tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418478075182532782024-02-18T19:55:37.726-08:00REVOLUTION NOSTALGIA DISCO THEATERQUESTION: What is Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater?
REVOLUTION NOSTALGIA DISCO THEATER IS A MULTIFARIOUS ENTERPRISE FOR non-violently DEFINING, CREATING AND ANIMATING THE WORLD IN THE IMAGE OF THE NEW HUMAN.
WE look to THE PAST FOR OUR CODES.
WE OPERATE IN THE PRESENT TO PERTURB THE COMMON LANGUAGE. OUR PRIMARY METHODS ARE SEDUCTION, APORIA, and HUMOR.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-71250465075200814602012-03-31T21:35:00.004-07:002012-03-31T21:40:26.630-07:00OMG WHAT WILL THE NORTH KOREANS THINK?It is not often that I get to be an ACTUAL REVOLUTIONARY attempting to overthrow all that is good and right in the universe.
Let me explain. Sort of.
I have apparently joined the Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater Revolution in Saudi Arabia that has something to do with Facebook and definitely promotes "homosexuality and pornography."
This is from the arabic via google translate (and it got 246 hits!)--it is mangled but maybe I get the idea???
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGQniuSvDHHWjW5nxUCQ2hpENArU-SAbVpWF9HTBkNh4qWAfp09nnXfme7cJ_u3SurEiJcr96Sg84n5L5wec4bSm0L-Fu1PlcBZSc8dWP16ys2qxnjKjGQ2vNprBR8iWwfm-GwfHXsG9I/s1600/perversion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="182" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGQniuSvDHHWjW5nxUCQ2hpENArU-SAbVpWF9HTBkNh4qWAfp09nnXfme7cJ_u3SurEiJcr96Sg84n5L5wec4bSm0L-Fu1PlcBZSc8dWP16ys2qxnjKjGQ2vNprBR8iWwfm-GwfHXsG9I/s320/perversion.jpg" /></a></div>
"Seemed that no one from the Saudis care about the so-called revolution of nostalgia, Valsafhh which calls for a revolution on Facebook does not exceed the number of members have 71 people, while the Forum calls for revolution, claimed that the number of Associate of another page reached 460 people through Wednesday last, in turn, opened the pages other to denounce the revolution and expose who is behind it, including the page "Sons of Arabia against the revolution nostalgia", and "page for the people of Saudi Arabia unified revolution against nostalgia" ..
But what is the revolution of nostalgia and why so named?. Scan through a simple Internet - and the lack of people known to present themselves at the head of the revolution - show that there are a lot of statements about the reason for designation, there are those who say it's a quote from invasion of nostalgia, and others claim that they attributed to the founder of Revolution owner's Dr. Hanin Mahmoud Qadu - who is currently in the Nineveh Plain in Iraq - but the hidden quote for this Title is a quote west of the Revolution of disco nostalgia, which calls for pornography and homosexuality.
And also shows that there are names - not Saudi Arabia - behind the revolution, including Mohamed Sabih Masri, and Iranian Hussein Ibrahim, Mohamed Ahmed, Ahmed Musawi vegetation.
There is also a person named Hussein Abdel Fattah, one of the claims With 26 Saudi activists behind the revolution, but he did not mention their names, and simply put the name of the famous Salman and named it carved out the first"
In any case, I am super happy to introduce Derek Jarman's Sebastiane to the Arab world.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-87683854779425101342012-03-31T20:29:00.007-07:002012-03-31T21:02:26.079-07:00WE ARE ALL GUILTY HEREApparently, there was, perhaps still is, a sign in downtown Pyongyang that reads, “We are all happy here.” I picture people on the street—rushing home from work, going to school, thinking about making dinner, a sick child, and that fight with a husband, etc. <br /><br />Ordinary life makes for horrible propaganda. <br /><br />It just can’t meet the 5-year plan. Take Henry Stimson, FDR’s Secretary of War who controlled the Manhattan Project. He goes to work, makes plans to obliterate Hiroshima and goes home for a nap. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvL9mTA87iQYzdieCSJmNMMgDUcUbsnGfCyH8myziN5uaAX4EysDdCnsYlkbHuNK7rGwQc4eudkSXkow8F1Aon8aH8EDt6JQIS__ltwf55vADdT9Q2cweH-pXUjBJi7c-ClFre2Pa_mGk/s1600/diary+entry.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 184px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvL9mTA87iQYzdieCSJmNMMgDUcUbsnGfCyH8myziN5uaAX4EysDdCnsYlkbHuNK7rGwQc4eudkSXkow8F1Aon8aH8EDt6JQIS__ltwf55vADdT9Q2cweH-pXUjBJi7c-ClFre2Pa_mGk/s320/diary+entry.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5726268756577316034" border="0"></a><br /><br /><br /><br />War is supposed to be about good and evil. But, at the end of the day, it’s millions of ordinary people who each decide to kill millions of other ordinary humans. <br /><br />This is from Philip Allott’s, radical Eunomia (I wonder what the other profs at Cambridge and his British foreign service chums thought of him after this): <br /><br />“And they (the nation-state) have ordered the consciousness of their societies in such a way as to cause their citizen’s to accept value-forming theories to the effect that the ultimate identity of other human beings is not their sense of humanity, but their national identity—ultimate, in the sense that, as members of one nation-state, we may be required to act, preferably of our own willing (and, if not, under the compulsion of the willing of others), to kill or maim human beings who are members of other nation-states.”<br /><br />Little Drops, my next novel, looks at the history of U.S. involvement in Korea as a way to explore mythologies of national identity, particularly my own. <br /><br />The idea began with a newspaper article I’d read in the NYT about a Japanese tourist kidnapped off a beach by North Korean frogmen and taken back to Pyongyang. The complete absurdity of the story tickled me. I immediately envisioned a slapstick scene of some poor housewife being wrestled into a Zodiac by men in wet suits and Bozo-the-clown size flippers. Humor is subversive by nature. Laughter is difficult to control. In fact, it works by defying reason. It points out our own ridiculousness and forces us not to take ourselves so damn seriously. <br /><br />Seriously. 3.5 million Koreans died in the Korean war. 2.5 million were in the North. One quarter of the total population there.<br /><br />When I started doing background research. I realized all I knew about Korea was that we’d gone to war to protect the democratic South when the communist dictatorship of the North invaded. <br /><br />THIS IS CALLED PROPAGANDA. <br /><br />It’s the Cold War doctrine and I got it pushed into my head probably in eighth grade and stuck. <br /><br />First of all, the South became democratic only in the 1990’s. Second, the 38th parallel was put into place by two colonels who went into a room and came out a few hours later with a map. Third, no one ever asked what the Koreans wanted. In fact, the U.S. military had the appalling idea that they would just keep the same people in power to ease transition. Of course, the Koreans had just a bit of a problem accepting that they’d continue to be ruled by the occupying Japanese and their Korean collaborators. The North did, in fact, invade, contrary to what the NK textbooks spit out about Yank imperialists, but Syngman Rhee, the President of South Korea wanted to do it first and was only held back by his U.S. handlers. Of course, this was all played out against the Cold War which had started almost immediately after Japan surrendered in World War II. <br /><br />Let’s play the blame game. How many of those three million Koreans were guilty? Let’s make it easy—we won’t even define the crime. 5000? 100,000? A million? <br /><br />And the others?<br /><br />And me?<br /><br /><br />Of all the tragedies of this peninsula’s history, I think the one that makes me, an American, the saddest, is the March First movement of 1919. After President Wilson issued his Fourteen Points, which included the right for countries to have self determination, a group of Koreans (living under Japanese occupation) issued this declaration of independence: <br /><br />“We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea and the liberty of the Korean people. We tell it to the world in witness of the equality of all nations and we pass it on to our posterity as their inherent right. <br />We make this proclamation, having 5,000 years of history, and 20,000,000 united loyal people. We take this step to insure to our children for all time to come, personal liberty in accord with the awakening consciousness of this new era. This is the clear leading of God, the moving principle of the present age, the whole human race's just claim. It is something that cannot be stamped out, stifled, gagged, or suppressed by any means.”<br /><br />I read this, and that naïve part of me thinks, yes! America, of all nations, would certainly recognize this yearning for freedom.<br /><br />Right?<br /><br />This from Wikipedia:<br /><br />A delegation of overseas Koreans, from Japan, China, and Hawaii, sought to gain international support for independence at the ongoing Paris Peace Conference. The United States and Imperial Japan blocked the delegation's attempt to address the conference.[5]<br /><br />In April 1919, the State Department told the ambassador to Japan that "the consulate [in Seoul] should be extremely careful not to encourage any belief that the United States will assist the Korean nationalists in carrying out their plans and that it should not do anything which may cause Japanese authorities to suspect [the] American Government sympathizes with the Korean nationalist movement."[6]<br /><br /><br />This novel is my way of looking at my own national identity and my country’s mythology. The Cold War background of U.S. Korean relations and the stuck-in-a-time-capsule politics of North Korea itself provide a ready-made historical backdrop for this exploration. Afterall, it was during this time, that the United States begin to sell the image of itself abroad as an alternative to Communism, even as, at home, it pursued Joseph McCarthy’s decidedly un-American agenda of persecution. Moreover, I want to explore power dynamics on the domestic front in the form of traditional and non-traditional gender roles in the U.S., Korea, and Japan, as well as Japanese genderbending in manga and Kabuki. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZV-GEqKPFqAKHYHM6ohcDbiQ9tHP5jVNnHlvQEg4b6JF8w5fi5D23qejTA0hCshvgpR4nY7nZ9b2vHqYYEJBOPfFT-EdIf_O-O2U1I_jMpP5IONChTSLPB1x-q5pbqNACLZrEBYvFKVA/s1600/doug.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 295px; height: 171px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZV-GEqKPFqAKHYHM6ohcDbiQ9tHP5jVNnHlvQEg4b6JF8w5fi5D23qejTA0hCshvgpR4nY7nZ9b2vHqYYEJBOPfFT-EdIf_O-O2U1I_jMpP5IONChTSLPB1x-q5pbqNACLZrEBYvFKVA/s320/doug.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5726277381781415394" /></a><br /><br />It seems to me that the current political scene can be read as a desperate attempt to revive a vision of small-town, middle class America that hasn’t existed since 1950, if ever. The lives of everyday Americans (a majority of whom use some form of birth control and have pre-marital sex and have never fought in a war and have no problem buying cheap Chinese air conditioners at Walmart) as well as the world will be altered, perhaps irrevocably, by our misplaced nostalgia for a past that never was and a future that never will be. <br /><br />My work changes as I go but right now I see the novel as a road-trip game. Using Google maps, you begin with planet earth, then hone in on marked cities in the U.S., Japan, Korea, (and probably Moscow and Beijing) and there discover objects and structures which have been superimposed onto the landscapes. Sound will be very important, and possibly different types of gesture or other direct user interface such as camera function. In this way, I hope to capture concomitant intimacy and distance of individuals to historical events. Also, important to consider would be the concept of group play influencing individual trajectories and outcomes. Maybe you have to pool your tiny drops or ask for help or work together on a project. <br /><br /><br /><br /> Google maps on street level possesses a vaguely apocalyptic emptiness. It's time standing still. It reminds me of the oddly normal yet eerie city scenes in Neon Genesis Evangelion (que to 2:00)<br /> I want the process of history to become one of discovering it from multiple sources both fictional and historical. The novel itself will be in an organic architectural structure either a tree (like Miyazaki) or underwater which is a really nice idea conceptually because it’s adding your tiny drops to an ocean that is “grown” when you collect enough tiny drops. I’ll also consider shooting out the novel in “chapters” as text plus ephemeral data (photos, vids, soundfiles etc.) <br /><br />I have a few ideas for “games” within the game. One would be to add neon propaganda signs to “Vegas” –I would love to see “We are all guilty here” in flickering neon. Also, I would like the 38th parallel to consist of a thicket of words—people can post political tweets regarding Korea, and players have to maneuver over and around the collective morass to get to the other side. Also, have an idea for a dress-shop, where you could dress yourself in new look designs. I have always wanted to make my JFK’s White house dinner party seating chart (Arthur Miller and Robert Rauschenberg and Saul Bellow!) ballgown a reality. <br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxCDchdPukLfeDn7GJZk-dO7WArWaUzALrF1ZQeUxZOi_qsBnrDecCR8ZRuGp9B7TMVBf3ZVuGjfNMxFw6r2A' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-61345987310500868172011-10-16T03:51:00.000-07:002011-10-16T04:54:21.990-07:00Machine Narratives and Database AnimalsHiroki Azuma argues in his book “Japan’s Database Animals” that the grand narratives of modernism were replaced, first by multiple small fictions of postmodernism, and more recently by attractive character elements (moe) that emerge from and relate to a database. He calls this process animalization as it constitutes a kind of compulsive affective grazing that does not require or even encourage the construction of narrative. He relates the relative social/political isolation of otaku as a symptom of this animalization. <br /><br />Partially agreeing with Azuma, and, like him, rejecting a Lacanian model of subject construction in favor of one based on information systems, Thomas Lamarre argues that the database or “distributive field” is not an “infinitely symmetrical material structure without horizon or limits. Material limits emerge in the form of attractors and they emerge with affectively linked cooperators.” The distributive field does not generate subjective asymmetries. Rather it generates affective asymmetries, which, if reinforced over time, can become subjective positions/asymmetries. Or put in the language of Felix Guattari: “Machine is ontologically prior to structure and the subjective asymmetries that may come to inhabit the field.” <br /><br /><br />If we concur with Lamarre’s idea of subject position emerging from the distributive field (as opposed to being imposed from without) then we see that the distributive field, in so far as it is asymmetrical, is necessarily political. (That is not to say that asymmetries arise in an entirely predictable way. Because they are emergent, the sum is necessarily more than its parts.) I would argue that Azuma’s database animal is the end-position of the human subject in a late-capitalist system. With the bankrupting of the narratives that support the dominant political and economic structures, all that remains is the mechanism for empty/meaningless repetitive consumption, emotional lollipops devoid of historical or even grand fictional flavor.