“This is a very important doctrine consideration in a place like China. Right now, if China was faced with internal unrest, the only capability they have would be military capability — they’d have to roll in the tanks,” Ichikowitz said.
--
"Tiananmen Square's now 20 years ago, and you could do that (then). Today you can't. Today that's just inciting trauma."
--
I see. Today that's just inciting trauma. You could do that then. Now, though, it wouldn't even work. Because, you see, "bring in the big guns and people are going to want to throw the big guns back at you”. It would just incite trauma.
This is what certain of those who should not exist mean when they say "progress," when they speak of “public security.”
via Signalfire
A one-sided argument on the occasion of an Italian basketball league using blackface to protest racism
"Italian basketball players to protest against racism by painting faces black"
Locker room. Shortly before game time.
Hey... everybody? Look, I know we already all agreed and that Abiola's cool with it and that it seems like doing the right thing, and yeah, some of the fans are getting really into the idea, but doesn't this strike anyone as a bit off? You know, kind of racist?
No, I'm not saying you're racist. I didn't say that. I'm not calling any of you racists. I'm saying structurally racist. You know what I mean. You know, black face... Minstrel shows... Al Jolson, the use of white actors in exaggerated black make-up. Birth of a Nation. Anyone?
What? You're asking me if it would be wrong if a team of black players had one white player who was taunted and they all painted their faces white in protest? Wait, you're saying... That is what you're saying. Jesus. No, that's not the same thing... Because a white player wouldn't be taunted here, because the situation is fundamentally different, because of a long history of...
What if a woman was playing on a men's team and the men all wore fake breasts and wigs, and the fans too, to show support? Is that the "same thing"? Or if a man was secretly playing in a woman's... OK, stop. You're actually now just recounting the plot of Juwanna Mann. Yes, you are. You are. I know because I watched it, OK?
No one else here feels that this might be the wrong way to go about "protesting racism"? You're telling me I'm the only one about to go play a game in blackface, in front of fans in blackface, who is feeling a slight hesitation? The rest of you just said, oh, normal day, time to go put on blackface and play professional sports, nothing abhorrently wrong about that.
No, I don't think it does matter if she's OK with it. Because it's not just her choice. You get that, right, that the whole thing has problems? No, you don't get that?
Anyone here remember that thing with Ted Danson? And Whoopi Goldberg? Remember that? Remember... Um, sure, I remember Sister Act.... Yes, I remember that the second one was awful. Wasn't Lauryn Hill in that? And what about what? Corrina, Corrina? Do I think... do I think that Ray Liotta's performance shows deft emotional subtlety and admirable range from a man better known for his work in Goodfellas, confirming him as one of America's most underrated character actors and too infrequent leading men? Well...
Wait, we're not talking about Ray fucking Liotta. We're... I mean... So really, no one else has any problems with this? Not one of you? Really?
[long sigh]
Oh fucking hell. Hand me that face paint.
New Pessimism Notes: Spittle [Ludwig Fischer's Response]
[The New Pessimism grows like an old homunculus here before your very eyes, left out in the sleeting rain, a foam pill that unfolds, but no, not into a baby dinosaur for the tub. Expect a series of exchanges between S a/o B and his co-conspirator Ludwig Fischer, thief of letters, rake, dandy out of joint, and, after all, "no gangrenous fob"...]
LF response to NPN: Spittle -
the decrepitude of life—the sole form of recognition that clings to the bottom lip of the one enunciating Pessimismus, no, not hatred of life, which has its delicacies, I chew the butt end of my cigars and wash down the blood of my flossed gums with J&B. hatred that life has become the occupation of imbeciles, of wretched incompetencies. one can no longer take a stroll without a lance and an ice-cream spoon for the boils and the cysts, for the fine tastes of the debrained and their silk garments. life lacks elegance. spit little. the point is not to grease one’s step but to lubricate the dagger so that it can slip between the ribs of the present, finding its place without too much fuss. spittle forms like last words. words that misdirect the blood’s usual ambulation. the unnoticeable froth that builds as the sentences pile. the mortar of this vast wall that we must construct to show our contempt. we will need it to protect our stolen caviar.
