Seemed time for an update.
Weird Films of the 1970s Presents: In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death (1974)
Inge Maier, who watched, kept getting the feeling that she was in the wrong film.
(see above and below)
Tuesday, February 22nd
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
ASH, NOTHING, OIL (Stuck engines, sexiness, and extinction in the holes of the year)
[note: this was a piece, loosely about 2010's infamous holes in the earth, that I wrote end of last summer for a Swedish online journal/project. It's now uncertain if that project will end up appearing. So now, several months after and into a new year, is this time capsule, marked by being written while the Gulf was still gushing.)
ASH
The threat was not the hole, and it was not what came from it.
It wasn't burning cattle or houses. It wasn't hungry, but it did hack and cough and then the planes stopped.
I’m very happy to live here in Iceland even though we’re broke.
[Every hole in the earth must be anthropomorphized, insofar as that means doing something that humans do at the moment when they seem least human: spitting, swallowing, gurgling, roaring, weeping. Made as if human to be made barely human, to try and register the shock, the frenzy of verbs outdo each other through the frothy news. Like a mass murderer in the cottage next door. We thought Eyja was quiet, good company, a bit strange, but kept to itself. I mean, you never know, but who could have seen this coming, this explosion, this exhaling, this monstrous outburst?
Because a hole itself is neutral, dumb: just a certain area in which the surface is suddenly not at the same level as it was before. There's nothing to think about it, nothing to say, but then things pass through it, one way or another, drop or spew, and other things get wrecked because of it, and what can we say about it? Only that it's just like us, insofar as that means it can do things that stand for the end of us all.]
It was effusive and buoyant and eager. Gibbets of lava, built up behind the restricted hole, harder chunks of matter. Tephra spume, darker, but first, a time of light and flame.
It provided the occasion for a dirty thunderstorm, which is at once the single greatest meteorological phenomena of all time, and the single greatest name for a meteorological phenomena. When all the ash and rock and ice in the volcanic plume rub together and produce a static charge and lighting strikes during an eruption. It belongs less to an incident that upset the movements of capital and more to a black, neon airbrushed hair metal shirt. Of a band called Dirty Thunderstorm.
But for all its flash, the countryside wasn't bathed in flame, shepherds didn't fall into a hot maw of the earth. It spat up, booted high.
Fresh eruptions thrust new torrents of molten rock through the shattered ice sheets in the mountain crater, spewing a towering wall of ash, dust and steam high into the air.
Fresh thrusting, it spews towering. Like all disasters, we have to borrow the modifiers of bad erotica to get at it. And what they did that night was a dirty thunderstorm, indeed.
But what was really bad, real naughty, wasn't the coming out but the hanging around, the shit hitting the Gulf Stream fan and floating. It was born up like ash feathers.
That damage was a swarm of waiting. It was passive, a siege engine that bides its time, lets you come to it, harmless until you approach in a machine that consumes air to throw itself forward and up.
And so we did not come to it, because the mere thought of it was too much.
(And so it was the highest disturbance of airline traffic since WWII, that last instance of the pesky interruption of the flight paths of the rich and busy.)
Like the black crystals of Lem's The Invincibles, but with no internal cohesion, no silent buzzing nanoworkings. Just that it had been beneath glacial ice, and as the hole became a scourge-hole and tossed up to heaven, that heat melted its ancient ice, which vaporized and changed the composition of the silicate ash, making nasty glassy ash, the kind that scratches corneas, that grinds motion to a halt.
And a wind of rustling glass, a dust like bees
But it has no shape, it requires an engine to take shape, and the only shape that it will take is the breaking apart of that engine.
That was too much for us. Better the engines sit and pace the airstrip while plans to see family or make money or get laid or look at buildings in another country all get mired at the airport, in that hellish slush of frustration, made all the worse by the rarest exception, when the ineptitude of the airline can't be blamed.
All for the thought:
One by one, each of the engines on the jumbo jet shut down, and the plane began to dive toward the ground
And so it took no shape, remained a cloud, and it did no harm. A forbidding sabotage.
For the danger was just the danger that's already there, hoisting massive heaps of metal and flesh up into the air. The silicate ash just made flying what it already is, a leap of faith supported by combustion and the willfully forgotten fact that sure, it rarely goes bad, but when it does, it goes all the way down.