<br /><br /><br />For Lamarre, the move from grand narrative to database/moe elements does not necessitate the end of narrative, rather, storytelling “is a function that appears upon the distributive field which builds on the emergence of attractor-cooperator asymmetries and tends to settle on characters.” With manga’s exploded view of perception and affect, and action spread across pages, it is the character function that allows for a controlled explosion of the action image. Lamarre relates character to embodiment in the visual realm or form. This is critical, I think, because although the compulsion to construct an ontologically consistent subject position is subverted in limited anime and manga, the embodiment of the viewer remains. Material limits –physical, psychic, political, economic and cultural will determine the asymmetries that exist in the database at any given time. Moreover, attractors connected to the body have a gravitational pull that is difficult to overcome, though not impossible. Illness and pain usually have the effect of constricting the distributive field. In extreme pain, there is nothing but the experience of pain.<br /><br /><br />In relating otaku obsessions with various moe elements, Azuma is astute to point out that “the desire to remain with a transitional object in PERMANENT transition is precisely realm of perversion.” Perversion as such exists because the Law, which it defies, is acknowledged. Practiced within a social group or privately, it is a form of resistance to the Law. In the database model, reinforcement of multiple lines of sight including narrative, through which other asymmetries emerge, creates transitional or multiple subjects as opposed to fixed, singular, Cartesian subject positions. <br />It is unsurprising then, that manga and limited anime disrupt the most important of Capitalist/Lacanian subject positions/power relations—that of gender. The anime version of The Rose of Versailles (manga by Ikeda Riyoko, 1972) is perhaps the earliest example. Here, we see Oskar, the beautiful captain of the Queen’s Guard, raised as a man but clearly female, announcing her decision to join the Revolution and to remain with her husband, a fellow soldier.<br /><a href="http://youtu.be/eHq6du2m_EI"></a><br /><br />The phallacy of the Lacanian/capitalist subject position is that the experience of lack is based upon the possibility of and desire for a fully constituted subject. If the idea of wholeness, completeness, that is to say selfhood and self-ownership is abandoned, then what was previously experienced as lack is experienced as ecstatic excess, not too little, but too much. The phallus turned inside out is a space, both receptive and generative. The truth is that an ontologically consistent subject is only one possible asymmetry among many. A viewer-retriever of information follows a sight line that depends on his or her own attraction. If the consistency of a line of sight is maintained, a traditional gendered object/subject may emerge, but this is also not necessary. For Lamarre, “asymmetry begins to implicate perception and imply emergent positions which hover between a viewing position (subject) and sheer delight, terror, disgust, or lust (affect).” <br /><br /><br /><br />If I analyze my own hybrid media writing in terms of the Azuma/Lamarre database/distributive field model, it’s clear that I am interested in creating a non-random distributive field of information containing an attractor called a story. My predilection for using melodrama and genre codes makes this line of sight apparent while at the same time positing it in an exploded field of information elements. “Reading” the novel, the viewer experiences not lack, but an excess of information (this, in part, because I use an open system of collaboration, in the case of Mayakovsky through links rather than embedded information, and in Queerskins through appropriating objects from virtual communities Youtube and Flickr. ) Just as the filmmaker uses editing to overcome the partial/lacking view provided by the frame, the viewer/reader sews together fragments of text, image and sound-- suturing becomes overt and the spaces between them apparent. Thus, the process allows the viewer to perceive the limits of perception related to embodiment and to his or her own desired subjecthood. In constructing a narrative whole (or not) the viewer becomes aware of his or her decision to pursue certain asymmetries. Continuities of form and action is replaced by multiple possible asymmetries created through resonance, iteration, affinities of affect, media form, character, action, and rhythm (time) which can be followed, or not, according to the reader’s own desires/limitations. <br /><br />Reading: Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals<br />Thomas LaMarre, The Anime Machine<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzFqc2e0BYLz_U8NBHmBcgOe7Ev91EdhSAJe7LRco3txJdiRzwxIOzLdGSymeBVf0jRJjIqUYxeTL9TF0mTXA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-6252633076581286852009-11-27T22:56:00.000-08:002009-11-28T00:17:33.804-08:00Scary Monsters/Super Freaks<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhau_kYRk8k5td8sub_fD48KC8e_47aH7znaoeA3C57sIWH8mNOdwlgM9jo89FD0lcfcD5g-klHcp11WVvI-O1Jjql-fBcJ6_vbFfKJS1tQChL0F0F9_AE-HFAVTinNos5qkhH3VwAwhhM/s1600/agamben2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 93px; height: 131px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhau_kYRk8k5td8sub_fD48KC8e_47aH7znaoeA3C57sIWH8mNOdwlgM9jo89FD0lcfcD5g-klHcp11WVvI-O1Jjql-fBcJ6_vbFfKJS1tQChL0F0F9_AE-HFAVTinNos5qkhH3VwAwhhM/s400/agamben2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409051397386851010" /></a><br /><br /><br />If as Agamben suggests <span style="font-weight:bold;">“ the profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation,” then the task of writing in the 21st century is the profanation of the apparatus of media that aims, Agamben says, at the “neutralizing (of the) profanatory power of language as pure means, at preventing language from disclosing the possibility of a new use, a new experience of the word.” <br /></span><br />How does one profane media except through the appropriation and mis-use of its own codes? Agamben would call this a form of play. “For the cat, what is the possible use for the ball of yarn? It consists in freeing a behavior from its <br />genetic inscription within a given sphere (predatory activity, <br />hunting). The freed behavior still reproduces and mimics the<br />forms of the activity from which it has been emancipated, but, <br />in emptying them of their sense and of any obligatory relation- <br />ship to an end, it opens them and makes them available for a <br />new use.”<br /><br />What I refer to as “kitsch” narratives are really media forms that, because of their propagation, repetition and relative stability, are contemporary substitutes for myth. Agamben writes that, “Play breaks up this unity (of myth that tells a story and rite that reproduces and stages it): as physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive.” <br /><br />To have the two in union produces a great satisfaction that is not unlike the process by which a new being is produced. But, if the point of the modernist project was a sacred object, the point of contemporary art ought to be perversion. For, resistance manifests not in the attempt to substitute one sacred object for another, a process that Agamben calls secularization, but in the conscious production of an object that cannot be made into a symbol of anything except that process of unmaking that produced it. Agamben calls this “pure means.” In other words, there can be no absolute winner, because there is no universally accepted set of rules. <br /><br />Or as Deleuze, quoted by Zizek http://www.lacan.com/zizrealac.htm#_ftnref2<br />puts it, “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed." <br /><br />Zizek goes on to point out that: “This Deleuzian procedure has an unexpected theological precedent - not the Christian immaculate conception, to which he himself refers, but the Jewish legend about the birth of the Messiah, reported by Joseph in a monoscript from the 13th century. God wants to give birth to the Messiah, but knows that all of the forces of evil are waiting in front of the vagina of Shekina to kill the Messiah the minute he is born. So God goes at night to his mistress, Lilith, the symbol of evil, and penetrates her anally (the expression used can also mean that he pees into her vagina). The Messiah will come from Lilith after anal sex: this is the way God tricks the forces of evil, by bringing the Messiah through evil.”<br /><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/trrVZe6Gnas&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/trrVZe6Gnas&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Keren Cytter’s "History in the Making or the Secret Diaries of Linda Schultz" which combines film, dance and theater is the best example of Deleuzian monstrosity that I’ve seen. It is about a male liberal activist and a female graphic designer/waitress who fall in love and wake up one morning to find they have shifted genders. Cytter utilizes repetition in dialogue, music (I am almost positive it’s constructed from free Garage Band loops) and choreography to empty it of a dominant meaning. As Zizek points out, “If the founding move that establishes a symbolic universe is the empty gesture, how is a gesture emptied? How is its content neutralized? Through repetition.” <br /><br /><br />Cytter’s project is not purely nihilistic. She acknowledges our nostalgia for revolution—though she kills off the protagonist--liberal activist Webber, she allows him to resurrect again and again with his identifying data slightly changed. In this way, Cytter hints at the potential for revolution. Nothing is infinitely reproducible, no category of knowledge or naming is stable for ever. [R]evolution will happen, Cytter suggests, not with a grand, unified effort, but in the slippage. <br /><br />Again, this is from Zizek’s essay, “Today’s crisis is indeed one of experience, that is, a crisis of the destruction of experience, and the ‘spectacle’ is indeed the means of that destruction. But what exactly is the relation between spectacle and the destruction of existence and temporality? If by spectacle we name our captivation by the techniques of the audiovisual technical system, then the question is to understand this process. It is a question of understanding what it is about experience as such that makes us susceptible to such captivation. And this means understanding the ways in which the flux of consciousness is able to enter into or be entered by another flux, that flux constituted by the programs of the audiovisual system, programs which are nothing but, as Stiegler calls them, “industrial temporal objects.” If clues about this process can be inferred from Agamben’s writing, these are not pursued to the point of constituting an analysis. In the end, Agamben fails to grasp that if the word or the image is insubstantial or immaterial, nevertheless the conditions of both are always material, and technical, and therefore historical. Agamben fails to think through the history of the exteriorisation process itself, to think the historicity of the changing milieu, from language to writing to photography to cinema, and beyond. For Agamben, in the end, everything is reducible to language, the apparatus par excellence, and hence what is taking place today is seen only as destructive (which it is), not as the opening of new dimensions of preindividual potential (which it potentially is).”<br /><br />Google images is perhaps the best example of this potentiality. Below are search results for “sacred.” <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi11QnuIbsFjYznWq6kmmxvBRPQnuG0RbWe2Zv_dIweZLSKMRAjEVvhJNpvrSDycHpfZjX1mAE_MH4VWqt-Q9KuLM1QoIUl1vNDfOQJ-T_mZgB_ABlTsN-OTesgM-UeLAe74_TwkoUThL4/s1600/agamben1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 134px; height: 101px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi11QnuIbsFjYznWq6kmmxvBRPQnuG0RbWe2Zv_dIweZLSKMRAjEVvhJNpvrSDycHpfZjX1mAE_MH4VWqt-Q9KuLM1QoIUl1vNDfOQJ-T_mZgB_ABlTsN-OTesgM-UeLAe74_TwkoUThL4/s320/agamben1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409048587961541170" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGpbw8kIAv5A98h_S_iaJGCTO2uWXgccGywSNEYxSKumaJqAK0P9fvQEOAQodXC2tq0VMnFohdsDrg_sNVYsvY2oTdTer_ViBHvVj2n0-qKHo3MpP2NK8pU5FktdSmeBA4njuD2l38wiI/s1600/agamben6.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 97px; height: 129px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGpbw8kIAv5A98h_S_iaJGCTO2uWXgccGywSNEYxSKumaJqAK0P9fvQEOAQodXC2tq0VMnFohdsDrg_sNVYsvY2oTdTer_ViBHvVj2n0-qKHo3MpP2NK8pU5FktdSmeBA4njuD2l38wiI/s320/agamben6.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409049204130812386" /></a><br /> <br /><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 137px; height: 103px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6SSguiykkRrgP364FNkah0QVQFXtIqORzRv33WbAA5aM-sho4QakLUodLDdowknTQs9fS8UDYo0_XDm9qxfzd7ztDRjRBvJG8EhC50wBdbUi45Rl91XPHPgWHdK-IFzJplmbktCD1l5w/s320/agamben8.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409049429118002338" /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuYr-5ppkgX3yM52pWym32Y2enhsrQQSPJFt1A6PIJMRVflYho46JnUKMpgxpiTnu0ZB5MSowuai1PfdaeqYDV4aYKI-yH6el_E2OCCxvaPy_q3fX6KJaH0GH-TrlNUvuRQPExg2Lj0Ds/s1600/agamben10.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 101px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuYr-5ppkgX3yM52pWym32Y2enhsrQQSPJFt1A6PIJMRVflYho46JnUKMpgxpiTnu0ZB5MSowuai1PfdaeqYDV4aYKI-yH6el_E2OCCxvaPy_q3fX6KJaH0GH-TrlNUvuRQPExg2Lj0Ds/s320/agamben10.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409049896983419314" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHNYRPsSVVdEOHYlqBozDZH67G-U_rXuy30diKZL9ahh0Lfs7ZF9CvucSLc0d7XdWVlDwVynNYRqjQ59hDDfc3tb7DV3bflunBs3xA1_9wpt_xHNDOWn_eqNhILuxuy-TeCsmANsrLK2M/s1600/agamben14.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 123px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHNYRPsSVVdEOHYlqBozDZH67G-U_rXuy30diKZL9ahh0Lfs7ZF9CvucSLc0d7XdWVlDwVynNYRqjQ59hDDfc3tb7DV3bflunBs3xA1_9wpt_xHNDOWn_eqNhILuxuy-TeCsmANsrLK2M/s320/agamben14.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409050109404783490" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_3GNbp9EP5sQ5cfdRdq0iGGBHhteLFkgHxImm8pdQhzNLb_TrSlrrUPHo_cCRVEE5Dc64zYIKj0Hso-XInpgBQYmgM1rofJJR7tnG6A5k1q-SCgCSFt0-uBQEEOQj-gaXmYIoBjfIIxs/s1600/agamben11.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 130px; height: 98px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_3GNbp9EP5sQ5cfdRdq0iGGBHhteLFkgHxImm8pdQhzNLb_TrSlrrUPHo_cCRVEE5Dc64zYIKj0Hso-XInpgBQYmgM1rofJJR7tnG6A5k1q-SCgCSFt0-uBQEEOQj-gaXmYIoBjfIIxs/s320/agamben11.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409050283470562066" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHL5KjEF-45hVvGnCDtSroNB7oi-gXDFPpaS-vgdzGqzxeMbhsVA2ZKZbpJjeVj7nx4wD0HI-xeV8TbDK41ZErsiO_aGixuBOV_n90NqVEKfnMeiaCRQYrzsRwfiYrZKFgnjRWx62l1LU/s1600/agamben13.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 121px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHL5KjEF-45hVvGnCDtSroNB7oi-gXDFPpaS-vgdzGqzxeMbhsVA2ZKZbpJjeVj7nx4wD0HI-xeV8TbDK41ZErsiO_aGixuBOV_n90NqVEKfnMeiaCRQYrzsRwfiYrZKFgnjRWx62l1LU/s320/agamben13.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409050472293612594" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />There is something wonderful and horrible about this. Clearly some video game has co-opted the word in the collective imagination. Nevertheless, that “sacred” has been released from its conventional associations opens up the possibility of new ways of working, thinking, communicating.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10778174533851713906noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-65731765233314528492009-09-22T19:06:00.000-07:002009-09-24T19:36:57.590-07:00Ordinary Gospels<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3-aYl_S-UQGhM-K7CTzuoG_gfAyZiUyFc8wM4lQwv5Lj-UfxWxN50jo0pooxlHYJIuhuUdU6jwCJnxUD93_86yptAF9Dg3zHtOGlRNJcfpVh1_AwGBCAkjaL4eOQ32qKXx7gb39H2f1c/s1600-h/sebastian+reliquary+2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3-aYl_S-UQGhM-K7CTzuoG_gfAyZiUyFc8wM4lQwv5Lj-UfxWxN50jo0pooxlHYJIuhuUdU6jwCJnxUD93_86yptAF9Dg3zHtOGlRNJcfpVh1_AwGBCAkjaL4eOQ32qKXx7gb39H2f1c/s320/sebastian+reliquary+2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384488098240987170" /></a><br /><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>So the golden boy shows up in this airport and it’s just a madhouse: people shouting, selling things, kids high on glue, people begging.<blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I happened upon an essay by Juan Suarez entitled “Myth, Matter and Queerness: The Cinema of Willard Maas, Marie Menken and the Gryphon Group, 1943-1969” in the Grey Room journal. Suarez links myth with metaphor since both serve to temporarily arrest the flow of time and meaning. He then juxtaposes these with matter and metonymy, the senselessness of surfaces jointed through flow in time and/or space. “…the rise of matter to the surface of film (is) a way to stage the vagaries of sexuality…’queer’ might be another name for the way in which sex uses everything and anything, indefinitely extending libidinal connections across the surface of the world…” The ability of desire to connect bodies in sex is part of a larger desire to connect things. These objects “both recall and replace the primal sources of sensation and affect.” <br /><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqqaSno6EoI<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_fGg7D1naIs&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_fGg7D1naIs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br /><br />In Menken's film, the unification of the images occurs through the soundtrack. Used in this way--even the natural sound of birdcall-- is experienced as patently artificial. Likewise, our experience of the garden- which begins with certain inchoate sensations and evolves into the cataloging of material objects, is shown to be a highly restrictive and reductive process. Nevertheless, this process is also always incomplete. The sheer variety of objects overflows all attempts to contain. Thus, despite the soundtrack and crude slide show, the film manages to re-invoke a primal sense of wonder. It is just this tension, the back and forth between what Suarez refers to as the "centripetal" pull of myth and the "centrifugal" attraction of objects, that I am interested in exploring in the novel.<br /><br /> The flux between myth and matter is nowhere better demonstrated than on flickr. <br /> Once we documented what we held dear, what we wanted to remember, what we did not want to lose in the flow of time. Now we photograph everything and upload it in an instant for all to see. Searching through the creative commons, I seek the banal, the incidental. The photographs I want are the ones that prompt the question: why did the photographer choose this subject and not some other? In these photos, the original meaning is lost. Only the power of materiality remains. By placing the object in an alien landscape, I hope to strip even the meaning that is acquired passively through its everyday use, and then reconstitute the divine aura of meaning through an overt act of fetishization. I am experimenting with makeshift shrines or frames. The frame itself will communicate through its material qualities: the color, texture, weight, opacity or reflectivity of the cloth. Ultimately, it is the text that will unite the images—in other words, the story itself will act as myth.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb70KX4n5Gr2ZGZiZ0kNgRAr_cQgAqwTTPK4WiF6P_vYhxzqJIB2NQs1_t1JgNlBEJ39mZ1VShqWju5NcKx3WHuOfJavOz8OWngCvjiydPxoMC75-wbJ6yc36DuEV2i8oEuLE8UiaYu0Y/s1600-h/1892_large.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb70KX4n5Gr2ZGZiZ0kNgRAr_cQgAqwTTPK4WiF6P_vYhxzqJIB2NQs1_t1JgNlBEJ39mZ1VShqWju5NcKx3WHuOfJavOz8OWngCvjiydPxoMC75-wbJ6yc36DuEV2i8oEuLE8UiaYu0Y/s320/1892_large.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384852840115557842" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOyMam6X2Wod-k99Zc0lPL8OftwvPwqDy8VmyyrKl3b80nJwbdIRRJ68wkqhSn7tHesbyMxRmjXDQJNy6GHGjtFipqfujqBuhUvHVUrdGvJDAbMjBxCiChiHkVOwcPkTom90fW4MH5VVs/s1600-h/1883_large.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOyMam6X2Wod-k99Zc0lPL8OftwvPwqDy8VmyyrKl3b80nJwbdIRRJ68wkqhSn7tHesbyMxRmjXDQJNy6GHGjtFipqfujqBuhUvHVUrdGvJDAbMjBxCiChiHkVOwcPkTom90fW4MH5VVs/s320/1883_large.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384852415231375842" /></a><br /><br />A show of Haley Tompkins work at Kreps Gallery allowed me to synthesize my recent obsession with objects. Any description of this show will fall flat which is part of its magic. It resists any attempt at abstraction. Tompkins takes objects and alters them. The intimacy of her gestures is what communicates. There is no great meaning, but these "objects" (that is what she calls her drawings and sculptures) become the meager but lovely substitutes for the artist herself. After viewing the show, I felt that I knew her in a way that was akin to sneaking into her room after she'd left for the day and lying in her bed and smelling her sheets and looking through her drawers. In other words, I had access to unquantifiable information. It was like touching a sleeping body.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-36255254901882590882009-08-29T04:50:00.000-07:002009-08-29T11:12:12.879-07:00Turning<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/tOkFm-nHLq8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/tOkFm-nHLq8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />If as Judith Butler says in her <span style="font-style:italic;">Psychic Life of Power</span>, the coming into being of a subject is predicated on loss of a desired object and the process of internalization of the object through identification, then the psychic landscape of the subject is populated with images of things, fictional entities, that serve to demarcate boundaries of self and other through ritual and repetition. “…a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or re-articulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character.” Referencing Althusser’s idea of how the law hails the subject and how, the subject, in responding to the interpellation, not only buttresses the power of the law, but also, limits his own freedom, in so far as naming, and language itself, does. How then to escape the law? Butler says, “such a turn demands a willingness not to be—a critical desubjectivation—in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems.” In other words, “ 'being’ (is) precisely the potentiality that remains unexhausted by any particular interpellation. Such a failure of interpellation may well undermine the capacity of the subject to ‘be’ in a self-identical sense, but it may also mark the path toward a more open, even more ethical kind of being, one of or for the future.”<br /><br />Why ethical? Perhaps because the loosening of attachments and the loosening of the boundaries of self allows one to see and experience the fact that the self and other are dependent upon each other for their definitions. If self can be reinforced through repetition and ritual, perhaps it is possible to use repetition and ritual to iterate an(other), more expansive self. Or, as Foucault puts it, “The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate us both from the state and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us from the state and the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of the kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.” The idea is perverse. It upsets one’s idea of natural law. This brings us back to the body, especially a body in pain—that which cannot be shared and so can be used to justify cultural, social and political institutions that would limit the self to a singular guilty subject. <br /><br />The law and the subject co-emerge because the power of the law depends upon the illusion that the law is other than the subject, resistance to the law (experience of law as law) occurs only when law and subject are perceived as self and other. Thus, resistance empowers not only the self, but the law as well. But, what happens if the subject’s submission is so complete, without any resistance that would serve to reify self and other? The self as such becomes a vessel for the law, is not separate from the law. Again, the stomach turns, the skin bristles, the self resists, “no, it can not be, I will not allow it.” In Tibetan Buddhism, the reliance on the teacher is paramount for progress along the path. Optimally, the guru’s will becomes inseparable from one’s own. The word guru brings to mind cults, brainwashing. But, the difference lies in the self-consciousness of the disciple’s act. The self is given not as blood-sacrifice to a higher power but as an offering for the sake of all sentient beings. What remains of self is something that exists and does not exist. It is a will, a entity of the future, that exists only in the future, the proof of which lies only in the past—in memory and the world—in objects and in habits, in ritual and repetitions that we are barely conscious of. The law is everywhere. Why accept the cup, but resist the blow? A man sits contemplating a tree. He says, “I know that is a tree, I know that is a tree.” He isn’t crazy, he’s just doing philosophy. The first noble truth is the truth of suffering. To recognize that there is no suffering is to understand this. The only response is compassion. It is a mathematical law, like adding two plus two. Knowing this, there is no other answer. <br /><br />Sebastian is in that in-between place. He begins with a blind obedience. He spends his life between resistance and submission. At the end, death forces a complete submission. What it is that Sebastian submits to is open to interpretation. Should we perceive his death as punishment meted out by the law (divine or natural?), an act of nihilism, or the occasion for his liberation? Can the conception of a self be so radically altered that death of the self is experienced as freedom instead of annihilation? In writing him as me and a male counterpart, I am playing with this expansion of self. It is a game, of course, but it feels real. The leakiness of self is the leakiness of bodies. Blood, semen, urine, shit. It shames. I try to embrace it, but it is hard. I hide. Guarding the image of myself, I am closed up, wordless, unable to write. When I started this project, I wanted so badly to change Sebastian’s name. I hated signing it. If I were a man, I’d be a real one, I vouched. A real man called by a real man name. When the law hails me/him, we will turn, in rectitude or shame. If I lived virtually, could I be a thousand selves, a million? By what name would I be called, what would my/our turning be?Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10778174533851713906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-52908023921577293752009-07-31T18:23:00.000-07:002009-08-02T11:39:23.903-07:00The World is All That is the Case<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBxBD7XRdbGDw58sV-EmB6xlGOKhWXsTL2sEbsDCmobIN5Djv_ERo7jJHkb6_xuCowSubYYbu_fnY_glTVHGguY6zHpN-Be6p7rMdSpDMnogyVkxfMe1PZaKTo0B4Vu_ljoDN2n_TRkE4/s1600-h/objects-727722.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBxBD7XRdbGDw58sV-EmB6xlGOKhWXsTL2sEbsDCmobIN5Djv_ERo7jJHkb6_xuCowSubYYbu_fnY_glTVHGguY6zHpN-Be6p7rMdSpDMnogyVkxfMe1PZaKTo0B4Vu_ljoDN2n_TRkE4/s400/objects-727722.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365437814549346594" /></a><br /> I have just finished devouring a book called the Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry. Reading it provided another of those uncanny moments that no longer seem supernatural, but still amaze me. Her book has two parts. The first focuses on the “unmaking” of the world as it operates in war and torture. The second focuses on the process by which the imagination remakes objectlessness (that is pure being or sentience) into an image object that is then materialized into the “real” object which is self-substantiating and which acts back on the sentience of a being to alter it’s conception of itself. Thus, she says, “human beings project their bodily powers and frailties into external objects—telephone, chairs, gods, poems, medicine, political organizations that in turn become objects of perception that are taken back in to human consciousness where they now reside as part of the mind or soul and this revised conception of oneself as a creature relatively untroubled by the problem of weight (chair), as one able to hear voices coming from the other side of the continent (telephone), as one who has direct access to an unlimited power of creating (prayer) –is now actually felt to be located inside the boundary of one’s own skin where one is in immediate contact with an elaborate constellation of interior cultural fragments that seem to have displaced the dense molecules of physical matter.” <br /><br /><br />She relates the beginnings of this object making to the biggest object of our making –God—and shows how in the Old Testament, that God (who is pure idea) is substantiated by his inscriptions upon human bodies (mostly in the form of wounding, but also in the form of pregnancy). In the O.T. God is voice/hands and human is body, mostly deprived of voice except for God’s words and forbidden to create images. The commandments and law itself becomes a substitute artifact for the body, but if man breaks God’s law, only the body is left to substantiate Him. Christianity is a radical move: God’s embodiment in the form of Jesus Christ makes the wounding of human bodies unnecessary to the display of God’s power. In fact, the reverse occurs, Jesus’ wounds become proof of his divinity and the disciples are called on to witness-to touch, to see that which before was only voice. Compassion is bound up both with imagination and with the knowledge of the sentient origins of the world. In a world flooded by images, constant acts of making, a remembrance of suffering body (the origin of world making) is important else the reciprocal effects of objects on private realm of being be forgotten or dismissed. <br /><br />In so far as we can extend ourselves (our identity) through objects we make/cherish, we not only share our private mental state with others, but also escape the confines of our bodies. Even so, bodies remain and torture, war, illness of all kinds remain. Scarry describes torture as an unmaking of the world for the victim—where every object/idea loved or despised becomes meaningless, is essentially erased by pain. The victim of torture loses language—resorting to the pre-language of scream or else the words/confession the torturer supplies. She makes a very impressive analysis of the torturers re-appropriation of a most basic object of human construction-- the house. Whereas before, walls, floor, table, chair had allowed a human to ignore some of the basic wants of the body, now these things become the objects used to elicit pain. Thus, the torture cell becomes a horrible inversion of shelter. <br />Scarry talks about Marx’s writing as a conscious alternating between sensuous abstract passages about the moving of capital to the most banal, detailed recounting of workers lives—how big a room, the kind of food they eat, the illnesses they have. In other words, he brings it back to the forgotten body. He does not object to object making, in fact believes that this is key to human happiness, but he objects to the loss of the reciprocal action of the object on it’s maker’s being. <br /><br />So, you can see that there are so many ideas here with voice/body, making/suffering, self/object, contraction/extension, being/world, God/human. The narrative voice has a divine quality (the Word) and yet the objects which point back to a body and its needs will also be present in the form of the short object films. Scarry says that if the object is intended to have greater reality than human beings themselves (as in a god or king) then it is important that the existence of that be made to seem natural (ie not artificial), it should be “seamless” without “cutting marks.” But, I am interested in no other reality above human. I am interested in the power of human imagination and meaning making to overcome suffering and to extend the self (a process of dispersal, that if infinite would be akin to negation) through creativity and love (extension of one's concerns to another’s wants/needs.)Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10778174533851713906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-66216901146995747602009-04-05T20:50:00.000-07:002009-08-02T11:37:18.839-07:00The Rules of the Game<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMHTOvkgVEdzFrsFRbRA-Bg_i0b_-hWOwNiXmhOKfNcJctlhUNjyQMYISxTobp_Nv3sjNUSGiFdtIGxEvf7rpD1vzItqvD85D5Yv8IIfBg8D6_lEN0kPEjnF6-deZKoVmnnaqnpTMnCMQ/s1600-h/wittgenstein1-big.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMHTOvkgVEdzFrsFRbRA-Bg_i0b_-hWOwNiXmhOKfNcJctlhUNjyQMYISxTobp_Nv3sjNUSGiFdtIGxEvf7rpD1vzItqvD85D5Yv8IIfBg8D6_lEN0kPEjnF6-deZKoVmnnaqnpTMnCMQ/s200/wittgenstein1-big.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325662293793040578" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a a game;</span><br /><br /><br /><blockquote></blockquote><br /> <br />What if the player acts to directly oppose the rules? It is the same for the one who plays obediently. At some point, the losses will necessitate either a return to the game or a position of abjection. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy. </span><br /><br />In the position of the abject, that is to say, in philosophy, anything is possible, even if most things are extremely unlikely.<br /><br /> <br />How do we get from the ordinary sensory data to objects, and how then from objects to belief? Wittgenstein would say that a belief in ordinary objects is not so different from a belief in God. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it. <br /><br />203. If everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it , is it objectively certain? One can call it that. But does it necessarily agree with the world of facts? At the very best it shows us what "agreement" means. We find it difficult to imagine it to be false, but also difficult to make use of it. <br /></span><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_oJtKPfBzH2O19Wp8VqY-_BmupADUQA9E81qEhzbeINMtgPeHEnaoMZL3VzO8gsVqS1luiG3eHeOGz3V4_QInTnHTJCwEB7i6GK0Yr04d1Mjv_yXj3KBCw5WhryIhu3FBE6YbNcKeC0/s1600-h/child+abuse+2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 174px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_oJtKPfBzH2O19Wp8VqY-_BmupADUQA9E81qEhzbeINMtgPeHEnaoMZL3VzO8gsVqS1luiG3eHeOGz3V4_QInTnHTJCwEB7i6GK0Yr04d1Mjv_yXj3KBCw5WhryIhu3FBE6YbNcKeC0/s400/child+abuse+2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365437252643250226" /></a><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/vOKyCw5D204&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/vOKyCw5D204&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10778174533851713906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-86189658970915242322009-03-02T19:31:00.000-08:002009-03-20T12:11:20.462-07:00Slipping<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_RumZ0P7Z_6lfy3t2QZoTJqnF8TnxvBwvRtwl7DlLevslGrY-My-YGaK5vD_bhTkhLVq-q4QOco45LGGfjg0GOQWYHa9r0kjRnWW2x5Hw3MPOxYjose1zhLWHAQHWhHQNtYm8bvGdNc4/s1600-h/angel.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 138px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_RumZ0P7Z_6lfy3t2QZoTJqnF8TnxvBwvRtwl7DlLevslGrY-My-YGaK5vD_bhTkhLVq-q4QOco45LGGfjg0GOQWYHa9r0kjRnWW2x5Hw3MPOxYjose1zhLWHAQHWhHQNtYm8bvGdNc4/s200/angel.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308803230530216370" border="0"></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkfUAW6rLwdw74eQUVYxAIRz3bsPEnYWimujfAPjqt44HEPhZGtLzwF6jlYpUG4F1qdqCiS60BDfliZdXnliH-rG0rOuMtV7JdpMtJOdkU4phCOhEUoyodXfIQYVhL5N3Ad6mQ1AOwWZQ/s1600-h/fly.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 133px; height: 100px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkfUAW6rLwdw74eQUVYxAIRz3bsPEnYWimujfAPjqt44HEPhZGtLzwF6jlYpUG4F1qdqCiS60BDfliZdXnliH-rG0rOuMtV7JdpMtJOdkU4phCOhEUoyodXfIQYVhL5N3Ad6mQ1AOwWZQ/s200/fly.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308803035605183954" border="0"></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBWKs2qcm5dgB5CB1zMFCLD36Rit7IArAAsbi_1W2JPokcmxRRkoCNCcdrT53WTwp1QjoPTWp-l2mmbG96JhEPf2mfYZe7q59LhgkyhTKVli5tCVZlTNxv_kFrEqPzvp5KvfaneZA_vdk/s1600-h/soul_body.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 169px; height: 228px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBWKs2qcm5dgB5CB1zMFCLD36Rit7IArAAsbi_1W2JPokcmxRRkoCNCcdrT53WTwp1QjoPTWp-l2mmbG96JhEPf2mfYZe7q59LhgkyhTKVli5tCVZlTNxv_kFrEqPzvp5KvfaneZA_vdk/s320/soul_body.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308802479934841474" border="0"></a><br />“Virtual existence is the condition of possibility for the return of the soul to the divine.” Amy Hollywood on Meister Eckhart<br /><br /><br />“If I were so rational that there were present in my reason all the images that all human beings had ever received, and those that are present in God himself, and if I could be without possessiveness in their regard, so that I had not seized possessively upon any on of them, not in what I did, or what I left undone, not looking to any past or to future, but I stood in this present moment free and empty according to God’s dearest will, performing it without ceasing, then truly I should be a virgin, as truly unimpeded by any images as was when I was not.“<br /><br />“So let us therefore pray to God that we may be free of God, and that we may apprehend and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal.”<br /><br />Another great read from Professor Amy Hollywood. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Soul as Virgin Wife. </span><br /><br />I am interested in the multiplication of images. I go to Google and type "soul" and "fly" and "angel" and these three appear among thousands, millions. I choose the first three that suit my purpose. Eckhart associates the will with the desire for certain images. I think that is why I want to use everyday images in the novel. Identity and particularity coemerge. Self-portrait as collection. My cup has a crack in it. I have blond hair. The table is sticky with jam. I am a woman. And if we could rid ourselves of the images we use to represent ourselves, would we annihilate ourselves? What if we choose infinite images instead of these few, in other words, God? In other words, nothing?<br /><br />In so far as we are exist in a physical world (embodied), there are limits. The limits of imagination (image making) are grounded in the body. What does God look like in the world? What does infinite look like incarnated? Obviously within a Christian tradition, it looks like Christ. With world as frame, Christ is God in the world, and acts that are Christlike are called just. Eckhart is very keen on this concept of justice. I think this is because justice is part of the world as such and nowhere else.<br /><br />The world is all that is the case. Tractatus 1<br /><br />Wittgenstein said that the Tractatus was an ethical document. <br /><br />Wittgenstein Brown Book, Part II<br /><br />"Do we have a feeling of familiarity whenever we look at familiar objects? Or do we have it usually? When do we actually have it? It helps to ask: What do we contrast the feeling of familiarity with? One thing we contrast it with is surprise.<br />One cold say: unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity."<br /><br />..."What makes us use the expression 'seeking in our memory?' when we try to remember a word? <br /><br />Let us ask the question: 'What is the similarity between looking for a word in your memory and looking for my friend in the park?"<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />The sensation of looking at trees: driving past them, I realize that there is nothing to see. A familiar feeling that is nothing but a body looking at trees. I extract the sensation and try to project it, so that looking becomes a kind of worshiping. I wonder: if I could nail it down would the tree become another me and I be emptied of every tree? <br /><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eJEEUFWJE4U&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eJEEUFWJE4U&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />jeffwaa (2 years ago)<br />Nice video and lovely music. Sorry about the two-star rating, my finger slipped. I wish I could take it back.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10778174533851713906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-13625413747650123092009-02-18T12:33:00.000-08:002009-02-18T13:24:22.816-08:00Trespassers Will Be Violated<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNV2PqWb85YsRZPmTZq1F2F0hh0q03mCGN3-Y2sy0JoOv_TQUReAJtRSXkx9N8y3Qn6lnkt2pi3N3cbiRulO-tB1YsRQhIdvj6nRoEvU7vivv2EwPMuOM9lwOgr3PndMwqLPOHAka_eb8/s1600-h/trespassers.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 273px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNV2PqWb85YsRZPmTZq1F2F0hh0q03mCGN3-Y2sy0JoOv_TQUReAJtRSXkx9N8y3Qn6lnkt2pi3N3cbiRulO-tB1YsRQhIdvj6nRoEvU7vivv2EwPMuOM9lwOgr3PndMwqLPOHAka_eb8/s320/trespassers.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304239104189673778" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />This novel is a memorial to someone who never existed. Who is he? A space alien, a man who fell to earth. one queer bird.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event. <br />Deleuze and Guattari </span><br /><br />What sensations should the novel and films produce? Just this: a sensation that “I,” the reader/viewer could be otherwise, that the world and me in it could become queer-- QUEER in the broadest sense, though queerness is not unrelated to sex. For the seductiveness of skin is the seductiveness of difference, it is the seductiveness of that intimate/infinite distance that lies between two bodies coming together.<br />The working title for the novel is <span style="font-style:italic;">Queer Skin</span>. The idea of skin relates to identity as a mask that is put on, but also to the medieval beguine mystics who talk of “wearing” Christ as a skin. This requires a kind of radical submission, a self-effacement, an erasure of prior identity and historical memory that can be read within conventional power structures as feminine and masochistic. The idea of skin is also related to the idea of a screen, upon which we inscribe and project our impressions. Skin is the original wall, the original ground. If the body is a house for the self, the skin is that which separates. The seductiveness of skin is the seductiveness of becoming other. <br /><br /><br />Elizabeth Grosz reminds in her essay, “Chaos, Territory, and Art,” that there is an overabundance of data that we select from in order to create and reinforce one form and not an infinite number of other forms. Bergson talks about the skeletalization of objects meaning that we perceive only what interests us, is of use to us, or that to which, by habit or evolution, our senses have become attuned. Flesh/skin is the material ground for sensation, the necessary screen upon which sensation is experienced. But, like the movie screen, “flesh disappears in what it develops.” <br /><br />Body as such exists only so long as skin that defines its territory exists. The body, always mindful of survival, preserves itself through kitsch, habit, and ideology so that predictable sensations are produced. How do we reframe, then? How do we begin to feel queer in our own skin? <br /><br /><br /><br />The first gesture of art is the construction of a frame, this area of space-time that traps these fragments of chaos that slows and filters the continual flux of life. How does framing relate to Foucault’s idea of heterotopia—that virtual space between the real social and the unreal (utopia). Can we think of the novel as a heterotopic space, a temporary frame, for imagining transgression? It could be the honeymoon train that Foucault speaks about, the not quite-space where deflowering occurs, and therefore does not-quite take place. <br /><br />Foucault says that Galileo was heretical because he destroyed absolute emplacement, since position was no longer fixed. Thus, the delineation of sacred and profane space became relative. In this novel, the sacred and profane should coexist. The novel itself should act as a heterotopia juxtaposing several incompatible spaces in a single site. The reader/viewer should be given enough freedom so that their own desires/belief provide the delineation. Thus, every viewer’s grouping of profane and sacred will be different. This should be accomplished through tagging. There must be an association of the words chosen by the reader and the material that is brought forth. <br /><br />I think that the films need to act as heterotopias. The flip is a great device because it is a chimerical organ of vision and touch. You look with your hands. I would like to exploit its proximity to the body. When you move, it moves, that is important because the perspective is always linked to a lived, embodied experience. The smallness of the machine also allows for flexibility—you can run, jump, bend and stretch with it. What does the world look like when we see this way? For one, there is an immediate and overt awareness of framing. You see these things and not others and those things are seen through the eye in your hand because you do not hold the flip to your eye, you see through the frame. I think the key to the films is to see the world differently, to see place differently and part of this is dictated by the mechanism itself, this having an eye in your hand. <br /><br />I want to capture the “real world” without trickery or cool effects or even artistry but with a change in perspective, a slowing, a consciousness of the frame and an examination of contents of the frame. The films should be intimate, as near as the camera is to your body. I want the films to reflect this sense of discovery of a new world, of beauty and horror. This could be anything from filming the landscape formed by sheets over a body in bed to view out a window of a building. I think the two key characteristics are making the everyday appear in a new way and to always maintain a consciousness of the intimacy of the mechanism ( to the body) and the personal act of framing, of choosing small pieces of information. So perhaps landscape is not the right word. I am interested in a perspective that is unique not because of content, but because of framing. At the same time, I am interested in the everyday because I want readers to be able to posit their own bodies (through memory) in that space. The images should be visually enticing, if they could be read as sacred or profane or somewhere in between, so much the better. There cannot be a real narrative to them. Rather, these films should create virtual spaces where the viewer can project him/herself into a world that is like and unlike that which they see everyday. <br /><br /><br />The novel is about love and forgiveness and the possibility for radical forms of this. When S. forgives the man who attacks him, he does it at a point where he has no choice. He is about to die. His options are only love or hate. He could resist, go down fighting for himself, but he does not. He submits. He becomes something other than his narrowly defined self and because of that act of non-attachment, comes back to life. This is how S. will understand it. And, the fact of that act so upends his sense of himself and what is possible in life, that he tries to leave his old life, history behind by running off to African, to the desert like the saints of old. It is ridiculous of course, possible in philosophy and biblical tales only. The end is not utopian. S. dies of AIDS, but he will have lived and loved in a way that is not at all tragic. If the reader is sad, S. is not. The point is to not neglect the limits of the body: hunger, pain, sickness, death. The point is to allow our vision of our own concerns and needs to expand beyond ourselves to include others. The divine limit of this (and also the Buddhist ideal) is that we love all others equally without consideration of how they relate to us or our welfare. The notion is perverse. It makes a lot of people angry mostly because it requires that they detach from their notion of a fixed self.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-64105328296977140962009-02-07T21:00:00.000-08:002009-02-07T21:38:19.043-08:00Experiments<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyxgxjnPZzmr8HRYB89FbSSU6SE4zkKkHHPKqnwhdmt5d-zor9Ma-HyeJUKFxY7ApnrwFNaqsgtP6i5L4A9Tw' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />text: Jean--the medical student from France and Sebastian's last love.