Solidarity Comment Thread

.


I posted the following quote:


“Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?” - Yevgeny Yevtushenko


And then found the comment thread particularly interesting:


JM: Cause 1/2 those people only call themselves liberals!

TP: We're still alive.

JW: We fall out with each other because we're still alive? Solidarity equals death?

TP: Nous n'aimons pas mais comment pouvons-nous ne pas aimer? 

FG: Let me try something. Maybe it's because lots of right-wing ideas are really simple (close to stupid), so the complexity off bringing smart and creative minds together is not an issue there...

JW: Calling the enemy stupid might also be a way of avoiding the fact that the enemy is winning.

FG: I would say that weirdly, it's not stupidity, it's in fact, in a way, faith. Maybe we have to work on faith.

MA: Because the left never fucks the company, it prefers posting and discussing instead.

EZ: Because they have the power to create money... they can and do fall out with each other all the time... but no matter how much they fall out with each other, they have limitless resources to fall back on... when "liberals" fall out with each other, its often because we are competing for scarce resources.

JR: The right wing bastards understand that corporate/collective action is power. They are winning because they understand this more practically than the left does.

RF: We are cursed with the capacity for independent thought??

NK: Because we're still thinking of "us" and "them".   

KC: Who's we?

JM: When dealing with justice, ie: values and principles (and the rights that societies develop in putting those into practice) the monolithic 'they' that decrees and enforces is an entity that by its essence creates 'we' by virtue of those who fall outside its estate. 'We' is a defacto description of those who do not create, police, enforce or litigate the application of 'justice'; 'We' speaks to those upon whom justice is administered. That is not to be confused with 'justice' as in the 'just' access to rights and application of law, but rather, the imperfect and structurally flawed enforcement of social mechanisms that include the administration of law. 'We' are the excluded, 'they' are the exclusive.

JW: I always thought that maybe it had something to do with a greater respect for hierarchy, a greater respect for discipline and a greater respect for power. But it's also clearly true that's it's much easier to display solidarity when you are the police then it is when you're fighting against the police. Still, no explanation ever feels completely satisfying. And I keep wishing that I was, personally, better at feeling a sense of solidarity.
 


.   
   

Too Much Fragment

.



As an artist, my most piercing feeling is that there are too many artists in the world. This mirrors my feeling, as a person, that there are too many people. But what is this 'too many'? Is it based on notions of scarcity? Of competition? Of sustainability? Or simply of wanting to feel special on an overcrowded field?

[Unfinished.]



.

Carol Treadwell Quote

.



When they finally slept together, Jean discovered that intimacy between them would not do any good, that when they touched they made dents in each other, made each other cold.

She’d meant to slam him into walls or be slammed. She’d meant to conquer her shyness. But they were in bed and blanketed, one of the more active things she did was sit up.

- Carol Treadwell, Spots and Trouble Spots



.

The books I brought home from AWP

.



It Then – Danielle Collobert
Murder – Danielle Collobert
Notebooks 1956-1978 – Danielle Collobert
Mopus – Oisín Curran
Tlemcen or Places of Writing – Mohammed Dib
Sprawl – Danielle Dutton
The Parapornographic Manifesto – Carl-Michael Edenborg
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) – Macedonio Fernández
Slut Lullabies – Gina Frangello
In the Moremarrow – Oliverio Girondo
Everything Flows – James Greer
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist – Emile Habiby
The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal – Tytti Heikkinen
The High Life – Jean-Pierre Martinet
Enduring Freedom – Laura Mullen
Calendar of Regrets – Lance Olsen
The Shock of the Lenders & Other Poems – Jorge Santiago Perednik
Beach Birds – Severo Sarduy
How Phenomena Appear to Unfold – Leslie Scalapino
May We Shed These Human Bodies – Amber Sparks
The Porthole – Adriano Spatola
Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing – Paul Vangelisti
West Wind Review 2013
Vertical Motion – Can Xue



.

Short poem based on an insight (and possible example of sophistry) gleaned while reading A Time for Everything

.



Scientific method is based on repeatability


you know an experiment is true because you are able to repeat it


a miracle is something that happens only once


therefore, by definition, science cannot recognize a miracle.



.

Excerpt from Antje Majewski / Alexandro Jodorowsky interview

.



Alexandro Jodorowsky: I’ve developed it into an art. The art of Tarot, for me that’s an art. So it’s the tarots that brought me to it. I developed it. And that’s how I came that far. Without trying. It does it all by itself. I always wondered what sanctity is. There are champions, heroes, geniuses, saints! No. So, I wanted to know what sanctity is. OK, for me, sanctity goes with churches. There’s Catholic sanctity, Muslim sanctity, Buddhist sanctity, OK? And the just man of the Jews. They all have different ideas, because they’re part of the prejudices of the churches. So I wondered what civil sanctity is. How a being that does not belong to any moral law of a religion can perform acts of sanctity without belonging to any sect—simply out of love for humanity. Or perhaps not even for that—simply out of love for art. You understand?

Antje Majewski: Yes.

AJ: So I began to imitate sanctity. Every Wednesday I imitate sanctity. Sanctity is being at other people’s service. Without judging them. Except of course, seeing the inner treasure everyone has. And trying to awaken it. Without any desire for profit, because I do it for nothing. Not even a word of thanks. Without deriving any benefit. No benefits. Simply doing it for the pleasure of doing it. OK. And that’s why I do that. I imitate sanctity.

AM: And why ‘imitate’?

AJ: I put it on, I’m not saintly by nature. I imitate.

AM: For me, you…

AJ: I imitate, I imitate. I do that when I think I should be a good person. And I do it.

AM: And why you do doubt?

AJ: I don’t doubt.

AM: But why do you say you imitate?

AJ: What? Why do I say what?

AM: For me, you are like that. It’s not imitation.

AJ: Not all the time. Not all the time. For example, when I’m going to read or in my conferences, everything that’s for others, I suffer a lot in advance. I don’t want to do it. I really suffer, it’s terrible. And then I’m in a bad mood. And once I get there, I change, and afterwards, once it’s over, I’m euphoric and pleased. I pledge myself to go on with it.

AM: Yes.

AJ: And afterwards I ask myself why I pledge myself to do that. I’m mad. It’s years, thirty or so, thirty years I’ve been doing that, and every time, I suffer. And afterwards I do the thing again. So it’s not a state of sanctity. You understand? I imitate.

AM: (laughs)

AJ: I imitate. But it’s a good imitation, because there are people who imitate being an assassin. In reality, I think everyone imitates something. Authenticity is difficult to find. You yourself look for authenticity. To see what you really sense in objects, it’s a quest—a modest one—about objects, isn’t it? But from the moment we’re in our mothers’ wombs, we begin to imitate our families, parents, we have a nationality. Nationality is imitation, it’s not a reality. To be German, or Chilean or French is imitation. Because we’re much more than that. Being a man or women is imitation. Because we’re everything. In reality, we have sexual desires, but that’s not what we are. We’re something else. Age is an imitation. Because spiritual age doesn’t exist. And so on. We imitate thinking, we imitate feeling, we imitate desire. But the real being we don’t see. So to get near it, we have to imitate. And from imitation to imitation, sometimes you get there for a moment. Really, there are moments when you get there. Yes indeed, there are moments you get there. (laughs) But every act of kindness I do, I force myself. It’s not natural, I force myself to do it.


