another quick little mc25 essay

This is about visuality in modernity, in terms of the spectacle and panopticon as deployed within the scene of the Parisian café-concert of the late 19th century (large drinking halls which were half-theater/half-giant-bar, where the new bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie could come to revel in a chaotic, inebriated display of class status, or false class status, based on new forms of commodity exchange). The café-concert was a favorite subject of the Impressionists, so I analyze here a painting by Manet of which I've posted a copy below the essay. It also touches briefly on the flâneur in Baudelaire and Benjamin.

One of the most salient features of modern visuality, post-1840, is the incorporation of capital, commodity, and exchange into the field. Furthermore, this includes a stratification of the classes, yet also a generalization and universalization of visuality based on the fluidity and confusion of that multiplicity.

Foucault's gruesome depiction of the 1757 public torture and execution of a man convicted of regicide in Paris is a prime example of pre-modern (Foucault: "Classical") spectacle. It is simply the display of power as enacted by the upper class for the masses below, in order to teach a strict lesson. As such, there are basically two separate modes of spectactorship in play at this gathering, though both rely on identification with one of the on-stage representatives. There is, on the one hand, the spectator of the upper class - who takes the place of the executioner, and can be characterized by the sentiment, "Good riddance; the brute got what he deserved; hopefully it will serve as an example to those of his ilk." On the other hand, there is the spectator of the under class - who takes the place of the executed, and can be characterized by the sentiment, "My body is malleable like the body I see; if I attempt to take the place of the executioner, such as this man did, I could easily meet the same end as he." (Regicide, however, was probably the surest way for a member of the under class to gain a role on stage, and moreover the upper class relied on this sort of spectacle for the maintenance of its empowerment in the hearts of the masses). It is thus evident that considerations of class were not only part and parcel of the pre-modern spectacle, but were in fact vital to its operation.

Those considerations were not to disappear in the ensuing century - but they did alter their activity, as new forms of the question of class - indeed, new classes - began to sprout and grow from the old crack in the facade. Foucault describes these new mutations as the beginnings of a surveillance society, as opposed to his formulation of Classical spectacle - and in direct rebuttal to Guy Debord's assertion that modernity is the engenderment of the "society of the spectacle." Yet with all due respect to Foucault's theorization of surveillance, perhaps it is a bit imprudent to so strongly oppose these two regimes of modern visuality. Indeed, Jonathan Crary notes the coincidence of modern surveillance and modern spectacle i, which prompts his shift in use from the term "spectator" to the term "observer" - a term which might be taken denote a more present (more empowered) viewer. The observer is someone who sees while being seen, or in fact sees in order to be seen. In a certain respect this is applicable to the modern method of consumption, of which visuality becomes an act; to see is no longer to passively identify oneself with an "on-stage" representative, but it is now to own, or in other words to incorporate the spectacle (if it can still be termed such) into and as one's self. Foucault in fact does touch on this, if only in a roundabout way, with his theorization of the panoptic principle: the individual assumes and internalizes the role of both observer and observed - he knows that at any moment he might be the object of scrutiny, and therefore he lives his life as if that were always the case, in a sort of performance of being for the gaze of a generalized and unidentified society. The stage has extended so that the audience is now its own spectacle.

This engenders a certain amount of irony on what is still the physical stage. T.J. Clark comments on this phenomenon with his analysis of the café-concert. He quotes Degas' brother's letter to his parents: "I go with Edgar... to the café-chantant to hear idiotic songs... and other absurd nonsense."ii This inanity and frivolity perhaps comes as a relief to the ultra-seriousness and fixed attention of the pre-modern spectacle. Modernity poses a stratified range of attention to counter the formerly socially split acknowledgments of the spectacular display of power. In the café-concert, society is recreated as an intermingling under one roof of carelessness, hence the usual allowance to see as much of the performance as the attendant could consume, or afford to consume, in libations. Furthermore, the on-stage performance was not even the main spectacle - the spectacle had instead become the audience itself. Clark quotes: "What an atmosphere! It was my first time in this place, the first time I had seen women in a café with smoking permitted... Twenty years ago, you could have sought in vain for such a spectacle in all of Paris."iii This sentiment is reflected perfectly in Manet's painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: the barmaid of the café-concert, dressed enticingly yet wearing the dull absent expression of the unattendant attendant, is the central feature of the picture. She stands before an array of consumable intoxicants, which are reflected in the overwhelming mirror behind her - along with the swirling costumes of the audience and a refracted view of both the barmaid's surprisingly disheveled rear and, finally, a gentleman purveyor, who assumes our misguided gaze in his preparation to make a purchase of something delectable. As an afterthought, green shoes hang lazily from a trapeze in the upper left-hand corner of the canvas.

Clark goes on to quote: "The most curious aspect of the picture for the flâneur who cares to observe is the audience outside."iv Clark writes that Thérése, the most famed of the café-concert singers, "claimed to be singing with them in view"v - she purported to identify most strongly with those poor onlookers. This is indicative of the new fluidity and nonchalance of class relations, and indeed class identifications, in the modernity of the café-concert. The rise of the bourgeoisie (and the petit-bourgeoisie) is essential to this change, as it allowed for a class devoted to value, or rather, evaluation. Thus, the under class was no longer the hopeless beggars that the upper class had previously made them out to be; their position could now be romanticized in a double characterization of melancholy and simplicity (hence Clark's discussion of Raffaëlli vi). The bourgeoisie moreover bridged the gap between the upper and under classes and created a space of movement between the two. That type of movement was defined by the leisurely stroll of the flâneur, who could conspicuously and silently consume images and therefore turn the visual world into a world of commodity. On the other hand, this newly generalized visuality called for a new type of monotonized attitude toward it - "a flat and eloquent sadness we call ennui,"vii as Clark quotes. Furthermore: "The physiognomy of the audience in general is a kind of troubled torpor. Nowadays these people come alive only as a result of shock."viii

