Capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of escape are not just difficulties that arise, they are the very conditions of its operation. Capitalism is founded on a generalized decoding of every flow: flows of wealth, flows of labor, flows of language, flows of art, etc. It did not create any code, it created a kind of accounting, an axiomatics of decoded flows, as the basis of its economy. It ligatures the points of escape and moves ahead. It is always expanding its own borders, and always finds itself in a situation where it must close off new escape routes at its borders, pushing them back once more...It is endlessly crossing its own limits which keep reappearing farther out. It puts itself in alarming situations with respect to its own production, its social life, its demographics, its periphery in the Third World, its interior regions, etc. The system is leaking all over the place. They spring from the constantly displaced limits of the system. And certainly, the revolutionary escape is not the same thing as other kinds of escape, the schizo-escape, the drug-escape. This is precisely the problem facing marginal groups: to make all the lines of escape connect up on a revolutionary plane. In capitalism, then, these lines of escape take on a new character, and a new kind of revolutionary potential. So, you see, there is hope.

Gilles Deleuze from Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974, pg. 270

“i try to carry out the most precise and discriminative analyses i can in order to show in what ways things change, are transformed, are displaced. when i study the mechanisms of power, i try to study their specificity… i admit neither the notion of a master nor the universality of his law. on the contrary, i set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and i do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them—in short, no longer submit to them. and if i do not say what ought to be done, it is not because i believe there is nothing to be done. quite on the contrary, i think there are a thousand things to be done, to be invented, to be forged, by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. from this point of view, my entire research rests upon the postulate of an absolute optimism. i do not undertake my analyses to say: look how things are, you are all trapped. i do not say such things except insofar as i consider this to permit some transformation of things. everything i do, i do in order that it may be of use.”

-Michel Foucault, dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. ii, 1976–1988 edited by daniel defert and françois ewald, pp. 911-912

scooters, vacation, fall

I feel incredibly guilty and sad today. And disappointed in myself, I guess. For not having any Marxist pep this morning and doodling horrific looking bodies instead of watching Santiago Alvarez films in my Brechtian cinema class. For being someone I would be afraid to be with. For having little motivation to write about Deleuze and modified bodies, and little confidence. I wish I wasn't so scattered and sad all the time.
Of course, I write here pretty much only when I get into these moods, so I am in no way trying to say that my life is bad or that I have any reason to mope. Everyone has certain thresholds that they come up against. When I get here there is nothing left to do but scale down my self-created wall of shame and pool up at the bottom until the feelings pass. Wait it out wait it out wait it out.
I've been meaning to write this quote here for a while. Blake Butler told me to read Zeroville so I did, and it is amazing. And each section functions like a vignette, usually unrelated and readable in its own right.

'In America you have this idea that anything about sex is acceptable only if it absolutely is not, under any circumstances, sexy. The Americans are too romantic to make such a film. They are in love with shame.'
'The French are romantic.'
Maria dismisses this with the flick of her fingers.
'Quelle mythe! No one ever said in a French film, 'We'll always have Paris.' Can you imagine Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysees as the Nazis march in? The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with what the characters are. The man does not pay me for the sex, he pays me to leave afterward. For the lack of consequences.'
'He pays you to leave?'
'This is what Brando thinks will save him in Dernier Tango...sex without consequences.'
'You are paid to leave?'
'This is what destroys him, because there is no sex without consequence.'
'Perhaps last Tango in Paris isn't just about sex.'
'Cheri,' she laughs, 'sex is never just about sex.'

Images:
3. Georges Rousse
2. Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus
1. Room O (I think) by Yves G. Noir

My brain is scattered because of the high caffeine and sugar content running through my blood.

A few things.
There is this amazing Blake quote at the introduction of "The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain" by Robert Pepperell:

ALL Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz. a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call’d
Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or
outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793

I love this. And Pepperell's text in general has encouraged me to start thinking (once again, after a few months of mind rest) about phenomenology and its application to the so-called "post-human" condition. The radical alterations taking place in our bodies and our relationship to our bodies (i.e. via technology) has brought us to an interesting place: only here can we really start to challenge the view of consciousness dilemma as purely cognitive/mind/brain-based. Losing control of our bodies (in a sense) has brought us back to them, which is lovely to me. Since reading Merleau-Ponty I've really started to think about the knowledge of the body. Or, maybe I've just started to articulate thoughts and feelings that have always been floating around.

--warning--huge shift in focus:

Other than that, I just bought this amazing vintage wrap dress from Purple Deer Vintage. Soooo Mad Men.

(Image propery of Purple Deer Vintage)

I've also watched five Bette Davis films in 24 hours. She is divine. Seems like there's two general categories of "classic" actresses, the Audrey Hepburn Marilyn Monroe variety, and the Lauren Bacall Bette Davis variety. Obviously I prefer the latter, but I still love Marilyn - she is so often cast in the stupidest, most ditsy roles. I feel pity for her but at the same I get filled with admiration. Because its got to take a pretty smart woman to pull off such a cliche of femininity. Does that make sense? Her performances reach such a height of silliness that I feel like she's in on the joke somehow, which makes her all the more charming. I have shitloads of pictures of actresses and actors on my computer, but the ones I love of Marilyn are the ones where she looks like she's been caught off guard (which is another fiction, but one I like to indulge).