<br /><br />He was already very sick. <br />It made me angry that I couldn't do anything for him.<br />What did it matter that I was almost a doctor?<br />I told Batilde, I was going back to France. <br />She called me a coward. I took the bus to Bamako. <br />I missed the first plane. The next was fully booked, so I spent the day <br />looking for souvenirs in the marketplace. <br />When I got back, Sebastian had become an old man. He couldn't even stand up. <br />The suit was dry like parchment, yellowed and stained. <br /> He asked me not to leave again.<br />I promised. It was unbearable at the end.<br />But, there was nothing else to do. I had given my word. I had to see it out. <br /><br /><br />Voice-over narration: Sebastian<br /><br />Jean at my bedside. Big Head. Skin shiny as navy silk. Lips pink and round as moons. His eyes were red. He had been crying. I always forget how young he is. He could have gone either path—to jail or to this--his private glory that manifests not as a golden laurel or halo, but as a quiet and steadfast confidence. J. is waiting for me to speak. And I do. I tell him that I would like to learn how to tango before I die. And he looks at me as though I were mad, and laughs raucously and shakes his head. A big laugh from his belly as if from a bass violin. Two days later, he made the trip to Bamako and in the bazaar there by the Great Mosque of Djenne, found a seller of old toys, dolls with real nylons, and waxy tubes of orange lipstick, he found a water-stained cardboard box containing numbered plastic feet decals and an inscrutable set of instructions, I believe, in Portuguese. In addition, he bought an old, yellowed suit of white duck and white tasseled white nubuck loafers, slightly cracked and flattened. <br />He wanted to dress me, but I was, too weak so he dressed himself and danced round the room using a shepherd’s stick for a cane. I love him. And, now that I am dying, I have no fear. I would proclaim it from the rooftop.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwHZj5qwXUjjgB9rYKuoG6nuDKmDfBmdZ6CgMSw2QS5dLQH_XvDfMuBZbzX2O-yBVkCoDIUu0y5DdnrHzRC6sLJUcdAwrh6uQAvC4gAj1TL0A7c_BRJB-iOcM6SHkd-QW8vhFX2-4mKFg/s1600-h/carlosexperiment1.bmp"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 178px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwHZj5qwXUjjgB9rYKuoG6nuDKmDfBmdZ6CgMSw2QS5dLQH_XvDfMuBZbzX2O-yBVkCoDIUu0y5DdnrHzRC6sLJUcdAwrh6uQAvC4gAj1TL0A7c_BRJB-iOcM6SHkd-QW8vhFX2-4mKFg/s320/carlosexperiment1.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300295102471965890" /></a><br /><br />Carlos: the prosecuting attorney<br />He sent me a letter from Africa on hotel stationary—the Intercontinental. Old fashioned letter head, cheap paper that soaked up the ink. It must have gotten wet. I couldn’t read half of it. He asked if I would forgive him. He’d asked me that before at the trial. At the time, I thought it was some kind of stunt. I didn’t know he was sick. But, the letter seemed like he was saying goodbye. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I heard that he’d jumped off the balcony. He told me he’d been mugged his first week there. It must have brought it all back for him, Even though Suzanne did not think he had post-traumatic stress disorder, I still think that something like that kind of violence affects you. It has to. I called his boyfriend, Alex after I got the letter. I thought he might know something. He never called me back. I thought about telling the police—they knew that Hector was lying about Sebastian, still they were not happy about him leaving the country. Legally, yes, it was the correct thing to do. But, then I thought, what good will that do? So, I just ran the letter under the faucet, let all the evidence run off like invisible ink.<br /><br /><br />Sebastian narrating: <br />It was like they say in the movies: my life passed before my eyes. And, suddenly it all seemed so absurd. I felt like I was on top of a mountain range looking at my life. The mountains were massive, immoveable and as I stood looking left and right, I saw how it all continued on and on. <br />I wrote letters to everyone. I cried doing it. I wasn’t sad. I was grateful. The tears drip-dropped onto the paper. I sent them anyway, I knew I wouldn’t write again. I didn’t want them to try to find me. I could picture my life, returning home sick—hope forced down my throat like some awful treacle. But, I did want to communicate some things before it was too late. I had to tell Alex, first off, so that he could get tested. I wanted to tell Carlos that I was sorry for running away. I wanted him to know that I was happy, not that that would make a difference. But, he was a kind man. He actually did care. I wrote my mother, too. I hadn’t talked to her in years. She came to the hospital, stayed for three days while I was still sedated. Alex told me later. I could only assume that she’d defied my father in coming. I wanted to thank her for it. For a long time, I had wished she would leave him, find a life somewhere, but I understand now, that I was wanting that for myself.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-29867407796128914962009-02-01T17:51:00.000-08:002009-02-02T12:51:48.477-08:00The Eskimo Trick<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikmKC3m6YP0zEW1s6MeDiRCFr_ytULEkecmnofFqz8BindsgTi80SXqwHpyBwxcPQ-dpxLZhY2AgbDnCL3b_rznGVKqRaTKQ7wd1I5xTjTZoUGdJiAWiAs5JcOo_AukwR-prLj9DxhQNM/s1600-h/eskimoblog2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 341px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikmKC3m6YP0zEW1s6MeDiRCFr_ytULEkecmnofFqz8BindsgTi80SXqwHpyBwxcPQ-dpxLZhY2AgbDnCL3b_rznGVKqRaTKQ7wd1I5xTjTZoUGdJiAWiAs5JcOo_AukwR-prLj9DxhQNM/s400/eskimoblog2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298300637429719906" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Ladies and Gentlemen: I want to make this perfectly clear.<br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 51, 204);"><br /> I AM NOT</span>, (nor have I ever been) <span style="color: rgb(204, 51, 204);">A MAGICIAN</span>.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXyz_cUOAq5biCEjgFZq65C-iyNclxsC-2GkSQNOM1ByIihcuYTYUNqLL0pD2PowBpuf02Tav0ax9dXv-3J0rBjrVIIFrCalJ6g0kVeyTscHP7Hr85aRYr5NDGmeG2QSp5QaTtYt4jdvo/s1600-h/magician_13.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 215px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXyz_cUOAq5biCEjgFZq65C-iyNclxsC-2GkSQNOM1ByIihcuYTYUNqLL0pD2PowBpuf02Tav0ax9dXv-3J0rBjrVIIFrCalJ6g0kVeyTscHP7Hr85aRYr5NDGmeG2QSp5QaTtYt4jdvo/s320/magician_13.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298289643066565394" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I was speaking last night with a man who came from of family of famous magicians. Their job was to make their audience believe. They did not consider themselves liars, (he was talking about me) because there was never any expectation of truth. It was a complicit arrangement.<br />Being professionals, they did whatever was required to finish the job.<br /><br />So, the man says to me that he has spent his life trying to assume the correct position ( I could only suppose that it was missionary) in terms of self-authenticity. And, that he could not believe that such a woman as the one I/SebastianA. had befriended on line , the children's minister who writes violent erotic poetry, could be charged with the spiritual education of children. I said, do you mean to tell me all your thoughts and feelings can be shared with your wife and daughter? His answer was essentially "yes." I felt ashamed because I realized that he was in the position of the magician and I, by that binary logic, was necessarily the liar.<br /><br />I'd be a sad excuse for an illusionist. I admit it-- I wear my heart on my sleeve. The blood drips over everything. Really, I wanted to say to him, (we were in a swank sushi place in Chelsea), really, you can’t take me anywhere.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 255);">I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM.</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKogIaxG-nZN7TR00XjKl2GXZr_efDzxhdoHo0KDV5oe3QomIHyr7R3tQgeplQ0jsLz_7n0WLMEYr3mIdyKfZ0vF3AY2HPXFaS8AaRdvN_ahZWd5FcoeH2pzbAiL2r2lyaKHVk5dFseR4/s1600-h/eskimoblog4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 25px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKogIaxG-nZN7TR00XjKl2GXZr_efDzxhdoHo0KDV5oe3QomIHyr7R3tQgeplQ0jsLz_7n0WLMEYr3mIdyKfZ0vF3AY2HPXFaS8AaRdvN_ahZWd5FcoeH2pzbAiL2r2lyaKHVk5dFseR4/s400/eskimoblog4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298301598835833090" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />I do love minimalist art, I do. And piano music, too—so clean, so precise, the stroke ringing out. I am sure both arts have bored people to tears or even to death, but they have never embarrassed a soul.<br /><br />I saw for the second time, the Pipilotti Rist video installation at the MOMA. Draped with magenta curtains, the two story high screens present a video so overflowing and luscious that it delights for hours. In viewing it, all the sensual pleasures of the body are experienced again pre-cognitively. The work is unapologetically female and brilliantly subversive. The traditional association of female with irrationality, sensuality, and nature is not denied; nor is it celebrated, rather it is made strange by making a world and acts that are usually imperceptible to men (and women) perceptible to both. Whatever shame rooting through the muddy grass for a fallen apple ought to bring is buried in the visceral satisfaction of that experience.<br /><br />In other words, one ought to know better. The two little boys, who crowed and ran around touching the screens like skin, don’t yet.<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dx-m5KP3KbYMXhdb6_6rgHDgy0Vq9v1yhRuFnqNl69LzsoUmx2fQuGnhLORyZYEU9n-oN5cqkhRouz7EWq1zQ' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br /><br />I look for Sebastian in crowds. The thought of him makes me pulse warmly as if he were a newly missed lover. I am slowing the writing of him online. I will stop it soon. It is too painful. I am a bad liar. Is it this shedding of old skin that hurts? or the new one emerging?<br /><br />Once in college, this guy to whom I was attracted and I were sitting in a dorm room drinking and talking with friends. At some point, we ended up exchanging clothes so that I was wearing his jeans and briefs and a white t-shirt with no bra and he was wearing a too tight skirt and sweater. Everyone watched us watching each other. The next day my friends all said, “we were so sure you were going to f*.” But, we didn’t. We certainly might have, but the exchange was erotic enough.<br /><br />Sometimes I don't know who said what. It it like Deleuze's becoming-Eskimo--I write in a hybrid space between us.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipfEzYsO7GAI7qoK2sv1Zx9oko0KJj-8gTAJxd0zBUzwKOtpTfm8PmSGgtjLb-RE0AhTHl7Qccyz5vs1QpnphJmw1qwb2-HdrR8ge7W3v5FNobyO2lLNZ4I8UweKpbgHxroaFZCFpzYx4/s1600-h/eskimotrick.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipfEzYsO7GAI7qoK2sv1Zx9oko0KJj-8gTAJxd0zBUzwKOtpTfm8PmSGgtjLb-RE0AhTHl7Qccyz5vs1QpnphJmw1qwb2-HdrR8ge7W3v5FNobyO2lLNZ4I8UweKpbgHxroaFZCFpzYx4/s400/eskimotrick.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298295329100249762" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 0);"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Reading: </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 0);">Elizabeth Grosz <span style="font-style: italic;">Space, Time, and Perversion</span> http://books.google.com/books?id=Htf7y-rcVFwC<br /></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 0);">www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Beddoes/BD6s5.htm</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0);">Deleuze and Parnet, <span style="font-style: italic;">Dialogues II</span> , page 53. http://books.google.com/books?id=8GJlkhNCcy8C</span>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10778174533851713906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-14761752122551650332008-12-23T13:54:00.000-08:002008-12-23T20:11:34.020-08:00I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_rdg-JUgQmGX-C160aBaRL02MZxP_B0VlSk8ohSXRFKGG6pp5lfOpo9bs4YxXthialU9vbqBaOitqpWXpalZ-ysaS9xAmLsfx8Anz7fphS-ucH-kymhDqLXHwrghTZ9OLCvycZlejLBM/s1600-h/nudesleeping.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 198px; height: 295px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_rdg-JUgQmGX-C160aBaRL02MZxP_B0VlSk8ohSXRFKGG6pp5lfOpo9bs4YxXthialU9vbqBaOitqpWXpalZ-ysaS9xAmLsfx8Anz7fphS-ucH-kymhDqLXHwrghTZ9OLCvycZlejLBM/s320/nudesleeping.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283199758481875618" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLXwFgFhmIrR4ey-5qAgtpKn4zynObeRIRkYL4AlwpaKmSxCHPAfRZpJXuxAWgjapvNhEZCtimIKlSZLwhhNAFbUtpn2aLhSG2V_isaXh_pzpHCxs3jetgA8I5DqBB01bmN-EoEkWoZFw/s1600-h/newfolder2098-large.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 231px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLXwFgFhmIrR4ey-5qAgtpKn4zynObeRIRkYL4AlwpaKmSxCHPAfRZpJXuxAWgjapvNhEZCtimIKlSZLwhhNAFbUtpn2aLhSG2V_isaXh_pzpHCxs3jetgA8I5DqBB01bmN-EoEkWoZFw/s320/newfolder2098-large.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283116397108820434" /></a><br /><br />the molecular unconscious, on the contrary, knows nothing of <br />castration, because partial objects lack nothing and form free <br />multiplicities as such; because the multiple breaks never cease producing <br />flows, instead of repressing them, cutting them at a single stroke—the <br />only break capable of exhausting them; because the syntheses constitute <br />local and nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic <br />conjunctions: everywhere a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the <br />woman containing as many <br />men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering— <br />men with women, women with men—into relations of production of <br />desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not <br />just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. <br />Deleuze and Guattari, <span style="font-style:italic;">Anti-Oedipus</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">“I love you.”</span><br /><br />In so far as love has an "I", this book is about identity. To broaden the concept of love and compassion requires a loosening of this "I", such that the other’s concerns become my own. I want to talk to Cyril, my web designer, about making a virtual perfume bottle, an old fashioned kind of cut crystal with a little red-tasseled stopper. I’d ask my readers to say these words and send me the file. When you opened the bottle, they would all play—peppery, musky, flowery---pheromones, phonemes. <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBgGIyoaDWx6Cs5jIDzdVgjTTxMc-7erZuPtRu_KYsTWdF1NTYbgdSUpvPiV-3JrLmksYmW3n-11F42BPl-15pFGxAGIFxUsunvmP88GBunNOX7f_JnujRVqq4L68n9dvPS99rsyc-Tk4/s1600-h/assorted-roses.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 318px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBgGIyoaDWx6Cs5jIDzdVgjTTxMc-7erZuPtRu_KYsTWdF1NTYbgdSUpvPiV-3JrLmksYmW3n-11F42BPl-15pFGxAGIFxUsunvmP88GBunNOX7f_JnujRVqq4L68n9dvPS99rsyc-Tk4/s320/assorted-roses.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283111141674533010" /></a><br /><br /> "I have this thought sometimes, that I would like to be made of chocolate . The finest, silkiest kind, stuff that tastes a little like wine and a little like earth, stuff so good that it makes you drool like a baby when it melts on your tongue and you feel pleasure spread like warmth from your belly to the top of your head. If I could, I would feed the world this way. I'd break off pieces of me as I walked through a hungry crowd, a finger here, there a leg. I'd scrape chunks from my chocolate belly and feed oceans of fish and skies full of gulls.<br /><br />I realize (sometimes) that love has nothing at all to do with me or any estimation of my happiness. And yet how miraculous that loving someone makes me happier than anything and bigger than I am without it. What mechanism is it that makes less always more?