This newly democratized visual consumption, along with the idea of shock, are key to Walter Benjamin's arguments on modernity. He, however, nuances and updates the idea of the modern flâneur for his milieu of the 1930's, and supposes that, in the 20th century's age of mechanical automation, the "composure" of the flâneur - in other words, his "ennui" or "melancholy," "has given way to manic behavior."ix He writes that the flâneur "plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy" - and that he is, as in Baudelaire's description, "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness."x This is related to the deprival of the aura of the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility - and its replacement with the effect of shock. In other words, the boredom which ensues from the irony and generalization of the spectacular in the mid-nineteenth century soon calls for "a new and urgent need for stimuli," from which "perception in the form of shock was established as a formal principle."xi

i Crary, p.18
ii Clark, p.208
iii Ibid.
iv Ibid., p.213
v Ibid.
vi Ibid., p.26
vii Ibid., p.209
viii Ibid.
ix Benjamin, p.174
x Ibid., p.177
xi Ibid.

my script

im hoping to shoot this sunday, and I would fully appreciate anyone's comments or criticism. the numbers after some of the sentences are footnotes. and if you want I cant explain that, but I'd rather have you guys come in cold at this point.

Tyler Henry
Shooting Script for "The Divider King" (tentative title)
[perhaps a better title is, "On We"]


INT. - BLANK ROOM (THE ETERNAL DAY)

A room is empty yet unkempt. The unpainted walls are painted white. The walls are thus brick, and through the cracks - actually, rotten holes - in the wood, ink shadows engulf trains of thought, steaming monotonously miraculously through a shining single window frame.

Option #1:

Camera is outside the window, looking in through the sash: sees a man, empty yet unkempt, sitting in muted rags, naked. He clenches his knees and pulls his mouth into his elbow, rocking back and forth by his heels. He stares away from the camera, disgusted. Close up of his eyes (he shuts them), and mouth, which cannot be seen. Camera is outside the window, looking in through the sash: sees a man, empty yet unkempt, sitting in muted rags, naked. He clenches his knees, rocking back and forth by his heels, and turns his mouth from his elbow in order to babble silently, his eyes closed as he knows that he is unaware that he is seen. Jump cut: the camera takes a step closer through the window (it in fact zooms, but the zoom is cut). The man is no longer speaking. His eyes are closed, but ours are not, and we watch in silence as he turns his head left and right and rocks back and forth by his heels. We feel no pity. We are disgusted.
A long time later, many frames from then, he begins to speak:

MAN:
'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo.
[whispers] Gotta do something.

He scratches his hairline and runs his hair back through his hand until he finds a suitable strand, and he plucks it without flinching and drops it with a roll of his opposable thumb. He is stupid and therefore contemplates himself. He plucks another hair in the same motion.

MAN:
[sighs]
Gotta do something.

He licks his upper lip in an odd animal manner. Again, and again and again he licks it in quick plops. His eyes glaze over and diverge. He blinks. He blinks and blinks and blinks in quick snaps.

MAN:
[clears his throat with his mouth closed so that his nose is aggravated and forced to expel air and mucous]
Gotta do something.

The man's breathing becomes labored. He breathes as if the air is cigarette smoke and he's been trying to quit. The man stands slowly, harshly, and stretches his arms out and whimpers, and that shot is then played in reverse so that the man sits back down again. He is motionless. He neither breathes nor holds his breath. Breathing has become as stupid as it is overt, and the memory of it fails successfully, as if it were anything else. Silence. What's the difference between a palindrome and a chiasmus, anyway?

MAN:
What's the difference between a palindrome and a chiasmus, anyway?

Silence.

MAN:
[whispers]
Silence.

Silence.

MAN:
[whispers]
Silence.

Silence.

MAN:
That's it. It's time. It's past time. I should have done it already. [groans] I can't anymore. I haven't any inspiration. [breathes in and out] Nope, not even an inkling. What's it worth anyway? Wouldn't it be better just to sit and do nothing. [pause] Tell me, isn't that impossible? Sitting is doing something. And I'm talking, that's something - isn't it? Am I talking? [quoting] "Any ING is someth-ING." If only somebody was listening, they'd give me a prize. A congratulations. Jobs well done. Awards ceremonies, in fact. Honor even. Indeed: justice. The problem is - obviously - not here, then. It's in this old trap of a system. I'm caught in it. I'm lost. I'm lost in it. [pause] Aren't we all.

Silence.

MAN:
Yes, yes we are. Just rambling around rambling, that's for sure. The only sure. That's only for sure. That's the only sure... sureness... sure-ity.... sure-thing, I guess.

Silence.

MAN:
That's it. It's time. I'm gonna do it. No more gotta, just gonna. I'm gonna do somep thin. [carefully] I - am - going - to - do - some - thing.

Long silence.

MAN:
Has it been long? What have I done? What have I... produced? [strokes his chin] Hrrmmmm... [strokes his chin, squints his eyes] Hrrmmmmmmmmm... [strokes his chin, squints his eyes, cocks his head] Hrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Silence. He closes his eyes.

MAN:
I've lived my life searching for something to say. And now it's come to this.

DISEMBODIED VOICE:
Come to what? Come to what? What has it come to? What are you going to do? You've done no searching. You've done nothing your whole life, and now you have the utter indecency, the utmost presumptuousness, the unfettered flatulence to say - out loud, mind you - that you are going to actually do something about this, this abominable patheticism into which you have graciously ingratiated yourself.

MAN:
I didn't say I was going to do anything. I just said, "it has come to this."

VOICE:
Thus implying that this is in fact a moment of action for you, our beloved, yet pitiful protagonist.

MAN:
No! I didn't imply. You see, that's the problem with you.

He looks away from the camera out the window, as if he were a member of an audience heckling a performer.

MAN:
You always assume. Implications, insinuations - [pauses, searches for another word] - so on, and so forth. Innuendo. It's all just babble. None of it's real. You're only hearing what you already think. Can't we just have a real conversation for once? You know, really express ourselves? Our utmost being? Why does it always have to be meaningless vibrations and pissed away opportunities?