[You can watch the full interview here.]



.

On making YouTube playlists

.



It seems now every year I make a YouTube playlist. I made one in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and I'm already working on one for 2014. There is also the playlist I made of music from Japan. I have  written about this process twice: A play list of 83 videos (with commentary) and A play list of 96 videos (with commentary).

I have been meaning to write about all of this again. How these internet habits feel like a part of my art and life, and how often they feel more like art than my actual art practice, and yet how this idea has also somehow become thinner and less compelling to me since I first wrote about it three years ago.

Also I wanted to write about how videos keep disappearing from these lists. I just opened the playlist from 2010 and the fist thing I am told is that '12 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.' The internet is a place where things disappear and nobody notices. In fact, the internet is a place where things appear and disappear and practically nobody notices.

2011: 10 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2012: 6 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2013: 1 video in your playlist has been deleted from YouTube. 

As time goes on more and more of these videos will disappear. And I have no right to them, I have only compiled them for a moment in time. YouTube is a privately owned corporation and can delete whatever videos it likes.

Art is ephemeral. Life is ephemeral. But what is strange (or actually completely predictable) is I have absolutely no recollection of which videos have disappeared. I have no notes. They are gone, and if YouTube hadn't told me of their absence I think I would have barely noticed.

I don't know if my logic will be as apparent to everyone else as it is to me. But all of this leads me to believe that there is still something really remarkable about writing books. The books will also disappear. But not quite yet.



.

Lauren Berlant Quote 1

.



...lives are not novels - or maybe they are, as no critic has ever accounted for all the acts and details in a novel either.

- Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism



.

2500 Random Things About Me Too by Matias Viegener

.



My Lemon Hound review of Matias Viegener's amazing book 2500 Random Things About Me Too
 


.

Opening fragment from 'Speaking These Lines for the First Time'

.



A performer stands alone on stage reading a text from a screen in front of them. It is a different performer every night but the text is always the same. The performer has never seen the full text before. For each line that appears the performer has a choice. They can either say the line on the screen or replace it with a sentence of their own. It is a kind of game they are playing with the writer but it is an extremely difficult one. The writer has all the advantages and the performer has only the adrenaline of the real time encounter. In many ways it is completely unfair to the performer, and at times we will definitely watch them squirm. (Perhaps the most honest pleasure of theatre: when something unexpected happens, when something goes wrong.) However, in the end the performer will prevail.

Speaking These Lines for the First Time is a game about freedom and unfreedom. What does it mean to use the freedom we have in our culture: on stage, in the media, in our daily lives. We say in a democracy we are free but often our options to utilize this freedom can feel extremely limited. Is the stage a place we can make use of our freedom? Is the media? The internet? The text that appears on the screen will playfully, but also sometimes cruelly, navigate within the labyrinth of such questions. At times the text will throw the performer soft balls, giving him or her easy opportunities to replace what is written with his or her own honest convictions. It is a game in which the first rule is that you read what is in front of you and the second rule is you can break the first rule at any time. But if you break the rules does it actually change anything? And if not what would?




Section One

For the next hour I will be reading sentences from the screen in front of me.

The sentences will be divided into four sections.

In section one, I will be reading sentences that I have seen before but have never spoken aloud.

Section one is, mostly, an explanation of what will be happening here tonight.

After that, the work begins in earnest.

Because – in sections two, three and four – I will be reading sentences I have never seen before in my life.

For each sentence that appears I have a choice.

I can either read the sentence as it is written.

Or replace it with something I would prefer to say.

When I am saying something different from what is written, you will know I am doing so because what I say is not what appears on the surtitle above my head.

I can also choose to say nothing and stand here for a moment in silence.

All of this is a kind of game I will be playing with the writer.

In this game, the writer has the advantage.

Since he knows what is coming next and I do not.

Much like in Las Vegas, the house always wins.

Or how, no matter which political party you vote for, the government remains the government.

No matter how I try to intervene, the text is still the text.

I can change things within it, but it will continue on regardless.

At times, the writer will make me say things I couldn’t possible agree with.

Such as:

“Former Nazis make the best teachers and parents.”

Or:

“When you commit suicide you bring yourself a little closer to God.”

And I will have to decide whether to say them or not.

These are of course statements the writer doesn’t agree with either.

He is trying to win.

What exactly he is trying to win is unclear.

He is putting words in my mouth that might make me feel foolish, vulnerable or confused.

By putting unexpected words in my mouth, he is trying to make my performance more real.

Our lives are surrounded by things that we might describe as “not real”.

Television, movies, photographs, advertisements, the internet, pornography, etc.

One of the reasons we might wish to go to the theatre is to see something that feels more real.

More real than television.

More real than photographs.

More real than advertisements.

You get the idea.

I am really here, standing in front of you.

I am really speaking each of these sentences for the first time.

The way this text is written it is very difficult for me to intervene.

This is much like many other things in the world.

If I wanted to change something in the world that I think is wrong it is also very difficult.

Much like if you, as an audience member, wanted to change something in the performance here tonight your options would be limited.

You could stand up and walk out.

You could yell something.

You could run up on stage and do something unexpected.

However, none of these things are likely to alter my performance in any significant manner.

Much like my own interventions in the text are unlikely to greatly alter this evening.

Unless I were to start changing every single line.

To say something completely different each time.

Which is not the game.

Which is not what I have been asked to do.

Of course, there is not only the matter of what I say but also the question of how I say it.

However, on this point as well, because of the straightforward manner in which the sentences are written, there is limited room for play.

Limited, but within limitations there are always possibilities.

If I say something with sarcasm it might mean the opposite of what the writer intended.

Or if I make the “crazy sign”, moving my finger in a circular motion directly next to my head, I might imply that what the writer is saying is crazy.

There are likely other options along these lines.

As I continue to play the game, and get into the swing of things, it is possible my options will increase.

When the writer writes isolated statements he makes the game easier for me.

If the sentence doesn’t directly relate to the sentence that came before or after, it is much easier to replace it with one of my own.

To demonstrate, what follows is a list of twelve isolated statements.

“The first world thrives off the blood and sweat of the third world.”

“Life in the Western world is wonderful.”

“Poor people can still live lives filled with meaning and joy.”

“The internet is more democratic than television.”

“Life is short, seize the moment.”

“People’s misdeeds are generally caused by insecurity.”

“People will behave differently in different situations.”

“There would be no crime if there was no poverty.”

“Greed is not natural.”

“Listening to me say these things is a waste of your time.”