<br /><br />Please, don't mistake what I am saying for desiring abuse or self-abnegation. You see, I want someday to learn to live like that-- to be part of the world, to let love flow everywhere, to the flushed faces of beauties and the festering wounds of a beggar, pumped from my heart, like blood is pumped, without calculation.”<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Pb4jb2k47Wk7vtixJbcG_wqxzqNdAlpczhg6XRd7BG-dtpFdiq2xGpl9MGQvusRJ8orxCcVi1RthHW7IQp80M2EkpGs9NAwTVwrcVPVXv4DHuN9x4mbHduKXnqRew2j9IRmllNw7KNA/s1600-h/box-chocolates.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 305px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Pb4jb2k47Wk7vtixJbcG_wqxzqNdAlpczhg6XRd7BG-dtpFdiq2xGpl9MGQvusRJ8orxCcVi1RthHW7IQp80M2EkpGs9NAwTVwrcVPVXv4DHuN9x4mbHduKXnqRew2j9IRmllNw7KNA/s320/box-chocolates.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283116635677566642" /></a><br /><br />I didn’t write this. S. did. If it is read as “feminine” because it is lyrical, because it reeks of sacrifice, it is still not exactly my “I” that wrote it. The fissure is filled by the thought of difference-- the rubric I provide. 19 years old. Gay man. It comforts. We can breath a sigh of relief. There is some explanation for our dis-ease. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />The Cinematic Relations of Corporeal Feminism<br />Theresa L. Geller http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/geller.html</span><br />“In other words, the movement-image and gender performance both may "seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity;" however, "their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this 'ground.'" Discontinuity reveals what, in effect, constitutes both bodies and the cinematic image—singularities. "Singularities are the impersonal events from which we compose the world into actual bodies," and it is from decomposing the cinematic image, or gender performance, into its singularities that an active image of thought is made available." <br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_uq6tcAqXGi6-vqPeqnhyphenhyphenAe9Cuhc5pRug2Qg6db4LXttg7Pl9Z0U3tj0giCmRzBJ40tvfCFMErCRqrte4ox1ypUBbgkwIfm48xHaM_C8ymGyegCtujklPUnHJEkNYU3D80tLp-myxK-4/s1600-h/002_freshbaked-red-dress.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 225px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_uq6tcAqXGi6-vqPeqnhyphenhyphenAe9Cuhc5pRug2Qg6db4LXttg7Pl9Z0U3tj0giCmRzBJ40tvfCFMErCRqrte4ox1ypUBbgkwIfm48xHaM_C8ymGyegCtujklPUnHJEkNYU3D80tLp-myxK-4/s320/002_freshbaked-red-dress.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283117526087297570" /></a><br /><br />COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU (YOUTUBE) <br /><br />The Red Dress:<br /><br />When I was little, my mother said<br />Shame on you, and <br />it’s a crying shame<br />And shame about that<br />She didn’t say<br />Shame is a red dress<br />That you will wear<br />Shame is a tight red dress<br />worn without underwear<br />She didn’t say that <br />You will cry tears <br />Hot as tea,<br />Hot as pee <br />streaming down your leg<br />In kindergarten <br />She said, “God is good.”<br />She said, “Love all men as your brothers.”<br />She did not say,<br />“If you love him you will let him hurt you.”<br />She did not say,<br />“If you love him, it will not matter what.”<br />He put on my face like he put on love<br />With his hands<br />And I looked in the mirror <br />And saw myself –as if for the <br />First time. <br />My cheeks like apples<br />My mouth a laceration.<br />When he kissed me<br />My features slid off<br />Dripping like juice <br />from a squeezed fruit.<br />I found the dress in the morning<br />Lying on the floor<br />I picked it up.<br />On the front was a stain,<br />A dark island of semen in a sea of red.<br />All morning, I traced the routes<br />I couldn’t find the way back.<br />So here I sit, with the dress in my hands.<br />It is nothing, a cloth, <br />A synthetic blush<br />You wanted to shame me, <br />you said I wasn’t much of a man, <br />Then why dress me in red <br /> the opposite of surrender?<br />You should have dressed me in white<br />And made me your bride.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />D. N. Rodowick - Unthinkable Sex: Conceptual Personae and the Time-Image from the online journal Invisible Culture</span><br />"Conceptual personae are the subjective presuppositions that map a plane of immanence….<br />the conceptual persona only rarely or allusively appears for himself. Nevertheless, he is there, and however nameless or subterranean, he must always <br />be reconstituted by the reader. Conceptual personae manifest a non-teleological movement where the subject wants to differentiate her or himself in constructing new concepts or positions of identity <br />that function as vectors for becoming.”<br /><br /><br />Time as layers of sediment<br />Media fragments<br />PETALS<br />SKINS<br />Face as screen. <br />Text as tattoo. <br /><br />Sebastian is dead. I am resurrecting him into his future, my present or else he is dreaming his own story, beginning middle end. <br /><br />"There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. […] We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development)."[3] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus<br /><br />IF S. CAN BE FOUND IT IS IN What D&G call STRATIGRAPHIC TIME. <br /><br />THE PROCESS I CALL RADICAL SUTURING IS UNIQUELY SUITED FOR THE INTERNET—so familiar is that idea of having multiple widows of various media open at the same time. What is the fuel that initiates the mechanism? THE DESIRE TO KNOW, >DESIRE FOR THE STORY> the desire for TRANSCENDENCE or else death. <br /><br /><br />The text is that which is written on the body. “TRANSCENDENCE” and “DEATH” are tattooed on Sebastian’s hands like Goan crosses. But, the novel is not only text, and the act of reading is not reinscription, but movie-making, the text becomes fluid as it is projected onto a ground of image and sound. <br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/aYSUBKnI42w&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/aYSUBKnI42w&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-72585973935606707112008-11-18T20:09:00.000-08:002008-11-19T12:58:03.561-08:00Perversion--with a cherry on top<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uiV8rA0O00A&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uiV8rA0O00A&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />“Structurally, perversion such as I have delineated for you on the imaginary plane,<br />can only be sustained with a precarious status which, at every moment is contested, from within, for the subject. It is always fragile, at the mercy of an inversion…The fundamental uncertainty of the perverse relation, the fact that it can find no way of becoming grounded in any satisfying action, makes up one aspect of the drama of homosexuality.” Jacques Lacan<br /><br />I want to suggest that my project to live online as a young gay man is profoundly perverse, it doubles so many losses that within a phallocentric economy, it can only be understood as a form of masochism. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">BUT...</span><br /><br />the fact is that I do not experience this as masochistic, for I see my double identity as a performative feminist act that questions the very idea that feminine identity is formed through a masquerade that serves heterosexual male desire. I do not deny that this play is an act of radical self destabilization which, if one remains within the dominant hetero male symbolic realm can only be read as a loss of self that is tantamount to castration. But, I think that outside of this system, it is possible to experience loss differently, as a kind of excess, an ecstatic remainder, the piece(s) which can not be incorporated into a whole (because the whole is imaginary.) As in the meditations performed by the beguine mystics this fluidity of identity is experienced as divine. <br /><br /><br />This doubling of surfaces--the persona of the male homosexual that overlays, but does not replace the female is not a disavowal of castration nor a fetishized femininized male identity but an active rebellion that destabilizes phallocentric structure itself. <br /><br />When nothing remains...nothing but skin and bones, when bones appear to be nothing...nothing but layers of skin, what once was called "reality" becomes not only unbearably light but impossibly thin. At this point...in this point, the boy is deprived of its substance and appears on the verge of disappearing. The missing body sets in motion the detective story ---in all its (dis)guises. Mark C. Taylor, <span style="font-style:italic;">Hiding</span><br /><br /> In Irigaray's terminology, I am performing a mimetic act of strategic essentialism, for, "if women's bodies are viewed as multiple and dispersed, women should speak from that position in a playful way that suggests that this view stems from a masculine economy that values identity and unity (e.g. the penis or the Phallus) and excludes women as the other (e.g. lack, dispersed, or "nothing to see"). http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm<br /><br />In other words in my world, this “No” is not the threat of the law, in the name of the father, it is the “No” that itself denies a transcendental signification and in doing so, provides a site for embracing other ways of being and communication with an other.<br /><br />Thus, with <span style="font-weight:bold;">Sebastian<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>, I want to create a inner experience that transcribes "loss" and "abjection," into something creative and sacred. If I can do this, it is possible that, Sebastian's own abjection, his act of radical forgiveness (in the face of a brutal beating) which is the central action in the novel, can be read not as act of self-loathing, but as an expression of a divine love: either a compassion for all others (even those that hate) or as love for God (love of the divine.) <br /><br />How can I transmute a personal mystical experience into something that communicates? How to communicate with all these unknown others. It will require a move from the imaginary to writing much like that attempted by Georges Bataille. <br /><br /><br /> I will not talk about language as fetish because to do so can only bring me back into the economy I am rejecting. Rather, I see <span style="font-weight:bold;">Sebastian<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> as a form of poetry. Poetic language resists fetishization through its instability and generosity. In other words, poetry mimics, in material form, the immaterial state of consciousness I am trying to achieve. <br /><br />Bataille however is not confident that poetry can achieve his aim. He says, "I fear courting poetry. Poetry is a drawn arrow. If I have aimed well, what counts, what I want--is neither the arrow nor the target (but)the moment when the arrow is lost, dissolves into the air of the night, until the memory of the arrow is lost."<br /><br />Of course, in true Bataillean fashion, he opts to use a metaphor to describe his rejection of poetry. Bataille understands that the moment of (self) negation is a silent moment, it can not speak itself. For this, it requires the resurrection of the body and identity, memory and language.<br /><br />Thus, "as the site of endless deferral and difference, writing contains asceticism without capitulating to idealistic totalization and the effacement of history. Yet as a present trace through which communication occurs, writing engenders community without necessitating the fetishization of the other." Amy Hollywood,<span style="font-style:italic;"> Sensible Ecstasy</span><br /><br /><br />Moreover, I see Bataille's writing as an early form of hybrid media, one that, anticipates the disembodied world of online presence. "Bataille’s textually generated, always moving, desirous, anguished and annihilated subjectivity replaces the lacerated body as the site of communication, suffering, desire, and identification.” Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy <br /><br />Bataille, however, (perhaps because he identifies himself as a hetero male and, thus, has more to lose,) continues to revisit a site of trauma that presupposes the transcendental whole. He seems to forget that pain as it is lived is experienced not as trauma, but as pure sensation. It is only when the cognitive consciousness begins telling its stories, connecting that sensation with objects and events and thoughts of past, present, and future, that is, when it is re-inscribed in the body, in time and space, that trauma as such occurs. But, the site of trauma is also the site of "communication, suffering, desire and identification" in other words, it is the site of compassion and identification with the other. (It is emphatically not abstract or dehistorized like Bataille's Chinese torture victim is). <br /><br /><br />The next post will discuss the work of Derek Jarman whose work, like Battaille's, employs (an) imagistic, non-linear way of working…(that)… disrupts the hierarchies of both medium and narrative and, in doing so, refuses patriarchal logic.” Chrissie Iles, "Derek Jarman" for Serpentine Gallery, London. <br /><br /> This clip from Sebastiane, Jarman's first feature length film demonstrates his creative achievement. The most striking thing about this scene is the radical equality of the beautiful lovers and their lovemaking. Watching it, I suddenly understood that not only was it impossible for such a scene to be filmed between a man and a woman, but that other possible structures for viewing/touching/loving (an)other can and should be sought.<br /><br />Reading:<br />Jacques Lacan <span style="font-style:italic;">Seminar XX </span><br />Luce Irigaray, <span style="font-style:italic;">Speculum of the Other Woman</span><br />Mark C. Taylor <span style="font-style:italic;">Hiding</span><br />Amy Hollywood, <span style="font-style:italic;">Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History</span><br />Chrissie Iles, <span style="font-style:italic;">Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty</span> <br />Georges Bataille, <span style="font-style:italic;">Guilty</span>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-54435837765105554352008-10-21T18:43:00.000-07:002008-10-31T11:39:08.258-07:00Being (S.)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzhfnRzeBIFpvx_x2i8EWVl4y-45oKypIEzookMRbtuXb7kSEMQYgMC2sbbegm6rrYt0tdKL0NT1LG2T_lQBH8Vd4N97VTNMeLbnn7ggPQVPKfow_7ny7hOWBVgTutQYgX07Snq8aJsZ4/s1600-h/abramov1-1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzhfnRzeBIFpvx_x2i8EWVl4y-45oKypIEzookMRbtuXb7kSEMQYgMC2sbbegm6rrYt0tdKL0NT1LG2T_lQBH8Vd4N97VTNMeLbnn7ggPQVPKfow_7ny7hOWBVgTutQYgX07Snq8aJsZ4/s320/abramov1-1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5259789128534192386" /></a><br /><br /><br />For a few weeks now, I have been living on-line as a not quite out of the closet, beautiful 19 year old gay man residing in the Midwest with my parents and attending community college.<br /><br />I have proclaimed my first love on line. I picture him dark, longish hair, side-burns, cleft chin, leather jacket, clever, not smart and charming as a dancing cobra. I’ve wrote the end of the affair today, inspired by reading Genet’s The Thief’s Journal on the elliptical at the gym this morning. (thanks for this, Mark Amerika) It’s hot and dirty, what else? I already had the youtube video in mind before I wrote the post: S. in teary drag (he’s been dressed by his lover in an act meant to humiliate) slow dancing with his beloved. It’s going to be lovely: tender and strange. Sartre writes in the introduction that in Genet’s work, he uses a double to represent himself. “Each of them has the strange property, of being both itself and a reflection of itself.”<br /><br />Yes. I feel the same way with the man I am. <br /><br />At first, inhabiting him made me intensely uneasy. I felt myself leaking out and him seeping in. Contamination. But, now that the initial wound is beginning to heal, the graft is starting to itch. And, an itch, as we all know, can be a source of both pleasure and pain <br /><br />(depending on the intensity of the stroke.)