VOICE: [pauses]
[matter-of-factly] Well, you said earlier you were going to do something.

[awkward pause]

MAN:
Did I? I don't remember.

VOICE:
Yes, yes you did exactly that. Your problem is that you can't remember - you don’t know whether it’s now or before or after! So much repetition - inanity - absurdity! Insanity! It’s enough to make us seasick!

MAN:
[has been rocking back and forth, now stops and loses balance momentarily - remains motionless for a few beats]
[moment of clarity] Ah! But how you’ve missed the point! The point is... you... were here... then... Weren’t you? [considers this] And yet... Well, shouldn’t you be congratulating me... for what I’ve done? Aggrandizing me for the achievements I’ve accomplished!

VOICE:
[angrily] You’ve done nothing!

MAN:
Haven’t I?

VOICE:
How should I know? There’s no way to tell now... it's too late.

Silence.

MAN:
Too late now. Now... [considers now] Well, now we’re having this conversation - [proudly] And consequently, I must have done something to instigate it! [pause, snorts] So grant me credit1 - where credit is due.

VOICE:
How do you expect me to grant you credit if you're already so busy taking it? [saving face, quickly] Besides, instigation is nothing, unto itself - it’s merely the precedence to something. Even you should be able to follow that.

MAN:
Perhaps if you told me something I don't already know...

VOICE:
And how am I supposed to know what you don't?

MAN:
Must you ask such stupid questions? They require such stupid answers. If you must know, here's where I'm amiss: What comes before something? [pause, motionless] And then, what comes after? [strokes his chin, as before] Credit. Where credit is due. After all, isn’t taking credit doing something? [raises his forefinger] "Every ING is someth-ING." Certainly it's all the rage these days.

Silence. Inertia.

VOICE:
Then we live in dangerous times. How can we know the truth if we can't be sure where it comes from?

MAN:
Truth? - My good fellow, I must say I don't follow. I speak merely of expression. Allow me that, at least.

VOICE:
How can I prevent it?

MAN:
It's all you're good for.

VOICE:
I expect nothing from you.

MAN:
Precisely my predicament. Now I can't stop doing nothing long enough in order to do something. Why don't you expect something from me instead?

VOICE:
If I expected it, I wouldn't be able to give you credit for it afterwards.

Nonsense.

MAN:
Nonsense.

My friend, let me tell you something - and I've thought long and hard about this - as much thought as I've been able to muster in this old grey bucket of mine. [pauses, thinking, scratches above his left eyebrow] That is...

[pauses]

You see, I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking - to the external act of its materialization into words - I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer - but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely.2

VOICE:
The man who thinks expends himself utterly.3

The MAN is pissing in the corner.

MAN:
May I, at the risk of importuning you, recur to a few matters which we discussed this afternoon?

VOICE:
With all best wishes.4

MAN:
Then I will continue. [stops pissing, shakes, continues pissing] You see, I have felt and accepted these phrases, these ungainly expressions which you criticize. Bear in mind: I have not questioned them. [he is sitting] They come from the deep uncertainty of my thinking. Fortunate indeed when this uncertainty is not replaced by the absolute inexistence from which I sometimes suffer.5

Silence. Inertia. He shakes his leg.

Yet is the substance of my thought so tangled and is its general beauty rendered so inactive by the impurities and uncertainties with which it is marred that it does not manage to exist literally? The entire problem of my thinking is involved. For me, it is no less than a matter of knowing whether or not I have the right to continue thinking.6

VOICE:
As I told you at the very beginning, there are awkward things and disconcerting oddities in your composition.
It is revealed that the man is looking into a mirror and speaking to himself.

MIRROR:
But they seem to me to be due to a certain quest on your part rather than a lack of command over your thoughts.

Reverse shot of the man listening to himself.

HIS VOICE DISEMBODIED:
Obviously you do not, in general, achieve sufficient unity of impression. But I have enough experience to sense that it is not your temperament that prevents you from focusing your abilities upon a simple object, and that with a little patience you will succeed.7

Silence. Inertia.

MAN:
You have just cause for having forgotten me. Before, I made a little confession to you. I hope you will allow me now to complete that confession, to continue it, to plumb my very depths. [shot of mirror image, silently listening to the man] I am attempting to justify myself in your eyes. [shot of man] I care very little whether I seem to anyone to exist. [2 shot] The distance that separates me from myself suffices to cure me of the judgement of others. [to the camera, i.e. mirror POV shot] Please do not regard this as insolence, but rather as the very faithful confession, the painful statement, of a distressing state of mind.

[over the shoulder shot into mirror]

My question was perhaps specious, but it was of you that I asked it, of you and no one else, because of the extreme sensitivity, the almost sickly perceptiveness of your mind.8

Close-up of mirror image listening. Close up of MAN's mouth speaking.

There is something that destroys my thinking, a something which does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me, if I may say so, in abeyance. A something furtive which takes away from me the words which I have found, which diminishes my mental tension, which destroys in its substance the mass of my thinking as it evolves, which takes away from me even the memory of the devices by which one expresses oneself and which render with precision the most inseparable, most localized, most existing modulations of thought. I shall not labor the point. There is no need to describe my state.

I should like to say only as much as is needed for you finally to understand and believe me.

So grant me credit. Recognize, I beg of you, the reality of these phenomena, recognize their furtiveness, their eternal repetition. And so once again here is my question:

Are you familiar with the subtlety, the fragility of the mind? Restore to my mind the concentration of its forces, the cohesion that it lacks, the constancy of its tension, the consistency of its own substance. (And all that is objectively so little.) And tell me whether what is lacking may not be restored all at once?9

MIRROR:
In any case, it is, I think, a fact that a whole category of men are subject to shiftings of the level of being. How often do we not suddenly discover, when mechanically placing ourselves in a familiar psychological attitude, that it has transcended us, or rather that we have become surreptitiously unequal to it! How often does our most habitual personage not appear to us suddenly to be factitious and even fictive, owing to the absence of the spiritual, or 'essential,' resources that were supposed to feed it!