The disaster was waiting to happen, it is called flying, and turbulence is the staved-off rule, not exception.
It defied passage through it, it chewed up engines in speculation. It had no solid surface, you can't have a hole in it, but still, it was thick. It seized us all up, and we drew pictures of it as it spread, pictures of black laid over maps, a swelling yawp from this single point, this hole which gave expression to something meaningless and old.
But it meant other things, because when those pictures were drawn, the planet had to be tipped, remapping needed, the new center of the tilted globe was Iceland and the nearer bald spot of the Arctic.
In October 2008, all three major banks in Iceland collapsed, relatively scaled the largest financial meltdown ever. And then the government folded as well.
Treason due to recklessness is still treason
Though Europe took little attention. Iceland was not Greece, and its yogurt was more polite, not a fire that burned banks.
Then this unpronounceable thing, forcing itself into the mouths of its commentators, slashing the wings of its tourists. As focal point of important things that happen, Europe can no longer compete with its minor brethen who hold it hostage, a new hierarchy of what landmass has what hole. This petulant sulky child, gorging itself on glass candy and chalky ash, who makes itself sick just to spoil the party.
The wretching is a cutting miasma and in the gasps, the thought that this scattered glass is a crystal ball of what's to come, a prediction whose very saying – that particulate yell – makes it nearly the case.
However, as Science Fair noted previously, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano isn't necessarily the main problem. It's Katla, Iceland's noisier neighbor, that's the concern. If lava flowing from Eyjafjallajokull melts the glaciers that hold down the top of Katla, then Katla could blow its top, pumping gigantic amounts of ash into the atmosphere.
The potential eruption of Iceland's volcano Katla could send the world, including the USA, into an extended deep freeze.
Like a GDP drop of 5.5% in six months.
A hole can't be frozen, but it can let loose what, in freezing and halting, stands things still that otherwise can never be seen while moving, like the spoked blades of a engine, like a history.
Iceland was ready, knew that this hot freezing was a snapshot mailed back in time.
On 20 April 2010 Icelandic President Ólafur Grímsson said that, "the time for Katla to erupt is coming close ... we [Iceland] have prepared ... it is high time for European governments and airline authorities all over the world to start planning for the eventual Katla eruption.”
But Europe wouldn't recognize, and the Katla eruption never came, but still, the air is thick and it cuts.
It promised a drop in global warming, and the glacial steam would cool to dew at least. Planes couldn't fly, gasoline sat nervously in its non-burned state, idling, with the darkening of the sky, smirched with ash, while the sun was still there.
And if it continued:
Sheep will die, but they won't be burned.
There will be less sunlight, and someone will break through the security checkpoint, refusing to think that the skies are dangerous, fumble the plane into take off, and it will rise feeble and surge back down, taking out a terminal full of permanently delayed families and fewer and fewer will bother coming to the airport after that.
And more and more will grasp the sneering grind between what aims to make the world circulate and what circulates against that, on upper winds, settling lower, on the containers and barges, in hair and on shoulder blades, what looks like snow but which does not think.
At this new tilted center, the bubbling lava
just looked like a pretty little candle twinkling in the distance, said Mr Eiriksson
It's just surreal to sit here and watch the plumes of ash up there
Engines of planes that carry people and things, it sits like glass in their hot spinning mouths and causes engines to sob.
NOTHING
A blindhole we call one where there is a bottom that could be seen, not the hole that doesn't see or where sight reaches nothing, clear through. But this was a blindhole.
The hole continues to grow, say officials.
In respect to total income in 2010, the balance of the national debt will be of 219.6%.
And a whale looks a lot like a fish, but calling it one would be very misleading.
In Guatemala City, the ground fell in and a house and factory and a possibly a human too.
It got called a sinkhole, but nothing sank, you must sink through a substance. It collapsed inward around a hollow, it made of a volume an unhealing yawn.
Everyone talked about how perfectly round it was, and that roundness meant that it had to be a fake. Because nature is supposed to be ragged. This was a rifle shot from the moon, down, a pavement crop circle, a scalding sphere.
It must have been made on Photoshop, they said, but there was the fact that the photos came from the government and this quieted that. Because governments do not have Photoshop.
