The half-dead poet's sham existence
This is one version of the pseudo in sonic form. The sound of one hand clapping in a carpet-lined closet, plenty aware and not stopping despite of this. A straight nothing dirge, misplaced bravado and muck. Hence what this gets very right is the sense that a song need go nowhere to go straight to the sham heart of it. Yeah, there's an ending, and yes, there need not be, and sure, it will go on. In the meantime, something should be drooling, but it yelled itself too hoarse for that.
It rents the gray house next door to this:
"Have you been in more than one of our homes?"
There is enough here for a year's worth of Lacanian Ink mutterings.
The voice of the father is the voice of a German castrato who blew out his vocal chords. The daughter cannot see how he strangles himself - "your dad just about lost his voicebox, I think, changing his voice up there" - in order to disguise the man who cannot be seen by her flat, lopsided bedroom bird eyes. And there are those watching who know all along, who clap and titter the whole way through.
"I didn't know he had it in him..."
Act Your Wage!
One of the more "gleefully eviscerating the last traces of species being" injunctions I've seen recently - first spotted in a billboard looming over Oakland - now comes with bright colors and pieces of plastic on which to choke.
"However, the game gets old pretty quick because you don't really have to make many decisions, you just roll the die, read the card, and put the money in the spot that it goes."
[A review from the site / a very short summary of the circulation of capital]
Of course, to actually act one's wage would be a vicious blow to accumulation, as one would act in exact accordance with the wage, thereby not working the extra portion of the day that produces surplus value or, in the case of the wageless, act as a sheer, desperate, contentless void, miming the null you are declared to be. The hunger of those with no template for action.
So yes. We will act our wage, with the flailing armed gestures of silent film, with no audience in sight.
Lucifer says: fuck it, may as well storm heaven while I still belong to it and thereby produce the situation in which it must be stormed
... no, not even not being with God. God always leaves one in the chamber.
"Young man, I am amused to observe that you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word, and that shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical rhetoric. You think that it is possible to pull down the President. I know that it is impossible, and I am going to try it."
Friday, The Man Who Was Thursday
...what the market is for you. Does it have a particular shape? LG: No, it changes ‘shape’ all the time.
KK: But you see it as a third thing? Or do you mean the other person?
LG: As a greater being.
KK: ( )
---
---
The trading floor needs no curse from on high. Just a self-modeling stain of the copier out from that rough zone where
we are a sum of our parts, or
it is a sum of its parts.
Hence once a greasy bit of "like a pig" gets anywhere in the equation beneath the "greater being," all is rooting around from there out...
there came a faint sound--not near but seeming to come up at me out of unknown abysses. Very, very faint and lost it sounded, but I recognised it as unmistakably the infinitely remote murmur of countless swine.
Nobody, baby
Happy Valentine's Day. Or, in other words, here's to the collapsing, impossible no-body of love, in the house of Keith Sweat. The lyrics which ruin the prospect of there only being this One (because of capacity to sex your body, capacity to strangely mix a few senses of the word "holler" in "I want you to holler, when you want me to stop") for that One (you as "baby"), from "nobody but me"
And who can do it like me (nobody)
to the looping end of the road, where there's no one for any baby, where the night may last a long time, but it will be left undone.
And who can give you what you need (nobody)
Who can do you all night long (nobody)
Nobody, baby (nobody)
As if Odysseus wrote sex jams in a New Jack turtleneck. As if nobody, not even Nobody, could stab Polyphemus into the endless night of blindness.
On, no, on, and on, on...
Nobody baby
No, no, no (nobody)
Such is the cooing shape of the Two. Good night, baby.
"It's a real cheek. The propery has not been empty."
Snatch the property of the hack:
Yet,
"It's not safe to be in at all. We have work to do on it before it is made safe to work on."
If that's not an ideology of the perpetuation of labor, I don't what is: it must be worked on in order to make it to be worked on...
At least they're not the bad sort:
One neighbour, who did not want to be named, said: "The police said we were lucky they were not the bad sort of squatters, but they said they will be moving in in force and will be bringing a grand piano."
A grand piano as assurance that you mean staying put. An unsettling down. To have moving in in force mean Shostakovich.
(thanks, JB, for the story, and pride to the Really Free School)
Weird Films of the 1970s Presents: The Castle of Purity (1973)
You are a creator of utopias, of places that do not exist.
An extraordinary synthesis of Golden Age Mexican melodrama with the more freewheeling films of the middle period of Luis Buñuel's career (note that lead actor, Claudio Brook, was Simón in Simón del desierto [1969] and that lead actress, Rita Macedo, has prominent roles in two other indispensable Buñuel films, Ensayo de un crimen [1955] and Nazarín [1959]), Arturo Ripstein's The Castle of Purity offers an allegorical telling of the true story of a man's attempt to keep his family free from sin by locking them away inside their hefty ramshackle house in downtown Mexico City. Beginning eighteen years into this enforced seclusion, the film depicts the falling apart of this impossible project and details with especial nastiness the misogyny of the family's rat-poison-perfecting totalitarian patriarch, Gabriel Lima, whose marvel and disgust at the prospect of female sexuality seemingly knows no bounds. As one critic has trenchantly put it, The Castle of Purity presents us with "machismo's last bunker." One of the most consequential Mexican films of the decade, Ripstein's depiction of an infernal utopia is not to be missed.
