1) Primitively accumulate (mechanism of extraction and control)
[Brief value-producing interlude:
Culture industry reinvigoration via slotting in of the barbarian, he who does not speak as you, who does not speak at all. Circulate capital (read: bring not just a wheelbarrow but the sticky, voracious good intentions of the young ducks, for always remember Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!) back through the geographical site of original extraction.]
2) Weaponize the primitives (mechanism of self-destruction and leveling) on their home turf
3) Leave be to flatten itself in the echo chamber of a disavowed zone (mechanism of walking away while "sadly" looking back)
(And no, no one doubted that you would "take vanilla".)
2. I will once again write substantive things here, despite the recent slide back into scattered ephemera. Writing projects I've taken on, the kind with collective schedules or official deadlines, have became monstrous Eaters of Time, and I've been gathering, polishing, and hoarding theses in private. Will begin dropping them here.
3. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is finally coming out. Should be available in the U.S. by the end of this month. Urge your local bookstore to put it up front alongside Twilight, because at night, when the store closes, it will eat those books and use their spines to make siege engines to take on the self-help section. Conversely, it's about $10 off on Amazon, if local business isn't one's thing. I'd like to give talks about it in various cities, so if you live in one and know a bookstore/library/gallery/university/museum/bar/house that would be interested, let me know.
4. The 70s Film Series I run with Erik turned out incredibly. We're starting up again in April with Melodrama, of the Mexican, British, American, and German variety. Those who might be saddened about the prospect of the falling weirdness quotient (although House sets the bar unfairly high), don't be. These are some of the stranger, sharper films out there, and they should be watched together (as should almost all films), with the transmission of giggling, dejection, turned-on-ness, and unease that does not happen in the echo chamber of the One and Only. Plato was worried about a "plague of pathos" - these are that well-lit nightmare.
5. Arab Revolt Reading Group will be starting in April as well, have gathered names of those interested, and will be working up a reading list in the next few weeks.
5. Pride to those in Wisconsin, shame to all of us just watching slack-jawed, and utterly yes to general strike.
THE LAST IN OUR SERIES THIS WINTER. TOMORROW NIGHT.
At that level, a hit movie about shark attacks
leads to a movie about bear attacks.
That’s the best they can do.
This is not a film you have to “see to believe.” You will see this film, and still you will not believe it. We’ve watched some odd films this quarter. This one, our last in this winter run, cannot be called “odd” or “weird.” It has no adequate adjectives, and it exists in a realm where natural light does not shine, where everything glitters soft, where pianos eat girls, where a theme song gets stuck on repeat, where landscapes open inward like double doors, where faces break like mirrors and there is fire beneath.
Criterion, responsible for its recent DVD release, states that it is a “psychedelic ghost tale” that “might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet.” That’s about right. But more accurately, it is an strangely pure cinema of effects and techniques, craft gone wild. It’s a joyous hijacking of all the tricks of the advertising trade, given a big enough budget to fully let loose not what comes from outside but from inside, the deep madness barely restrained by the conventions of profit-making. What results is a manic goofiness so profound it becomes sinister, and a shuddering collapse of the gap between the sublime and the moronic. We see, at the same moment, one of the better sunsets committed to film and a severed head flying through the air to bite the ass of her friend. It is gorgeous and cheap, a profound gag, and the anarchic giggling of an unhinged ludic impulse which asks, in deadly seriousness: actually, what can film do that other media cannot?
Also, you will see a painting of a fluffy white cat named Blanche vomit enough blood to flood a house.
He tends to become marginal, the pollution of capital. Capital is autonomized and surpasses its limits (a kind of surfusion of capital), but it cannot do this without men, the necessary pollution. They are the limit to capital.
Camatte, "About the Revolution"
Today "pollution" is in fashion, exactly in the same manner that revolution is: it takes hold of the entire life of society, and it is illusorily represented in the spectacle. It is boring chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying writings and discourses, and in reality [dans les faits] it gets everyone in the throat.
Reacceleration of chopped and screwed tracks to their "normal" speed. The slight shudder beats become hiccups. There is little difference except we know what it has been through and that can't be forgotten. A hangover made to sprint.
Project 2:
To cut through this absurd confusion of values, we can observe that Griffith’sBirth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history of the cinema because of its wealth of innovations. On the other hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being shown in its present form. But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the cinema. It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the United States even now.
(Debord and Wolman)
Very well then. Time to answer a call. For a start, a one minute section of the film stretched out to ten minutes.
The soundtrack?
Chopped and screwed down to the lowest of all stuttering bass. The codeine dirge of an black American communist singing out the words
("Dat's de ol' man that I'd like to be...", "you gets a little drunk / and you lands in jail," "Ah'm tired of livin' / An skeered of dyin'")
Melodrama mining project continues. Watching this tonight - do the same in your respective zones or homes, and we'll meet halfway, between the Vaseline-hued glow of her and the gathered shadows of doors too large to be opened by those pass through them.
