass to mimic a tail. Its chiseled grimace.
They stood around it and aside it and on it, and when the cry came, they let their axes fall and shoved their spears through the wood.
Blood seeped out from the first cut. The one who had let his axe fall saw they must be pressed close inside, all those waiting to take the city, squeezed up against the walls through which the blades and heads were tearing.
They pulled back all that steel and bronze and iron, black and red and wet now, and struck again, on the ears, the shins, the throat.
And the red began to pour.
On the fifth blow, it became obvious: there was no one hiding inside. Just the flesh of the horse, its small ocean of blood.
It came hot, spattering and choking them. Lapping at the walls. The splinters bobbed soft.
They did not know how to stop and they hacked and stabbed, madly, gashing their legs in accident, breaking their ladders. They tore and dismantled, hunk after hunk, no organs inside, just a sheer dead silence of meat and its constant pour.
And they went home and did not speak and went to sleep. And as they did, fitful sleep to the sound of the blood that rustled in their hallways, splashed lightly around the feet of their beds, the plague it carried, the plague that had been building in their lungs and nodes, began to surge.
One by one by one they awoke and they did not move. Limbs stiff as wood, a frantic heart. A tongue that thought SORRY and a brain that said nothing. They did not move and the air became still.
The four piles, sulking aimless with their plague, they did not move.
We would counsel you to carry your enthusiasm into arriers more urgently in need of it, that is to say, to your political and moral institutions.
A template for letter writing, particualrly for those that might like to be "letters of protest." An alternate model of the old-fashioned three part dialectical duck and weave, with all the sick grace of a doomed encounter:
1) The politics of declassed, deneighborhooded dandyism concerned primarily with the bothersome disappearance of girls with which one can amuse oneself
2) Self-inflating formality and coldness ("it is inconvenient... before we have the opportunity to visit it") of a piss-ant, cloutless group likely known best for fucking with Charlie Chaplin, declaring in the Times that urban development should be halted given that it not accord with their wishes to undertake psychogeographical experiments (read: gather fodder for future tracts, wander drunkenly, and look for girls with whom they can amuse themselves)
3) A devastating lightness, an indifferent suggestion that pulls the rug out from the feet of all involved and names all the more what has been demolished from the beginning
Yours, faithfully
The Leaky Kettle, The Black Cauldron
For those things bred of the stewing center surrounded by neon ghouls
More likely to get into bad hands
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this whole state of affairs is that it accidentally and insistently establishes the divide between the strategic (nukes) advantage of the U.S. and the tactical (nukes) advantage of Russia. It's almost as if they never read Debord.
(And that "reserve" of unused strategy, just sitting around, a lodestone ticking down to collective half-life, while the worry remains that some of those tactics will go missing in search of bad hands.)
Wreckers write their names only in graphs
Two more, as I'm still transfixed with a rough data capture of things I have been working on for the last year. (Despite the likely possibility that these may lack any genuine explanatory power / correlation to "actual trends". At the least, the real effect of Ngrams is to make Franco Moretti simultaenously the most relevant and most outmoded critic of the times, by allow everyone to play at the project.)
1.
Shared spikes, with salvage lagging slight, at the time of world wars, when sabotage gets writ large. (Italian not available, so autonomia fantasies of wide relevance go unproved.) Wreckage begins to climb around the Commune. Salvage always jagged as thrown-out teeth.
If you want the depressing one:
An idiotic beam of sunshine comes late, flares bright, and begins its plummet quick.
2.
1.
If you want the depressing one:
An idiotic beam of sunshine comes late, flares bright, and begins its plummet quick.
2.
Again, the 1870s. That briefest scraping near kiss and cross, after Weimar hyperinflation and money is burned and Wall Street goes down:
1992, the Anglo century's greatest year of negation.
And the dwarf that has stuck around too long, bilious and repetitive in the corner, shows itself aiming for an unwanted comeback:
Finish it off once and for all.
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