It is a savage puncture without origin, because it is round. A punctuation mark, a single period, and soon E's and F's and O's and G's and one K will become be written in the city that falls away. Crumbling sentences, and the edge is nearly clean, blocks and dogs and groceries plummet a hundred feet below, and finally we whose planes have unstuck engines can read what the city meant all along.
WE SAW NO KNIFE, BUT THE FACTORY IS SPLIT AND DANGLING.
But no, just a period
Turns out it wasn't a sinkhole, though that's what was written everywhere. Sinkhole implies “natural” and this is “not natural”, because there are pipes that snake beneath the city and they burst and there is an underground flood, cleaning, eroding, supping from below and carrying somewhere else.
Instead, Bonis prefers the term "piping feature" -- a decidedly less sexy label for the 100-foot deep, 66-foot wide circular chasm.
(Elsewhere, it was called a piping pseudokarst)
Because it was sexy, of course, even with learning the mood-killing details of a lack of fresh water and the desperate and shoddy attempts to remedy this that lie behind the floor-dropping out beneath us and we're dizzy and breathless. A perfect hole, untouched by man! All natural!
But even that petty bureaucrat's technical name couldn't ruin it, because the hole wasn't the fact of a falling, and with it, the weight above.
No -
gobbling several buildings and nearly an entire intersection
Residents of Guatemala City may be thinking the world is trying to swallow them after the mother of all sinkholes appeared in a city street
A gobbling, swallowing mother of holes
And they still couldn't believe it, because where did this swallowing go, how did a hole become a hole? Where did it all go to make the ground a hole into which all could be gobbled, a throat that falls away darkly? And they wanted it to be bottomless, a real problem solver to consume without trace, crumb, or wracked steel bones, to have the staring meet nothing.
But they peered and saw, in the blind spot far below, the banal pile of broken.
So it is a hole that swallows but does not chew. And those chunks of money and time up above, factory and house and flesh just sit there, fall and sit mixed with pumice, to be slowly eaten away by the water that made the hole happen, the water that was supposed to flow elsewhere to pass through bodies and to flush away waste. It chews with the same substance that made it swallow. A dissolving throat that doesn't need.
It was not a yell of ash that pollutes, but a flipped dream of urban management gone wrong, a cleaning from below, the pipes that act of their own accord, gnawing with wet tongues at the outmoded and eroded, until the city falls in circles down.
That falls in circles anywhere
"Our recommendation was that this could happen again," he recalled. "When you have water flowing from storm water runoff, a sewage pipe, or any kind of strong flow, it eats away at the loose material.”
The event horizon is just the sidewalk. It is the whole city, below which the unsexy piping features, the bent joint and blackwater. The undrinkable whispers lapping and the unfillable listens. Elsewhere in the city, the pavement creaks a bit, they're bending down, tapping with knuckles, and the same echo is made constant across these vacant shells that are not yet a hole.
We don't know how long it has to go on before it collapses
A hole that grows, negation that increases, in porous fits and starts. Erosion starts and the figure itself spreads until thinking teeters and there's a total equivalency of hole.
"I think the whole media is a sinkhole," she quips.
The metaphor that eats all, these multiplying nothings that up from a failure in circulation, which eddies and washes, the undercurrent that scours it all like lace
But once it starts collapsing
OIL
the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can "get there first"...us or the well.
Of course, there is no us or the well, we are nothing if not that shoved-in shunt, that screwing the pooch 5,000 feet deep, that shallow breath, that frantic attempt to murder what is already dead.
Of these 3 holes:
The volcano was something that kept happening, it had a beginning, but its force was not the punctual nature of how it started. And it could have spread, and only Iceland was ready for the ashen horde.
“We” - that is, us, not the well – didn't have any hand in it. We were just scared to fly through it. It is one hole, beneath which a quantity of stuff seethes, it is barely a hole, just a shaping of what comes.
The eroded blindhole happened, in degrees, but it happened as a punctuated thing. The ground fell. And happened because of the designed flows of water beneath a city, the well seeps quietly out, but the disaster is not the leakage. It could repeat again and again, it will, but without direct incidence: it does not fall at the precise point where a cut was made. A factory does not fall into a hole in a pipe.
It is many holes to come, over which there is no quantity.
