No wealth no ruin no silver no gold
I'll fix your feet til you can't walk
I'll lock your jaw til you can't talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
I'll lock your jaw til you can't talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
---
(Oh the young, the rich or poor
Hunger like me you know
No wealth, no ruin, no silver no gold)
Hunger like me you know
No wealth, no ruin, no silver no gold)
Pe' nuie na ca chiagnimmo o cielo e Napule
Briefly:
1. For those who don't know, I moved to Italy a few days ago. I live in Naples now. It is excellent. Although it is a difficult time to not be in the States, I'm very glad to be living more in the collapsing Euro-zone area of those I already know and those I have yet to meet. If you're in either of those categories and are anywhere near here, from Greece to Scandinavia to Spain to Portugal to France and et cetera, stay in touch or get in touch, and I hope we can meet up soon.
2. To friends and comrades back home busy fleshing out that swelling map of Occupy X sites and busy making those sites mean something fierce and real: good luck, take care, and do what needs to be done with no apology or hesitation, what's needed to be done for a long damn time.
E
No matter how you stars want to shine
First apply on the proper dotted line;
We're sure to renew your permission
For shining or writing or extinction.
October 1930
Escape From Venice (2nd Lt J.S. Foster's First Interview with Marira Bentsson)
First Interview. 3:22 AM. August 14, 2025.
2nd Lieutenant J.S. Foster: [Ruffling sound as he sits in the chair.] Testing, testing. [On the recording, a “THUMP THUMP,” as he taps the microphone twice.] Are you comfortable?
Marira Bentsson: Yes.
2nd Lt JSF: I see you have a soda, that’s good.
MB: Umm-hmm.
2nd Lt JSF: Did the man outside get it for you? [Pause] You, you like grape flavored? I mean, I bet you didn’t have that on the island, did you? Or anything fizzy?
MB: Well, a few months ago, someone found a can of Coke that wasn’t opened. Some people thought that was pretty cool.
2nd Lt JSF: I bet you did. Did you taste some of it?
MB: No, I hate that syrupy stuff.
2nd Lt JSF: Isn’t this grape stuff sweet… Never mind. [He coughs. He reaches across the table and turning the straw in her soda back to face her.] So. Do you mind telling me how old you are?
MB: I thought all of you died.
2nd Lt JSF: All of who?
MB: All of you who didn’t let us leave.
2nd Lt JSF: Well, I never said I did not want you to leave. That wasn’t my choice. That was the decision of a lot of people. It was very complicated.
MB: But didn’t you all die? When the movie started?
2nd Lt JSF: When the… no. Do you mean the people in the boats?
MB: Yes. All of you. In the boats. And in boots. You don’t have boots on. What are those things on your feet?
2nd Lt JSF: Look, it doesn’t matter what I have on my feet. [Pause.] They’re called loafers.
MB: Are they comfortable?
2nd Lt JSF: Uh, yeah, they are.
MB: You don’t tie them up?
2nd Lt JSF: No, they just sort of slide on.
MB: They are ugly. I bet they don’t even stay on when you run. But it doesn’t matter. I bet you own those boots.
2nd Lt JSF: Which boots?
MB: The ones that the soldiers wear.
2nd Lt JSF: Yes, I do. I am a soldier too. Does that bother you?
MB: So why weren’t you there with the soldiers?
2nd Lt JSF: Well, I was here, sort of monitoring the situation. I was talking to the soldiers who were coming to help get you and the others off the island.
MB: And then they died.
2nd Lt JSF: Yes. And they died.
MB: When the sea rained. All of them?
2nd Lt JSF: Do you know how old you are?
MB: I’m about 19.
2nd Lt JSF: [He notices she is straining forward against the snug wrist and neck restraints to reach her straw with her mouth. He pushes the can closer to her.] Sorry, I hope that is better. You said “about”?
MB: Yes. About 19.
2nd Lt JSF: You don’t know how long you have been on the island?
MB: No.
2nd Lt JSF: How old were you when, when the island was closed off?
MB: I was 7.