“I like things that are evil.”

“This text is far too didactic.”

To further assist me, when the writer believes he is writing an isolated statement he will place it in quotation marks to indicate that I might attempt replacing it with another sentence.

But, of course, I can also attempt replacing sentences that are not in quotation marks.

Isolated statements occur frequently in our society.

For example, one of the strategies employed by television news is that each of the different stories are presented as if they don’t directly relate to each other.

This makes it more difficult, rather than easier, to make sense of what we are watching.

The news presents not a coherent picture of our world, but a series of seemingly disconnected facts.

What would the news look like if it instead tried to present a more coherent picture?

If it tried to link the various news stories together?

If it tried to show how the various news stories relate to each other?

If you use this as an analogy for my task here tonight it creates a paradox.

When the sentences I say are more isolated from one another it is easier for me to intervene.

And when the sentences are more connected it is more difficult for me to intervene.

Unlike the news, where the lack of connection between different statements makes the world we live in seem more incoherent, in this game, a lack of connection between statements makes the game, for me at least, more empowering.

However, this is true only if we assume that it is more empowering for me to say my own sentence rather than the one that is in front of me.

Which is by no means clear.

Since what is written might very simply be more interesting than anything I am able to come up with on the spot.

This is another way in which the game is extremely unfair to me as a performer.

But I am brave and stubborn.

And will persevere.

Now that we have explained the basic premise, we will listen to a song for approximately two minutes.

It will give me a moment to catch my breath before we continue.

[A song plays for two minutes. During this time the performer can do as he or she wishes.]




Section Two

As previously announced, I am now reading sentences that I have actually never seen before.

And, as was explained in the previous section, in this task I have a certain degree of freedom.

Freedom is a strange idea.

One might think that one can only be free in a pure sense.

That freedom means having no responsibilities or connections.

But, in fact, one can only be free in relation to rules and restrictions.

There is no such thing as pure freedom.

To be free is not to be able to do whatever one wants.

To be free is to be able to change the spoken and unspoken rules that one exists in relation to.

In this game I can change some of what I say.

But it is unclear whether or not I can change the rules.

For example, if I were to stop reading, and spend the rest of my time on stage dancing, would that change the rules?

To change the rules is always difficult.

It takes time.

And if it goes wrong it can result in complete disaster.

Totalitarian states are an attempt to completely change the basic rules of how society operates.

They do so through violence. By force.

Changing the rules through solidarity is even more difficult.

As well, one person’s freedom is often based on another person’s unfreedom.

The fact that I am free to stand here on stage and speak is based on the fact that you are sitting there willing to listen.

Which is another way of staying that you are not free to speak.

If everyone here were to speak at the same time it would be chaos and my freedom to speak would be canceled out.

So my freedom to speak is based of your lack of freedom in regards to speaking.

Of course, in a sense, you are all free to speak.

But the rule we have all agreed upon is that I speak and you listen.

My freedom to buy a cheap pair of running shoes is based on someone else’s unfreedom of having to put together those running shoes while being paid a very small amount.

However, both my freedom to buy the cheap running shoes and the child’s unfreedom to put them together for a low wage serve another purpose.

To make money for a corporation.

My perceived freedom and the child’s obvious unfreedom work together to create profit.

Profit is what occurs when some people make more money because others make less.

A billionaire could never become a billionaire in a world that was fair and reasonable.

But, of course, life isn’t fair.

When we say life isn’t fair we are also, in a way, accepting the unfairness of the world.

By believing the world is unfair we also create the conditions for unfairness to occur.

Unfairness begins at birth.

Some people are born:

“More attractive.”

“Physically stronger.”

“More intelligent.”

“In wealthier countries.”

“With richer parents.”

These people will, in general, have an easier life.

People who are privileged are rarely aware of the extent or origins of their privilege.

Most people in this room fall into this category.

The things that really upset us do so because they remind us of things in ourselves we don’t like.

If I am upset that the world is unfair, it is also because I am nervous that I am unfair.

Or that I directly benefit from injustice.

Guilt is conservative.

Guilt is not connected to action but to inaction.

Guilt says: I am doing nothing, but it is all right because I feel bad about it.




[Unfinished.]



.

Heriberto Yépez on 'to see what happens'

.



And when one of us used that phrase - ‘to see what happens’ - I thought seeing what happens was impossible. To see requires involvement. And once you get involved, you see nothing.

- Heriberto Yépez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers



.

Excerpt from I Want To Start Again

.



Dissatisfaction, alienation from my own body (and the bodies of others), boredom, an overwhelming sense of disowning, of not wanting, everything I have (perhaps as a way of owning it more naturally or subversively), anger and sadness, in great quantities, that seem to have no object or purpose, nowhere to go. These are the traits, the reasons, that convince me there is little point in writing about myself honestly. Who needs to read such things? Toward what end? But I have written all my other books and now it seems I have no choice. I am the only topic left. At least I can use my anger for slander.

The artistic life has convinced me that people mainly want to read inspiring stories. I don’t. In this fact I might well be in the minority, but I’m certainly not alone. There is most likely a way, or many ways, I could describe my life so that most would find it inspiring. There are so many ways to tell a story. In writing this, I feel such a strong desire to control how my story is told (perhaps after I’m dead, a moment which so often feels to me will come remarkably soon.) I don’t want others to decide what my life has been. I want to decide. Apparently what I most want is to portray it as slanderous.

The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it.

Critical optimism. Naïve on purpose.

I read about Quantum physics and think: this is scientific evidence that has found an incorrect solution. Something is missing, I don’t know what, but some of the basic premises through which the experiments are conducted and interpreted must be wildly incorrect. They do experiments, record results, yet because of some fault in their basic understanding they do not see what is actually there. Or they do see what is there but miss something else even more important. This is my feeling when I read about Quantum physics and I have absolutely no idea whether or not this feeling is correct. However, when read about Quantum physics I also don’t feel that I’m reading about myself. Am I the scientist who looks at the evidence (of my own life and experience) and comes to the wrong conclusions?

A friend in Berlin tells me about retrocausality. He attempts to explain it – I believe he was quite drunk at the time, perhaps I was as well – with an example: two particles are placed in a particle accelerator, traveling at speeds so fast, and yet variable, so that one particle is, in a sense, temporally ahead of the other one. One particle is in the future and the other in the past. When you alter the future particle, for example by hitting it with some sort of beam, it affects the past one. This experiment has been used to hypothesize that events in the future can concretely alter things in the past, that it is possible for a affect to occur before its cause. At least that’s what I thought when X first explained it to me. However, further research made it clear that retrocausality remains little more than a science fiction hypothesis, and has never been proven, experimentally or otherwise. At that moment I felt more gullible than usual. I always feel gullible. Yet things in the future do alter things in the past. Writing this book will change how I view my own past, and also how others perceive it.