Also have a huge crush on Monica Vitti since watching l'avventura last week.

I am thinking:

That moment - when you reach the focal point of the parabola. The steady upstream is upset and the subject hits a wall and everything splinters and fractures. The parabola is never the same, the downward tilt is obliterated and you're suspended for a split second, waiting for gravity to kick in so you can get a grip of your body again. Maybe a new trajectory is formed and the old is never seen again in the same light. The new is birthed from one of the splinters; it slowly congeals and progresses by its own momentum. Each intersection is a bit painful. Looking back you can only ever observe progress through the screen of debris.

I am reading:

"The most solid materials perish, as do the mightiest thoughts. And the greatest book ever writen can convey only a tiny fragment of the artist's real emotion. No, we are only building tombs for posterity to admire with our words. We are trying to record the changing ego, but the Self will not be revealed thus. We are only throwing off sparks."

- Henry Miller, from his letters to Anais Nin.

Here's a great essay on Miller and Whitman and the relationship between the two. I suggest reading it.

Art is by Linda Spjut, Anders Berggren, and Nhu Duong, from here.

when lights are low.

"Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his...one night in the dark quilt-and-cold refuge of their bed, drowsing to and fro himself, he licked Jessica to sleep. When she felt his first warm breaths touch her labia, she shivered and cried like a cat. Two or three notes, it seemed, that sounded together, hoarse, haunted, blowing with snowflakes remembered from around nightfall." - Pynchon, GR

I'm reading Gravity's Rainbow; therefore, I am extremely frustrated. I know, that's the point, and maybe there is value in that. Every 100 pages or so it starts to make beautiful sense for a few pages and the other 90% feels like I am bashing my head against a wall. I don't really enjoy having to do extensive research every other page. Pavlovian physiology is interesting though. And I'm brushing up on my mythology. And I now know shitloads about the Blitz and other such WW2 facts. But what I love are the little bits of mystic gorgeous descriptions of sex and miscommunication and loss that are absolutely brilliant and wrenching. Still, GR is the opposite of a phenomenological text - ultra cognitive - and it doesn't give you any breaks as a reader, or any place to settle in and get comfortable.
I am listening to music appropriate to Autumn and watching the neighbours across the street separate on their respective porches, letting their children mingle together on their still-unkempt spring lawns. The little blonde girls have so much energy and noise that steadily declines. And their voices slowly quiet down and their little bodies get limp and then the sun goes down and the lights go on upstairs. Young people migrate out of their houses, all heading south a few blocks to busier streets, and the laughter of children is replaced with the cynical, syrupy giggles of drunk girls in stilettos.
Tonight is dedicated to poetry, reads and the mixed media piece I started a few days ago. I wish I had a work room or office to scatter pages around, but presently my bed is my best bet.
I want to tattoo a Walt Whitman stanza somewhere on my body. Which stanza, which poem?

I didn't enjoy An Education but I relate.

When I first came here I was not wide-eyed but extremely porous and everything was radically beautiful and depoliticized and every step outside was a breath of fresh air and a slap in the face. Every street corner was the first line of a poem I couldn't finish. And each new man was an entry-point into understanding the streets. You're fucking him but you're thinking of the city and it gets you off fast. And I was like a jittery wet kid just learning to masturbate, my body stuck at the front at concerts, vibrating against the speaker. My eyes permanently damp and closed really tight so as not to breathe and each song got me close to climax that released itself like a swell, not a bang. Becoming an adult is learning how powerful people are and the terror of desiring bodies all clenched and holding themselves in. And I learned about the obligation of being an object and I learned that men coerce and pull. Romance is not a well framed sepia toned print with soundtrack and a clear foreground, romance is abandonment on an empty street in chinatown at four AM so drunk the city looks like sticky wet paint. Learning romance is realizing the cruelty I am capable of showing myself.

"It is the possession of a role which provides the impetus to go out in the world, to act at all. The more numerous roles, the greater the number of excursions" - Susan Sontag from The Benefactor

ph: them-thangs.com

Heidegger, and other things.

So, yesterday was amazing. My boyfriend is amazing. I realized today during my psychiatry appointment that I feel ashamed when I communicate positive news to people. I'm not really sure what that means. Most of what I dwell on is negative, which frustrates me. I'm not a negative person, per se, but I feel more invested in unravelling and delving into so-called negative emotions. I've always assumed there is more to uncover and more to learn from more difficult things, but the more I ponder the less I think that is true. There is a lot to uncover from positive emotions as well, and significant room for self-discovery in that arena. I think its partly an age/maturity thing that makes me dwell so heavily on the negative-dialectic side of the existential dilemma.

I got out of the shower yesterday to find a beautiful 1953 typewriter wrapped up in a gorgeous vintage case on the kitchen table as my birthday gift from Andrew. Finally, a typewriter! And we spent the rest of the afternoon in High Park at the mini-zoo and basking in the sun by the pond. Then popsicles red wine and horror movies. Toronto surprises me, often.