2nd Lt JSF: That was five years ago. That means you are 12 years old.
MB: I don’t feel 12.
2nd Lt JSF: What is 12 supposed to feel like?
MB: I guess like this.
2nd Lt JSF: [Pause, as he stands up and takes two steps to the right.]I want to ask you something, if you can remember a long time back. Can you remember back what happened at first?
MB: Umm-hmm.
2nd Lt JSF: [He clears his throat, and sits back down.] When did you start skinning the dogs?
MB: When I was 7.
Uccellacci e uccellacci che mangiano cadaveri
The noise would diminish, he would fall asleep, and then there would be more screaming boys, more clanging shutters. It was a highly traditional uproar perhaps, but Venice seemed to have an unhappy aptitude for combining only the worst of past society with the society of today. What might once have been falcons, had become hawks, and were now carrion crows.
(R. Aickman, “Never Visit Venice”)
Carta aberta aos que condenam as pilhagens
We still call it... I mean, you know how things are.
the esteemed guv'nor
Quick object lesson in the functional American logic of public and entirely electable racists:
The campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas found itself on the defensive on Sunday over a report that he had hunted at and taken guests to a West Texas camp with a racially charged name that his father, and later Mr. Perry, had leased.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that at least seven people it interviewed said the name for a portion of the property, N-----head, was visible on the rock at the entrance “at different points in the 1980s and 1990s,” and that a former worker said he believed he had seen it as recently as three years ago.
From this perspective, this seems to be "bad" for Mr. Perry or someone like him. It is not the kind of thing that a presidential type has known about him. As such, he and his ilk are out to claim that, "Perry’s father painted over offensive language on a rock soon after leasing the 1,000-acre parcel in the early 1980s."
[Ray Sullivan, Perry’s campaign communications
director, issued a statement soon after Cain was asked about the camp on
both the ABC and Fox morning programs.
"Mr. Cain is wrong about the Perry family’s
quick action to eliminate the word on the rock, but is right the word
written by others long ago is insensitive and offensive. That is why the
Perrys took quick action to cover and obscure it," Sullivan said.]
But wait...
The revelation was one more challenge confronting the Perry campaign just as it was left reeling from his comments during a recent debate in support of granting the children of some illegal immigrants in-state tuition at Texas state universities, remarks that he later retreated from.
It is also "bad" for him to come across as the type who treats poor brown people semi-decently, which would include the scandalous extension of that bargain known as in-state tuition.
This new scandal, then, is no threat whatsoever. It is a boon. Because it allows one to say
a) No, no, we painted that over, because we know that isn't acceptable
(see, liberals! how could they think we're so barbarous? Remember that thing I did about tuition? And you won't mind if I have to back-pedal a bit on it, because politics can be sort of partisan and... well, you know how things are.)
b) But it is still there, under the paint
(don't worry, conservatives: we know that it's important to put a new coat of paint over certains things to, you know, keep up appearances. But don't you worry. We're still the kind of people who own property, who hunt on it, and who call it... well, we don't have to spell out for you what we call it. I mean, you know how things are.)
Three crime scenes
6:40:45 PM
6:42:43 PM
6:44:44 PM
And it is undeniable that while the gulls had heard nothing of the missing poodle, camera, or toddler, and even while their alibi stood up as straight and true as the line of their polygraph tests, still, still there were those footprints.
The Sgt. remarked how They looked like those old dance-diagrams that could be drawn on the ground for you to follow with your feet, all double-steps, arrows looping back on themselves.
Sure, Sgt, muttered Inspector Neras. Just like that. Provided it is a dance where you slaughter a pig in the middle.
The Sgt did not bother to restrain his thick, mushy smile when the reports came in the next morning of a missing pig.
And there had always been that fact of the music.
6:42:43 PM
6:44:44 PM
And it is undeniable that while the gulls had heard nothing of the missing poodle, camera, or toddler, and even while their alibi stood up as straight and true as the line of their polygraph tests, still, still there were those footprints.
The Sgt. remarked how They looked like those old dance-diagrams that could be drawn on the ground for you to follow with your feet, all double-steps, arrows looping back on themselves.