Shooting the moon. (To demand that we demand nothing, or everything, or whatever.) The best form of "internal contradictions."
Stay strong, Milwaukee. Pretty sure we can work out a way to simultaneously end winter - though you may have to keep global warming - and get you some ice. (Heads on their way, packed in said ice.)
If it wasn't already obvious, Thomas Friedman is a staggering waste of flesh and breath. It's a common and stupid thing these days to overuse the word "literally." (As in, "I didn't eat lunch, so I was literally starving.") Here it is justified: he literally has no idea what he is talking about. To even remotely suggest, let alone straight-up state, that Egyptian revolt was inspired by Obama (“Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.”) or by Israel ("when you live right next to a country that is bringing to justice its top leaders for corruption and you live in a country where many of the top leaders are corrupt, well, you notice"), you cede any right to publish anything further, in any format, in any medium, in any language. Stop.
The Arab TV network Al Jazeera has a big team covering Israel today. They frequently report Israeli incursions on Palestinian towns, illegal settlements on Palestinian land, Israeli killings, torture and illegal detention of Palestinians as well as Israel’s continual transgression of international law. I will ignore this and focus on a few incidents of domestic housekeeping (and include a completely irrelevant reference to Google maps!) in order to prop up my theory and ignore the fact that if Egyptians are in any way inspired by anything that happens in Israel, it is their ability to identify with Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. When you write a column for the New York Times and your name is Thomas Friedman, well, that’s what you do.
With Gopal Balakrishnan and whoever else wants to offer input or help plan, I'm going to organize a spring reading group in Santa Cruz on the Arab revolts, including both long-term historical analysis and recent writings on the current situation. Think it would be a big help to a lot of us, myself very much included, who are quickly discovering how little we actually understand of the region and its dynamics. If you're in the area and want to join in, let me know.
[If you aren't around these parts but want to contribute or follow along, at the very least we should be able to set up ongoing email threads. And if there's interest elsewhere, perhaps we can work together to set up roughly similar reading lists for groups in a few cities. This could be a useful occasion for us to begin to develop a common analysis - or, at least, more fleshed-out contentions with each other - on the present moment. And that is surely a needed thing.]
We don't care what as much what people chant, but as long as they increasingly define their position they will increasingly come into an internal contradiction with democratic logic.
[communist aesthetics should not be bound to a simple equation of "representations of crowds ['mass subjects] = the end of bourgeois concerns of psychological interiority". (Any more than they should have anything to do with the degree to which they track out a "typical" development of a "typical" worker becoming an exceptional Party Member.) But crowd scenes are nevertheless the instances most marked by the works themselves as the site where such a prospect is supposed to be mined.
And more often than not in films, such as the Brit melodrama below, they stand in as a safety mechanism which points such tensions away from the rest of the film/book/painting into one or two containable instances of showing "the people."
(Note: In film below, for instance, one of the functions of this "scene of the people" is as a container, one which ultimately fails, not necessarily of communistic elements but those which more generally are insupportable to an order of the management of the social. Such an instance, of excess and punishment, helps to to point away from, for instance, the deep pleasure of illegality and the fact that the entire film is so turned on by itself that it doesn't even bother with double entendres. It just goes for single ones. I mean, one would never say that if one was actually talking about eating to the point of being too full. I began to suspect that the entire British libidinal economy allotted for about 15 years was blown in full on this film. After these heights, nothing can remain, other than a still camera framing two gray-faced people eating porridge at a table and talking about marriages that failed but stayed together to save on rent.
More specifically, the deeply kinky and quite startling moment where the mixed-up couples, stuck in the wrong arrangement and unable to change it for reasons of scandal/Margaret Lockwood tending to murder those who get in her way, suddenly realize: wait, this is seriously idiotic, and we're treating each other horrible. So screw it, let's go ahead and all four of us live in this big house together, technically married to the wrong people but leaving behind any linkage of state/social recognition of coupledom and actual affective bonds, and free to fuck in whatever combination seems right to us.
Spoiler alert: if the film actually allowed this radical outcome, rather than deviating into mistaken identity and bullets lodged into stomachs and once again Lockwood dying on a carpet, with camera angled down at her, in a large stone room for the second time in two years, if it actually had allowed this, we could be damn sure that the "free choice" of the swinging parties involved would have looked very heterosexual and very monogamous.)
Very well. For this reason, let's start by taking them at their word and winding through these instances...]