The point of this post, however, is this quote from Heidegger, which made me smile this morning on the subway:

"Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art's poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual" -from "The Origin of the Work of Art"

One of my problems with conceptual art (conceptual in the purest, po-mo sense) is that there is no opening up, no "revealing" in confrontation because the "thing-ness" is entirely immanent, like a case for ideas only accessible via the cognitive. I am conflicted because in a sense conceptual art performs what Heidegger talks about when he differentiates between the object-side and subject-side (the "thing-ness" of the work vs. its "work quality") but in his words, those two sides are collapsed together in our experience of the work. But in conceptual art those lines seem strict. The "thingness" of the work is maintained as thing, as purely representational. That seems to be how conceptual art works, but that kind of separation is counter-intuitive to how humans experience things, or how we would if we weren't all only semi-aware of our bodies. Maybe this paradox of contemporary art is itself an expression of our historical time, and thus a revealing of "truth" in a sense. But it seems more and more the phenomenological component is downplayed purely for the sake of the purely cognitive. A lot of conceptual art is just "thing-ness" without the beauty, until you sit and think about it for a while, and then it opens itself up. Sometimes. And maybe that is also the fault of the whole "exhibition value" theory from Benjamin. But I find less and less inspiration from contemporary art and more and more inspiration from being-in-the-world. Sitting on the side of a grassy hill and watching people touch each other, watching old men shift their weight on park benches, watching the way light moves across water. Sometimes, contemporary art feels dead to me. At most, an interesting diversion, but never something truly beautiful. I am definitely old-fashioned and nostalgic, and maybe all those modernist-theorists and their ideas aren't applicable to art "now." If that is true, I am disappointed, because I think art and poetry should still be about revealing something new, and feeling, and beauty. Authenticity, sure, but sometimes what passes as "authentic" now is just dead-ness, it doesn't add anything to our experience of life. Art should be accessible and we should be accessible to art.

There are, of course, great and interesting things going on. But very rarely do I sense that "rift" Heidegger goes on about. And I am nostalgic for that, even if being 23 in 2010 in North America means that I've only ever experienced echoes and reproductions of it.

oh, Pessoa.

Down the steps of my dreams and my weariness, descend from your unreality, descend and be my substitute for the world.

One longed, in order to truly feel life, to be a patient convalescing from an illness.

I created various personalities within myself. I create them constantly. Every dream, as soon as it is dreamed, is immediately embodied by another person who dreams it instead of me. In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally. I am the living stage across which various actors pass acting out different plays...

I did not act the part. It acted me. I was merely the gestures, never the actor.

Civilization consists in giving an appropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities.

Leaning on the bridge, I wait for the truth to pass so that I can regain my null and fictitious, intelligent and natural self...to know nothing about oneself is to live. To know a little about oneself is to think. To know oneself precipitately is suddenly to grasp Leibniz's notion of the dominant monad...a sudden light scorches and consumes everything. It strips us naked even of our selves.




[feeling isolated, angry, anxious deep into the
pit of my stomach self-deprecating and intellectually exhausted.
Reading Pessoa is like stepping into already-familiar words.
I want to sit in a pool of water near a beach, one of those little pockets that becomes stale and lukewarm, watch people swim and feel water droplets slowly evaporate off my skin under white-blind sunlight, experience the chill of close-to-summer-sunset breezes, feel at home in my body again
why are people so inpenetrable and why do I turn away so quickly?]


All text is from Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. All photos belong to Miranda Lehman and can be found at ghostinthewoods.com

Sources of inspiration this week.

Jonathan Zawada

All night dreaming of a body
space weighs on differently from mine
We are making love in the street
the traffic flows off from us
pouring back like a sheet
the asphalt stirs with tenderness
there is no dismay
we move together like underwater plants

Over and over, starting to wake
I dive back to discover you
still whispering, touch me, we go on
streaming through the slow
citylight forest ocean
stirring our body hair

But this is the saying of a dream
on waking
I wish there were somewhere
actual we could stand
handing the power-glasses back and forth
looking at the earth, the wildwood
where the split began

from "Waking in the Dark" by Adrienne Rich

Sanne Sannes

I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.
My guide in these matters is your self,
Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same
Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon
Much later, I can know only the straight way out,
The distance between us.

from "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery

...more typewriters...Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Will Self.

I'm really tired and cranky. We're reading Moby-Dick for my Literature & Philosophy course. I thought it was going to be one of those books that are excruciatingly painful to get through, but its actually been a really fun read. It reminds me of being a kid and reading adventure novels 10 hours straight in my backyard during the summer.

I now have two jobs, plus my poetry editing job which will kick back into the forefront around January. Plus end-of-semester papers and 4 grad school applications to pump out. I want this month to be over and I want a day to write and drink tea and lounge around with my cats. I also want to stop whining, because my life is pretty damn good.