LF response to NPN: Spittle -
Today We Live, But Not If The Men Can Help It
Living more daringly... loving more excitingly!
One of the more disarmingly misleading trailers I've yet see. Strangely unable to account for the fact that the film is, in truth, about:
incestuous love triangles (see: three wedding rings, and the moment, visible in the trailer, when Ann / Joan Crawford is dead-eye staring up, not at a Gary Cooper grand passion in question in question, but at her brother as she and her boyhood friend/current pseudo-lover tell him, in essence, that they finally did the deed - "remember how the three of us used to mess around as kids? Well, we're not kids anymore" - and that this occasion is used for she and her brother to kiss, albeit their lips barely missing each other to maintain an unconvincing semblance of propriety) that are always threatening to become a square, the prospect of which is desperately fended off by a shift into thrill-seeking homosociality and a masochism that can't stick to its guns and enjoy anything,
the total evacuation of historical gravity, cockroach fighting, a joy of guns and flight, a startling subtraction of all emotional connective tissue between claims (leading to the hybrid of an early form of Hawksian tough talk, here meaning mostly that you either remove the word "I" from sentences ["see clearly now. See a lot of things now."] or that you render yourself third person, and a seemingly causeless declaration of "fierce passion" -
[rough approximation]
Hi, we've only met once, and I kept picking up the pipes and personal affects of your father, who just died today unbeknownst to me, and I am an American buying your estate and taking over your house, relegating you to the cottage out back, and I've only seen you a couple other times when you bicycled past my house and I was stalking at the window, but I can't wait any longer: I love you!
Oh damn it, I love you too! [despite my interaction with you only involving that first disastrous moment of apparently successful transference from Dad to you]
- that ends up mirroring the sheer frictionless drift of the whole enterprise), Faulkner's idea ofBritishness (in brief: not that into sex, oddly good at shooting things, inseparable unity of national and personal destiny),
and, above all, the sublime idiocy of a masculine death-cult / operative definition of masculinity as a cult of death. For it's the last that dominates the entire film, in which there is no seeming urgency to the war other than as a chance to get oneself done in, in which the Germans (despite being the only people seen as a) not drunk, and b) organized enough to fight a war) are incapable of shooting anything, including a small boat hurtling toward it with a torpedo attached, in which no one raises a real complaint at bringing untrained competitors for the affection of Ann into in which you race against your competitors not to get the girl but to kill yourself and therefore forcing the guilt of your death onto the suckers who didn't die fast enough A guilt that doesn't even stick. (The letters on the tombstone are raised, not chiseled in.) A decade and a half after the war, in which even a monumental explosion cannot pit the gliding surface of this Teflon world.
They set flame to a story. That much is true: staggering, inconsequential, blinded, they hasten off to throw themselves into the fire of war, conveniently dragging down the remnants of an empire and a large number of German battleships with them. The cunning of history has rarely been so suicidal.
New Pessimism Notes: Spittle
Spittle -
not just the formless spider gob itself, but the production of it, the metamorphosis when it goes from being saliva to being spittle, like magma to lava, the "expectoration" (that word flawless, as it includes flinging expectations themselves to the ground to be trodden on) -
is the crucial substance of pessimism. More than the melancholic's bile, which is petulantly hoarded, except in moments of sickness, and only then, it only comes out as a last resort and against one's wishes. No, spittle is pessimism's moronic Promethean labor, transformative and active, the tossing forth of what should lubricate good speech, the consumption of food, kisses.
Instead, kicked out to spite a word (that which has not been fully spoken but which has wound itself through all the liquid of the mouth), a rich man ("someone took him into a magnificent house and warned him not to spit, whereupon having cleared his throat he spat into the man's face, being unable, he said, to find a baser place", of which Cioran write, "Who, after being received by a rich man, has not longed oceans of saliva to expectorate on all the owners of the earth? And who has not swallowed his own spittle for fear of casting it in the face of some stout and respected thief?", such that one swallows one's hostile. How can an ulcer be a surprise?), a civilization (“Whenever I pronounce the word civilization,” Gaugin cried, “I spit.”).
