on films recently seen, film
thoughts recently thought:
·
sans soleil, the first documentary i immediately want to
see again, that thrills me as only the best features and shorts do, quietly
advocates a lifestyle of aesthetic detachment, of a lens (more correctly,
lenses) correcting (uncorrecting) vision(s):
(lenses replacing [being added to] masks in identity theory)
·
playtime, a film of futility, affirmation, and
comedy: a rare trio
·
andrei rublev: i now
view as tarkovsky’s best, a masterful meditation on art, god, time, love,
politics, desire, modernity, through a non-linear story of a medieval
painter-monk; one of the few films i want to call perfect
·
the pied piper of hamelin: a
ridiculously terrible film
·
alphaville: where
art, technology, society intersect in a comic dystopian scifi film noir
·
four notable romantic
comedies: annie hall, eternal sunshine, amelie, chungking express; but only
one notable sexual comedy (if one ignores comic porn like deep throat) comes to mind: conspirators of pleasure
aphordITtyacs—
the flowering of the
internet: humans rooted in the screen,
the veil—now no impenetrable seduction of god or woman or man or even nature or
consciousness (which also have now truly been usurped by the homogeneity of the
human) but the impenetrable seduction of technology: no birth or death, no love, but by means of
the screen …
a new beatitude: blessed are the witless, for they shall
inherit.
… to continue refraining from
yielding to two temptations, each aesthetic and political: 1) to reduce the plurality of narrative in
content or form (other than that which my flesh inevitably bounds)—in other
words, a continual regrounding in doubt (in doubt [is it not?] of the limits
and whispers of flesh; 2) to raise theory, abstraction (the need to explain),
to anything other than one-among-many narratives. (The only temptation to iteratively yield to
is the labyrinthine advance of flesh’s murky dictates—which roughly, opaquely
circumscribe and advocate our doubt—which are our doubt, being death.)
we have bartered earth for
fire, water, light. The elements are
imbalanced.
art is born of an ill-designed world …
knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in
life …
… live between divine forgiveness and your own
torment …
no authentic art permits the response,
I don’t agree; it avoids the traps of
mental segmentation, the call of the collapsed one … i have to extract, reduce
it to the size of something smaller, within or of myself, to then dispute an extraction,
amputation. It becomes like a dachshund
arguing with the severed leg of a horse.
envy needs to be restructured
into fantasy for it to be socially productive, palatable. (reconstituting, modernizing, our psychic factories;
rewiring how we transform the raw inputs of social aggression, apathy,
hostility … into aesthetic outputs)
if i believed in protests,
i’d protest against them.
the only standard is
aesthetic perfection—not a measure of moral goodness, not even a measure. Like all standards, itself it is not visible. Yet what else to believe in?
the internet is democratic only
for those who have negotiated the root democracies of the transient; for the
rest, it is commercial and exploitive, a commercialism and exploitation which society
so frequently and masochistically aspires to as if emancipatory. One rather has to use it as a transport to
bypass the (official) structures of enculturation, incarceration; to suck from it
its deep nutrients. So with all
technology.
… you can get lost in others’
illusions or your own, others’ language games, your own …
the historic
poetic-religious-philosophic perception of solitude, silence, darkness as the
bedrock of existence … as the negotiated encounter with these, without recourse
to simian forms of vengeance, as noble; what happens when communication, noise,
light become the foundation built on (certain optimists would say replacing) the bedrock? How will the new ground be tested? How will
it perform? What happens as it’s stressed, becomes cracked? How is nobility
being redefined? (Yes, it’s being surfaced, as all things, and so is being
reorganized into a subdivision of money, a star on its walk of fame.)
… when you live in darkness,
the shadow you cast is made of light …
since no longer was there any
authority that legitimates, it has become this no longer that legitimates …
the deck is large and who
would not use the alice card as
necessary—the card that trumps even trump … (isn’t society a competition to
hold a hand composed entirely of alice
cards? and don’t we all fail, this failure one form of an authentic [emotional]
democracy?)
idiocy is like a hollywood movie—it
requires a large production of people and money to make it happen.
if only the self burns in
hell and the self is unlocatable, unidentifiable, indescribable, it may be that
there still is a hell but there is no self and so nothing burns …
(blood meridian’s
cold currency, fire)
the coincidence of nietzsche
(1889), modern physics (1896), aesthetic reconstruction (1913 – 22), the atomic
bomb (1930 – 1945, flowing from physics) … the collective human spirit makes a
giant collective stumble forward, (for humankind? for anything? [objectless stumbling, perhaps the only authentic
stumbling—a kind of secularized gita])
…
social normalcy,
respectability, is frequently achieved by bullying one’s way into a corner of
the human cosmos and devoting one’s life to defending, buttressing, expanding
that corner: this process called
civilization, its detached description an aspect of art.