Sartre admitted in 1939 that he never experienced the existential nausea he wrote about. I feel cheated by this a little. I never really enjoyed Sartre as a person. I've read too much of Simone deBeauvoir's autobiographical material to respect Sartre. A combination of Camus, Kant and fucking Schopenhauer has put me in a very strange head space. I hate hate hate my dreams. Even when they are pleasant enough visually they terrify me. I was floating in the ocean and it was sunny and beautiful and despite this I continued to experience waves of panic, feeling that something foreign and larger than me and dangerous was about to brush against my legs. That's only one part of the sequence that involved lots of people I don't really want to dream about, but I do all the time. Schopenhauer is a very bleak and sad man. Everything is utterly meaningless and absurd and despite that we still possess 'will to life' that results in the fabrication of a 'bubble of illusion' - a fabricated excuse to keep our body moving, to justify reproduction. The only metaphysically respectful form of suicide (according to Schopenhaur) is starving-yourself-to-death because it involves a slow process of waning 'will to life' - when your body shuts down you enter a state of depersonalization where its possible to step outside of your body and detach from its petty concern to remain alive. No wonder I'm feeling groundless and sad. Camus is the same:
"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood it in solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone."
This in particular bothers me a lot. The absurdity of seeing someone that I have touched in every way possible, that I spent hours in bed with - now as a stranger. I no longer know them and I never really did. "Knowing" people is familiarity and habituation; association. I want to shake people hard when I feel this way, scream at them, "what the fuck, this is a stupid game, I know you;" I want to sustain that illusion because it makes me feel less lonely. But instead I keep up the stupid vacuous exchange, I continue to let words spurt out of my mouth mechanically, mundane fucking shit. I can't even deal with it. The loss, but also the indifference. It's paralyzing. When I first read Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (which you should read, by the way) I felt "fuck yeah, I get this" but then I felt, confused, that I can never really reach that state of indifference again. I feel irreparable sometimes, in certain areas. In my seminar yesterday my professor asked: "if, according to psychology, Schopenhauer's philosophizing is the result of a chemical imbalance or psychological disorder, does that devalue what he wrote?" I guess you could ask the same of most philosophers, who, for the most part, either killed themselves or went insane (except for dudes like Sartre who were apparently faking anyways). Of course I don't think so, I am still wary of 'diagnoses.' Maybe some psychiatrists (I doubt mine would, he's become aware of my sensitivity in this area and is generally a cool dude) would probably say, yes, everything you wrote over the past few weeks has been symptomatic of your various 'disorders.' How to reconcile my identity and creativity with this, I don't know. I'm supposed to ask myself a series of questions when I feel this fucked up. "Is anything really broken?" "if you are broken, do you need to pick up the pieces" "is it possible to relinquish the struggle" These questions make me feel nauseous and silly. They feel like stock psychology questions meant to manipulate a certain response out of me. But when it comes down to it: yes, I think most people are 'broken' and yes, I think most of us, including me, try to pick up the pieces, because who the fuck enjoys feeling untethered. Who the fuck wants to feel like damaged goods. As for relinquishing the struggle, I don't really know what the fuck that even means. I don't feel that I'm struggling, I just feel depressed. There is a word for this world-weariness in German that has an untranslatable connotation in English. Weltschmerz. World-pain. I think that this kind of angst probably sounds less trite in German. English words are so inadequate, they betray my meaning. I'm pretty good at life, though. There is no reason for me to feel waves of panic and literal nausea while sitting in groups of people talking about stupid shit. There is no reason for me to feel disgust at people's faces, people that I love or respect. I wish I could control these things. And when it comes down to it, I want to affirm life. I don't think everything is meaningless and absurd, or rather, I find it insanely liberating to feel untethered and disillusioned. According to Camus, thats when consciousness starts. I believe that. But I also believe that philosophy is really, really dangerous, and that its impossible not to swing between those extremes: elation and desperation in the face of absurdity. What I love about most of my professors is that they're all very good-natured, very chill and seemingly content people, despite having read so much depressing material. I admire this, and I want to be like this. I wish I could just snap my fingers and feel less terrified, less sad, less angry. My Dad always told me that happiness is something you can just choose. Simple, just give your problems to God, he used to say, completely serious. But that's not going to happen.

Rape Tunnel/Rape as Fetish

But rape is way more extreme than a punch to the face. Is your intention to ruin people’s lives?

Possibly. I’m not necessarily concerned with the positive or negative effects of this project so long as there is some effect on people’s lives. I’ve merely set up a situation where there is potential to impact people in meaningful ways. Maybe I won’t be able to rape everyone who crawls through the tunnel, but the door is open for all kinds of scenarios; rape, serious injury, maybe even death. I might even get arrested. Right now the installation isn’t even complete, and I’ve riled up a substantial portion of the local population. The installation as an idea is powerful enough itself.

- Richard Whitehurst interviewed by Sheila Zareno for Artlurker

The enigma is that of an object which offers itself up in total transparency, and hence cannot be naturalized by critical or aesthetic discourse. It is that of a superficial, artificial object which succeeds in preserving its artificiality, in shaking free of any natural signification to take on a spectral intensity, empty of meaning, which is that of the fetish. The fetish object has no value, Or rather, it has an absolute value; it lives off the ecstasy of value.