Where does our being go and from where does it return? It is an almost insoluble problem.

He who never feels his soul being broken by the body, invaded by its weakness, is incapable of obtaining any insight into man. One must go below, must look at the underside. One must no longer be able to move, to hope, to believe, in order to perceive. How shall we distinguish our intellectual and moral mechanisms if we are not temporarily deprived of them? The consolation of those who thus experience death gradually must be the fact that they are the only ones who have some notion of how life is made up.

There is no absolute peril except for him who abandons himself; there is no complete death except for him who acquires a taste for dying.10

READ ALOUD:

A CRY

The little celestial poet
Opens the shutters of his heart.
The heavens clash. Oblivion
Uproots the symphony.

Stableman the wild house
That has you guard wolves
Does not suspect the wraths
Smouldering beneath the big alcove
Of the vault that hangs above us.

Hence silence and darkness
Muzzle all impurity
The sky strides forward
At the crossroad of sounds.

The star is eating. The oblique sky
Is opening its flight toward the heights
Night sweeps away the scraps
Of the meal that contented us.

On earth walks a slug
Which is greeted by ten thousand white hands
A slug is crawling
There where the earth vanished.

Angels whom no obscenity summons
Were homeward bound in peace
When rose the real voice
Of the spirit that called them.

The sun lower than the daylight
Volatilized all the sea.
A strange but clear dream
Was born on the clean earth.

The lost little poet
Leaves his heavenly post
With an unearthly idea
Pressed upon his hairy heart.

Two traditions met.
But our padlocked thoughts
Lacked the place required,
Experiment to be tried again.

tragedy and the virtual (updated)

NBC revealed today that it received a number of photographs and quicktime videos in the mail which had been sent to them by the shooter at Virginia Tech (between the two shootings) - it described these materials as a "Multimedia Manifesto," a term which the New York Times quickly adopted for its latest headline. From the New York times blog:

An Image’s Ties to a Dark Movie | 8:07 PM ET

A self-shot photo of Mr. Cho, above, and a still from the Web site of the movie ‘Oldboy.’ (Photos: NBC News, top; Tartan Films)

The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

The poses in the two images are nearly very similar, and the plot of the movie, Oldboy, seems dark enough to merit at least some further study. Following is The Times’s plot summary:

The film centers on a seemingly ordinary businessman, Dae-su (the terrific Choi Min-sik), who, after being mysteriously imprisoned, goes on an extensive, exhausting rampage, seeking answers and all manner of bloody revenge.

It was the hope of a Virginia Tech professor, Paul Harrill, that passing on this observation would shed some light on what led Mr. Cho to kill 32 on Monday before turning the gun on himself.

Of course, this observation may indeed serve to revive the old controversy concerning the influence of media violence (or any representation of unethical behavior) on impressionable spectators. Perhaps it won't be mentioned, however, in those newsworthy debates that Cho Seung-Hui not only reproduced the simulated violence of Old Boy in a physical manner, but also reproduced it virtually by engendering the interminable media coverage surrounding his rampage - which is presently subsuming any and all type of "eye-witness" account (video) of the actual events or the history of the killer's unstable psyche (each witness a "newly christened I-reporter": see below). It seems that this was Cho's aim in sending the "multimedia manifesto" not to the administrative offices at Virginia Tech, but instead to Rockefeller Plaza.
There was a Bank of America video advertisement that played before the video confession that I saw today on the NBC website. It told me that the only "No" you will hear at Bank of America will come before the words payments, fees, and charges. Cho Seung-Hui went on to tell me how he had been denied any options other than the rampage ("I" had denied him, or "we," or NBC, or his peers at Virginia Tech, or the viewers of his video, depending on one's interpretation of his use of the word "you").

also today: At least 164 people are killed when four large bombs explode in mostly Shiite locations of Baghdad.

Also from the new york times running massacre/tragedy blog:

The Citizen Videographer | 5:44 PM ET Jamal Albarghouti, a graduate student in civil engineering at Virginia Tech and newly christened I-reporter at CNN, is telling the network how he got the most widely-distributed footage of the carnage.

Initially, he felt “really safe,” but then realized that he was in a “serious situation” after a loud boom was followed by a cop screaming at him. Watch the video to see for yourself.

A Nokia N70, a cellphone that costs $427 on Amazon, was his tool of choice.

I'll allow you to draw your own conclusions about that post. Do watch the video (it is completely uninformative, of course). Also, I think these other posts are quite interesting, in regards to how the internet is now seen as a site of mourning:


Linking Victims With Myspace | 10:38 AM ET

MyDeathSpace.com, a site that specializes in “respects and tributes to the recently deceased MySpace.com” members, links to the profiles of some of the victims, and posts their profile photos. Of the ones they display, two are not on the campus newspaper’s list at this time: Mary Read and Brian Bluhm.

Hokie Nation Unites | 10:05 AM ET

Adeel Khan, president of Virginia Tech’s student union, just predicted on CNN that 40,000 people would attend a candlelight vigil on campus tonight. He also described how student leaders began organizing for the healing process on the Web minutes after the horrifying news emerged on Monday afternoon.

Several parts of a growing online response are outlined on MTV’s Web site, and the Washington Post gathered excerpts from Facebook pages. Many Facebookers are replacing their profile photos with a a symbol of mourning and solidarity, left.

new york times reviews

Zizek's new movie
for what its worth

so it goes

en memorandum: kurt vonnegut

i had heard that he had died when I was in high school. i was told that he died of smoke inhalation.

he died yesterday, of brain failure.

he claimed that his dick was three inches long and five inches wide.

so it goes.

Lyrics to Songs by Singers I like

I have omitted the chorus in the last song.