Reverse tracking shot from prefiguration, as gibbet toy and broken neck floppy rabbits, through the rabble and the carnivalesque (following the previous actual carnival sequence, which ended with a massive roast pig, a precursor echo that sets expectation for the film: motley mixed class crowds = hunk of dead flesh at jubilant center), out to frame the material support for the occasion that brought together such a toy and such a crowd, the crowd whose subsequent rioting will cause such disarray that the hanged man will not be fully hanged, cut free by his friends and brought back from the almost dead.
The prole crowd gathers for a hanging in order that such a hanging will not succeed.
In news that makes me happy, the Roman Letters are becoming a book this year, from Oslo Editions, with whom I worked on the Contra Mundum volume. They are terrific designers, and the book will itself take an uncommon shape appropriate to the epistolary mode and the kind of project the writing became. In short, now you will be able to read about partisanship, Michael Jackson impersonators, swagger, the clavicles of dead Christians, duration, and street dogs in paper form. Also, there will be the final four letters which, for a few reasons, were neither posted here nor sent to their destinations, on the topics of:
- Burri's burned canvases and Argento's puddles of red, or rather, violent represented by or done to materials, some of which may be human
- wolves, Italian fumetti, gang/racket/group formation, and how not to turn from our enemies onto each other
- The New Pessimism, i.e. the only stance possible when watching Italian 14 year old young "men" interact with the public sphere
- property, space, and leaving (on going from not belonging to against belongings as such)
Overheard last night, downtown SC, two police officers chatting with the woman getting their coffee.
Cop # 1: Well, it was a long night, because we were on search duty. Cop #2: Yeah, but this guy loved it, was grinning like a kid. He loves having the excuse to break things. Cop # 1: Pretty much.
Your information is correct, but we have reason to suspect that the operation as a whole, and the particular objectives of Agent Vulpus, was compromised before it even commenced. Before the fox, there may have been a mole. Judging from the counter-intelligence, filtered to the public through various sub-operatives engaged in cultural industrial warfare, both against (see below, 2002 and 2009) and in collusion with (1982) our conspiracy, we can only conclude that Mission Shard/V-72 was, for all intents and purposes, a lost cause from the start.
1. 2002
This "artist's rendering" gives further reason to suspect that infrared security camera footage is now processed and analyzed in off-shore fan-boy/fan-girl facilities, off whose underfucked psyches run massive libidinal displacement motors capable of triangulating the target in question. Although Vulpus was not yet in the Shard at the time of this image was gathered, the sheer desperation of Piano-Prescott caused an obscure torsion, resulting in the rendering of a proximate, albeit beefed-up, image of the uncompleted end of Mission Shard with risk calculation fed through Allegorical Dice. Hence, a very tawny silken fox touches a water, not to shatter its reflection, but to mark the space above red and gray fish. It is rumored that there are certain pseudo-cogs capable of making sense of such a unresolved prediction.
2. 1982
Of course, the species is wrong, as is the metropole, but Associate Cohen's preemptive effort cannot be disregarded for its massive initial influence on the project. Not only in terms of laying the subcutaneous reaction frame in the public (first reptilian, second time mammal, as we know well by now), but in terms of a speculative endeavor from which a significant part of Vulpus's actual mission structure came to be derived. That said, his incessant rewatching of Michael Moriarty sequences became first a joke at the facility, then a near serious problem, when the news had to be broken that he would be laying no eggs this time.
3. 2009
It was at this moment that we knew the gig was up. (His remaining on site and unrevealed for such a duration after the release of the film is due to a phenomenon still undertheorized. In brief, a side effect of the architectural-financial one-two punch (the veiled-demolition of Southwark and the subsequent injection of Qatari liquidity) was to cause such significant disturbances to the collective mental image of London that the interior of the Shard collapsed into a Restrained Gray Hole (RGH, from here out). In such a space, it's far from simple to find a fox.)
What the film got wrong is the very reason that the counter-forces began their pursuit of Vulpus in earnest and with the full extension of resources available. Namely, the thought that there was a familial-gang subterranean formation of many foxes and, moreover, that they were interested in securing agrarian territory. The winged fox illustration above indicates the pastoral dimension of the initial attempts, and from fall 2008 to early spring 2010, the frequency of orchard and hillock demolitions in the Green Belt can only be tied to the frantic efforts so casually reflected in the film.
As if such an operative could be allowed the cold comfort of the domestic sphere. We are speaking, after all, of an agent who can have no name other than that derived from his genus: he is an instance, nothing more. And of the notes abandoned by Vulpus, before he had time to swallow them or shred them into a downy nest (thereby bolstering weaponised sentimentality), which were recovered by Shard's defenders, the following remained intact and heavily underlined:
For this reason, but only for this reason, he will study mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine. But all day and all night he studies the vital science of human beings, their characteristics and circumstances, and all the phenomena of the present social order. The object is perpetually the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order.
