Pasolini's Body: New Directions in Pasolini Scholarship

If you're in Santa Cruz this week, I'll be speaking at a three-day conference on Pasolini about, among other things, La Rabbia, Timpanaro, mediocrity, proletariat sub- and otherwise, Bordiga, shaving the heads of hippies, mediocrity, anthropological devolution, and a defense of pessimism.

(And the film screenings will be straight excellent.  If you haven't seen Arabian Nights, come remedy this fact with me Thursday.  There will be no regret.)

Info here.

Conference April 29-30, 2011
Cowell College Conference Room

And the sun came in

@ 3'30"

It was a grey day, it went on and on.  We had headaches, strangely, all four of us.  I saw her poking at her eardrums as if the buzzing was inside.  More than grey, the clouds were almost black, sooty, blocking out the sun.

Then the clouds parted.  It was blacker behind them.

We realized then the clouds we took, all along, since our youth, to be opaque and light-swallowing had in fact been luminescent.  A stopgap radiance, a grimy shimmer.  A failing buffer against a perma-dark noon.

There was a long way to keep going.  We put our hoods up.

Without transition / An apogee of mooing....

Wedding - 'lyricism' - Negro chorus. Parody on
Fomka's motif with Hawaiian guitar
Growth of Fomka - crescendo of Fomka's leitmotiv.
Choppy. With each jump in Fomka's growth the sound
gets stronger. Without transition. This same figure is
repeated in Fomka's running. There they fuse
The 'Attack' - terrifying increase
Cow spreads her legs - complete pause. Then sound of
Gunfire and an apogee of mooing'.




[Unfulfilled sound script for The General Line, thanks to BN]

World Melodrama Film Series Presents: Letter from an Unknown Woman(1948)

Oh, if only you could've recognized what was always yours,

could've found what was never lost. If only...

One of only four films Max Ophüls made while in exile in the United States during World War II and the immediate post-war period, Letter from an Unknown Woman ranks as one of the best in the peripatetic (though abbreviated) career of this world-class filmmaker.  Made up of a triptych of episodes from the life of Lisa Berndl (Joan Fontaine) as described in a letter sent from her deathbed to the unattainable object of her lifelong love and affection, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), the film is a delirious representation of erotic frustration, deferral, and (ultimately) morbidity that also displays Ophüls' remarkable use of conspicuous camera movements in almost every scene, the effect of which is not only to show off the director's technical mastery but also the artifice of most of the film's stagebound sets.  Not to be missed.

Tuesday, April 26th

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

But not our blood

 "if the only thing more grotesque than an undertaker with embalming fluid coursing through him is imagining what we'd bleed if we should become so static..."

If we should become so static.  I like our faith, against all, that we are not so.

I hadn't read that thick custard blood as embalming fluid.  But now I imagine his long nights with his retrofit dialysis, swapping in the yellow, preparing himself - like the suicide of Taxidermia, but with nowhere to go and no machine to sever the thread - for a longer haul.  The centuries of labor, his thoughtless ticker sludging that pudding through his veins, morning in, morning out.  I imagine him lying in bed, always waking up twenty minutes before his alarm clock, the eyes snapping open slow.  Why do I even bother setting it, I know I will wake.  I know what today will be like.  Why is there no decay?  My oxen heart louder than that clock.

For, indeed, the static can course.

But not our blood.  Our blood just puts on a good show for us.  Too often it sits torpid, like hot mice sleeping, until it is pricked and startled, the blinding light and air bursting in.  It pulls itself together fast, in that quick instant between a cut and a leak.  It makes itself a liquid, it gets everywhere.

Like magma and lava, blood does not become the latter - that is, itself - until it leaves.

Otherwise, it tricks us.  Because it is solid.  Yes, it knows how to thump and wave, knows how to produce the semblance of running cold, but it's dry, solid.  Between chalk and sponge.  It is a substance through which time and messages are passed: the blood of an arm remains the blood of an arm, but it has heard of a heart.  It's gotten word.  A circuitous game of Telephone.  Wait, I can't hear you.  I should pulse or blush?  I should stiffen or stutter?  A decision, an instinct just means the blood is sick of waiting, takes the phone off the hook, goes about its business.

In The Andromeda Strain, the blood dries without being bled.  The corpses stiffen into poses.  (Perversely, it's from the same director as Sound of Music - I think now of a very different version, where the von Trapps are found, goggling, open mouthed, dead, and so too the Nazis, and there is no motion, just a still-life, arranged into a chorus.  The soundtrack will need to be changed.)

They become statues, like those frozen soldiers in Kaputt and Life and Fate.  Like Pompeii

and yet not at all, not like when that hot ash settled soft and cradled and became hard around the bodies, so when they rotted, they remained in negative space, an indictment, a full-body equivalent of the one who writes the killer's name in her own blood.

But this is without lava, without the heat from without.  They find them and cut their wrists and what drains out is a dry powder, a rusty silicate.

And it is nothing but blood caught off guard, without the warning to make of itself a liquid, to keep the whole illusion of our being bodies of water, whispering low and rustling.  If the camera panned down, it would find a gathering message in red sand, written in florid, expert script.  Not that we could read it.