There is one past we have lived, and another past we tell now. I have always searched for ways to reinvent myself. Some of the stories, facts and reflections I will be recounting are stories I have told over and over again, over the years finding better and more effective ways to tell them. One improves a story by selecting the sharpest details, choosing what to leave out and what to keep in, various gradations of nuance and timing. All of this happens instinctively, without noticing, most often based on the subtle reactions of the listener. And yet none of the stories would work if they hadn’t once actually occurred; if they hadn’t, more or less, happened to me. Many of these events were dramatic at the time, while others only became so gradually over years of recounting. Others find their first life here, as I remember things that previously had fallen away. This is something I thought I would never do, write about these events all in one place. In so many ways I’m against it. I hate thinking about the past and I hate nostalgia. And yet, like so many others, with every passing year I become unerringly more nostalgic, almost against my will.

A number of times I have watched some of the most brilliant artists I know shift, over a relatively short period of time, into some of the least interesting artists I know. I feel this process always has something to do with purity, with wanting to be pure, the purest.


[You can read one possible opening for I Want To Start Again here.]



.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Quote

.



For me, anthropology is in fact the theory—to sound a bit like Trotsky—the theory of a permanent decolonization. A permanent decolonization of thought. That is anthropology for me. It is not a question of decolonizing society, but of decolonizing thought. How to decolonize thought? And how to do it permanently? Because thinking is constantly recolonized and reterritorialized. I have always thought that the notion of “a society against the state” is a profound notion and it has to be deepened. And this goes along with the idea of a society without interiority. This means that, finally, interiority is the state. I still like the wordplay: “the state is the self.” Thus a society without a state is a society without the self, without interiority in this sense. This is animism, the idea that the subject is outside. It is everywhere. And that society is not a guard, that the state is neither guarding nor a guard, meaning that the society does not coincide with the state. That is the idea against the state. Against the state means a society without interiority, which only recognizes itself while being outside of itself. This is the idea of a society without a state. What does it mean to live in a society without a state, against the state? We don’t have any idea. You have to live there to see how things happen in a world without a state. In a society that is not only lacking the state but, as Clastres thought, is against the state because it is constituted precisely on the absence of the state. Not because of the lack of a state, but upon the absence of the state, so that the state cannot come into existence. And animism has to do with that. Animism is the ontology of societies against the state.

- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, from Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism



.

Miguel Gomes Quote

.



And this idea of thinking that what the characters are missing—more than the loss of the Portuguese Empire or the land loss of the land—I think its their youth. I think that cinema, also, in a way is missing its youth. Back then in the youth of cinema, the viewers would be more available, there would be a larger ability to believe in things. It’s like the process of aging as you were talking, there is a moment when you believe in Santa Clause or whatever and then you grow up and see—no, it does not exist. But in a way, cinema can restore this belief even if you’re believing in unbelievable things, which is I think is far more moving to believe in unbelievable things. So you know it’s fiction, it’s a lie but somehow it gets you back in time into the moment where you believe these things. I think that, for instance, people that were seeing 1920s Morneau’s films, maybe they had a larger ability to believe in these vampires and these love stories. Because cinema is now more than 100 years old, it’s much tougher to believe and we are much more aware of things. This is a problem for us to believe in a very direct way.

- Miguel Gomes
 


.

Four quotes from Empire of Neomemory by Heriberto Yépez

.



A good portion of that enormous distance that Olson always maintained with respect to his body, he learned from his mother, for whom all corporeality was risk. We cannot understand Olson if we do not understand the abyss his mother sowed between him and his body, early on, to the point of his conceiving of it as his lugubrious satellite or golden cloud. When he got to Mexico, many years later, Olson was mostly surprised at the manner in which the descendants of the Mayans—as he said in “The Human Universe” (1951)—took pleasure in one another, in the natural closeness of their bodies.

It was as if the distance between Olson and his body could only be restored by a complicated postal system. Something similar was the case with women. Olson always maintained distance—like his father, who his mother had chosen precisely for his being a firm man, who became, at a certain moment, an alcoholic. (The firmness of a man is directly proportional to his averted vertigo.) Through his whole life Olson had a fear of the feminine body. Olson knew that to come close to a woman was not only to come close to the open body he had learned to fear through his mother, but also, above all, to come close to a woman, as he knew very well, was to come close to his own body. (Why does woman signify body, psycho-historically? Because the parallel fantasy indicates that male signifies mind. Genders were put in place in order to survive dualisms.) “Woman” is that which the “male” unknows of himself. And vice versa.

In order to not come close, Olson, very early on, became a devoted student. From a very early age he sought to become cultured. And it is to have another body, to make it possible to flee from the real body, that our civilization teaches us to construct a fantasy body, the body of requested information, the imaginary body that one constructs, we might say, by reading, by selection of others’ memories, cybermnemic editing. And for those of us who continue on the path of the imaginary co-body, the body of the poem, the story, the essay, the body, the text—the body is transformed into the replacement-body. I do not want to live here. I want to live in language. The word is the island where I am moving to. The text will become the history of the loss of our body. The text is both the balm and the poison.




All story has closure as its theme. Reduction. Sudden limits. Born in Poe as an oppressive genre, the story is a capsule of claustrophobia in which time pretends to be trapped in a quick space. The story—temporal narration turned spatial limit—attempts to store away the All thanks to the perfect synthesis and linear time. What genre is more linear than that of the story?—if Europe invented the novel, the neo-Oxident invented the short story, and in this mutation we can see the shift that occurred between these Co-Oxidents. In comparison with the long novelistic reign of Europe, that of the United States will be succinct. The North American empire will be brief, as brief, technical, and fantastic as the best science fiction stories.




Burnout is the perfect crime. Be it Bartleby, Funes, or the dandy, let’s not ignore the fact that the fed up man, within the vociferous yawn of his dissipation, hides the fact that he has appropriated All. Burnout is theft. Weariness is a strategy for appropriating the world. “I am weary of Everything” means I possess everything. Which will always be false. Not only because the All does not exist properly but because to appropriate it is the pantopic and the pantopic is the illusory.

This is the first great trick of weariness: the trick of its appropriation, the trick of its looting. This theft will be hidden beneath the giant complaint, beneath the shouted apathy or the ironic gesture. Boredom is a theft that denies its own agency, its own action, depreciating what it has stolen. The burnt out man appears to get away with what’s his, because it can be argued that he possesses it ALL! —and he is satiated with this, Same as Always—he continues arguing that “in truth...I don’t want it.” Because the All which the burnt out man has appropriated is an All-Undesired, the burnout pretends to reject it, however, as we see, the rejection of the possessed All is the same trick by which he retains it. The burnout is not responsible for his illusion of having it all. The burnout is no more than an involuntary comedian. It is not an accident that excess forms the basis of imperial life.