4. 1540
This resonance gives us pause and is forcing us to rethink several other operations in progress, if not the entire drift of what has been understood as "progress" and against which we have fought. Either Martin Luther's anal-obsessed ramblings were in fact directly linked to future HTML streams 471 years ahead, or - as we feared - the current counter-revolution is not only scripted: it has been a reformation, and it will be Protestant.
---
Yet to review the operation as a whole, we consider it largely a success, despite the fact that it "came too light too soon." This "too soon" was always the plan, although as previous operations (recall the Canis Project, 1917), this was not the "too soon" envisaged.
1. Sentimental cloaking turned out to be a success: Vulpus became a plucky loner Romeo. The unwillingness of the counter-forces to reveal the severity of the project to the wider public has been attributed by some to a) their belief that the war has not yet hit the point of unmistakable open hostility or b) that they remain in full possession of the affective dimensions of the public sphere. We know better: the trap was laid, such that the discovery of Vulpus was exactly what allowed for necessary self-immolation of every trace of suspicion. The workers who previously noticed a particular recurrence of missing objects ("Ben, I can't find my hammer") have now been conveniently folded back into an anthropomorphic consensus.
2. The success of the cover story of food scraps disguises a second success: in his time in the Shard, Vulpus managed both to significantly sabotage the installed Taut transmitters and, more importantly, steal enough building material to make considerable headway toward the sub-project that initially demanded his location at such an altitude.
Although the agent remains out of reach for the moment, the final entry transmitted by his smoke signals was interpreted, after initial disbelief, to read: THE SKULK IS ON ITS WAY. IN FIVE DAYS, THE SKY WILL BE THICK WITH US. Had the net not closed around him before that potential outcome, it it safe to say that the entire geopolitical situation would be entirely unrecognizable.
3. As hoped, the following line was both uttered and disseminated:
Ted Burden, the centre's founder, said: "We explained to him that if foxes were meant to be 72 storeys off the ground, they would have evolved wings.
We are, therefore, a step closer - a small step, perhaps, but such is the tireless work of our conspiracy - to the mass secession of humans from their general condition of living above the earth while not contesting their winglessness. At this stage, it is dislocated onto Vulpus, but if his anthropomorphic infiltration was correct, many should be looking from their apartment windows to their bare shoulders with increasing fury. We remain firm in our commitment that the development, elaboration, and dissemination of such a recognition (they would have evolved wings..) is the first step toward the articulation of a mass demand to which no contemporary government can safely answer, a demand that will impel the total and contagious discrediting of the state form itself.
On a closing note, the potential past or future deployment of Lupus will not be commented upon. Rumors of unorthodox cloud formations over the Eastern shore are to be considered unfounded.
"I never could resist anything that belonged to somebody else."
It’s no stretch to see Larry Cohen as the American director of the long 70s.Not the “best” director and certainly not the most serious.But when it comes to the hot fusion of total social dread, tectonic economic shifts, the hangover of the late 60s, and the inveterate, almost unwilled weirdness that marks the decade, no one nails it like Cohen.I mean, name another director whose insane range included Quetzalcoatl residing in the Chrysler building (Q, 1982), one of the least marketable films ever made (Bone, 1970), the tender love of murderous mutant babies (It’s Alive, 1974), a fierce blaxploitation film (Black Ceasar, 1973), a location-shot biopic of the most famous of pervy FBI chiefs (The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, 1977), and the deep and unabiding evil of mind-controlling no-calorie health food (The Stuff, 1985).And then there’s this one, the most explicitly “70s” of his film, haunted by the violent incoherence of the metropolis, often filmed guerilla style (for instance, inserting Andy Kaufman into a real police parade), and in which New Yorkers begin arbitrarily murdering strangers, family members, and themselves because “God told me to.”And by “God,” yes, we may very well mean a gender-bent alien creature straight out of a Satanic glam version of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.This is some seriously wild stuff, whose chaotic goofiness only makes the unmistakable anxiety of an era reek that much more.
God, oh God in Heaven, hear my prayers.
To you I cry as I did in my childhood.
Why did my poor father not trample on me
as I lay in blissful sleep
within my mother's womb?
Now I am old, a grey-haired, deaf old hag.
My short life long was an abundance of poverty
Oh God, what great toil for a tiny scrap of bread
For peace I cried into the great wars
And what have I achieved?
Soon I shall die.
Oh God,
grant that Communism triumphs!
A quick prayer:
Grant that my beloved Wolf does not end up
behind barbed wire as his father did.
Grant that his troubled mind turns once again
to the Party that disowned him.
And grant me our peaceful state over there
be so rich and free that nobody runs off anymore,
and if then they take down the wall
Granny Meume can fly to heaven blissfully.
Not in vain has she always relied on you.
Then, dear God,
shall Communism triumph too.
(Wolf Biermann, dissident communist and "class traitor")
