I never could resist anything that belonged to somebody else.
In brief: a woman steals her best friend’s man, gets bored with the rich country life, gambles, loses an important object in said gambling, becomes a highway woman to get it back, gets off on the thrills of criminality, keeps doing it, meets James Mason in a black mask, has a real good time with him, engages in some of the raunchiest dialogue out there (calling them double entendres would imply falsely that anyone would not get what she means by a “hard bargain”), does some killing, meets a man with a great mustache, brings about a proletariat riot at a hanging, and much, much more. The war was on, rations were tight, but Britain blew all its libidinal resources making this overcharged romp. No wonder kitchen sink realism was so big after the war. There was no melodramatic excess, snappy comebacks, or joyous eroticism left. “I’ve not deceived my husband yet.” “Then it’s time you began…”
Yes, I may be someone who reads too much into things. Yet is there not something pointedly cynical, beyond the standard pale, about a campus tour guide standing in front of the large concrete Humanities buildings and explaining how "the Humanities were built from pre-fabricated, identical parts" and that "they can easily be dismantled, their parts rearranged or even entirely moved"? I know that restructuring the university is a code that often means take things like the humanities apart piece by piece, cut by cut, a budgetary Leng Tch'e, and "redistribute" their resources, but you might not want to so baldly trumpet that to your prospective students. "Plus it's good for the environment!"
The enormous white ruins looked like a troop of ghosts. I spent a night at the foot of the Colossus of Memnon, devoured by mosquitoes. The old rascal has a fine fce - he's covered in graffiti. Graffiti and birdshit, these are the only two things on the ruins of Egypt that indicate life. Not one blade of grass on even the most eroded stones. They crumble to powder, like a mummy, and that is all. The graffiti left by travelers and the droppings of the birds of prey are the only two ornaments of decay. You often see a great tall obelisk with a long white stain down it like a curtain, wider at the top and narrrowing toward the base. It's the vultures; they've been coming there fore centuries to shit. The effect is very striking, and curiously symbolic. Nature said to the monuments of Egypt: you want nothing to do with me? Not even lichen will grow upon you? All right then, damn it, I shall shit all over you.
Flaubert, a letter from his trip to Egypt
You know occupations are hot again when even über-misogynist (among several things: "a form of ritualised "chosen polygamy" which he calls Halcyon, making the women bow to him and punishing their transgressions with cold showers and being shut naked on balconies") rich puddles of shit are getting into it.
"I've decided to set myself up in my office and not leave it until this crisis is over," he told the media.
[video loses intro - the book in question, as revealed on spine, is Will to Power:
]
"Because the original version of the film (1933's unparalleled Babyface) was rejected by the New York State Censorship Board in April 1933, the film was softened by cutting out some material (such as Lily's study of Nietzschean philosophy as well as various sexually suggestive shots)."
[The above scene was redubbed as:
A woman, young, beautiful like you, can get anything she wants in the world. But there is a right way and a wrong way. Remember, the price of the wrong way is too great. Go to some big city where you will find opportunities! Don't let people mislead you. You must be a master, not a slave. Be clean, be strong, defiant, and you will be a success."]
As in, you can show a woman fucking her way to the top, mirrored in the recurrent tracking shot up the outside of an office building, floor by floor, from filing to the mortgage office to the big boss. But a) citing Nietzsche directly, b) the concept of exploitation, c) self-exploitation, and d) exploiting men - well, that's a no go.
Indeed, that is exactly what Twitter - remember that thing that didn't bring down Mubarak in the least, but still, got the word around quick, and that's something - should be used for: a deafening echo chamber of puttering little things proud as birds of having fulfilled an obligation to the state.
Sure, my life is hell. But this, this right here is a triumph.
head gallery
165 e. broadway
new york,
NY 34887
+212 477 5006 info@headgallery.org
Head Gallery invites you to My Spinal Cord Traversed by the Axis of the Planet, an exhibition that "exists" as a stream of indeterminate white-code, punctuated by a series of contingent meaning-units (postulated artworks), moving through the directionless plenum and time-bends against which orbital space shores up. It accelerates in an abyssal "vertical" plunge, masked as an effort to trace the abstract lineaments of a post-solar gravitational vacuum. It's total illusory narrativizing or phantasmic integument-production as refusal to accept the coming meltdown, absolute material dissolution. The end of the mesh, networkscapes, Spirit, objects, Real. An ultimate context of no-context. The white-code speeds through deep space in a mock mission of alien contact as parody of the futile galactic transversality wish-work of uploaded and deep-stored consciousness. Like the white-code, emancipated from the gravitational slavery of the terrestrial, uploaded and catapulted consciousness as survival mechanism is left to spin in the vortex of its own unimaginative existence as solution to anything. A mixture of self-generated binary couplets, DNA string sequencing, ancient Latin, Koranic braille, cthulhic runes, pre-dessiac hieroglyph, and Zoroastrian symbols, the white-code and the meaning-units it pulls along are mathematics breaking down in the dissipative zoom of matter, "measured" by a better instrument than the metric regimes of biomass prejudice.
The Axis of the Planet Traversed by the Inviolable Linearity of the Dissipative Drive of Matter and Energy.
“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.”
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?
[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"...]
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.
I write you of wallpaper.
You write me of plagues. I fear we are beginning to understand one another.
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.
A friend just emailed me a fitting typo in my book: "...finds us only worth saving if we deicide that we aren't...."
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'
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.
[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.]
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
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.
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.
"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."
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 ofeveryday 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.
"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.