1.
alphabet city is haunted
constantina feels right at home
she probably won't say you're wrong
you're already wrong
you're already wrong
and you threw up whatever she shot down, said
show me around
this alphabet town
show me around

there's a name you keep repeating
you've got nothing better to do
you're with someone who'll
hear you say it and
just not mind

her hand on your arm
her hand on your arm

she put her hand on your arm
and told you her name you can't pronounce it
i'll show you around this alphabet town

i'll show you around this alphabet town i
know what you are
i just don't mind

i won't say you're wrong
i know what you want
and it's what i want
so let's go out
i'm ready to go out

i'll show you around this alphabet town
i'll show you around this alphabet town

2.
she took the oldsmobile out past condor avenue
she locked the car and slipped past
into rhythmic quiet two
lights burning
voice dry and hoarse

up through the screen door like a bastard back and forth
the chimes fell over each other
i fell onto my knees
the sound of a car driving off
made me feel disease

sick shouting like you hear at the fairground
now I'm picking up
to put away
anything of yours that's still around
i don't know what to do with your clothes or your letters
it'll make a whisper out of you

she took the oldsmobile out past condor avenue
the fairground's lit a drunk man's fits
by the gates she's driving through
got his hat tipped bottle back in between his teeth

looks like he's buried in the sand
at the beach i can't
think about you driving off
to leave barely awake
to take a little nap
while the road is straight

i wish that car had
never been discovered
they took away the bottle and the hat he was under
that's the one thing that he could never do
and it'll make a whisper out of you

she took the oldsmobile out past condor avenue
cops were running around the scene
looking for some kind of clue they
never get uptight when
a moth gets crushed
unless the lightbulb really loved him very much
i'm lying down
blowing smoke from my cigarette
little whisper smoke signs
that you'll never get

you're in your oldsmobile driving by the moon
headlights burning bright ahead of you
someone's burning out out on condor avenue
trying to make a whisper out of you

what a shitty thing to say
did you really mean it
you never said a word to me about what passed between us
so now i'm leaving you alone
you can do whatever the hell you want to
nahh na na nuh nuh nuh

3.
Anger
he smiles
towering in
shiny metallic purple armor
queen jealousy
envy
waits beside him
her fiery green gown
sneers at
the grassy ground
blue are the
life giving waters
taken for granted
they quietly understand
once happy turquoise armies lay
opposite ready
but wonder why
the fight is on
[...]
my red
so confidently flashes
trophies of war
and ribbons
of euphoria
orange is young
full of daring but
very unsteady for the first go round
my yellow in this case
is not so mellow
in fact i'm trying to say
it's frightened like me
and all of these emotions of mine
keep holding me from
giving my life
to a rainbow like you

ivy film festival

You should all check out the Ivy Film Festival, which will be occurring tomorrow (Monday, 9th) through Sunday the 15th.

here is the schedule
which is not actually entirely complete, as far as I know - but it's getting there.

Some of the events require tickets (mostly Wednesday night onwards), which you can buy tomorrow in the P.O. (they're actually selling out, so I would recommend it) for a dollar a piece. The Keynote and the Awards Ceremony (open bar and limo service!) are actually both free, yet still require tickets. I will be at most or all of this stuff, and I promise it will be fun, though not only for (perhaps even in despite of? - you bastards) that reason.

The documentaries playing tomorrow and Tuesday nights are preludes to the Documentary Panel on Saturday from 2:30 to 4 pm, where the directors will be speaking - supposedly these films are great, so I'd recommend checking em out to see if you want to see the directors on Saturday.

Other highlights include:

Lady Vengeance on the main green Wednesday 10 pm - 12 pm, a prelude to the director, Park Chan-wook's talk Friday at 8:30 pm in Stuart Theater. He also directed Old Boy.

Harold from Harold and Kumar (aka John Cho) speaking in fluent english Thursday at 8 pm in Stuart.

Screening of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (winner of Best Director in 2006 Sundance) with director Q & A: 10:30 pm Stuart, Friday night.

some stuff on Saturday, panels and crap. but good crap.

keynote address is director Doug Liman '88 (Swingers, Bourne Identity, the OC, Go) and writer Simon Kinberg (X-men 3, Mr & Mrs Smith): saturday at 6 pm, salomon 101.

awards ceremony: saturday 9 - 11 in stuart
I'm the guy who's editing the "academy awards-style film clips" that play during the announcements, so come if solely to witness my practice-sellout handicraft.
plus you can't get limo shuttled to the after party without a ticket stub from the awards ceremony.



ps: why do they make shitty tasting jelly bellys?

the hunger

something written in haste for a class that is barely a class. I'm really not sure if I agree with what I'm saying here, in fact, I think I fundamentally disagree. In a sense, I don't take any of my terms deep enough. But I felt like it was a train of thought I needed to flesh out and have articulated. What do you guys think?

the hunger

An unsatiated hunger plagues the mass of Urban Humanity. This is not another material desire fed by feverish postcapitalist consumerism. It is instead a simple desire to exist, even for material existence. For an absolute referent, a thing that precedes language. Reality.

Because in the urban space, every form is relational. Everything signifies, but the only signified is the void left by inescapable desire. In this environment, language itself—in the broadest definition of language: that which signifies—is the fundamental building block of material reality. This is the logic of capitalism: first, a market for a thing exists. A void exists, a desire, for, say, “real estate” or “fast food,” and then the materials are assembled into an object that fills the shape of that void. And livelihoods are made and wealth continues it’s reverse-entropic flow towards centralized power. The signifier always precedes the signified—everything is born of a desire.

But traditional rationality will claim that language is a set of signifiers that was created in order to describe a reality which preexisted language, and which will continue on long after language is dead. And now that real has abandoned us to our relational, artificial systems. And thus arises a deep desire to attain or reclaim the real that leaves us an unfillable void in the core of the masses.