Tuesday, February 15th
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
EGYPT
There is no day like this amongst the days I have seen in my life.
(I know just that there is far more now that I cannot know whatsoever of what comes. Without thinking that this is or is not something to be called a revolution, without the thought that this is or can be remotely a terminal point. But it is, without doubt, what was not so until far too recently.
And that is what we call singular.)
EVERYTHING IS IN EVERYTHING - International Conference at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena , Friday, March 11 & Saturday, March 12, 2011
In one month, this is going down in Los Angeles, and it should be stellar. Full line-up is:
Emiliano Battista
Arne de Boever
Claire Fontaine
Peter Friedl
Sharon Hayes
Maria Muhle
Martin Plot
Kristin Ross
Evan Calder Williams
Jan Völker
"The Graduate Studies in Art Department at Art Center College of Design is pleased to host an international conference on the work of Jacques Rancière, on March 11 and 12, 2011. The theme will be that of “Aesthetic Education,” a philosophical and political program first proposed by Friedrich Schiller in the last decade of the 18th century and the subject of Rancière’s recent innovative work on the relation between aesthetics and politics. For Rancière, politics is not primarily the exercise or struggle for power but the emergence of a certain type of space and time, a mode of visibility and intelligibility that creates a tear in the consensual fabric of a given form of collective life. Under certain circumstances, art can institute just such a space and time, in which the fundamental polarities of experience—activity and passivity, form and matter, appearance and reality—are suspended and transformed. Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man offers, according to Rancière, an unsurpassed model for the construction of a space of nondomination, of “free play”; the aesthetic education of man, in turn, is nothing less than a program for an “aesthetic revolution,” “a revolution of sensible existence.”
This conference will bring together senior and junior scholars as well as internationally acclaimed artists working in the field of contemporary political and aesthetic theory. The papers and presentations will consider the knot formed in Rancière’s work between aesthetics, politics and education. From his earliest work The Lesson of Althusser to his magisterial book on the pedagogical theory of Joseph Jacotot The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the theme of education have been at the center of Rancière’s concerns; his apparently recent turn to aesthetics, after the 1995 publication of The Disagreement, should in turn be understood as a continuation of his studies of the aesthetic experiments conducted during the post-work nights of 19th century proletarians The Nights of Labor. The question forming the horizon of this conference is therefore: what would it mean to propose a new "aesthetic education" of humanity today? How would the resurrection of this concept transform the current concepts of art, politics, and pedagogy? And to what extent is it necessary to return to the founding moments of aesthetic theory to rearticulate the relation between art and politics today?"
I will be speaking of Rancière very little. Rather, I want to talk, among other things (like decomposition, Jenning's Pandemonium, and Vigo's Zéro de Conduite), about the moment in Gombrowicz' Ferdydurke, leading up to the Filidor and anti-Filidor shoot-out/bullet by bullet, piece by piece taking to shreds of their respective partners, where we watch quantity become quality with a single zloty too many:
She was riveted as she watched the growing heap, which by now was no longer merely a heap, and although she tried to count, her arithmetic didn't quite add up. The sum ceased to be a mere sum, it was becoming something unfathomable, unthinkable, something more than a sum, expanding the brain with its enormity, equal to the enormity of the Heavens. Flora let go a hollow groan.
An aesthetic education that piledrives the mind in question. The winning argument spills from the table, to join the exhausted sludge of the one it just convinced.
Melodrama is chasing horror up the stairs with a dulled hysterical outburst
Horror film theory remains concerned with who is doing what to whom. Or, perhaps, for whom (the working class, colonial subjects, women, the bourgeoisie) another who (cannibalistic families, attacked teens who chose to have sex, axe murderers, cops) stands in. At its most interesting – that is, at its most fraught – the attempted transposition between a figureless what (patriarchy, the value form) and who (monsters, madmen) or what (unlocatable evil held back by an ancient talisman, asubjective blobs, hornets) figures it.
This is wrong.
The basic form of the question – who is doing what to whom with what kind of knife in what setting? – itself reveals a fundamental blockage, one that misses so much of what the horror genre has done and, more damningly, a prospect of another kind of political reading capable of grappling with the massive apparatus of money, convention, and distribution that engender these films and which they necessarily refract. In short, these questions are, fully across the board, concerned with horrible content. The underlying supposition is that if we are to “read politically,” to detect in these films an elaboration of their historical moment, of the structures of alienation, repression, and violence, then we are to do so on the grounds of these films including bad things being done to bodies and psyches. As if the work of thought was to figure out what that zombie is, which political tendency which deep-sea leviathan stands in for, if a sword is phallic or not, or if giving a cannibalistic prole family chainsaws is radical or conservative.