With + Stand 5 Reading and Release Party

[I can't make this, unfortunately, as I'll be in LA.  But my work is in this issue, which should be stellar on the whole, and there are a lot of good people reading that night.  If you're in the Bay, go.]

With + Stand 5 Poetry Reading and Release Party
Friday, May 13th, 2011
7-11pm

Zugahus Gallery1306 3rd Street
Berkeley
(on the train tracks)

Parking will be available nearby at Gilman Grill:
1300 4th Street, Berkeley, CA

FREE POETRY. FREE EVENT.

A reading and release party at the intersection of poetics and radical politics, celebrating the fifth issue of one of the most cutting-edge arts publications of recent years—With + Stand, the journal of postindustrial poetics. Readings by Jacqueline Frost, Barbara Claire Freeman, Lauren Levin, Meg Day, Monica Peck, Kristin Palm, Lara Durback, Erica Lewis, Brian Ang, Dan Thomas-Glass, Jennifer Karmin, and more. BYOB.

ψευδής

“pseudo-world”
“pseudo-nature” x 2
“pseudo-sacred” x 2
“pseudo-justification”
“pseudo-use” X 2
“pseudo-needs” x 2
“pseudo-need” x 2
“pseudo-goods”

“pseudo-negation” {the real kicker}

“pseudo-enjoyment”
“pseudo-star”
“pseudo-power”
“pseudo-values”
“pseudo-freedom”
“pseudo-revolutionary” [“role” or “common actions”]
“pseudo-cyclical” x 9
“pseudo-valuations”
“pseudo-displacement”
“pseudo-festivals”
“pseudo-events” x 2
“pseudo-community”
“pseudo-countryside”
“pseudo-peasantry”
“pseudo-novelty”
“pseudo-culture”
“pseudo-sensational”
“pseudo-histories”
“pseudo-knowledge”
“pseudo-concrete”
“pseudo-response”

[Dialectics, though, get a pass.]

What would it mean for a cinema to burn or be burned

like a church

like a bank

like a theater

like a supermarket


Has it ever be torched like none of these

Does it matter if the film had gotten stuck before the lamp, peeling and smoking, like old oil

Cujo & Me

 The really terrible thing about it is that it is basically "The Oval Portrait" -

And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him. And when many weeks bad passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp. And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned suddenly to regard his beloved:- She was dead!

- in which there is no painter and no art, and the happy couple - red faced, "better for having gone through the tribulations of an incorrigible pup", ready to pop out a few of their ghastly blond brood - sup young canine life together.

The portrait they paint is naught but that of themselves as relationship, weeping and consoling each other over the picked bones of their finished meal.

Proposed sequel: At the beginning, during a lightning storm, Marley claws his way back out from the front-yard grave.  The rest of the film basically follows the plot-line of Cujo.

From an aesthetic point of view, the landscape was highly romantic. From Gerfaut's point of view, it was absolute shit.

He wanted to confront his Lip watch - which he had bought directly from the Lip workers when they had occupied their factory and which had never worked very well - but he discovered that he no longer had it.

[Manchette, 3 to Kill]

---

In the absence of any real solidarity movement the workerist character of the struggle prevailed over its proletarian origin as the conflict developed. In their isolation the Lip workers were unable to go beyond the immediate conditions they had faced from the outset, and it was from this narrow basis that they rushed into struggle. Attached to their isolated factory, they strengthened their consciousness of themselves as producers, and attempted to realize in practical terms that consciousness. They resumed the production of watches. The "Lips" -- and that is the origin of their disgusting popular nickname -- became a collective capitalist.


["Lip and the self-managed counter-revolution" from Négation No. 3, 1973]

---

He made several false starts that ended in pathetic and painful tumbles.  At last, he had the idea of crawling and using his fingers for purchase.  In this way, he dragged himself up a short incline and reached ground that was all broken up and distinctly discouraging: nothing but sharp rises, patches of bare granite, tangled branches brought down by lightning or avalanche, and vertiginous overhangs.  From an aesthetic point of view, the landscape was highly romantic.  From Gerfaut's point of view, it was absolute shit.

[Manchette, 3 to Kill]

World Melodrama Film Series Presents: The Wicked Lady (1945)

You don’t love him anymore? 

I never have. 

But you took him from me! 

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…”

Tuesday, April 19th 

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

Remantling

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!"

Then again, truth in advertising.

Thomas Müntzer is to God as a vulture is to Egypt

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.

May you starve.

The Questionable Virtues of Using Nietzsche as a Self-Empowerment Tool For the Great Depression-Era Working Woman

[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.

The Worsening of the World, Pt. 1 of ∞

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. 

My Spinal Cord Traversed by the Axis of the Planet

My Spinal Cord Traversed by the Axis of the Planet 18 April to 11 June Ray Brassier, Eileen Joy, Dean Kenning, Rachel Kushner, Patricia MacCormack, Nicola Masciandaro, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Nina Power, Hillary Raphael and Evan Calder Williams. http://www.headgallery.org/spinal_spinal.html

Share this announcement on:  Facebook | Delicious | Twitter

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.

"without being overtly offensive"

“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.