The Deepwater oil gusher is our hole, species-being in drilled form, right where we lanced it, and it could not stop happening.
I read this morning that there are 27,000 abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
It is one amongst a scarred series, the one that happened to take, not because the odds of this are 1 in 27,000 but because 27,000 times is more than enough to get the needle stuck not in a vein but in a black gold ocean beneath a grey one. They plugged it up now, but that changes nothing. Like covering your mouth after you sneeze.
It is the unmanaging end of the Atlantic
There are brown waves that roll in, they cannot mix, so the wave is spotted with surface like the plague and it will not fold.
Those same waves made the unused fishing boats slippery.
They said it could not really have happened, but the thought of a hurricane on fire did happen in our heads, which is more than can be said for the 4.1 million barrels, which happened somewhere but not in our heads.
If you framed it correctly in a viewfinder, the ocean was split in half: the ocean as it used to be, and the ocean where there was another ocean on top it, a thin viscous one.
And a flowering plenitude of killing (because it kept being killed and kept not dying), pages and twists and turns about how and where it would be killed, with what, where.
(Static, top, bottom, over.)
The language used to describe it alternated between the diary of a sex murderer
The gusher will be choked to death by a "top kill," in which heavy mud and cement will be shoved down the throat of the blown-out well.
And a blow-out blockbuster, the plot of Armageddon but starring robots and the ocean, which is to say, better
“Drill a hole, drop a nuke in and seal up the well.”
All this was necessary, to make it alternately into the pornographic fact it already was, albeit one that constantly slipped between gender and figures of what was happening and who was inserting what into where and what was spraying into whom, and into an action film with an eye for the particularities of civil disaster engineering ramped up to nuclear. Because we could see everything and could not make out what we saw.
That constant web feed, a slow resolution toxic gush, but too close up, whose spray hit no object, just out of the frame, and then elsewhere there were maps that showed the spread, continents and forms we recognize now squaring a different mass – the plume, the preferred word when talking about pollutants this year – that is neither land mass nor body of water, that is neither mass nor body.
But through all this, a strange lack of talk about it. Of course the news were all over it, but for how nasty it was, for the fact that it was and is the death by poison of the second largest ocean on the planet that had potential to not stop at all, there was little. Which is to say, Americans talked about things other than this during this period, they got used to it.
Which is to say, the fact that BP stations weren't torched by a mob, in a guttering echo of the sea. This indexes two things.
- A subterranean awareness that despite all the blabber about mismanagement, there was nothing exceptional about what they did. It was business as usual, as conducted always: rushed, shoddy, scrambling, hungry. A value hole – a whooshing of negative space, that is the vacuum of potential profit, of what could be capitalized – that attaches itself to every teat, cut, and leak it can find. The relative degree of leaving BP be, beyond a fangless boycott, is first a sign for hope, that then immediately binds to a matter of despair – we get right that it isn't a special case, they can't be called bad guys until we're willing to tar anyone who conducts business at all, but we're not getting what to do otherwise, to that total tarring. The bad pounds over us like a brown wave and we're slick reeking and do not want to sleep.
- That for all the talk elsewhere – we're looking at you, philosophy – about the “unthinkable,” this is as close as we come on a mass scale. Not a petty transgression or speculative absolute we already understand damn well. No, a black, mindless excess that seeps and pours and does not scab, and made worse by the knowledge that it is not “indifferent” to us, it is hostile, and we know very well that in this case, it does not happen to us like the tail of a cold universe brushing us away like flies or like symptoms routed far away from their cause. This is at once the perfect figure of direct cause and what drowns the thought of cause because there is no distinction betweenwhat might have been value and generation and profit and what could be the deathknell of all that.
And all the worse because it was not the end
The spread widened to $22.73 a barrel today as the December 2018 contract jumped $1.39, or 1.5 percent, to settle at $94.17 a barrel on the Nymex. July crude dropped 7 cents to $71.44.
There is no earth as such, to save or ruin or conserve or squander. There are just competing piles of ex-motion, heated and cooled to various degrees, sometimes thrown high into the air, other times humidly coming apart, other times a building in which you chew and swallow and wait.