So how are we to understand this Real, ever more elusive, ever more the object of raw uninteresting Nostalgia? So many theoreticians, Baudriallard, for example, claim that it does not exist. They claim that the very idea is simply another relational construct, whereby we imagine reality to exist because we are so sure of the existence of the unreality which immerses us. I can’t really argue that, except by referencing a set of emotions and carnal knowledge which I have access to, and I assume must be shared but repressed by Urban Humanity at large. I lust strongly, and I rage; I feel emotions which have no space in the temperate concrete space.

I have continually referenced the Urban because I feel that those whose life is lived in closer proximity to the natural sublime are less likely to have this problem. In the natural landscape of this earth we have inherited, we can get a glimpse, or get overwhelmed in the real. In this, perhaps, I indulge my own nostalgia.

There still exists in the American landscape a back-country, swaths of land unencumbered by roads, within the closed boundaries of the Frontier, and yet overlooked by Manifest Destiny. In these lands, it is still possible to exist as a beast. Here, fire is a sound which means a light and warmth—it’s not some new perfume from a Denim company. The skin is permeable and language is material. And yet, in this land of simplicity, almost any city-dweller will become overwhelmed with the feeling of the sublime. They will feel that they have transcended a previous existence. The raw fact of an expanse of natural space reaches into the Sublime, as it has for all the history of human consciousness. This appears to provide the physical real which would ground the metaphysical realm or representation which dominates Urban life. And for that moment, we can taste the presence of a real referent. But that moment is fleeting and foreign to our everyday modes of living. When we leave the country and return to our cement apartments, it is impossible to retain that feeling.

This is why nature poetry is the most quixotic of literary forms. Language is entirely artificial, well suited for cities and social commentary. Natural beauty precedes all literary forms. We have all had the feeling of being stunned and left without words by the natural sublime. Then why is there such a rich tradition of pastoral and nature poetry? because this type of literature does not reference nature as such, but instead references each reader’s highly personal relationship with the natural sublime. Therefore, the relationship of the signifier to the signified is much different when we describe natural beauty than it is in more urban contexts, where readers are more likely to share experiences and emotions. In urban, relational literature the reader seeks to understand the argument and get inside the author’s head, as you may be trying to do at this moment. But in nature poetry, the reader seeks only the contents of her or his own heart and feet. All we can know of Gary Snyder, for example, is that he existed in the back-country world at some point and that he had a personal relationship of that world, which may in some way reference our own (or it may not). The words themselves lose meaning, and their form gains importance; the more simple and lonely among a white page they are, the more effective they are in reminding me of my own relationship to the natural world. Through the medium of my mind, the natural real lends a fragment of its beauty to the purely relational worlds.

And thereby I see that my relationship to the real is one of deep aesthetic appreciation—both of beauty and of raw and real darkness, and by this recognition I can see how all art gains its power by its reference to the real. Instinctually, we value art beyond its potential for social relevance or political commentary. Because art derives more strength—even the most abstract or industrial art—by referencing the artist’s interpretation of our relationship to the real.

As inhabitants of the urban environment, it might make sense to rely on Framed Art to satiate our hunger for the aesthetic real. But in order to live our lives as artists, we must be more in tune to our relationship to the real than is available second-hand through someone else’s interpretations. We must seek natural beauty, stillness and chaos directly upon the living surface of this earth in order that we may develop a closer relationship to it and convey it through abstraction.

Thousands of artists will disagree with me. A relationship to the natural world seems as distant as conceivable from artistic production. Each artist comes to his or her finished product through an arduous process of creation, and that process itself is what creates a relationship of the real between the object of the art and the artist. For the viewer, a piece of art is representational, but for the artist, the art is a material object that he or she has struggled to create. This physical process of creation is another avenue to the real, because it is material.

But it will be objected that artistic creation can occur through language itself, as it is occurring at the moment of this writing. And this is the point at which we must remember that although I have been speaking of language as pure representation, it is also a material in itself. A word is a sound, or a splotch of ink. That it is directly representational, and in some ways the building blocks of representation itself, is secondary to this materiality. And the struggle to assemble these material units is a process of creation entirely unique to the author, which helps me form a relationship to the natural reality of my finished product.

The viewer does not have access to this process that is the origin of the real within the artistic process. For the viewer, the art is successful only to the extent that it references his or her own relationship to the real. As I have chosen to discuss ‘the real,’ it is natural material that precedes language and therefore precedes the market. A genuine experience of art is one that is outside the capitalist system of the commodity. Fundamentally, pure art liberates us from the economic and relational systems which govern our urban existence. This puts an immense political weight on the role of art in our society, because it creates an alternative space in which we can imagine ourselves in a relationship to the real outside of the linguistic and economic system which mediates us and removes us from the natural real in all other realms of urban existence.

But in reality, this is simply an unattainable ideal for art because it has become so thoroughly` integrated into the relational capitalistic marketplace which governs all other commodities. Art has become thoroughly framed, by galleries, hierarchies of talent and fame, and price tags. Because artists are bound to the same modes of existence as everyone else. Art is inescapably a marketable product of capitalism.

In reality, art is only a single element in the hypnosis of urban life. It is part of the same continuum that includes TV and crunk. We can lust after the Pure Art of the real, but art as an object can inevitably only satisfy our most surface, most lustful desires. Silence is inevitable, but hypnosis is not. Silence is the fuel of the chaos inside me, inside the core of the earth. Where they used to think Hell was, there lies silence. But hypnosis, the silent consent to be organized, is not inevitable, it is an urban creation. It is continual pleasure, a repetition of satisfaction, that lulls me and keeps me awake.

Happy Birthday Pinko!

In fondness and love, I hereby announce the biannuary passing of this, our famed and favorite blog! I do so as a contributor, and not as creator: to the ever-evervescent Sturgeon General we ought all to proclaim our continued admiration. In honor of that, I injunct you all now to click your hairy little rodent pointer upon the April 2005 Archive, and scroll to the bottom of that page. Here you will find an epigram, a living elegy which can only re-remind us of the irony and joy with which we here engender our electronic selves - here, in Pinko's territory, home to commie reds in this age of coldest post-cold wars.