<br /><br /> I feel myself wanting to scratch. I am falling in love with him—my dream self. There is a woman on-line who could be me—smart, likes poetry, has a small child, a distant husband, and she is falling in love with him, too. Because, for one, she can, because he’s gay and nineteen and writes like an angel about how “the wide world had shrunk to a six inch plot of warm, brown skin….how (his neck) plunged past the collar into the white foam of his shirt… the scapula—those bones like fins cutting through the ocean of skin.” So, who is she falling for? <br /><br />I think of Marina Abramovic’s Role Exchange piece (1975) in which she and a prostitute switched places—she--in the prostitute’s show window and the prostitute at the gallery. Now this is clearly about embodied identity, but what of disembodied identity? This kind of identity is much more about what and how we write (language) and the display of our preferences (books, movies, tv shows, music.) If I seduce, the framework is gay 19 year old man--those are the limits, but the rest is a convergence of what I want to show and what my “friends” want to see. <br /><br />It ends at the body, of course—I will forever be closeted. A lonely gay man near me in MO wanted to meet (not just for sex, he assured me) but, of course, I couldn’t. I haven’t heard from him since.<br /><br />Today I met young woman who is a children’s minister whose page is devoted to the suffering of children, but who posts intensely erotic poetry on myspace. <br /><br />And, I think we are all leading double, triple, quadruple lives. Perhaps we always have and we are just now seeing how fluid it can be when the pieces of ourselves are given in bytes.<br /><br />More of Sartre on Genet’s Thief’s Journal: “His stories are not stories. They excite and fascinate you; you think he is relating facts and suddenly you realize he is describing rites…His memories are not memories, they are exact but sacred; he speaks about his life like an evangelist, as a wonder-struck witness.”<br /><br />Yes. How odd that before I’d read this, I’d already planned to film a performance of my feast day.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-4277950022048125152008-10-13T21:15:00.000-07:002008-10-13T21:56:27.226-07:00After the Fall<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYzo4mSyAUct1ETbR-VefvjPQFSi-YxMeulzWFUOEmxdikTlkCKYiV-yWvDyL94svbVFNtTfMck4cdENlJhY2-neDsahzpitFckpbJ8PR3utZByDVazjfSTli7x55edpZv9QjJUk98QGM/s1600-h/pearlstein.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYzo4mSyAUct1ETbR-VefvjPQFSi-YxMeulzWFUOEmxdikTlkCKYiV-yWvDyL94svbVFNtTfMck4cdENlJhY2-neDsahzpitFckpbJ8PR3utZByDVazjfSTli7x55edpZv9QjJUk98QGM/s320/pearlstein.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256860375367248834" /></a><br />Video still "After the Fall"<br /><br />http://www.alixpearlstein.com<br /><br />Some of us at the RNDT saw Alix Pearlstein’s wonderful video work “After the Fall” at the Kitchen. The main piece is a 4 channel video installation that forms a box around viewers seated in the middle. Pearlstein stages (literally on a stage—think Dogville) a series of confrontations between actors and films using four moving cameras. The action is spare, aggressive—a shoving match that involves two of the actors ganging up on another one so that the “loser” ends up “crushed” under a piece of foam board. There is nothing allegorical or even very interesting about these contests. The actors are of different ethnicity. Some are dressed in a way that might suggest character traits (class, education, personality,) but others are dressed in indistinct clothing of the same hue that suggests only the possibility of an allegiance with other actors. In other words, there is no real narrative save for an all too familiar picture of aggression and humiliation. The brilliant part is that Pearlstein gives just enough of a framework for viewers to project their own experiences on the actors. At the same time, she stymies our desire for a good guy, bad guy, or even a story by repeating the contest and by using multiple cameras. This work has some elements in common with Omer Fast’s The Casting (staging, multiple perspectives, uncertain narratives.) Both pieces demonstrate what seems to be a trend: true viewer participation in the work. Of course, art develops alongside changes in technology and culture. So, it is not surprising that the harnessing of viewer’s visual and mental labor is becoming part of art making. We are (thankfully) moving away from the incredible narcissism of artist’s private world where we as viewers were invited to join in, but not really. This art is far less insular. Indeed, it requires the viewer to activate the artwork. (I’m sure Michael Fried is dying here.) Art has become not only a spectacle, but also a mirror, and, it ain’t too pretty. But, it's better than not looking at all. <br /><br />This from Marjorie Perloff's fab book The Futurist Moment, on Fried's objection to theatricality in art:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkKETwOamu4jqRt_S3J00Pzppw4t4a0aYNy7rKFWQhopUM1kiHHOFtAIv0g5XCo_owNs8ufP8tYt_jaTZgn46MRoeaH0fuXF1MxjXmBxfXWylr7ToGAfJJYyD2Pw7X3S47Cgxwqu_9mpE/s1600-h/theatrical1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkKETwOamu4jqRt_S3J00Pzppw4t4a0aYNy7rKFWQhopUM1kiHHOFtAIv0g5XCo_owNs8ufP8tYt_jaTZgn46MRoeaH0fuXF1MxjXmBxfXWylr7ToGAfJJYyD2Pw7X3S47Cgxwqu_9mpE/s320/theatrical1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256864721652176930" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBt0-2TckfPu5fmJan1uH20NIlgjzr7DitPX863CCzPK41lv4MvAcbGgiPeEzq58LPkQ2Q-WeA2Gmuc9f28TlIeG18KLZ3stQ4mdS9gFszw7r8Lq2YieWVSIo7eQw30qnO0p6z4_Ed8q8/s1600-h/theatrical2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBt0-2TckfPu5fmJan1uH20NIlgjzr7DitPX863CCzPK41lv4MvAcbGgiPeEzq58LPkQ2Q-WeA2Gmuc9f28TlIeG18KLZ3stQ4mdS9gFszw7r8Lq2YieWVSIo7eQw30qnO0p6z4_Ed8q8/s320/theatrical2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256865212509997506" /></a><br /><br /><br />It seems clear that theatrical art is what is required now. I don't know about you, but the idea of a wholly manifest, self-sufficient object scares me, it sounds like something the Bush administration made up.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-57606966972845127002008-09-24T19:55:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:14:40.571-07:00WE ARE WILD FOR THIS MAN<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwflgbVvnpFDMer9Z76Os2FOtd8lhUqXlqzdGAY9Kn76Vn0FfrIbLNE6R6EK3cDS53rs_uj9RUZOTX43RP06DFLGVe4ytexqL4PCnwIbs452IhkjEKMKWQuSAmulb12xT2Be0LkGGsWps/s1600-h/garrel.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwflgbVvnpFDMer9Z76Os2FOtd8lhUqXlqzdGAY9Kn76Vn0FfrIbLNE6R6EK3cDS53rs_uj9RUZOTX43RP06DFLGVe4ytexqL4PCnwIbs452IhkjEKMKWQuSAmulb12xT2Be0LkGGsWps/s320/garrel.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249788216365428530" /></a><br /><br /><br />and we think his son is oh, so, sexy...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3s_rXu0re6DQP73JJXJSlaJ3jvMkifjh6EZW_qD1qlK_a59yeW7YhFnayjSzkdMxYVWhWiC0BZeWuXG_Sq6MyUWu9kKKzzMxXkeCnAoqvFqskrbuSCV0ZcVh47PzgjtOuXOnC9lJs9eE/s1600-h/lgarrel.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3s_rXu0re6DQP73JJXJSlaJ3jvMkifjh6EZW_qD1qlK_a59yeW7YhFnayjSzkdMxYVWhWiC0BZeWuXG_Sq6MyUWu9kKKzzMxXkeCnAoqvFqskrbuSCV0ZcVh47PzgjtOuXOnC9lJs9eE/s320/lgarrel.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249789098341375378" /></a><br /><br />we'd like to give them both honorary membership in the Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater. We'll have to think of a name for the award (the Bruno, has been taken already by the SETI league), but it's clear that it will be in the form of a miniature revolving disco ball (what else.) <br /><br />What to say about this clip except to quote Deleuze on Garrel which is how I found him in the first place. <br /><br />"This may be the first case of a cinema of constitution, one which is truly constitutive: constituting bodies and in this way restoring our belief in the world, restoring our reason...It is doubtful that cinema is sufficient for this; but if the world has become bad cinema, in which we no longer believe, surely a true cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to believe in the world and in vanished bodies?"<br /><br />This is from Garrel's L'enfant secret (which is UNAVAILABLE!!!as far as I can tell.)<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PvIARfZRm44&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PvIARfZRm44&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Here you see the quiet, intense focus on gesture and movement. Bodies, volumes, emerge from or are consumed by light and shadow. <br /><br />Reading: lovely little essay on L'enfante secret http://www.rouge.com.au/1/garrel.html<br /><br />Speaking of bodies and missing persons. I saw the Vik Muniz show at Sikkema this week. I thought it was a clever idea--making exact replicas of the verso sides of iconic paintings and photographs. I was prepared to be tickled for a moment by the trick, but wow! GREAT SHOW! http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/exhibitions.html<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinD1O9Q9sMT3iOOHxZ_yBZfMmUXTuSax_5EnqR3ZQwvCmANJKg0aKUq6KmItfWRDq8CRmEd1yjBSW_SgtyCQlDXRoPp25lP33yS5HmkPgoQdE-HI3GN2iebr0JupMMgxfVSEY_bh18Szk/s1600-h/vikmuniz.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinD1O9Q9sMT3iOOHxZ_yBZfMmUXTuSax_5EnqR3ZQwvCmANJKg0aKUq6KmItfWRDq8CRmEd1yjBSW_SgtyCQlDXRoPp25lP33yS5HmkPgoQdE-HI3GN2iebr0JupMMgxfVSEY_bh18Szk/s320/vikmuniz.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249796659434673586" /></a><br /><br /><br /> Muniz makes us, the viewers, the missing bodies of the future. The experience becomes an elegiac projection of the past as well as the future. In the here and now, to read the verso of Van Gogh's Starry Night is to evoke a personal history of the missing image. I felt such (bodily) tenderness to those wooden objects. To think that humans had cared for, made their mark, and passed on this object, was heart-rending. Not, because it elicited the lost aura of the masterpiece, but because it made me mourn the loss of the physical object in the midst of all its images. I thought about a day when it would be too expensive or dangerous for the painting to exist outside of some titanium underground vault, and even if that were not the case, how the generations to come will perhaps not even be aware that there is a difference.Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-37873314630843686062008-09-18T18:48:00.000-07:002008-11-08T10:52:04.343-08:00Occasional notes on Cinema--Cinema and Cliché<span style="font-weight:bold;">"A cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing. As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of economic interests, ideological interests and psychological demands (I'd add physical, too.) We therefore normally perceive only clichés. But, if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character, because it no longer has to be justified..." Deleuze, The Time-Image</span><br /><br />some thoughts on this: if our consciousness according to Bergson and Deleuze is by its nature, impoverished relative to the entirety of the image because of its subtraction by the body, then perhaps desire is an irreducible component of consciousness, in so far as memory (of other possible images) is operative. Now, consider the future with barrage of images and mechanical memories allowing archival retrieval on a scale that is not possible with the human brain. The situation of information overload can lead to a desire for stasis, a desire for culling and comfort provided by kitsch. At the same time, kitsch is like drinking salt water. It can alleviate immediate thirst, but in the end leads to further dehydration and a violent desire for fresh water. Unfortunately, kitsch also reinforces just those sensory-motor schemata which make us see only kitsch. A rather desperate situation which, perhaps, requiring a trauma, a cut, a break of some sort to reset it. Now, where does this leave language, which also has its clichés and its poetry? Again, I reiterate the importance of language, despite its tendency toward metaphor. (Unlike Deleuze, I believe in the destabilizing potential of metaphor.) <br /><br /><br />“There is no longer any metaphor, rather metamorphosis. Metamorphosis abolishes metaphor, which is the mode of language, the possibility of communicating meaning. Metamorphosis is at the radical point of the system, the point where there is no longer any law or symbolic order.” Baudrillard, Forget Foucault. <br /><br /><br />WE HERE AT RNDT MAINTAIN THAT REALITY REMAINS A BULLET IN THE HEAD. <br /><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eaXHFc7D4GQ&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eaXHFc7D4GQ&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />To fool ourselves into thinking that in a cybernetic universe, our brains are not hardwired for wanting fixed points of meaning is thinking we can google our way to enlightenment. Bullshit. Thus, was Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater born. For the full manifesto go to http://www.reconstructingmayakovsky.com and click on "Manifesto."Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-90285298091393679892008-09-17T09:37:00.001-07:002008-10-31T11:40:54.386-07:00The Life and Times of St. Sebastian<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxQ2N6zkObnpaUsbk1YazulmA0Z-PNLwaKUwO6CFvXv-WFNHfi2B42UR1iOGfSxW5iIfqIVva2YSAYfPpcRIaUtQoiFxSkgKzaFnN-tvgV06dUh2aKhZUg5NgwhFXfrlOAdbrFRjrCBVM/s1600-h/sebastian.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxQ2N6zkObnpaUsbk1YazulmA0Z-PNLwaKUwO6CFvXv-WFNHfi2B42UR1iOGfSxW5iIfqIVva2YSAYfPpcRIaUtQoiFxSkgKzaFnN-tvgV06dUh2aKhZUg5NgwhFXfrlOAdbrFRjrCBVM/s320/sebastian.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247032800848093602" /></a> "Saint Sebastian" by F. Holland Day, 1910.<br /><br /><br />St. Sebastian is the newest project of the Revolution Nostalgia Disco Theater. Born two days ago, he is not quite able to stand. We've given him bones. We hope the online community will give him skin(s). <br /><br />We think we know how his story will end. But, to quote our resurrected Mayakovsky, "it's just that it never turns out quite the way you expect." <br /><br /><br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">We are currently seeking 1) an open-minded amateur filmmaker <br />2) actor (18-21, slim, handsome, blond, or light brown hair, open-minded ( homoerotic overtone --no nudity) for youtube "home movies." We are in NYC area, you should be, too. Please send an email if interested. <br /></span><br /><br /><br /><br />If we were truly ubermensch we'd have no qualms about this. As it is, it makes us quite uncomfortable. We are experiencing waves of akithesia, that is the feeling of wanting to crawl out of our skin ( and into another's--in a kind of ontological cross-dressing.) We begin to question the value of our identity, we feel the boundaries dissolve. The theological equivalent of this is "shame." But, more on that later.<br /><br /><div><object width="420" height="336"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/k3NLu1BVtuFsa3mnqH&defaultSubtitle=&related=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/k3NLu1BVtuFsa3mnqH&defaultSubtitle=&related=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="420" height="336" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always"></embed></object><br /><b><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x36b6r_the-price-of-a-wig_events">THE PRICE OF A WIG</a></b><br /><i>Uploaded by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/brest44">brest44</a></i></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />To read: <br />St. Sebastian as gay martyr<br />http://books.google.com/books?id=YdaI7y2B3-UC&dq Chapter 5 <br /><br />Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy<br />http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nietzsche_birth_tragedy.htm<br /><br />Amy Herzog Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze, Bergson, and the Question of Cinema http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/herzog.htmVera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-72199944460604315922008-08-20T19:07:00.000-07:002008-08-20T19:08:04.630-07:00<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://reconstructingmayakovsky.blogspot.com"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-1.png" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites" /></a>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-38161683152752235062008-08-15T20:14:00.000-07:002008-08-15T21:25:58.908-07:00Resisting The Lure of KitschPerhaps I am a romantic when it comes to the divine<br />word<br />(though I do think there is neurobiological data to<br />back up this bias) but I consider verbal<br />language to be the most<br />human of attributes. I am afraid of what it will mean<br />if language is reduced<br />reduced to genres of speech "cheerful, acoustic."