Sure, Sgt, muttered Inspector Neras. Just like that. Provided it is a dance where you slaughter a pig in the middle.
The Sgt did not bother to restrain his thick, mushy smile when the reports came in the next morning of a missing pig.
And there had always been that fact of the music.
Rolling hunger strike in California prisons
Meanwhile...
Something that is guaranteed to receive far less media attention than those Occupy Wall Street Brooklyn Bridge arrests, yet which is arguably far more important, desperate, and powerful: the 12,000 prisoners now on hunger strike in California. This concerns the organization it takes to try and concretely modify the hell in which you live, however you can do so, and with whatever tools you have. In this case, the only tool at hand is your continued existence as such and the prospect that your death, when combined with others, would cause some problems for the institution that tries its damnedest to reduce you to a technically continuing existence, and nothing more.
The demands are simple: to have the chance to be more than just technically existing, breathing, consuming, aging It is a threat of sabotage - the problem (mere existence) becomes the very thing turned back upon itself - at the most fundamental of levels, being fought out in the worst place possible in this country.
Numbers released by the federal receiver’s office show that on September 28th, nearly 12,000 prisoners were on hunger strike, including California prisoners who are housed in out of state prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma. This historic and unprecedented number shows the strength and resolve of the prisoners to win their 5 core demands and is a serious challenge to the power of the California prison system and to the Prison Industrial Complex in general.
Prisoners are currently on strike in Pelican Bay State Prison, Calipatria, Centinela, Corcoran, Ironwood State Prison, Kern Valley State Prison, North Kern State Prison, and Salinas Valley State Prison. Throughout the last week prisoners at California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, Pleasant Valley State Prison, San Quentin as well as West Valley Detention Center in San Bernadino County were participating.
The receiver’s office and the CDCR begin monitoring prisoners who have refused food for 72 hours or for 9 consecutive meals. Representatives of the hunger strikers have previously stated that this will be a rolling strike, allowing prisoners to come off strike to regain strength. Because of this, numbers will likely fluctuate throughout the duration of the strike.
Info here
Demands to be treated like something barely approximating the minimal degree of decent treatment of another living being here
Something that is guaranteed to receive far less media attention than those Occupy Wall Street Brooklyn Bridge arrests, yet which is arguably far more important, desperate, and powerful: the 12,000 prisoners now on hunger strike in California. This concerns the organization it takes to try and concretely modify the hell in which you live, however you can do so, and with whatever tools you have. In this case, the only tool at hand is your continued existence as such and the prospect that your death, when combined with others, would cause some problems for the institution that tries its damnedest to reduce you to a technically continuing existence, and nothing more.
The demands are simple: to have the chance to be more than just technically existing, breathing, consuming, aging It is a threat of sabotage - the problem (mere existence) becomes the very thing turned back upon itself - at the most fundamental of levels, being fought out in the worst place possible in this country.
Numbers released by the federal receiver’s office show that on September 28th, nearly 12,000 prisoners were on hunger strike, including California prisoners who are housed in out of state prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma. This historic and unprecedented number shows the strength and resolve of the prisoners to win their 5 core demands and is a serious challenge to the power of the California prison system and to the Prison Industrial Complex in general.
Prisoners are currently on strike in Pelican Bay State Prison, Calipatria, Centinela, Corcoran, Ironwood State Prison, Kern Valley State Prison, North Kern State Prison, and Salinas Valley State Prison. Throughout the last week prisoners at California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, Pleasant Valley State Prison, San Quentin as well as West Valley Detention Center in San Bernadino County were participating.
The receiver’s office and the CDCR begin monitoring prisoners who have refused food for 72 hours or for 9 consecutive meals. Representatives of the hunger strikers have previously stated that this will be a rolling strike, allowing prisoners to come off strike to regain strength. Because of this, numbers will likely fluctuate throughout the duration of the strike.
Info here
Demands to be treated like something barely approximating the minimal degree of decent treatment of another living being here
If you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store (And why no one should ever listen to Naomi Wolf about "protests")
Two brief notes on the alleged occupations of streets, Wall and otherwise.