My regards and my plaudits! Howdy doody to you all!

Young Science Fiction

I was thinking about this story over Spring Break; I hadn't thought about it in quite a few years. I finished writing it in my Sophmore year of high school, but I think I started it in like 8th grade. The word file says it was last modified in 2001. I guess that it's pretty much the coolest thing I've written to this point. So I was thinking I wanted to share it with you guys. Feel free not to read it--at this point, I feel little attachment to it. Reading it for me is like reading something by someone else for the second time.

The First War of the Mind

The sickening sea of the enemy’s mind laps against my legs like the hands of so many ghosts trying to pull me down into the shadowy mosaic that I stand in up to my knees. A mindscape is the most brutal, twisted theater of battle any war was ever fought. Can we count ourselves human anymore?
I, for one, am a machine. When I joined the Forces, my entire psyche was uploaded into a computer imbedded in my head. My organic brain became as useless as my appendix.
Then the War came. The naturals, the organics, the humans, the animals, attacked us. They came with the ability to hack into our chips and wreak havoc on us from the inside. Our technicians were charged with developing a defense to their electronic infiltrations, but instead created a weapon: we could upload the data stored in our chips to the unused parts of their organic brain, freeing our mind from any physical container. The once-mighty Forces were whisked away into the spirit world. We could beam ourselves from one host to another, occupying the enemy’s minds, destroying them.
So here I am, fighting the First War of the Mind. I no longer own a body; I am a parasite that uploads itself into an organic mind, destroys its host, and moves on to the next victim. My physical body now floats in a tub of preservatives, waiting for me to return from the war.
The enemy mind is a bloodcurdlingly intricate place. Millions of crevasses that bottom out in the endless misery of the subconscious zigzag across the mindscape, waiting to swallow you. The mindscape itself fears and hates you, and you are constantly barraged with pure revulsion as you navigate it.
This is my life. I never get a rest from the incessant hate that defines my world. I am rejected by nature. I am constantly a murder, an intruder, and an enemy. I never sleep, and home has become the force that I fight.
I sometimes watch as my host engages in the act of hacking into chips and killing my own people. The mindscape is a prison then, and all I can do is watch the horror before I kill my host.
Yet, just as I am unable to prevent the destruction of my people, no one can stop me. That is what I love. I am unstoppable, invincible, all-powerful. I hold the fate of any organic in my very being.
I am pure chaos. When I reach a human’s cerebrum, I can re-arrange its neurotransmitters at will. It is plunged into hectic fury; the enemy begins sending the wrong messages along the wrong channels in their brain. It dies of confusion.
But first, I must battle the mindscape. I can only be uploaded into the depths of the hosts’ unconscious, from there, I must make my way to the active conscious.
I pick my way delicately through the swamp at my feet. I’ve boarded the human in a regrettable area; all I can see is acres upon acres of slime. There are no laws of physics in the mindscape, not down here, in the dark, untouched depths of the mind. Down here, everything stays the same; no human ever ventures down here, below even the unconscious. The slime stays below me because there’s no reason for it to move. The small disturbances my feet are making in the muck are probably its first disturbances ever.
I float up into the darkness above my head, so thick, I had assumed it was a solid roof. The darkness that envelops my head is so vacuous it was almost violent in its nothingness. This is the area of the human’s brain where nothing is allowed—this is the vast emptiness of all humans.
I spend eternity in this vast oblivion. I slow my thoughts to a stop and I allow the stillness to wash over me.
I am abruptly forced awake by a wall of guilt. I’ve finally come to the base of the unconscious. Every emotion that a human has comes from this guilt. It’s a sort of survivor’s guilt that a human can never bring itself to face. Down here, the human understands the absurdity of its existence; there is no real reason why it should exist. Therefore, it knows how lucky it is to exist. But the human doesn’t feel gratitude that it is alive, it feels guilt that it should live and nothing else does. This guilt controls the human in every way. When it is happy, either it has managed to remove itself from guilt or it has done something that it feels combats this guilt. When it is angry, it cannot control its guilt. But mostly what comes from this guilt is fear.
I rise up past the guilt and enter the thick layer of fear. This fear is born of a simple fact: there is no reason to exist, therefore there is no reason why the human should continue to exist. And so, the only thing it feels here is a generalized, petrifying fear.
The fear is paralyzing, impossible to resist. I fold in on myself, hiding from the terrified world around me. If I lose my focus and feel my surroundings for a moment, I will be unable to free myself from this net of horror. I am traveling through the prison that all humans live in.
Fear presses on me as if I were at the bottom of an ocean of iron. It surrounds me so thoroughly that I cannot help but experience it myself. I become claustrophobic. I strain against the immense force around me, only to find that I am entirely imprisoned by it.
The human nearly has me captive when I feel the fear around me transform into blind hate. Still in the depths of the unconscious, the human is learning to transform its overwhelming guilt into anger, but he still doesn’t have a target. The anger is intense, untamed rage.
I traverse this area of the mindscape without fear. The human is too distracted with hate to threaten me. I move boldly, wishing to limit the time I spend on this victim. Further ahead, the mountains of the shallow unconscious loom. The shallow unconscious is the lowest level of consciousness that humans interact with. It is a vast mountain range, whose peaks sometimes reach high enough to form islands in the conscious. It is here that the fear and anger of the lower levels begin to solidify into thoughts.
I find myself at the base of a massive peak. Unthinkingly, I begin to ascend. The ground I walk on is frail and papery. It is a mosaic of dark colors, with an occasional outburst of bright emotion. The colors meander aimlessly under my feet, until there is a sudden eruption, which disturbs the fabric of the unconscious so much that it often knocks me off my feet. Sometimes there are geysers of passion that charge through the ground and explode in a painfully bright display.
I pick my way gingerly over the sea of emotion, wary of the dangers of the mindscape. Often the enemy senses my presence at this stage, and throws his mindscape into violent disarray. I grow tense and begin to creep even more lightly over the mountain.