Linear history, Oedipal history, is our fantasy, and to perpetuate it we invented the myth of an authoritarianism arising from the preterit, even though authority can only be exercised from the present. Borges, whose work was concerned with the manipulation of time, claimed that each author invents his precursors. Or, to put it in Phillip K. Dick’s terms, the Oedipal structure is a Counter-Clock World, a world where, as in this Dick novel, the libraries destroy books and the dead emerge from their graves. The best-kept secret of linear oxidental time is that it is written from the future to the past.



Empire of Neomemory by Heriberto Yépez is translated by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, and Brian Whitener and published by chain links.



.

Anne Boyer Quote

.



I have said I am a poet in order to suppress being a cultural critic — because the lure of cultural criticism is that it gives an endless opportunity to waste one’s life. for culture is almost always wrong, and always presenting us a wrong to contemplate: and how addicting it is to perform one’s cleverness, again and again, to lob each fiery thought at each of the million wrong ships which float by, doing nothing about the sea itself.

- Anne Boyer, doing nothing about the sea itself



.

Perverse Curating Essay Fragment

.



The Curator is expected to know the difference between good and bad art, select relevant examples from the good, and arrange them into consequent, thematically resonant exhibitions. Works should complement each other rather than clash. Themes should be relevant and sophisticated. Perverse Curating says fuck that. Why must art be well-behaved and why is it the curators job the color within the lines? Who is willing to put art together in provocative ways that defy all notions of politeness and common sense? Instead of works that complement each other, what if the art was at war? Would a more perverse, combative form of exhibition-making, over time, lead to more exciting art?



[Unfinished.]



Other approaches to Perverse Curating can be found here and here.



.

Sergio Chejfec quote

.
 


Neither of us would have imagined that, years later, these events would be written down on paper. If we had foreseen this, we would have acted differently, guiding our steps according to our idea of posterity; fortunately, we did not. (This foreseeing should be clarified, however, given that if M knew the reasons why I would end up writing these pages, he certainly would have done what was needed to avoid his abduction, though, in fact, he did nothing at all to cause it. They say that one could avoid innumerable problems, mistakes, and catastrophes if one knew how things were going to turn out, but this is an impossible dream. The most extreme example of this is that we are all certain of death – and even, expanding things a bit, about the decline of civilization, the destruction of the environment, and the inevitable ostracism of the sun – but are still unable to avoid the end. What keeps us from losing hope in the fact of this inescapable truth? A belief in the interim, in the fact that, in the meantime, things happen that are worth experiencing.)

- Sergio Chejfec, The Planets



.

Resistance as Paradox

.



1.
The paradox is as follows: we, as artists and viewers alike, know that art is fundamentally conservative, yet we still want to believe that it is radical and revolutionary. Within the space of this paradox there is room for a great deal to happen.


2.
Art is conservative because the moment you call something art (or theatre, literature, etc.) it has already been contained. The things it can change, and the ways it can change our thinking, have already been limited. Art is the corner in which transgression and questioning are allowed, at times even encouraged, and making art is like being told to go stand in that corner.


3.
The recent, romantic history of art is a history of alleged transgression. So many of today’s standard art moves began as small deviances and transgressions. And while it does seem there are now no rules left to break, more to the point is that knowing a transgression, if successful, will soon be canonized and therefore de-fanged, drains all energy from the gesture.


4.
Politics requires efficacy. Trying to change things entails immense frustration. The tension between this lived frustration and potential for efficacy often feels absurd.


5.
Politics as a spirit of resistance, as a desire to open up possibilities. And yet: resistance, in order to remain resistant, must always be unfinished, a work-in-progress, because if you win then you're in power and somebody else has to resist against you. (I am wondering if this paradox might ease the inherent frustration involved in any act of sustained resistance.) Something similar might be said of opening up possibilities: once they have been opened one has to move on. There is something restless, unsustainable, about such modes of political thinking.


[Unfinished.]



.

Protest and Projects

.



1. 
Your rent goes up, you now need to work more hours to pay it, which means less free hours to protest the underlying political changes that led to the increase. A vicious cycle. When you are unemployed do you have time to protest or must you spent that time looking for work. There is something about time, about everyone remaining overextended, that keeps the status quo in place. When you are busy all the time, stopping, even for a moment, produces anxiety. Being precariously busy for money is the ego-gratifying trap that keeps each life in place, little time to think, little time to dream of anything else. And what would something else look like? Weekends and vacations are only shadows. And yet the hands want to work. There is one kind of anxiety when the overwork addiction momentarily pauses, and another kind when one genuinely does not feel useful in the world. Or to feel one's use in perfectly doing nothing, more perfectly then anyone has ever done nothing for as long as life exists. Some have too much work, others too little. Some die of obesity, others of starvation. And, in the end, we all die a natural death of too much time.



2.
We are working on things. We are working on projects. Some of these projects will be seen by a few people and some by a few more. These few and few more are all, also, working on projects, only some of which we will see. In ten years most of these projects will still exist, in twenty years less, in fifty years I would guess, generously, less than half, and in one hundred years considerably less than that. In two hundred years we will be lucky if one or two of these projects made by us today, made by those who come to see our projects, or by those who go see their projects, are still being viewed or considered by anyone. And yet now there are hundreds if not thousands. Perhaps some will exist in an archive or library waiting to be rediscovered. Maybe it won't be one or two, maybe ten or twenty, I have been accused of being too pessimistic in the past. Will the world two hundred years from now still be livable, recognizable, and why doesn't this question matter more to how we proceed today? One truism might be: projects have no future; but any historical period in art has produced a majority of works that were left behind. Art is what survives, is a quote I once heard attributed to Duchamp, and he has certainly done so, survived, at least until now. Is there a point of no return, past which one's survival is genuinely assured? Might we still forget about Rembrandt, about Kafka, about art?
 


.

Kinds

.



I don’t even know what kind of writer I am.

Maybe I'm the kind that doesn’t know.
 


.

Four sentences

.



In entertainment culture, superheroes become dominant during times of war.



Agent provocateurs promoted violence, which was in turn used to justify greater state repression.



I feel extremely alienated by the dominant discourse, but I also feel somewhat alienated from a long series of other, less dominant discourses.



Like planting a flag on an artificial moon whose purpose is to host flags, and now it’s all just covered in flags.



.

Lene Berg quote

.



I think that one should defend the right of art, and actually of every one of us, to be eccentric, odd and even boring. That art is associated with society’s elite is a sociological fact. This does not mean that I as an artist must respect the same boundaries. For me art is a place where I have been able to work quite freely with issues that are not yet fully digested. Mainstream reality is very constricted. In art you do not necessarily have to follow fixed patterns, and the requirements for distribution are not as narrow and dogmatic as with film and television. But every field has its limitations, codes and power struggles. In order for interesting things to arise, these things must be challenged.

- Lene Berg



.

Dora García quote

.



Whatever meaning we give to outsider art — art made by psychotics; art made by non-professional, untrained artists; art made by the socially marginalized; art that is not art because it was never conceived as art; art made spontaneously, that is, without knowledge of what art is supposed to be; art that is defined as art by other people (insiders) instead of its maker (an outsider) — whatever meaning we give to outsider art, it says much more about mainstream art than about whatever is outside it.