I think, though, of what it means to spit during a rainstorm.
I think of the dollar thrown into the spittoon and why, before whiskey-desperate Dude can fish it out of the slime, Chance kicks the spittoon away. How Dude knocks Chance out cold.
'Orbitecture II: Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent'
'Orbitecture II: Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent'
curated by Cedar Lewisohn and Focal Point Gallery
18 April to 11 June 2011
curated by Cedar Lewisohn and Focal Point Gallery
18 April to 11 June 2011
Artists include: Gerd Arntz, Ray Brassier, Pim Conradi, johnny de philo, Romain Gavras, The Gut Club, Head Gallery, Eileen Joy, Dean Kenning, Rachel Kushner, Patricia MacCormack, Alastair MacKinven, Man Like Me, Nicola Masciandaro, Robin MacKay, China Miéville, Stephen Molyneux, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Laura Oldfield Ford, David Osbaldeston, PLANNINGTOROCK, Nina Power, Hillary Raphael, Francis Thorburn, and Evan Calder Williams.
The state counts for you, and it's never wrong
---
[Raymond Bernard's Les Miserables, 4 hours, 39 minutes, from '34, the same year as L'Atalante, and with that, the other grounding post of directions to be followed by films that are interested in film. I thought it standard DVD rerelease hyperbole to speak of "one of the greatest and least-known directors of all time." I thought wrong. This is brutal and correct, obsessed with the venomous neutrality of the contract, of writing away your rights. Doubling back and back onto the dwindling sums of those with no reserves, their names held onto and drawn forth by the state in all its forms and malignant facilitators.]
World Melodrama Film Series Presents: María Candelaria (1944)
There are things that bleed if you so much as touch them.
This week we turn from Marlene Dietrich’s horsey Russian empress to arguably the most iconic example of Mexican melodrama’s suffering woman figure, Dolores del Rio’s titular role as the virginal Indian in María Candelaria. Set in and around the Xochimilco borough of Mexico City, Emilio “El Indio” Fernández’s film idealizes the indigenous populations of Mexico even as it tracks out with fateful implacability their tragic encounters with the prejudices and injustices meted out to them by whites and mestizos alike. In this film the lion’s share of injustice, prejudice, and tragedy befall María Candelaria, the pure but nevertheless reviled daughter of a prostitute, and her beau, Lorenzo Rafael (Pedro Armendáriz). Shot by one of the greatest cinematographers of the twentieth century, Gabriel Figueroa, María Candelaria is not to be missed. Tuesday, April 12th
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
For the remainder of the quarter, we will be showing melodramas from different countries each week. Same time, same place. All are welcome. Tell your family, invite your friends.
If you pull this handle...
Out of the blue, a friend I haven't spoken to in years sent me this. It's simply staggering. Had I seen this earlier, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse might have been nothing more than a set of page-shaped paper padding surrounding a DVD of this.
There is a moment - you'll know it when you hit it - when the entire order of vision (that of ink and the hand-built line, with water-colored gray that trembles, that of the cartoon), is thrown literally to the windows edge, where now there is an other world of sight, of photography, above all of the everyday, and it requires only a turning on its axis, a throwing into velocity or freezing, to make it jive and jar with the animation of collapse. (Note: this dislocation happens only after the world as a whole, shot from afar as a gurgling, pustulant, seething thing, blows up in fall. It happens only after the animated world as totality is wrecked.) Nothing I've watched so nails the double sense of apocalypse that always interested me: an end, sure, but an end that means the bringing forth, as if refocusing a lens, lengthening the depth of field, such that the foreground loses out. That which we were here to see finds itself scrambling, like Koko, back from the teeming fact of the street. More than that, such a slippage and disaster occurs here in the formal construction of the thing and its manic incapacity to stay with a figure or theme for more than a moment. The planet will smoke a cigar, but it is not always a head. It was insofar as it smoked a cigar. It is no more.