But it's not that Michael Meyers is chasing a teen up the stairs with a butcher knife and that our task is to figure out what each of these elements means.
No, it's that melodrama is chasing horror up the stairs with a dulled hysterical outburst, and we cannot look away from the strange wallpaper on the stairs. That conventions of romantic comedy, excessive prettiness, a soft yellow light that comes from no discernible source, a set of clicking objects, real pathos and tenderness, an overlong tracking shot over the outside of a house are coming from that strange double position (necessary part – necessarily disavowed) to get this production called horror.
Mandom's just another word for nonsense left to lose
In follow-up to last point, there are moments where something goes very wrong in the transition from shark to bear, or attack to sale to attack to sale, and we face what cannot be accounted for in any possible register.
[note: Obayashi is also responsible for this]
Morons in the U.S. get excited about SuperBowl ads. Were we to have ads in which the toxic effects of drenching your ripped body with an entire bottle of cologne leads to fantasies of fanning the hammer of your Colt while wearing buckskin, I could start to understand. Until then no.
[note: Obayashi is also responsible for this]
Morons in the U.S. get excited about SuperBowl ads. Were we to have ads in which the toxic effects of drenching your ripped body with an entire bottle of cologne leads to fantasies of fanning the hammer of your Colt while wearing buckskin, I could start to understand. Until then no.
Just none of the guys
"A creature like Chewbacca in the space opera Star Wars is just one of the guys, though a creature gotten up in the same wolf outfit, in a film like The Howling, would be regarded with utter revulsion by the human characters in that fiction."
(Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart)
The prospect, therefore, of mapping the base moves, capacity to get weird, and subcutaneous tendencies of every genre via a demand that at least one character be "gotten up in the same wolf outfit."
For instance,
How to Lose a Guy In 10 Days
Battle of Algiers
Shanghai Express
Through all drifts the wet matted reek of an overused fur suit. Freeze frames to see which nostrils flare.
Weird Films of the 1970s Presents W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)
[a conveniently cross-ocean echo of a screening of this in London. If you've never seen this and are in our area, it really is not to be missed - Erik's description below ain't kidding.]
I’m a romantic. I claim there’s no real revolution without free love.
A supremely bizarre movie that intercuts experimental documentary footage shot in the U.S. with a fictional narrative (filmed in Belgrade) and archival recordings (of, among other things, a Stalinist propaganda film and Nazi electroshock treatments), W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism is a free-for-all pick-and-mix collage work that seeks to fragmentarily embody the beliefs, concerns, and methods of Wilhelm Reich, a rogue Austrian psychoanalyst, former Communist Party member, inventor of the orgone accumulator, and author of (among many, many other things) The Function of the Orgasm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and Sexpol. In a nutshell, Dušan Makavejev’s film is an invaluable document of and from the free love era. Come for the fucking, but stay for the decapitated head that won’t stop proselytizing about the revolutionary potentials of fucking. Not to be missed in any case.
Tuesday, February 8th
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
My whole body is just a-quiverin' with cleanness
Davis Grubbs' sketches for Night of the Hunter that he gave to Laughton. Combine this with Agee's scrapped idea that the switchblade in the strip club would erupt through the Preacher's pants, the remaining fact of the pot of fudge splattering up at a moment of damp charm, "the slit in her throat like she had an extra mouth," four profoundly under-fucked women, rabbits snatched into the night: all this means all the more that the swerve into a hamfisted Christian moral Christmas tale at the end is a desperate attempt to clamp down on what would have been - and still is - one of the dirtier films the States ever made. A fairy tale in the way that The Devil in Miss Jones is a fairy tale.
... perfumed smelling thing. lacy things...
+
It is a wind that
Would be called
A color
Named salmon
Over the back, a wide
Bladed axe
Is felt and still
I live in a shit town
Manicured as shit, sure
But manicured all the same
--
What’s-her-name
A new tendency for
Those leaving small
Groups to bundle into
Bent cars who crouch
I tried to call but I
Knew you were supposed
To be studying some things
You have no idea how
To get there do you
--
I have yet to find
A pair of shoes
That will make
These rocks underfoot
As hooves
"You don't get it from practice"
Proposal for a film to be made:
An American "remake" of Pasolini's Comizi d'Amore, not shot by shot, but demand by demand, in which the exact same questions are asked, rendered in as close a translation as is idiomatically possible. Not updated for contemporary slang or mores, such that one assumes that what would have been probing then would need to ramped up to the full slovenly obscenity that is the general case now. Rather, the asking of the same questions - what do you think of abnormality... - with their coding lost, their new-found restraint. To be shot in the same order of scenes, in zones that transpose and approximate the sites of his asking there: migrant farming communities, sports teams, dance halls, town squares, dry fields, racetracks. A formal procedure of anachronism without which there are no correct things to ask. To be reminded that decades of "talking openly about it" have not rendered the comizio any more or any less clandestine, only banal, overspoken, under-meant, and with ellipses in the place of a question...
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