-Baudrillard, "Machinic Snobbery" from The Perfect Crime

This article fills me with so much distaste and anger and resentment on so many levels.
What the fuck is going on with the post-pomo art scene? How does a rape tunnel in any way contribute to art becoming 'meaningful' again within contemporary society? If anything, this kind of..."installation" contributes to the increasing meaningless of contemporary art, which has become a scene of increasingly 'weird' people invested in maintaining identities as 'crazy' artists making as much noise as possible to promote increasingly boring ideas about irony and absurdity and the death of the artist, blah blah blah. I think as soon as art took a turn towards absurdity for its own sake, all of its social purpose or 'meaning' disintegrated except as a vehicle for personal self-promotion, under the guise of the artist as a 'non-entity.' Baudrillard talks about this, it is not new. But I think it is an illusion to say that the artist has disappeared, because I think all that remains is the artist as some stupid laughing asshole throwing shit around and demanding an audience.
Why, if art is indeed meaningless, are we only reinforcing this message by focusing more and more on the absurdity of art? Wouldn't it be more radical at this point to create art with a purpose and some sort of social intent, with values and a particular aesthetic manifesto in mind? How does more shock = a return to meaning? Doesn't this method actually result in the opposite? Art is reduced to publicity stunts for attention that evoke little else but shock value. If you read his interview, he doesn't actually give a shit about what is actually going on here, in terms of interpersonal relationships (if you can call it that), hyperreality, any sort of message, etc. The 'artists intent' is literally "evoke a response." Never mind what kind of response or the irrevocable damage it could cause; any response will do, and apparently, the only thing that even evokes mild discontent or concern within our society currently is a pseudo-staged strategized rape scenario. The really frightening thing is that the public becomes increasingly desensitized as a result, and this phenomena produces shit like this asshole's 'rape tunnel.' What the fuck is wrong with our society that makes us so fucking numb to everything except the thrilling possibility of "consensual rape"? And doesn't this whole installation trivialize the experiences of actual rape victims? Doesn't this trivialize the experience in general by turning it into a hyperreal simulacrum of violence? Are people so numb and dead and unaffected that they would enter this tunnel knowing full well that it will lead to sexual assault? It is sad the lengths people will go to feel anything, and the associated absurd attitude that all experience is good experience, which corresponds to the whole paradox of more shock = more meaning. Meaning is not a quantitative value; you can't measure meaningful experience according to its severity or, in this case, the degree to which you are possibly psychologically and physically damaged. There seems to be a general attitude of 'fuck it, I'll try anything once, why limit my experiences' hence, 'fuck yeah, sure, I'll enter a rape tunnel.' There is enough sadness and destruction and rape and violence going on in the 'real' world; why the fuck do we seek out simulated hyperreal versions of this in (of all places) the art scene? I thought art was supposed to detract from this, not contribute. Why do people feel that excess is required to achieve any sort of meaningful existence? Our widespread existential groundlessness results in this compulsion to fill ourselves up with 'new' experiences but the irony is that all of these so-called 'authentic' experiences are manufactured for consumption, they are not genuine, authentic or meaningful experiences. Everyone wants to 'live life to the fullest' but no one ever thinks about picking and choosing experiences in terms of their positive or negative effects. For example, I find it incredibly ironic that people feel they are living 'fun and exciting lives' by going out to bars and drinking their asses off every fucking weekend. I mean, really? This is exciting to you? It all just seems very manufactured and simulated and repetitive to me. And so fucking easy. Art and bars and social situations in general are all laid out for us to pick and choose from (for a price, of course). Everything - 'contemporary art' 'live music' 'the bar/club scene' - are designated spaces purchased and purchasable, we can pick and choose pre-fabricated experiences and then pretend like we've earned it and have some free choice in the choosing. And apparently rape is now on the board of possible experiences produced for easy consumption.
When I read early post-modern poetry, poetics are still meaningful, the artist has a method, a system of values that guides their creative process. When I read this kind of poetry I respond strongly, in ways that I never really do when I read most current contemporary poetry. I mean, there are amazing moments when I read something new and think 'fuck yes, this means something' but for the most part, I just feel kind of bored with the cynical post-ironic, blase tone (of some, dare I say most) of the literature being produced by my generation. Call me old-fashioned or romantic, but I'd like to reinvest some real values into art. Some passion, some ethics. Nobody works hard at anything any more, everybody wants everything to come easy. And, voila, it does. It just doesn't mean anything.

Creeley hit me hard and my anxiety subsided like a cold wave pulling away from my body or clouds dissipating momentarily/releasing warm sun

For Love

Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.

Today, what is it that

is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but

what would I not

do, what prevention, what

thing so quickly stopped.

That is love yesterday

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and

whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me

because it is my own.

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,

what have I made you into,

companion, good company,

crossed legs with skirt, or

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything

but that which it wishes

would come true, fears

what else might happen in

some other place, some

other time not this one.

A voice in my place, an

echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into

not the confession but

the obsession I begin with

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or

place beyond time, no

mind left to

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love

it all returns.

(Robert Creeley)

Movies.

Lots of people ask me why I take cinema so seriously, why I can't "let myself be entertained" and chill out. Zizek says something in part 3 of "A Pervert's Guide to Cinema" that is so perfect.

"Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It's, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it's just a game? It's reality. It's more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a screen persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I'm a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and so on and so on. So this would be the naïve reading. But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I'm not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it's only a game, it's only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthfully. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self."

Images are very very important. Watching a movie is like re-experiencing the mirror stage over and over: the formation of primary identifications, the literal and metaphorical articulation of the symbolic and imaginary registers in opposition to one another, the projection of Self onto a screen and the introjection of the imago. The images that seem harmless are actually the ones we should pay most attention to; the 'easy' entertainment that doesn't require any sort of conscious deciphering is potentially dangerous. Not because the content of these images is any more or less revealing or complicated, but due to the way we approach them. So, yeah, I refuse to believe that anything should be easy. That images can be easy and opaque. I want to condition myself to see as clearly as possible.