The only thing that remains constant here is the urge to negate, a drive boiled down into single dog form, an admirable counterpart to the catastrophe-encouraging/deferring lupine gang of Wolfen, an asshole on the grandest scale cousin of Tintin's snowy. But unlike Wolfen, Fitz the Dog manifests just a will to do it all the way (read: a "passion for the Real"), despite the scrambling resistance of his human companion, the Catechon. And do it in proper, whole by part by atom. This small white Fenrir doesn't just bring about Ragnarök. The pup is committed to do it up right, hacking down one of the final trees that stands. The end, therefore, retains shape because of the ceaseless project of breaking binds and bounds. A pointless plan alone makes sense of what otherwise is just a bad storm.
[Two already's and a scattered note:
The earth is already turning, beneath them like a spherical treadmill. We cannot know if there is any traction, if their walking accelerates this, or if it a frictionless gliding. Moonwalking in place.
The earth is already empty. We don't see crowds until after the switch has been pulled.
The sign that hangs warns DO NOT TOUCH EARTH CONTROL: the entire facility is labeled CONTROL OF EARTH. The clown's hands may not be so clean after all. For while the blame is narrowed into a single handle, as if there was one emergency kill switch and the rest was the blameless play of weather, day and night, we notice, on the wall of switches with which Koko plays, one switch for LIGHTNING. And it is exactly lightning we see after Fitz finally succeeds that marks the end of the world: it is the sign of the cut here, a montage filler, a break between scenes of destruction and the apparent cause of all being stood on its head. The point is that the switch is just a fantasy concentration point, the blind that allows us to fumble and fuck with the wall of all the effects of catastrophe without having to claim the moment has yet come. Leave Koko at those switches long enough, and the outcome will be identical.]
So watch this and come apart. Of course, like Koko, you lose your head, and it will not be your own you will first find as solace. We slip into a dark puddle to slosh, without leaving a stain on the filmed desk, for these things may bristle before and aft of each other, but they cannot merge. Back and forth we go over the animator's page, the sea-drunk's rhythm of a conclusion knocked off its axis.
And on the off chance that this not be the case, rest assured, cameras can tilt the horizon, sidewalks can threaten to slide us right off the map, and we know how to wrestle ourselves to the ground and, clawing, desperate, more than a little bufoonish, to pore over the cracks, looking for that missing friction. After all, it's not as if we know how to do otherwise.
[Many thanks, J, for this]
The ruined and the unruined alike
"Of course, the capitalist economy will not simply come to an end. Resisting such an outcome, the great powers will no doubt continue to fight over natural resources and markets. Yet I believe that the Japanese should never again choose such a path."
Karatani, perhaps on the gap between can never again and should never again
In brief, though, a problem that comes up again and again, as this points up a continual elision in thought, including my own at times or often, and visible in Karatani's piece at the telling point of where the article ends (that courage of striding down a new path and the phrase "It may be that only amid the ruins").
Namely, the deadlock between what is necessarily the case
[Only a sequence of ruptures - above all, bloody, terrible, and senseless - and continual failures in the circulation and accumulation of capital, with the attendant disruption in material patterns of everyday life, will visibly mark the limits of a social relation. Limits that have been present for a long while, but regarding which it was worth the while of many to shove further and further out to the horizon. These ruptures and failures may be "human," from mass uprisings to a drawn-out decimation of state services to the increasing impossibility of successful battles over wages, but we do not choose them. They are made, and so too us with them.]
what can only be the case
["Or rather, it is only then that people will, for the first time, truly be able to live"]
and what is not the case
[Namely, that given we know historically about collapse and breakdown, that unless one wants to commit to some notion of "the human spirit" ill-advised, given its track record), disaster - on jerky fast-forward or frame-by-frame, exchange-by-exchange - gives no preference to communism as its recuperation. To say that "The reality, however, is that people who regarded one another with fear when living in the social order created by the state form communities of mutual aid amid the chaos following disaster, a spontaneous type of order that differs from that which exists under the state" may be true in certain instances, when disasters look like disasters, when they are clear and punctual and cannot be mistaken. But such disasters are barely half the story. For when we include in disaster - as we must - things like war, massive inflation, stock market crashes, violent purges, mass unemployment, epidemics, who can remotely say that the general tendency is to stop regarding each other with fear? Who can say that outside of the most immediate circuits of those wrecked and plagued, that disaster bears any necessary relation to a new form of community?