It is impossible to discern where the unconscious ends, but soon the atmosphere of the mindscape becomes less erratic and more calculated. I begin to see information about the human. It is obviously fighting the same war I am—it hacks into the Forces chips at a furious rate and corrupting their systems. Base rarely sends me to kill an organic that is not fighting The War.
I summit the mountain. I look around me at the mindscape of my next victim. The human’s mind sprawls out in front of me; it is for me to invent. It is for me to train, to imprison, and eventually to kill. I can wander about the mind at will until I can map out the best contortions to force it into death.
Every time I invade a host fighting against us, I am shocked by how much easier The War is for them than it is for us. They sit in front of a screen all day and watch data scroll across it. Yet we must sacrifice our lives to defeat them; we must surrender any earthly existence to live entirely in their world of fear, while they lounge in chairs just meters away from their homes.
It is working on hacking the chip of one of our soldiers, so I settle down to watch the death of one of my compatriots, while I lay the groundwork for my hosts’ death. I move up to the area of the mind where optical information is processed. I can see the world through his eyes. I find myself staring at the screen on which the data of the victim is displayed. It always disturbs me that the entire personality of someone like me can be seen in the green symbols that I find myself staring at.
A sudden wave of nausea sweeps over me. The numbers on the screen—the numbers on the screen—they could be mine. I peered closer. The top of the screen proudly displayed the message “Success in entry of Andreas Vilkland, Mind Soldier. Please wait to proceed with data corruption.” Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Andreas Vilkland
The human has not started to kill me yet. I instinctively begin to tear at its brain. But suddenly, an immobilizing idea is born out of my fear. If I could re-arrange a human brain, couldn’t I just immobilize it until I could kill it?
I fling myself into the messy web of neurotransmitters. I can see the chemicals being spat out to axons into dendrites. I can see the electricity of nerve impulses spark smoothly down axons. I can see calcium leap in and out of channels like pistons in an engine.
In frenzy, I set about ripping up the structure of the nerves. I blindly tear at the myelin around the cells, hoping to slow my murder. Then I begin breaking synaptic connections wildly, plugging in some ends of the cells at random. I feel like a child being called upon to diffuse a bomb.
Every second I brace myself for a confused death when the human would succeed before I do. Each change I make in the fabric of the mindscape seems more ineffectual than the last.
Finally, I have a makeshift block, and the human’s hands freeze above its keyboard. As I feel a wave of relief pass over me, it occurs to me that, with just a few more changes, I could control my host. I could have a real body. The thought fills me with anticipation.
After endlessly unraveling and rebuilding of the mindscape, I have control of the human. I have linked myself with the fabric of the mindscape, so I can input my commands and they will be executed. I am like a sixth sense in my host’s head; it can sense me now just as he would see a picture. Except that now, it must obey me.
I feel a sudden rush of power. I am now a god in this mindscape that almost killed me.
I don’t want my new prize to be destroyed; the humans around me must not know what has happened.
I tack myself onto his optical nerve again. I force him to bend over the screen that still displays my information. Manipulating him is clumsy, so I try not to force him to any big movements.
Everything besides my name on the screen seems to be in a code. I force my host to translate the code to me in its mind.
I begin to listen, for lack of anything else to do, to the contents of my data file. He starts by telling me everything I know: that I hate organics, that I am in the Invasion forces, that I miss my parents. Everything about my life down to the minutest detail.
Then it stops conveying information in words to me. I am confused, but soon I feel the mindscape beginning to pulse with emotion. It is just as easy for it to communicate in emotions as in words.
The emotions seem strange, yet familiar. I begin to puzzle out what I am feeling. At first, it seems jumbled and nonsensical. I think that the human might haves stopped translating right. I find myself disturbed deeply; I seem to be receiving segments of some dark, angry sentiments.
Then I am frozen by the worst realization of my life. My entire psyche was uploaded onto my chip, then onto this data file. The data that I am composed of originates in an organic mind. My data file is no different from a human mind. I have the same overwhelming guilt as a human. I fear death, just like a human. I fight because I have nothing else to do with that fear than turn it to anger.
My mindscape is just as stupidly craven as any human mindscape, just digitized. Worse, even, because I spend my life festering in their fear and hate.
The War is just human against electronic human. Neither side is better than the other. All those years I spent hating all that is organic I spent hating myself.
I begin to loathe myself for all the lives I have ended in the name of war. I am a murderer. And I have just sacrificed another life to save my own.
I must free my host. Perhaps he will see that I am his equal. He will spare me. He must be able to see what I can see; it’s so blindingly obvious.
I dive back into the fabric of the mindscape to undo the damage I have done. I carefully rearrange the human’s nerves. My new understanding forces me to be tediously careful in my task. I spend hours carefully mending the fabric.
Finally, my task is complete. I rush up to the human’s consciousness to plead my case.
I am so infatuated with my noble mission of peace that I don’t realize that the human has returned to work. Its fingers fly over the keyboard.
I recognize too late that I haven’t left myself a means to communicate with him. The familiar tide of fear sweeps over me, as I comprehend that I have just committed suicide.
I dart frantically over the mindscape, trying to make my presence felt. I begin to become confused; the mindscape twists and contorts itself around me. I flail against the fabric, scratching for an escape.
I lose control of myself, and I find myself tumbling through the layers of the mindscape. I tumble down the steep slopes of the unconscious to the great hate, down to the great fear. My own fear matches the fear of the human. I struggle against the pressure of the mindscape.
I fall through the thick fear into the immense void. My hope is sucked out by the emptiness, and I resign myself to certain death. I remember my family; the last time I saw them was when I joined the forces when I was twelve. A wave of desolate depression tumbles over me. I feel empty.
I land in the sickening much where I first entered my host. I lie there, soaking in the sewer of the mindscape, awaiting certain death.
I lie a long time. My surroundings become hazy, and I feel tired.
Finally, I hear a voice. “Private, what’s taking so long in there?” Base is calling me. “Mission failed, sir.”