So the quote brings up a lot of problematic issues for me. The cause and effect relationship between the producer and product. In the case of the cinematic apparatus, which is which? This dichotomy exemplifies the illusion of the Subject-Other relation in general: neither one is entirely stable or grounded in either position. Thus, the instability of the mirror image - we form an identity based on the stability of an image reflected on a screen before us, but that image is really only the distorted and idealized vision of our own 'reality' - the 'reality' is formed from a fiction and the fiction is simultaneously a reflection of that inevitably fractured and inconsistent Self.

Where do these cinematic tropes develop? The fact that we take certain motifs and character types for granted tells us about ourselves and our vision of 'who we are.' Why is a lame stock comedy even entertaining unless we can form identifications with the characters on some level? Do we all want to identify with these characters? Is this, as Zizek says, a form of enacting or experiencing an identity much closer to the 'truth' because we can't submit to the excesses of cariacture in reality as a result of social constraints? And what does that say about us, taking into consideration the stock characters we choose to identify with and indirectly produce and reproduce in popular films?

Cinema is important because it is like a threshold between the imaginary and the symbolic registers, or, in any case, the closest we can get to a threshold. Zizek: "Illusion persists. There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it." Oi. Watch "A Pervert's Guide to Cinema" if you have not, I think my brain short-circuited due to the sheer amount of amazing going on.

I'm probably in love with him. Zizek, that is.

I watched Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom (Salo) last week. The full effect of the film didn't really hit me until last night, while watching The Last House on the Left. If you've watched both, you'll understand, I think.

LHotL - torture porn, very short shots, 'documentary' style, unstable cinematography, washed out sepia colour tone, the illusion of a narrative that functions to justify the viewer's investment, the drawn-out high-intensity emotion that reeks of melodrama and only evokes indifference, inane and trite dialogue that exposes 1) the importance of dialogue 2) the complete insufficiency of dialogue in film, stock characters, typical score. The scary part for me in watching movies like this is that I feel nothing while watching a girl brutally raped and her friend sexually assaulted and murdered. I don't like watching rape scenes in film because I don't want to be confronted with the brutual reality of my own indifference to that image. I don't like the games that the director plays on the viewer: we're all aware that we're watching this for entertainment, that we obviously enjoy on some fucked-up level watching people die simulated brutal deaths. And the directors add some stupid shit like an upper-class family with a dead kid and marital problems to ease our minds and soothe us into thinking we watch because its a story that we are invested in with characters and real people who somehow overcome their suffering. We may as well cut out all of that shit and just be honest with ourselves. We just want to watch people suffer. We want to see girls victimized and see the rich white people overcome their complacency and seek revenge. It's a sadomasochistic viewing experience; we punish ourselves for the desire to see these acts played out for us by following through with it and feeling nothing, not horror or enjoyment or anything but a numb void. And what the characters say means little to nothing. The dialogue doesn't really change our experience of the film at all. The voice is on mute, words are nothing, just glossed over decoration necessary but not vital in terms of the viewing experience. We're here for the images and movies like this expose the degree to which dialogue is superfluous in most popular films. I think most people could watch Transformers 2 with no dialogue and still enjoy the movie.

Salo - long, painfully drawn out shots, very stable cinematography, mainly wide and mid shots, high attention to framing and composition, an absurd score that contrasted the content of the screen images, a degree of surreality, severe emotional disconnect, almost like an aloof indifference of the camera in relation to the action, deliberate dialogue consisting mainly of pornographic stories and demands or rules given to the victims, a lack of a typical narrative structure in that there is no introduction that cushions our perspective of the violence - it starts immediately. The characters are blank slates with no identity except as archetypes - but no one is pretending otherwise. This includes the director, the actors, and thus, as a viewer, we can't form these connections because they are not provided and manufactured for us. We remain suspended at the entrance to the image, struggling for something 'human' within the narrative, wanting a flimsy security blanket to maintain some degree of illusory moral security. This film forced me to feel uncomfortable with my position as 'audience.' The film involves you while remaining disengaged, it pushes you into the events; you are victimized by your own curiosity, while the camera maintains a particular distance from the characters and the horrific acts going on. So basically, this film does the opposite of what typical, contemporary 'horror' films do. I could write about this film forever, it is so fascinating and has had such an intense impact on me.

I've been writing a lot recently but I don't feel comfortable on the interwebs at the moment. I feel like writing for a blog conditions my creative process in a negative way. Like I assume I am writing for an audience immediately, which is usually a bad way for me to start.

I am so so happy with my life. The last few weeks have been insane with new experiences people images and ideas. And a new year begins.

We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part: we look for a mirror; we want to rub off the paint, to remove all that is artificial, and to become real. But somewhere a bit of masking that we forget still clings to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our lips are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughingstock, a mere half-thing: neither real beings nor actors.

-Rilke

I was stirring my brandy with a nail

Lying on my floor again, eating strawberries and reading early hunter s with the mount eerie on full volume. I told my psychiatrist that I feel like a cliche. He often looks at me like he's slightly confused and doesn't know how to respond to certain things. It's awkward. I Just finished watching masculin/feminin. There are some great lines.

We'd often go to the movies. We'd shiver as the screen lit up. More often we'd be disappointed. The images flickered. Marilyn Monroe aged badly. It saddened us. It wasn't the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted to live.

To have a conscience is to be open to the world.
To be faithful is to act as if time didn't exist.
Wisdom would be to see life, truly see it. That would be wisdom.