Logically speaking, then, “mainstream art” (or art tout court?) should be made by sane people; trained and professional people; socially successful people; mainstream art is art that has been art since the moment of its conception; un-intuitive art, that is, art made with well-grounded knowledge of what art is supposed to be; art that is defined as art by its maker (an insider).

No wonder then, that the truth about art might sound like: radical artists profoundly mistrust the ideology of art.

- Dora García



.

David Shields quote

.
 


We live in a culture that is completely mediated and artificial, rendering us (me, anyway; you, too?) exceedingly distracted, bored, and numb. Straight-forward fiction functions only as more bubble wrap, nostalgia, retreat. Why is the traditional novel c. 2013 no longer germane (and the postmodern novel shroud upon shroud)? Most novels' glacial pace isn't remotely congruent with the speed of our lives and our consciousness of these lives. Most novels' explorations of human behavior still owe far more to Freudian psychology that they do to cognitive science and DNA. Most novels treat setting as if where people now live matters as much to us as it did to Balzac. Most novels frame their key moments as a series of filmable moments straight out of Hitchcock. And above all, the tidy coherence of most novels--highly praised ones in particular--implies a belief in an orchestrating deity, or at least a purposeful meaning to existence that the author is unlikely to possess, and belies the chaos and entropy that surround and inhabit and overwhelm us. I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.

- David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life 



.

Excerpts from All the Stories by Dora García

.



Two messengers were sent with two different messages: the one should tell 'You are all mortals', and the other 'You will live forever'. Only the first one reaches us, the second messenger is still trying to deliver his message.



In a far away country, men are so wicked that babies refuse to be born.



There is not just one universe, but many, all threaded together like pearls on a string, and then tangled.



Two people wait in the street for a theatrical event to start, impatient to see the actors, who are said to be very good. As they grow tired of waiting, they realize that the theatrical event has already started, and they they are the actors.



A way is found to freeze aging. All people look like eighteen, although of course there are real eighteens and fake eighteens. A test circulates among people to distinguish the fake from the real, the real eighteens being highly appreciated as sexual companions.



A man takes the train every day to his job and back. Every day the train goes through a tunnel for about two minutes. Then one day the tunnel does not seem to ever end.



Twin sisters present themselves to the world as one single woman. One of the sisters represents the outspoken, social, successful self; the other sister takes care of the tender, familiar, sexual and emotional side. When one of the sisters kills herself, the other has to cope with all aspects of the fictive personality they had both created.



Technology is irrevocably changing the world. Including human feelings.



Tanks enter the city to extinguish a revolution. Citizens fight the tanks with stones, and then one soldier comes out of one of the tanks, crying: Why do you throw stones at us? Don't you realize we are here because we love you?



http://www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1556
http://doragarcia.org/allthestories



.

Walking Stewart and The Roll of a Tennis Ball Through the Moral World

.



He did still have some visitors to break up his loneliness, though. His old friend John Stewart was in the city for a while, and - how time was changing him! Strange to think of all that had passed since their days together in London, reading the day's papers and philosophizing until the wee hours of the morning at the White Bear coffeehouse on Piccadilly. Back in 1790, Stewart had been perhaps the only man in London who could draw more stares than Paine himself. Tall, muscular, and exotic, Stewart had lived the kind of life found only in adventure fiction. He'd shipped out to Madras as a young clerk for the East India Company in 1763, only to decide that - as he announced brusquely in a letter to company directors - he was "born for nobler pursuits than to be a copier of invoices and bills of landing to a company of grocers, haberdashers, and cheese-mongers." And he was right: joining an Indian prince as a secretary, he rose through the ranks to become an army general and a prime minister - before, incredibly, throwing it all over to walk on foot through the mountains of Persia and Turkey, the deserts of Arabia and Egypt, deep into Ethiopia and into the terra incognita of central Africa, and then back around the Adriatic and Mediterranean to Paris. When he reached London, he was dubbed by the incredulous press "Walking Stewart." Never was there a more apt name; for he later hiked through Lapland and down into central Asia, and after sailing to New York walked all the way down to Paraguay. Walking Stewart became, as his friend Thomas De Quincey put it, the first circumambulator of the globe. Stewart attributed his survival to two things that struck anyone else back then as incomprehensible: a vegetarian diet, and an utter refusal to ever carry a weapon.

Yes, they'd made quite a pair back then. Paine, a failed grocer and customs officer who had moved to America and overthrown the monarchy, and Stewart, who paraded through Piccadilly in Armenian garb, his mannerisms mixed with those of all the exotic lands he'd walked through, and his speech and accent now a mélange from the innumerable languages he'd learned. It was muttered among onlookers that Paine had become some sort of inventor, going about trying to sell iron bridges - and Stewart, well, nobody knew quite what to make of him at all. The man wouldn't talk of his fantastic travels; instead, he was always distributing bizarre pamphlets he'd privately printed, bearing titles like The Roll of a Tennis Ball Through the Moral World. The few who could read past their strange diction and publication date - for Stewart had invented his own calendar - found all sorts of curious ideas inside. Stewart found it incomprehensible that women put up with child care, and believed the state should establish daytime nurseries so that mothers and fathers might work or improve their minds. He saw nothing wrong with prostitution, and considered it a typical city business like lamplighting or driving a taxi - indeed, he saw little wrong with sex, and so believed there should be "promiscuous intercourse... that the population might not be come redundant."

And now, as they sat aged in Manhattan, Paine and his old friend still warmly disagreed on many issues: Walking Stewart had always been dubious of Paine's cries for overthrowing kings, and he thought Paine's support of voting rights was absurd. What would it come to, Stewart scoffed - giving the vote to women and apprentices as well? And while Stewart was a confirmed atheist, Paine still believed in a God - in an animating moral force, if you will - he just didn't believe in the Bible or in clergy.

But they were both misunderstood geniuses of a sort; Paine found his books banned in England and despised in America, and Stewart brooded over the fate of his own pamphlets as well. He had a notion, he said, of preserving them for posterity. Stewart bid his readers, when done reading him, to bury his books in their gardens at a depth of seven or eight feet. They were to tell no one else of the location; but then, on their deathbeds, they were to breathe the secret to a trusted few. These fellows would keep the secret burial place until their deathbeds years later, and would communicate it again - down though the centuries, and the millennia, a secret society of philosophers passing down at death the sacred memory of the locations of Stewart's writings. Oh - the Circumambulator then feared - but what if someday my works prove unreadable because the English language itself has moldered away by then? He thereupon decided that first his readers should translate the works into Latin, then bury them.

Paine watched his strange friend return to England. Poor John! a traveling ascetic whose only real pleasure had been in music - the man was going deaf now. Their times were drawing near now... too near, in fact. Word came back from across the ocean months later that Stewart's ship had been dashed to pieces on its way to Liverpool. It sounded like he hadn't survived, hadn't even had the chance to pass on his secret burial spots to his brotherhood.