1.
2.
But a brief comment, one that applies not to those who got picked up on that bridge but to a whole lot of what has been said about this?
No one should not let oneself "get" arrested. There is nothing sexy, useful, or sacrificial about doing so. It is a waste of legal fees, time, and zip ties, and it renders protest recognizable in an old-fashioned, familiar, and therefore irrelevant way. (And not "old-fashioned" in the Barcelona 1936 way, for example, which would be quite another story.)
If one thinks that 700 people getting arrested makes a splash, try seeing what happens when 700 people don't get arrested, despite police efforts to the contrary. See what happens when a video is released of forty people un-arresting someone successfully. See how that will change the stakes in the way that a mass arrest never can.
But if you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store and use the cash to buy needed materials for those protesting. That is literally more useful. And hell, you may even get away with it.
Do not sit there and wait for it. Do not listen to others who tell you to do so. If you see someone people to do so, shout that person down.
[Case in point, someone like Naomi Wolf.
Who writes:
"
Unlike previous protests, there was no large scale police crackdown. The parliament was partially burned during the protests.")
Become enormously, allergically suspicious of the word "peaceful."
And above all, do not sit and watch others get arrested while waiting your turn. Do not let the taking photos (even if they look like they'll be very good) of that act take the place of stopping that arrest, even if it means that the subject of the photo - someone being pinned and hurt by a number of men - will cease to exist. In this case, it is the absence of a picture will be worth a thousand words. For when people speak of "a critique of separation," of the problem of a fundamental divide between seeing and doing, this is the sort of thing they have in mind.
And for once, they're totally right.
1.
Big cheers to those who know that's what it means and takes. And to the messy spread of it to other places, to other "issues" (read: capital, state, and - for old time's sake - church; jail, immigration, unpaid labor, policing, foreclosure, access to medicine) that have nothing to do with "Wall Street greed," as none of this has much to do with that in the first place.
Scorn and loathing to those wee katechons who restrain, who make nice, who tell you to sit down. Whose breath reeks of the word peace as if they've long been drinking from the toilet.
2.
But a brief comment, one that applies not to those who got picked up on that bridge but to a whole lot of what has been said about this?
No one should not let oneself "get" arrested. There is nothing sexy, useful, or sacrificial about doing so. It is a waste of legal fees, time, and zip ties, and it renders protest recognizable in an old-fashioned, familiar, and therefore irrelevant way. (And not "old-fashioned" in the Barcelona 1936 way, for example, which would be quite another story.)
If one thinks that 700 people getting arrested makes a splash, try seeing what happens when 700 people don't get arrested, despite police efforts to the contrary. See what happens when a video is released of forty people un-arresting someone successfully. See how that will change the stakes in the way that a mass arrest never can.
But if you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store and use the cash to buy needed materials for those protesting. That is literally more useful. And hell, you may even get away with it.
Do not sit there and wait for it. Do not listen to others who tell you to do so. If you see someone people to do so, shout that person down.
[Case in point, someone like Naomi Wolf.
Who writes:
"
Unlike previous protests, there was no large scale police crackdown. The parliament was partially burned during the protests.")
Become enormously, allergically suspicious of the word "peaceful."
And above all, do not sit and watch others get arrested while waiting your turn. Do not let the taking photos (even if they look like they'll be very good) of that act take the place of stopping that arrest, even if it means that the subject of the photo - someone being pinned and hurt by a number of men - will cease to exist. In this case, it is the absence of a picture will be worth a thousand words. For when people speak of "a critique of separation," of the problem of a fundamental divide between seeing and doing, this is the sort of thing they have in mind.
And for once, they're totally right.
Here's to a grease fire
["Research":
]
Then the dissolves come unstuck and the words hang, not as things that have been heard but as injunctions (clip the mooch!)...