<br />The foreboding I have for our future is the loss of<br />language. I can not imagine it. And it brings up a<br />terrible question of what the new human will be. Of<br />course, the <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_2">Futurists</span> explored the idea of new<br />languages, new ways of communicating, but visual<br />language is different from the written word.<br />Eisenstein knew this, all the fascists certainly did,<br />they couldn't wait to instruct the masses. In the<br />present time, the military-industrial complex has<br />evolved into a military-media complex.<br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlzdZqSVbJ4<br /><br />There is an<br />aestheticization of politics on a scale that perhaps<br />only the clairvoyant <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_3">Walter Benjamin</span> could have<br />imagined. The last paragraph of <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_4">The Work of Art in</span><br /><span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_4">the Age of Mechanical Reproduction</span> bears repeating.<br /><br />"Let Art Flourish--the world pass away," says fascism,<br />expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic<br />gratification of a sense of perception altered by<br />technology. This is evidently the consumation of l'art<br />pour l'art. Humankind, which once, was an object of<br />contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become<br />one for itself. Its self-annihilation has reached the<br />point where it can experience its own annihilation as a<br />supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing<br />of politics as practiced by fascism. Communism replies<br />by politicizing art."<br /><br />And us? What should we do? Is<br />the only "ism" left "humanism?" What does that mean?<br />What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?<br /><br />I am not an eternalist. I embrace the freedom that<br />comes with this ability to re- organize knowledge. I<br />think the lurking problem with this free-for-all<br />organization is that everything becomes equivalent, a<br />currency to be traded. Popular sites, those capturing<br />the most attention, will determine not only the<br />popular aethetics but<br />the "nature" of the world. It brings up the problem<br />of kitsch, aethetics and power. Without stability,<br />the seductiveness of kitsch increases. Not only does<br />it provide familiarity, it provides community. (The<br />relationship between kitsch and architecture<br />especially these very strange planned communities like<br />Celebration USA is also interesting.)<br /><br /><br />I take this consideration of kitsch from U. of C.'s<br />media theory site:<br /><a href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/kitsch.htm#Figure%201" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_5">http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/kitsch.htm#Figure%201</span></a><br /><br />"The appeal of kitsch resides in its formula, its<br />familiarity, and its validation of shared<br />sensibilities...The self-congratulatory spirit of<br />kitsch can also be seen as a deception. Kitsch holds<br />up a 'highly considerate mirror,' according to <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_6">Hermann</span><br /><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_6">Broch</span>, that allows contemporary man to 'recognize<br />himself in the counterfeit image it throws back at him<br />and to confess his own lies (with a delight which is<br />to a certain extent sincere).' By providing<br />comfort, kitsch performs a denial. It glosses over<br />harsh truths and anesthetizes genuine pain. As <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_7">Harold</span><br /><span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_7">Rosenberg</span> perceived: 'There is no counterconcept to<br />kitsch. Its antagonist is not an idea but reality."'<br /><br /><br />You see the problem. In the web-based world, there is<br />no reality. There is no antidote to kitsch. And what<br />does that mean for the art of the future?<br />Mayakovsky and Burliuk threatened to throw Pushkin off<br />the boat.. But, what happens when there are no old<br />gods to throw overboard or what if there is simply the<br />next batch of gods. What is radically different now is<br />the development of a culture industry and an economy<br />of attention that can feedback to alter those visions<br />in real time.<br /><br />Artist and writers, and all those who want to resist, will need to explore and create<br />alternative forms of organizing information because<br />that perhaps above all other systems of "mapping"<br />shapes our perspective of the world and the <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_0">vision of</span><br /><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_0">the future</span>.<br /><br />Some very interesting examples can be found at<br /><a href="http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/01/-map.php" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_1">http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/01/-map.php</span></a><br /><br /><br /><br />Artists and writers need to develop alternative systems for<br />distributing information and collective/nomadic<br />actions. We need to explore and demonstrate how these<br />alternative systems can effect social space and the<br />construction of community. Psychogeography is one way<br />to transform a city. Perhaps we could employ a code<br />and a method for mapping (like the stickers or the<br />chalk or even texting where clues can be communicated<br />to everyone participating) with the goal being that<br />people will arrive at a certain time and place to<br />witness a performance (preferably something this shy<br />of legal) on a rooftop or at someone's house or in an<br />abandoned warehouse....And it ought to be one hell of<br />a party.<br /><br /><br />Billboard by artist Suzanne Opton<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_9nD3IgxT6wwzz9iyzGiZyPk4oxZIBCwQ1T5i0fFEwK_nS1u5QBGb-MfzV4wwMejHFBhXU37Y5A0VxznzGbhKc5DV_IZG3c-_NB55Z5n-6hwt8CY2Zv4pXD_PrR-3gg0H5WDdxtnVl34/s1600-h/soldier2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_9nD3IgxT6wwzz9iyzGiZyPk4oxZIBCwQ1T5i0fFEwK_nS1u5QBGb-MfzV4wwMejHFBhXU37Y5A0VxznzGbhKc5DV_IZG3c-_NB55Z5n-6hwt8CY2Zv4pXD_PrR-3gg0H5WDdxtnVl34/s320/soldier2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234956130087574898" border="0" /><br /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKaPOCqlqcjEl6_ASi1_cVpj1x4tv0NFhovX6saQudFDYEMCXt61V5Tu5w9Ry7U_Bv7Z_qjX3HTL4PO_JU3GEZi6F1Di8K-pEUZs1LcFaXTWcwKlGkXBxbxRdhmBBKeQu4O_ljhRPkWDU/s1600-h/Final+Army+of+One+Poster.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKaPOCqlqcjEl6_ASi1_cVpj1x4tv0NFhovX6saQudFDYEMCXt61V5Tu5w9Ry7U_Bv7Z_qjX3HTL4PO_JU3GEZi6F1Di8K-pEUZs1LcFaXTWcwKlGkXBxbxRdhmBBKeQu4O_ljhRPkWDU/s320/Final+Army+of+One+Poster.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234956137341824978" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Movie poster from the U.S. Army<br /><br />For instance see<br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Culture_jamming_techniques" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_8">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Culture_jamming_techniques</span></a><br /><br />Also<br />check out the pdf file of a mass anti-war effort in<br />1936 by Princeton students who wanted to be paid a<br />bonus with the expectation that they would be veterans<br />of future wars since war had become an endless<br />occupation.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_of_Future_Wars" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_9">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_of_Future_Wars</span></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/PatriotismPrepaid" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1218856287_10">http://www.archive.org/details/PatriotismPrepaid</span></a><br /><br /><br />Another way to resist is to develop an artistic vision that <br />recognizes that we are still bodies in<br />space. That is why live performance is so important.<br />Performance acts as an antidote to kitsch<br />because it is happens to real bodies that excrete<br /> sticky fluids.<br /><br />I would argue that the other antagonist to kitsch is<br />poetry. It is the hardest form of language, it resists<br />easy consumption, at its core, it remains unfamiiar,<br />untranslatable even to the native speaker. Of course,<br />you will remember that Plato kicked the lyrical poets<br />out of his perfect Republic (the ones who wrote epics<br />could remain) "to educate our soldiers."<br /><br />One of the most effective antidotes to kitsch is humor, (not the safe haven provided by irony)<br />but slapstick because it involves the body and offends good taste<br /> and<br />parody because it represents the possibility of making<br />the monologic, a dialogue. This regarding Bakhtin's<br />idea of heteroglossia: If a speaker assumes another's<br />discourse and "objectifies it" for his own purposes,<br />the double-voicing is a stylization of the original.<br />The "stylizer" assumes the assimilated discourse to be<br />essentially correct and in agreement with his own<br />aims. Stylization turns to parody when the intentions<br />of the quoting discourse are somehow different from<br />the intentions of the quoted discourse. "In contrast<br />to stylization," says Bakhtin, "parody introduces ... a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the<br />original one."<br /></div>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-141847807518253278.post-27869516081407366592008-07-23T19:23:00.000-07:002008-07-24T07:22:57.158-07:00Some Thoughts on the Nature of Kitsch or Why Art Matters<span style="color: rgb(255, 153, 255);">Art is to life as Kitsch is to death. Kitsch has become our COMMON Communion, IMMUNE TO HISTORY, RESISTANT TO REASON. Kitsch is the Ventriloquist’s dummy, a bloodless Corpse at the scene of a real murder. Swept along by the flow of information, we Are detectives forever collecting the evidence, Forever making the case. Seekers of An Undying truth, we have replaced the inconstancy of human witness and memory with the incontrovertible proof of email. –</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 153, 255);">--from a Petit Manifesto<br />(for full text and a beautiful downloadable pdf version go to http://www.reconstructingmayakovsky.com )</span><br /><br /><a style="color: rgb(204, 204, 255);" href="http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/kitsch.htm"><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Let’s say you make this little film for youtube using public domain images. Let’s say you want to add a soundtrack to it. Let’s say, like me, you have no musical talent and you can’t afford to pay the Rolling Stones a million dollars for a snippet of “”, and you don’t want to appropriate something because most likely you’ll be sued. You might find yourself parked before your Mac with only an inarticulate notion that you wish to generate in the listener a sensation of happiness—not of the transcendent variety, not Ode to Joy joy, just an everyday good feeling. Stymied, you might see what possibilities the application “Garage Band” offers. You might try searching the free loop library for “Cheerful.” You might then, for reasons as varied as personal taste or wanting to invoke a pastoral contentment, limit your search further with the category “Acoustic.” </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Play sound file of loops below.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And, damned if they aren’t all cheerful, acoustic--every single one. If one invokes a cowboy riding across the wind-swept plains, and the other a careening red pick-up truck full of drunken teenagers—the general result is the same. Cheerful, acoustic. It is diabolically mechanistic, and too true. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The power of kitsch resides in its ability to imitate the visceral effects of art, if those effects could be simplified. To argue that kitsch does not generate real sentiment: wringing sadness, bleeding pity, bounding joy is wrong. Invoking limpid emotion—eternal and delocalized-- is all that kitsch does well. The p</span>urity of feeling acts as a substitute for depth. If kitsch generates an idea as well, it is in the form of a nearly meaningless abstraction like “freedom” or “truth” or “love,” or “hero” or “tragedy.” </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Googlification of knowledge includes the Googlification of sentiment; the most popular will always float to the top.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We cling to the purity of sensation as if to an angel. Yes, I feel. Let the tears flow. Because I have no language left for the more difficult feelings, to say nothing of the more difficult ideas—those located in time and space in the context of a mutable and unreasonable collective or personal desire. I am mute, but I feel. Cheerful, acoustic. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Technology has not forced this upon us. Technology arises from the same social, political and cultural conditions that enable us to utilize it. We need to begin to talk about why this is happening and what we oug</span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ht to do about it. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We used to have ways of perpetuating the illusion of solid ground: place, season, ritual, history. We used to have words like “sky” and “reason” and “god.” IN A WORLD OF IMAGES, IN A GROWING ECONOMY OF SPECTACLE THE WRITTEN WORD BECOMES A FORM OF PROTEST. WORDS CREATE A LIMINAL SPACE WHERE MEANING CAN BE LOST OR DISTORTED. T</span></a><span><a style="color: rgb(204, 204, 255);" href="http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/kitsch.htm"><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">HEIR DISTANCE FROM THE WORLD IS THEIR TRUTHFULNESS. Even if used for propaganda, words are ideologicall</span></a></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">y unstable. The possibility of a secret code is always present. Words operate primarily through ideas. The sensations they invoke are always at a remove. Because written language operates in a looser conceptual space than images, it is in a unique position to disturb and challenge the desire for a particular narrative. It is inherently anti-kitsch.</span><br /><a style="color: rgb(204, 204, 255);" href="http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/kitsch.htm"><span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span class="down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);"><img src="http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif" alt="Link" border="0" /></span></span></a><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dy-KrctWlRfabFL0dlIF0GmAPltZQ4bnXo8vt7a2lKvi8adh0TrE1acV8PvrL54eLB3oPQjmHVWXZRznFDcbw' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe>Vera X.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06797527359402111974noreply@blogger.com0