some hundreds of years ago,
man swallowed the clock, internalizing time; now humanity swallows the computer,
internalizing eternity: is it not this
mixture of elements in our bellies that necessitates the present spiritual
indigestion …
the artist is light and soft,
like an oyster; it develops, slowly, a hard dark pearl to protect itself
against the incessant irritation of the demands to kill itself—that is, to
reduce its innate sense of teeming multiplicity (of world) to the stupid
solidity and request of a single grain of sand … (but the masses’ lust for
pearls, for pretty spheres …): this
abrasive dialogue in the substrata of desire …
in a bar:
she: people like birds
he: i like birds a lot
she:
{unintelligible}
he: i just don’t get them …
in a café:
look, we’ve got three
maximums: regular maximum, extra
maximum, and maximum maximum
meta- is all that
remains: there is no metaphysics, only
meta-; no metanarrative, only meta-; with the dissolution of substantives, only
prefixes … (lyotard’s metanarrative collapse combined with baudrillard’s
hyperreal: the hypermeta, the metahyper,
the posthyper, historiopost, uberhistorio, …)
the insecticidation of
humanity: the buzzing of endlessly competing
and incompatible narratives, many of which are and must be largely
incomprehensible, as little different than mosquitoes, wasps, fruit flies …
care is a form of harm
minimalization, a reduction of damage … or at least its maintenance at present
levels …
dogs have become handbags, or
at least handbag accessories … animate&hairy birkins …
yoga: your
orgasmic guru airhead
most relationships: alliances of tedium, carnages of possession,
structures of veiled terrorism …
the toronto special: a 39-storey tower, with no 13th
floor or floors with 4 in the unit space (thus 34-stories) …
… what do the people clap for
when they clap?
everything you inhabit was
whimsy once; today’s law and truth, our precious modes, committed patterns, are
built from and on yesterday’s whimsy …
the soft strings of language,
which we pluck to still the ragged scream of time …
everything is possible,
possibility a function of vision: even
death is possibility, especially death—the furthest reaches of vision … hence
our fascination with it, not in blood (for blood is as impossible for us to
imagine as a macbook air was for citizens of the thirteenth century) but in our
incarnated dreams—in film, television, video games, all forms of news and
media, therapy and psychology, in the technourban soundscapes we inhabit—fascinating
in concept, as we were once fascinated with God.
how can one be committed to
any idea? Ideas are hardly committed to
you.
it’s quite reasonable to
postulate in these hypermad days, overgrown with weeds of conformity in the
name of freedom, with ubiquitous bombs of balm, that only those not pretending
to be mad are mad …
society grants individuals as
much slack as time: with both
accumulating, accelerating, the citizen counteracts the double increasing tension
typically through money, pharmaceuticals, work, entertainment … the artist, to
the extent it doesn’t use these, must find other means: cracks in time’s edifices, peepholes in
society’s walls, sinkholes in culture’s pavement …
an ode to a high digger:
how time times
how time times, timing
how time times, timing, timed
to have a book which contains
a table of contents which refers only to tables of contents: a book of possible books … the referents not
random and whole, as in the library of
babel, but encyclopedically exhaustive in suggestibility: so we would accept the parameters of possibility
suggested by these taxonomies as we do our present society through its
artifactual and conceptual summaries, with little ability or time to
ever independently explore the evidence.
significant books from a
rough onset of postmodernity—
blood meridian
(’86: the last authentic literature of unity,
bookend of the iliad and the bible, of western civilization)
the book of questions
(’63 – ’72: the first authentic literature of
fragmentation, born of the holocaust)
the waves – orlando
(of gender and identity)
waiting for godot – proust
(of a new spirituality of infinite waiting, of
a subsistence of time and its subservience to memory, of a deconstruction of
linearity, a subjugation of the line)
ulysses
(of the reconstitution of society and language)
the second sex
(of a new pandoran psychology)
kafka – borges – nietzsche
(of a new urban forest of symbols and dreams)
alice in wonderland
(of the union of mathematics and art, science
and fancy)
straightup poetry excludes itself, for it by nature must be insignificant
but when we ask for a list of significant films,
paintings, albums … ! … the list is significantly longer …
the age and weight of an art: modern technology spreads open, cracks, all
the arts except literature which, as the first art that was also a technology,
seeks its proper revolution not in technology, that which opened its siblings,
but in the dark forces that spawned it, an odd return to that point in its
revolution when it was a point … a coupling of innocence and guilt on the present
desert of language …
coming soon to a dream
near you—
the pathologization
of diffErence
a the
projection of acceptance onto the visible
b the
transference of christian dogma into the secularized psyche
c the roots
of the fear of plurality
d the
desperate competition for sanity
e our
inability to find a proper home for death
f the
technicization of aesthetics: a matter
of geometry
principles of a
quantum spirituality
thoughts on religion, science, time …
world
war iii and other stories
three traumas
advocating a psychic periodic table of elements
questions for the book …
I only had eyes for the infinite. I tended to let the days pass by. They punished me.
heresiarch alben
The writer alone decides his own death, pledged as he is to go through with the task he set himself: to have us read the blank universe at the price of the instant.
heresiarch brudenhöffer
Is not every thought a prisoner? Thought is set free by another thought, an accomplice. All we do with the latter's help is change jails.
heresiarch nuck
heresiarch woondaŧœƫǣ
