"...to their slippages, to their irrationalism, to their sometimes viscous ambivalence..."

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“You could say that all my work is about the repressed fantasies of our field and about the desires produced and pursued through those fantasies. I do think that you have to understand the structure of that field and its fantasies in order to get at those desires – which I’ve also considered in more political and sociological terms as interests. And I do think that such understanding takes a certain amount of research, and that certain reading lists can be of help. But you can’t get at those fantasies and those desires through intellectualizations. Psychoanalysis would consider that just another mechanism of repression. In the end you can only get at them by subjecting yourself to their excesses, to their slippages, to their irrationalism, to their sometimes viscous ambivalence, to their contradictions. And in those contradictions there is violence and there is also absurdity and there is also pleasure. And there may also be a kind of beauty.”

- Andrea Fraser



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Andrea Fraser Quote

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“...the ambivalence of artists who want to be wanted and loved for what they do, even in their transgressions and their objectifications and their critiques. One of the things that critique is, after all, is a test of love.”

- Andrea Fraser



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Öyvind Fahlström Quote

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“I infect Stockholm with infectious madness and in the end everyone is mad except me and everything turns into a film that was made during the time and then in a dream and then in darkness.”

- Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976) describing the plot of his unpublished (and now lost) novel ‘Ryska Dansöser’ (‘Russian Dancers’).



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A playlist of 70 videos (with commentary).

It seems now every year I make a YouTube playlist. I made one in 2010, 2011 and in Japan.

I have written a short post On making YouTube playlists.

All year I have been working on one for 2014. And now, twice, I have hit the playlist limit of 200 videos. Previously I didn't realize there was a limit and now I've hit it twice. I'm trying to think a little bit of this idea of a limit. Who would possibly take the time to watch a playlist of 200 videos? I know the internet has almost completely changed the way I listen to music, an endless stream of songs so many of which I can barely remember even a few minutes after having listened to them. So many amazing songs and wanting to organize them into playlists each year is almost defeatist.

I can keep adding songs to the playlist but eventually hit a limit. Then I go through the playlist, delete some of the weaker songs in order to make room for more. At the end of the year I'll remove as many songs as I can bear in order to get the list down to some reasonable size. I will try for under a hundred. None of this seems to me like a particularly good use of time and yet, internet addiction aside, it does also possibly spring from some desire to share.

The number of songs on the internet feels infinite yet, as I compile them, I hit a limit. It is not a real limit: I could simply begin a new playlist, but the limit in itself is perhaps useful, curbing the compulsive activity ever-so-slightly, forcing me (eventually) to start making decisions. With so many of these songs I would like to hear more, know more about the artist, but so often I don't. The slot in the playlist is as far as it goes. The curiosity is there but not the followthrough. Of course there might also be information I will stumble upon randomly at some future moment.

Along with the 200 video playlist limit, I am also continuously hitting the 5000 Facebook 'friend' limit. I have been thinking about writing about this other limit for a while, a limit made somehow resonant due to the inclusion of the word friend, but songs always feel like the more telling metaphor. And anyway I'm embarrassed to write about Facebook, fearful that it's evidence, a verdict too clearly depicting just how little I live.



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