No, it is a worsening, plain and simple and awful.
Yet... one cannot exclude from those infamous "material conditions" that give shape to disastrous or deferred times an enormous set of "subjective" and "affective" conditions: the words that have been in the air, that sense of things getting nastier, that tightening, the networks that exist, the practice one has, the kind of television one might watch and philosophy one might read, the getting-used to not knowing if a day will start and end in a world that feels remotely the same. That is, such a worsening breaks onto a shore that is not a bare fact of economy. We too are rocks of sorts, worn down and smoothed, such that we become channels or levies, but inflections of a break all the same.]
Between these three cases, something like a present.
The point, the vicious fact of it, is that it simply is not our decision. We choose a period of capital as much as we choose an earthquake. To make of this a principle, not of withdrawal but of holding on and forth: such would be a courage, to hate the ruined and the unruined alike, with neither fetish nor indifference, to know that we cannot make our time, but that it does not, and never will, unfold untouched.
"According to what we knew, that tablet should not have been there,"
The permanence of writing is a throwing away (crumpling the pages, oh fuck me, this just doesn't sound right!) and a trash fire.
"Those tablets were not baked, only dried in the sun and [were], therefore, very brittle. ... Basically someone back then threw the tablet in the pit and then burned their garbage," he said. "This fire hardened and preserved the tablet."
But of course...
"The Mycenaeans appear to have used Linear B to record only economic matters of interest to the ruling elite. Fittingly, the markings on the front of the Iklaina tablet appear to form a verb that relates to manufacturing, the researchers say. The back lists names alongside numbers—probably a property list."
But of course. A defaulted account, a score settled, a deal gone wrong, cooked in the flames of other things thrown away. Such are the enduring shards.
And we all fall down
[For those...]
Collapse means falling together.
Think of those trees in Kant which grow straight and tall and do not touch, like the rain of atoms, because there are too many of them, because of competition for the light. The more there are, the more they stand straight and try to not have contact. Vertical, upright, arrows pointing toward noon.
Only one thing is sure: trees don't bear the axes that make them fall. From where the wood of the axe's handle is gathered, though, is another question altogether.
When intellectual montage means a refusal of cutting to or from
The Guardian, with this caption and photo coupling/rift, becomes, for a brief moment, something like Eisenstein with his sharpest of idiosyncratic cuttings. The screenplay:
[Intertitle: The country postponed national parliamentary elections after voting materials failed to arrive in many areas]
Shot: An explosion of oil gushes like a black milk separator. The plenitude is not gathered. A figure in red stands beneath a stormy sky. It is unclear whether or not the small circular ripples in the pool are from rain or from the crude.
That link - failed projects of "democratization" and oil sprouting and falling - is on the order of that elusive intellectual montage of which Eisenstein wrote, because it routes its sense not just between any two at hand (shot 1/shot 2, or shot 1/evoked concept) or even through the gathered energy of the preceding sequence, but through a world order as such. Through the historically particular situation in which one can not only make sense of that linkage between elections delayed-oil bubbling in place, but in which one cannot choose otherwise, as it is not a link of speculation. It is the order of our day, it does not arrive in time yet it does not close. It's the growing dread that despite the talk of the unmappable tangle of capital's totality, what montage may mean now is simply a camera that rests in place, at most turning slowly on its tripod, and that needs no cuts to bring together the incompatible, just a stare long enough to watch the contradictions bubble and belch and fall before it, senseless.