Midway through the Deepwater time, when the “situation wasn't improving, and hence might be structural,” the thought came out: what if it was broken below, if the problem wasn't the corkless spray from the top, but a lower break, chthonic deep below, and that BP knew this, they didn't want to topkill it, just to catch and release (in the form of burning) that oil, because if it were plugged up high, the pressure would build below, at the actual break, a break held tenuous at bay by the rock surrounding it And the real hole would show itself, the hole that isn't a single puncture and siphoning but a loss of structure, a break in division, and the divisions collapsing. The spill cannot be plugged it has no hole, just holes, because it seeps up through sand, through those smaller gaps, the blasted pores swelling. Nothing bleeds anymore, it sweats the infection out in tiny beads.
For it couldn't but look like a shunt stuck in, to drain it out, only to find that something was sicker than it could have been thought, that this was a rageful old sore to be left alone, that had no reason, and that will not leave us be now.
But this shunt hole is also a tunnel, a point of connection and passage, a relinkage between this world of future speculation on dead living labor to come and the this far past world, of dead life given an unseen future, made valuable only in how it rots and how it will be burned.
For just what comes from this hole?
There were certain warm nutrient-rich environments such as the Gulf of Mexico and the ancient Tethys Sea where the large amounts of organic material falling to the ocean floor exceeded the rate at which it could decompose. This resulted in large masses of organic material being buried under subsequent deposits such as shale formed from mud. This massive organic deposit later became heated and transformed under pressure into oil.
That is to say:
Oil is the revenge of what was not allowed to decay
The once alive buried and compressed so that it could never become dead and gone.
The rage and horror of this zooplankton and algae, pressed into a permanent unrotting. The hatred of simpler life for the complicated forms that follow and opened it up, suck it out, and then the joyous burning, the final consumption in fire of what oxygen alone wasn't allowed to do.
It is the return of the formless undead, piled and coiled. Our entire enterprise, our failed management of holes and ceaseless digging of new ones, of debt that makes us ants sliding back down the eroding walls of a sand trap, of scoured-out value, of mines and miners who can't get out, of planes that won't leap and pipes that won't hold, of the breathless, tired hauling about of things made from other things dug up by people who hauled themselves into a building to make them: it all runs on the hot light of the smaller dead we keep with us to burn.
But what they made continued into our present, their burial and decay is our present.
The poison of the spill, then, is just a stored-up, welled-up,and cut-loose death, a death that was supposed to drive forward, but now clogs and thickens, the coming back of the little ones who never had their day and who never had tongues but who will bring this whole thing down, who will get sick in the ocean and cloud the air until things get hotter and wetter.
But we try otherwise and when they let loose, gurgling and gibbering, we drag them up to the top of the ocean, we siphon them onto boats that run on the combustion of their refined cousin, boats paid for by a system of credit dependent upon the future extraction and refinement of this dumb prehistoric anger. We pull them up and we burn them there, in the purest potlatch. The massive energy it takes, the workers fed and transported, the machines running on gas to pull up oil, the flare of heat echoing over the cold gray water, to burn what would have become that gas, to burn it in a corpseless pyre straight through the night.
The Atlantic splashes and rolls above the sludge of buried rot. In this collection of moments frozen and unstuck, of holes given and made, the Atlantic is on fire yet that fire leaves untouched all that should be charred beyond recognition.
It is clear that the negative impacts go far beyond the physical presence of oil. Thus far, the impact on housing markets has been measurable in sharp decreases in volume from the previous year.
This slicked-flame burning is another sun and it eats all light
Culture on the skids
“In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial. The last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.”
Jean Vigo
But the lesson of experience is enough to induce us to stop pussy-footing
As we see it, the revolution needs organisms to oversee it, and repress, in an organised sense, hostile sectors. As current events have shown such sectors do not accept oblivion unless they are crushed.
There may be anarchist comrades who feel certain ideological misgivings, but the lesson of experience is enough to induce us to stop pussy-footing.
Not organizations, but organisms, not forms-of-life, but life forms...
(We would say, not oversee but elaborate, not repress but dissolve, not crushed but inconsequential. But the case remains: there are worse things than a loud misstep of that unwarranted thing, that organism, that has no name but a practice, that gathers ourselves together in order to let itself go.)
They cannot say we are over-reacting. The present moment has nothing revolutionary about it.
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.
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