- Paul Collins, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine



.

Judge McMahon and the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement

.



…this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.

- Judge McMahon, as cited in the Wired article ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Ruling Lets Feds Keep Mum on Targeted-Killing Legal Rationale



.

I want to start again (possible opening for a new book.)

.



I want to start again. I want to write a book that has nothing to do with any of the books I’ve written before. This is the kind of book you write when you think you might soon be dead.

A book to make enemies, to take revenge on people who most likely don’t deserve it. Should I keep the names the same or change them? I will change the names. The world is small enough. Those who care about such things will figure it out. Gossip is a false mystery that must be solved.

A few seconds ago I felt confident I would openly slander people and now, still on the first page, I am no longer sure it is a good idea, this oscillation being so familiar it hurts.

I’m still on the first page and, already, I know I basically won’t slander anyone. And yet, still, I want to start again. I always want to start again.

For me, over the course of a lifetime, five books feels like the right number for a single author to write. I have now written five: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, Polyamorous Love Song and Rich and Poor. (I have also written three others, a very long time ago, under another name, which I don’t count or think about.) I have written five books and therefore am done.

Yet writing these books has been a kind of therapy. Having something to work on each day, to struggle with, give focus, take my mind from my more terrifying, regular, existential mental habits.

I don’t think of my books as being for the benefit of my mental health. I think of them, mainly, as being for readers. To read, be provoked by, possibly enjoy. Five books feels like enough. It feels unnecessary to continue, and yet, obviously, I can’t quite stop.

There are people I want to slander, who I did not mention in any of my previous, more polite, more fictional, less neurotic, books. This is not a good reason to write book number six.

I have decided all those I intend to slander I will refer to as X. There are at least five or six different individuals, possibly as many as twenty, here all referred to as X. In this way it is a bit like I am slandering the entire world.

Of course, the real person I hope to slander is myself.




.

Penguins

.



At the coffee place
on Christmas day
on one of three televisions
a movie I had seen most of
once before on a plane
Jim Carey as a rich jerk
who's humanized by a gaggle
of CGI penguins
a movie for children
with a simple lesson
the rich are not destroying the artic
not destroying the penguins
but rather saving them
and being humanized in the process
brought closer to their families
a shitty, stupid movie
pure propaganda
and both times I saw it
I cried



.

From an article in Der Spiegel about US drone pilot Brandon Bryant

.


Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world…

[...]

[H]e remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact…

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.

“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?


- From an article in Der Spiegel about US drone pilot Brandon Bryant as cited by Glen Greenwald in The Guardian



.

Some favourite things from 2012

.



[The last, and perhaps only, time I made one of these lists was back in 2010. Not sure why I'm doing it again now, but it seems to have happened. The list is in no particular order and most of these things didn't actually appear in 2012. But they were all new to me.]



Books
The Transformation*** – Juliana Spahr
Debt: The First 5000 Years – David Graeber
Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film – Masha Tupitsyn
The King of a Rainy Country – Brigid Brophy
Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant – Edmond Caldwell
In the Time of the Blue Ball – Manuela Draeger
Event Factory – Renee Gladman
The Event – Juan José Saer
The Ship – Hans Henny Jahn
Mercury - Ariana Reines 
Summer of Hate – Chris Kraus
Selected Works – José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Blast Counterblast – Edited by Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke
Progress of Stories – Laura Riding


Albums
Las Malas Amistades – Maleza
THEESatisfaction – awE naturalE
Fatima Al Qadiri – Genre-Specific Xperience
Brand New Wayo: Funk, Fast Times & Nigerian Boogie Badness 1979-1983
Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974-1984
Frank Ocean – Code Orange
Solid Space – Space Museum
Gigi – Maitnent
Angel Haze - Reservation
Roberto Cacciapaglia – The Ann Steel Album
Hospitality – s/t
BLU – No York


Plus:
A YouTube playlist for 2013
Not to be confused with the YouTube playlist for 2012
A YouTube playlist of Japanese music I made in Japan
Some (all time) favourite books
A list of visual artists
I listened to a great deal of music that I discovered at Bodega Pop
And I recorded all my songs for Every Song I’ve Ever Written




*** The Transformation was most likely the best book I read this year.


.

Big Brother where art thou? vanishes and then returns

.



Big Brother where art thou? - a project entirely on Facebook that I made last year in collaboration with Lene Berg - had mysteriously disappeared for awhile but has now returned in it's entirety. To view the project you now have click on "Highlights" and scroll down to "Posts by Others." You can find it here.



.

Stories I started but couldn't finish.

.



1.
I want to start again. I want to write a book that has nothing to do with any of the books I’ve written before. This is the kind of book you write when you think you might be dead soon. A book to make enemies, to take revenge on people who most likely don’t deserve it…



2.
I don’t remember exactly when I started calling it The Pinocchio Syndrome, this: I want to be a real boy / I want to be a real novel thing. I don’t want to write strange, experimental, impossible to categorize, novel-like-things anymore. I don’t want to be marginalized like that. I want to write a real novel with real characters and a real story that will be taken seriously by the literary world. I think every writer of difficult-to-categorize fiction struggles to some extent with The Pinocchio Syndrome (along with the exceptions to every rule.)



3.
I am fascinated by the novel Mount Analogue by René Daumal and, more specifically, but its ending. As is well known, Daumal died in 1948, in the middle of writing Mount Analogue, and the books ends mid-sentence. The last line is:

[...]

I have often wondered if it would be possible to end something I wrote mid-sentence, not because I had died, but for some other reason.



4.
I have been thinking so much about solar energy, about how much of what I read, especially from a mainstream perspective, seems misplaced. When I read that we will not be able to generate enough energy using solar and wind, I feel they are completely missing the point. The points are:

1) That these new, sustainable technologies will force us to use less, will demonstrate – on a real, lived, experiential basis – that resources are renewable but not infinite.

2) That there is more autonomy, and less greedy profit, in a decentralized power grid.

3) That the many exorbitant expenses of polluting the air and water are simply not being factored into the standard calculations. Environmental devastation is expensive on every level.

But it is mainly the first point I obsess over. Let’s say you have solar panels on the roof of your house. Each day, you will use only as much energy as these panels generate. When it runs out you go to sleep and wait for the sun to come up tomorrow. The energy is not infinite, not available twenty-four hours a day. There are limits and you learn, out of necessity, how to live within them.

This, for me, is the main lesson of sustainable technologies. They would force us to live differently, to be aware of daily limits, to find solutions that acknowledge real limitations. They do not make life easier in every way. They make life harder in some ways, ways that force a fundamental shift in how we see the world and our place within it. I also suspect that working within a series of concrete, reasonable limitations would bring along with it a kind of reality and even joy.



.

Winter

.



During the winter, I always wish I lived in Lisbon.



.