Ever notice there's the word "mask" in masculine? And also "ass"?
And in feminine?
There is nothing.

(pow! that's a fucking great line. Oh, Lacan, how you haunt me. Seriously, I really am haunted by Lacan.)

I flirted with the dude at the video store, not the asshole who wears the beret, the nice one that I would actually chill with, and he told me I was awesome because my favourite Godard movie is 2 or 3 things I know about her (oh my god that's his favourite toooo!!! what a goddam coincidence!!!!) and then reduced my late fees. It's like all you need for street cred in this fucking city is to "appreciate" Godard and know the definition of conceptual poetry and spout on about "the meaningless of art in our time" in a cynical blase tone like its "no big deal," etc. Excuse the "quotes." I really suck at floating on the surface of things. Apparently the psychiatrists are going to "fix" this so that I no longer feel performance anxiety in groups of people. Hm. Pyschiatry is a really funny thing. I find the process fascinating, the lists of questions, the questions that come from answers.

In an interview when asked about his favourite director, Bradford Cox said "not Godard." Classic. There are two different ways I respond to this. 1) he's safe because he confirms that he "knows what the cool artsy kids like" 2) and yet manages to secure a place for himself out of the new mainstream by disdaining what the cool artsy kids like. Insert reference to increasingly obscure film maker. Its such a fucking game and shit. I still love Bradford though.

Feeling good, feeling good.

convoluted things coming out of my brain.

"Drama is what happens when people get together and live"
this is a profound statement adam coates, this is exactly what I should have said last week when a man said that he "didn't want to be involved in my drama" this is exactly what I thought, while feeling very sad. instead I think I started to cry and stared at the ceiling for a little bit, feeling that something was ending. maybe he didn't think anything except 'get me the fuck out of this girls life.' I think a lot of men think that a lot about me, maybe I felt "this is starting in the same way and will end in the same way and I feel sad because I don't have the naivete to be excited anymore." there is a certain fatigue in that but we all keep on keeping on, etc. also, that song on your blog is so so beautiful.

I have only cried 5 times in the past two weeks. twice have been in the past two days as a result of blog posts. Here and here.

I know that noah cicero does not read my blog or whatever and I feel that if he did notice that I linked to that post he would probably feel some degree of disdain or distaste toward me. Fuck, that sounds like a lame disclaimer. But...these lines really hit me, really really hard, because this is something I have been trying to say to people over the last few months without feeling like anybody really knows what I'm saying at all:

but i don't want a lot of people around
they've really begun to drive me nuts
really crazy with their stupid shit
It is like I'm constantly overwhelmed by the present
there it is
the objects, the now, everything talking place
observing
hearing
other people have the knack of turning it off or not noticing it all

People say things like this all the time but I don't really feel it from them. But, truly, I always really feel stuff that Noah Cicero writes. I guess thats a sign of a good writer. Fuck I'm really lame tonight, I apologize.

I am oscillating between feeling very very alone and feeling very very free. when one component shifts or removes itself from my life I start throwing everything out the fucking window, I feel like every important component in my life has changed or dissipated in the last two weeks. This is somewhat terrifying and I am sorry if you are one of those people who has periodically been deleted from my life. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

I just want to feel important and loved by one single person for one single day. Someone, please, I need this very badly.

when I jumped into the air over the water for that split half-second before my body hit I felt shocked and euphoric and light and out of control. and then my body was submerged and everything was open and I felt like my skin was tearing and my brain was tugging out of my ears and then I was up again with the sun shining all over my naked exposed shoulders

"the condition of renewal means you cut your roots"
-Zizek

"I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."
-Donna Haraway

"If you don't understand, so much the better, that will give you the opportunity to explain."
-Jacques Lacan, XX The function of the written

I am feeling a little bit better these past few days. It's amazing what a day of wine, relaxation and shitty tv can do for a person's mental health. Plus, I think I forgot my meds for a good few days. I tend to forget things like that and then go crazy.

I am trying to reconcile myself with Lacan's belief that woman is 'not-whole,' that we cannot speak of woman in language so it is necessary to cross her out (literally, he crosses out the word woman a lot of the time). Woman is the empty signifier that structures the jouissance of the male. She is a signifier of nothing, there is no content, only a framework by which the signifier 'male' is constructed.

As such, the sexual relationship is impossible for Lacan. Men seek the 'object' of jouissance, but in the actual relation of love, of physical love, they are stopped short. Phallic jouissance necessitates fusion with the object but when this occurs, the woman 'castrates' the male (according to pyschoanalysis). So there is always that limit reached by the male, and really no place at all for female jouissance within a phallocentric, symbolic discourse whatsoever. The woman only has access to jouissance (which, according to Freud, is always masculine, because libidinal energy is always masculine) when mediated through the male, or through a child.

But then, ta-da, Lacan brings in this notion of an "extra" jouissance, only capable for women. There is always a limit, in which women refuse to participate in the game of phallocentric jouissance. A holding-back, so to speak, that prevents full submersion within the discourse. As a result, this jouissance cannot be articulated. It cannot be articulated in language, just as the woman has no place within language except as Other, and as such, doesn't exist, making "sexual relationship impossible."