Further proof that the difference between mainstream film and its experimental counterparts is not a difference in kind and rarely has been. It is merely a difference in
a) quantity of filler, against which the dissolves, nonsense speech, and drooling is off-set, and
b) location of that filler: in the film itself, padding it out to 2 hours and 17 minutes, like caulking padded around one little razor or opening, or as the entire negative space surrounding the film (read: the social relations of everyday life; the social relations of cinema), as if what we watch was a very small and quite temporary black hole burning in a sea of fat.
So, here's to the re-cutting of all that has heretofore existed. To a little padding where it's missing, to let a razor breathe from time to time. To less of it overall, to those little holes chaining together.
For here is, too, a grease fire.
Vista 1-2-3
If you stood here at dawn you might be the first person in the country to see the sun's first rays
Vista 1
Vista 2
Vista 3
Later Cadillac founded Detroit, inspiring the name of the prestigious automobile
Later Cadillac founded Detroit, inspiring the name of the prestigious automobile
Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia About Difference)
Utopia,
I’m writing you from hiding, because I’m hiding I have crouched down and pulled a wet version of a cardboard box over myself, right beside a short metal pole, and I am breathing very quietly. To be perfectly honest my pen may give me away and then where will we be. Like dragging a dead car across tin foil. SCRITCH SCRITCH
But I’m not hiding because it’s loud, I’m hiding because I just killed a man, he had sweet soft jowls, his hands were full of rope, just like a cartoon of an old-fashioned sailor, yeah, but he recognized me, that big dopey face opening and then darkening and I saw the mouth start to come open to say SN… And he did not finish his word because I killed him and then I got inside the box.
But I’m not hiding because it did not say a name, I’m hiding still, still here and still as all, because nearby someone is playing the harp. There must have been a very nice harp left somewhere because this is no janky bit of twine and stripped buoy parts, it’s the real deal. And before I saw that man I heard the harp, I said to the guy playing it, I love that song! because he was playing Debussy’s “En Bateau”, which is very fitting because this is a city about water. He said, yeah, I bet you do. It’s killer. And now I was gonna say to him, hey play that more, did you see what I just did to that guy, play that Debussy, but he never stopped playing, and I am hiding because I truly cannot tell you if he ever was playing Debussy or if he is playing Jimmy Buffett’s “Stranded on a Sandbar”. I get convinced it’s the Buffett, and that’s fine, because the Debussy was good when it lasted, and it was different, it’s still good that way, it’s like milk totally surrounded by glass that’s sitting next to milk that is just sitting out and smells like it. And then I’m saying, no, it’s definitely still the Debussy, I was such a fool, a real ninny for thinking of Buffett, I’m in Venice after all, Venice where one most certainly does not think of Jimmy Buffett or any music that is made for people in shorts who play songs about people who wear shorts and smoke weed and just talk about smoking it and crumple their dicks in their hands and do the same with puffy dying birds and lead business seminars. Buffett does not have four hands! You do not think of Buffett in Venice, in fact it is impossible to think of him here, the canals block it out, like moats do. Because Buffett never makes the music water and vice versa, he’s never played a note that shook itself off and drunken slid back in amongst the rest of them, without shivering. Buffett just writes songs about all that. He wants to tell you, I have heard there are those who do not crumble puffy birds, dying or not. This song is a war on them.
But I’m not hiding from anything, I’m hiding because there is no more difference anymore. There is no more difference between “En Bateau” and “Stranded on a Sandbar” then there is between a city and a fog these days, between a bear chock-full of maggots that aim to conspire to rise and fall like a bear’s chest and a bear. There used to be a difference. A difference between dicks and birds. It was plucked out by the century. Between my left eye and where my right one used to be. Between a day with a few clouds and a night with many things on fire spaced at very even intervals. Between a city and a fog that is shaped like a city.
If I don’t make it home, at least you will know exactly what happened and just what to tell them, and you should know also that I always thought there was a difference between you and a century and I do not even care if that is true or not because it does not matter to have difference but it does to have had you.
Love, Snake
But negation is not always made of razor wire.