And whether or not this will be intelligible is a problem addressed to another order of montage, one called lower, one called earlier in the progression, one known in the guts. For like all industries, the development of cinema was never a one-way street, and a shock to thought and sensation, if real, will not be registered in either the mind or the body alone, not in the spurring to reflection or in the palpation of the heart. It's in the faulty wiring between the two, the lost microseconds of transition, that seasickness. A film that can bind together voting materials and the gusher will hit us between the spirit and the gray matter, and it will get us in the neck. A dull whiplash, we've grown accustomed. But still...
Something is in the air
[5:00]
A two year span in France, where the end of the world and the end of school both hit their pitch - the moments before the mushroom cloud, the night before the coup - through pieces of white material floating in the air. Perhaps because it nailed the sense of time halted, a breath held and gravity held almost in abeyance, before nothing will be the same again. (Or so the story goes, though the boys climbing the roof know what that after the flags and the expulsions, the world as such will still be there.) Perhaps because nothing that looks that good can happen only one time.
Anti-hero of labor
Despite having plenty of Carnegies, capital has never had a Stakhanov. And it never will, for it cannot.
There are heroes of Labor and there are those who heroically put up with laboring. But capital has no hero of labor, for there is no subject of labor. [See: "Labour capacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditions of necessary labour -- the means of subsistence for actively producing labour capacity, i.e. for its reproduction as mere labour capacity separated from the conditions of its realization -- and it has posited these conditions themselves as things, values, which confront it in an alien, commanding personification." Not only does "labour capacity" (read: those who labor) only appropriate for itself (a rather key qualification in the subject-side of things) "subjective conditions", it then posits those conditions, materially and perspectivally, as a set of hostile objects and conditions.] It just wraps gaudier sheets and sharper fences around its stupid, busy vacancy. Nations, comportments, types, allegiances, parties, teams. Class is at once the dodging of this (the declaration of a common identity that needs to "develop" itself) and the threat of mass deixis, a material pointing toward this incoherence, via the act of collective seizure of what surrounds, protects, and produces it. And that process, of seizing and pointing, is not a gathering of common subjects.
If capital slept, it would toss and turn over this, but it does not sleep and it does not worry. Neither do we. All the more hollow a core to crack into view, when historical projects come to the end of their lines, when programs go to shit, when battles go nowhere. It is not our job to provide capital with the keystone essence that it could not provide.
For like capital, communism begins from and turns on a negative anthropology. The difference is that we see no point in denying this. Better to learn to make of the given something than to rummage around for what once may have been.
When those who set out across land come to an ocean, after miles of textured land, thickets, groves, and plateaus, they often build right there, on the edge of that huge shifting void, barred from the land but with the promise of crossing and an idea of arrivals from places that couldn't yet be found or mapped. A notion that declares a massive nothing yet which, in matter and fact, is always busy, generative, dangerous, never pristine or unused. Not an outside but the premise of transfer. Because, at the end of it, even continents are islands.
So too do we, sprained and dusty, making our home next to this terrible emptiness whose wind we've sensed for a long while, that only now is coming into to view.
Hostility directed toward hostile things by means of other hostile things (including one's laboring, consuming, or resting body) turned to that purpose of taking to pieces
Office Worker Goes Absolutely Insane - Watch more Funny Videos
[thanks, Chris, for that initial ballet of workplace fury]
Damned if you do
Overhead yesterday:
"My doctor said I can't eat chocolate or nuts because of this cold sore [gesturing to the red weep accenting the mouth], because, you know, I've got herpes. But I have this whole jar of Nutella just sitting on my desk. So I don't know what to do. I'm screwed."
Oh, America, you swath of Ur-urges.
| In the name of These States, shall I scorn the antique? | |
| Why These are the children of the antique, to justify it. |
One-man many-voice band
Who was in there with you?
No one, I was just singing by myself.
I know about the heads. I mean who were you talking to?
Oh, the camera! The camera...
But there is nothing to say to a camera.
It's true, there's just a slightly dimmed reflection of you and three and a couple spaces below a table and not a gout of blood in sight.
Don't forget the banjo. I broke another banjo.
Ah yes, the camera...
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