But in order to cover his ass, Lacan relates this "extra" feminine jouissance to a notion of God. He can't just say that 'woman' doesn't exist without making up some bullshit theory that doesn't make him look like a complete ass. So, he mystifies it. Because apparently, if men can't understand female sexuality or find a place for it within their discourse (heaven forbid your reconstitute it or re-think its foundations), then there is no choice but to put female sexuality behind a "screen" of mysticism and divinity that pretends to relegate to women some privledged place close to God and somehow puts them 'above' language and the paltry discourses of tradition. Unfortunately, positioning women behind this screen (because men like Lacan, self-admittedly can't understand female sexuality) is just another way of idealizing femininity and placing female jouissance within the framework of some patriarchal male deity (literal or not, the 'Divine' is always masculine). It's basically like shoving woman behind a veil and then worshipping her from the other side as something unknowable. Ironically, Lacan shifts back and forth between glorifying this 'extra,' 'unknowable' jouissance and saying that it doesn't exist, and sometimes goes so far as to say that women are holding back, they are not "telling us everything." Fuck, yo. How the fuck can he blame women for 'not telling him everything' if, after all, according to him, there is no way to even communicate and speak female desire? Isn't this a fault of your discourse?

The annoying thing is, even Irigaray positions female sexuality somewhere within 'the divine.' She thinks women need to accept their corporeal nature and sexual difference, but also spouts off about how women must recognize the "divinity of their sexuality."

Even fucking Haraway talks about female sexuality as something "divine, close to God."

What the fuck are we doing here?
There is no place for female sexuality except as pure archaic, primitive body, or, as sexual beings somehow related to 'the divine'?
I don't want to be divine. There is nothing special or divine about female sexuality, any more than for men. Thinking of my sexual identity as something that brings me closer to 'the divine' makes me want to throw up, actually.

Come on, people.
I love you, but...come on.

(I'm pretty sure maybe 1 person will read this whole post. Thanks if you did.)

Also, the image above is by Leonardo daVinci. Need I explain and rant about its portrayal of sexuality? Jacqueline Rose already did this for me.

Early memories, OR why I am afraid, OR eros/thanatos

I spent every afternoon with my best friend who lived behind a white link fence that separated our backyards. We were both six. He had a shock of blond hair and we played cars and made up a new language and visited the neighbour across the street who had a sun room full of birds. Maybe that is a dream. I don't remember the boy's face. We were holding hands between the bars because we couldn't reach high enough to un-lock the gate. Then he told me that if I didn't take off my clothes and swim in the pool while he watched, he wouldn't talk to me anymore. I went inside and curled up in my closet with my new cat and felt uncomfortable. That night, I told my mom what the boy said. I never saw him again.

I was climbing the tree in my front yard. All childhood pictures of me involve mud, sand, or food. I liked to climb or dig or consume. I watched a dalmatian cross the road and get hit by a truck. I had never seen the dog before. I jumped down, stood on the sidewalk and watched the dog die. I didn't know what to do.

I woke up one night when I was a kid in pitch darkness. My night light went out while I was asleep. I still sleep with a light on. I woke up to the sound of doves cooing outside my window in the predawn. I was terrified. I didn't know what the sound was. I tried to keep as much of my body under the blanket as possible. I thought the creature outside my window would attack me if any skin was exposed.

I was camping and and woke up to hideous screeching sounds. I crawled over my little sister in her sleeping bag, got out of my tent and walked over to the door of my dad's tent, curled up on the grass, wet with dew, and cried very quietly. I felt ashamed and didn't want to wake him. I fell asleep from exhaustion on the forest floor in front of the tent and woke up with swollen mosquito bites like patterns on my legs. The screeches surrounded me but it was only owls. The only place I am not afraid of the dark is in the woods.

These situations remind me of the first time I heard my Mother having sex. I woke up and walked into the hallway and tearfully called for her, explaining that there were strange noises. She yelled at me to go back to bed from behind her door. I cried myself to sleep on the floor of the hallway. This was the first time I remember feeling abandoned and alienated and aware of something profound.

Memories are ridiculous and absurd and I can laugh at my ignorance but still feel unsettled.
I feel that I don't care about people judging me or feeling uncomfortable because of things I say or write.
I see my memories play out like youtube clips or music videos, pastiche that curls in on itself and neutralizes history, fear, relationships. Benjamin shakes his head. My memories are mechanically reproduced and serve fascism.
A friend once told me that of all the senses, we cannot turn away from sounds. Sound is very formative. We cannot control noise. Noise is nostalgia and terror. The sublime implies both terror and elation in the confrontation of something unknown. Something natural and powerful.
I have been thinking a lot about the past and the future. Mainly because the present is overwhelming and I feel myself curling inwards again.
I would like to partake in an orgy with Fanon, Guitarri, Bataille and Laclau and see who gives the most intense orgasms. My bet's on Bataille.

"nostalgia is the alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history"

"Cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject: it can no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real world for referent but must, as in Plato's cave, trace its mental image of the world on its confining walls. If there is any realism here, it is a 'realism' which springs from the shock of grasping that confinement and of realizing that, for whatever particular reasons, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach"

-Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society

Photo source: glass orthodoxy @ livejournal

"Everyone is disappointing. The more you know someone...this whole romantic love thing, its just a projection anyway, right."

"-The end is built into the beginning.
-God, you're just perfect.
-I'm a mess, but we fit.
-Yeah."

-Synecdoche New York

"I fucking hate people." -me.