KopfkinoTrailer#1 by Lene Berg

The title of the Norwegian film artist Lene Berg’s new film Kopfkino (2012) literally means head film, or film in the brain. Kopfkino was filmed over the course of two days in Berlin with a set of exceptional characters. The basic concept is simple: eight women exchange stories about their line of work, which is to fulfill their clients’ sexual fantasies. Seated behind a long table, as in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c.1498), they are dressed as the various female clichés that they impersonate: a schoolgirl, a circus director, a general or a princess. The scripted conversation evolves in front of the camera without any direct intervention by the director. The women use their own words and experiences but the situation in which we observe them is staged. We are on a film set. Real experiences and actual stories come together in a universe of illusions, fictions and fantasies.



.

Bookshop

.



Sad angry bookshop
world against world and
again world
who are the scumbags who
think they can hide all the
good books
a poem is a world without poetry
sexual fantasy about someone
I met for less than ten minutes
and who is quickly receding into the past
a poem is a world again
against the books that are read too much
towards secret worlds
and future hits
and future time
we are here



.

Paul Celan quote

.



Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.

- Paul Celan


.

Isabelle Stengers on diplomacy

.



And this is something that I link to the question of diplomacy – which is about the risks of war and peace. Diplomacy means that in such and such a situation war is the normal thing to do, but that it may be possible that peace has a chance. In other words, peace is possible not probable. When you have a police operation, peace is what you enforce. Today many wars are in fact police operations, pedagogical operations. ‘They’ will learn how to behave. It is easy to put yourself in the place of people having to face a zero-death war: stop fighting or you will be crushed. No place for diplomacy here, because diplomacy presupposes a peace to be invented, not the weak part bowing down in front of the strongest part. I think of the diplomat as a figure of inventing peace as an event. And a diplomat will never say to another diplomat, of the adverse camp, ‘In your place I would do this or that’. They know they cannot share their risks because those risks are related with what the population they belong to will be able to accept, the risks this population will accept to take. If there is a practice where hope is important it is diplomacy – hope and not faith, because it is a matter of becoming able, not of ‘seeing the truth’.

An important point here that makes diplomacy possible is the difference between sense and meaning. When you have a war situation, when ‘This means war’, there cannot logically be a place for peace – it is a matter of winning or being defeated. But the diplomats are the ones who can play between meaning and sense. You try and risk keeping the sense while a small modification of meaning may produce a possible articulation in the place of the contradiction from which war did follow, logically. But the population to which the diplomat belongs must accept this modification, must accept that sense has been preserved while meanings have been modified, and this is a risk for this population. If they refuse, the diplomat has failed; she can even be called a traitor. So the risks the diplomat is able to take depends on the trust she has in the population to which she belongs. Trust is always the condition of experimentation, of taking chance. Trust must be created for things to change.

- Isabelle Stengers, from an interview in Hope: New Philosophies For Change 



.

Olivier Assayas on the two paths (for art today) that coexist, and are not mutually exclusive.

.



My point of view today, and this had determined a good deal of my relation to cinema and to fiction in general, is that when it comes to art, and particularly the relation of art to the world, two paths coexist, and are not mutually exclusive.

The first path would be the one that shaped the 20th century: that of avant-gardes and their constant interrogation of the relation between the arts – their role, their borders – and the world: also their interrogation of their own nature. One might say that the situationist moment is its final stage: there was formulated the answer that remains, of its kind, unsurpassable.

But the very nature of humanity is to survive the unsurpassable. There are novels after Proust and Joyce, there is poetry after Mallarmé – even if the aforementioned, each in his own way, through a transcendent oeuvre, defines a resolution of those questions that constituted the inaccessible horizon of their predecessors. I am describing this in a doubtlessly summary fashion; however, it seems to me that beyond supersession there lies not necessarily another supersession but, rather, access to a virgin terrain, a lunar landscape where everything remains to be built anew, sometimes even using the same tools as before.

Situationism identified precisely the path to supersession of art and proceeded to carry it out. From the vantage point of the plastic arts, let’s say that we are today in an after which is not only unable to find itself but has often given up even seeking itself, sparing an individual, fragmentary salvation only at the expense of a pretty remarkable reduction of its ambitions: a space nonetheless sufficient for the expression of specific genius in some great, entirely isolated artists.


The second path, which grows in the shadow of the first and often in ignorance of it, is that consisting in the simple representation of the world where humanity simply concerns itself with the human, with the timeless means that, in every era, have allowed it to reach these ends, always renewed, always the same.

What I mean to say is that beyond all theory, beyond any historical perspective on art, there resides within a contemporary artist the same question that posed itself to a gentleman of the Tang Dynasty: how to capture this moment, the face of a beloved, a country road in an autumn mist, the corner of the street where you live. Or, to pose in a more specifically contemporary context the same timeless question: how to seize the thoughts that traverse us while we are seated in a metro, rushing through the underground tunnels of the big city?

This is where to find the simple, limpid need for figuration as one of the immutable functions of being human. But does this idea actually distance me all that much from situationism?

Didn’t Debord write La Societé du spectacle while simultaneously making autobiographical films devoted to preserving from the ravages of time, to capture in a flash for all eternity, life as it offered itself to him at certain moments of grace? And did he not also make these films so that, in them, might radiate the glow of the faces of those he had loved? Isn’t that exactly where their poetry vibrates most dearly? All this I see clearly today, even if very few know how to articulate it, even among those who regard themselves as being closest to Debord’s ideas.

- Olivier Assayas, A Post-May Adolescence
 


.

Success

.



I didn’t succeed
I failed
and will fail again
my work will be forgotten
no one will read it
it will all disappear



.

of the

.



Tomb of the unknown drone pilot.



.

Idea for a stage project: Three Old Movies

.



At a large German Schauspielhaus, three separate dramaturge’s are instructed to pick one old film each. The film must be feature length. They do not tell each other what old film they have chosen, and also do not tell anyone else. They each assemble a cast to perform the film, one actor for every roll. Each dramaturge works in isolation from the other two, yet employing the following, identical method: the film is projected onto the wall of the rehearsal hall and the actors are instructed to imitate it to the absolute best of their ability, imitating the timing as well as the performances. For the entire rehearsal period they simply imitate the film over and over again, until they have created a more or less precise stage facsimile of it. On the night of the premiere, on a large empty stage, all three casts simultaneously perform their films, on the same stage, at the same time. Each separate cast is instructed to perform their film as precisely as possible, while at the same time remaining aware of everything else happening on stage, avoiding collisions, etc. Many unexpected and fascinating things will occur as the three separate films overlap, as well and many moments of pure incomprehensibility. It will be a spectacle.



.

Harry Mathews quote

.



It’s true, as I’ve told others, that knowing one knows nothing is the best way to be, since life, minute after minute, is never more than being inspired to rediscover what one thought one already knew. I did know it, but… No, not “but”: and I’m about to know it again, right now.

 – Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day



.