A long piece from me at The New Inquiry on cinema, counterfactuals, riot police whose throats remain intact, the limits of criticism and of the films critiqued, sword-forging, restoring old houses, forcing Wes Anderson to remake La Terra Trema in black-and-white with an all-Limp Bizkit soundtrack, pseudomorphism, and, above all, more compelling uses of teeth.
Good evening, everyone, and here is the latest news from Athens: Good night. (Also, watch out for floating torch lamps. We've had reports they're heading west.)
A briefest of evening news. A very long commercial break.
(Note on the alarming autophagy of all things spectacular: the pre-broadcast video features a happy gathering of young people raising what look like flaming rocks to the dark sky. In a time of forthcoming civil war, it appears that if you can't beat them (i.e. anarchists), then "join" them. By "join", that is, we mean "make sure they are smiling, well-buffed yuppies with sexy hair and that they do not touch the things - those Ikea molotovs - that are burning as they rise upwards magically to touch nothing, like banks or cars. No, just to softly illuminate the night. You know, just like hope. Or something.")
Weep me deadly (Il nuovo caso Matarazzo, 3)
1952.
A nun is crying very hard, near hiccuping, because outside where it is brighter, they are carrying her son in a coffin and she just threw flowers down on him, they fell surprisingly fast, flowers she borrowed from the feet of a stone Mary and she then apologized to Mary. It's the end of a film. The word that tells us so comes from the depth of the frame, glowering just before her, terminal, and growing in size. But the closer it gets to the surface, the further it gets from having any excuse to participate in that depth, any more than the names that spelled out who spent money and picked out costumes could touch the stone quarry they obscured. And yet the more the word swells, the more it does interfere and cast, the more it glows, making those tears flare and shine, hot as radiation.
But this is not an ending, after all. It is merely a halfway point, three years before it is picked up again, in 1955. Then the story opens up once more, to burn a whole lot faster and stranger this time, doubling her into a desired knockoff played by herself and impregnated by the same man, three years before Hitchcock will do so. Building its pitch to the shriek of ending high above another courtyard where this time this nun will try to stop a women's prison riot by appealing to every mother everywhere ever.
That same year, another ending, another opening, further west, by the water.
Hot as tears.
A nun is crying very hard, near hiccuping, because outside where it is brighter, they are carrying her son in a coffin and she just threw flowers down on him, they fell surprisingly fast, flowers she borrowed from the feet of a stone Mary and she then apologized to Mary. It's the end of a film. The word that tells us so comes from the depth of the frame, glowering just before her, terminal, and growing in size. But the closer it gets to the surface, the further it gets from having any excuse to participate in that depth, any more than the names that spelled out who spent money and picked out costumes could touch the stone quarry they obscured. And yet the more the word swells, the more it does interfere and cast, the more it glows, making those tears flare and shine, hot as radiation.
But this is not an ending, after all. It is merely a halfway point, three years before it is picked up again, in 1955. Then the story opens up once more, to burn a whole lot faster and stranger this time, doubling her into a desired knockoff played by herself and impregnated by the same man, three years before Hitchcock will do so. Building its pitch to the shriek of ending high above another courtyard where this time this nun will try to stop a women's prison riot by appealing to every mother everywhere ever.
That same year, another ending, another opening, further west, by the water.
For the record:
May 2008.
The parole board in the state of Georgia spared a convicted killer from execution hours before he was due to die by lethal injection on Thursday and commuted his sentence to life in prison.
At Thursday's hearing, his lawyers presented a dossier of evidence attesting to his remorse and good behavior in jail, according to local media reports. The lawyers also said he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction at the time of the crime.
This in a case in which there was no doubt about the evidence and the man in question pleaded guilt.
The man in question, for the record, was white.
May 2008.
The parole board in the state of Georgia spared a convicted killer from execution hours before he was due to die by lethal injection on Thursday and commuted his sentence to life in prison.
At Thursday's hearing, his lawyers presented a dossier of evidence attesting to his remorse and good behavior in jail, according to local media reports. The lawyers also said he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction at the time of the crime.
This in a case in which there was no doubt about the evidence and the man in question pleaded guilt.
The man in question, for the record, was white.
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