Friday, October 29, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Engaged Sculpture
ENGAGED
Two elk linked in battle antlers tangled, bodies curved and joined at the bottom in male and female intercourse. 5 ft. high crafted in gold plastic on a 7x5 ft lace doily.
Child's toy, home, the deer would have tiny front legs so they would not be able to stand on all fours. this is the marriage bond, social rather than natural, between graceful and aggressive, decorative, lacking acceptance between violent collision and mating, pressing upon each other and now the only way to stand. thrusting. Companionship and incarceration. Linked by the male's antlers and penis, together they make a vaginal form. Their muscles flexed, facing the other with their own force they are tangled.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
John Marie St. Francis
John Marie St. Franceis and I met randomly at Saint Marks Coffee shop in Denver and spent the entire summer playing mind games with each other, the first time we hung out just the two of us we did not speak to see what would happen, etc. When he went back to California and I returned to school we had an unspoken acknowledgment that we would not continue to contact each other in order to avoid nostalgia and inaccurate knowledge of the other. He made such a large impression on me that I thought about him at least once a month for the past seven years. I decided last week that the silence was too long for someone I connected with so well and looked him up online to sadly discover that he had not responded to my love CD that I sent him at the end of Sophomore year because he probably never got it before he died. Our summer together was the last of his life, and he has lived in my mind for seven years. It is a strange passing to mourn, knowing that he has been rotting for this long, and I have loved him as a special friend all that time wondering where he was and what he was doing, and still do. I have two photos of him at home, which he reluctantly let me take because the picture below convinced him that he looked like someone he did not like. We also talked about how we would want to be buried while eating late night at The Denver Dinner. I wanted to have a tree planted in my chest, he did not know what he would want.
John Marie St. Francis
Ventura County Star
(June 14, 2003)
John Marie St. Francis, 22, died June 8, 2003, in Salinas, Calif.Mr. St. Francis was born May 20, 1981, in Martinez, Calif. He graduated from Eaglecrest High School in Aurora, Colo., in 1998. For the last four years, he attended St. Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula and had just graduated with a bachelor of arts degree on May 17. He was planning to teach in Europe for the next year. John was a world-class fencer who twice won the Junior Olympics for his age group.
He is survived by his parents, Michael and Valana Stevens; sister, Fiona; and brother, Peter.
Rosary will be recited at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, June 15, at St. Thomas Aquinas College. Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Monday, June 16, at San Buenaventura Mission, at a time to be announced at the rosary. Interment will take place at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park.
The family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made in John's name to St. Thomas Aquinas College.
Arrangements are under the direction of Pierce Bros. Stetler Mortuary, (805) 525-5595.
This obituary originally appeared in the Ventura County Star on June 14, 2003. Reprinted with permission.
These are Google street views of the place where he is laid to rest, the only visitation I get to indulge in.
On Roland Barthes' lecture 'Comment vivre ensemble'
The audio material available here represents the whole lectures given by Barthes during his first 2 years' teaching at the Collège de France in 1977 and 1978, and also his inaugural lecture about the question of power (and the way it is inscribed in the core of the language).
The Collège de France, in Paris, is a prestigious institution created in 1530 and whose vocation is both being a research center and a teaching space. Neither a University nor a High School, it also has to be distinguished from public research centers and does not award any degree either ; admission to lectures is free and open to all students without any preliminary registration. There are 52 chairs for 52 holders in a wide range of subjects. Professors are elected by their peers and, on their arrival, name their own chairs according to the researching themes they mean to develop. Actually, in opposition to the other institutions that provide an established knowledge (Lacan's « S1 »), the Collège de France deals with knowledge "inthe-making" (Lacan's « S2 »). The prestige of the Collège can be judged by its old professors : Champollion, Paul Valery, Henri Bergson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, André Leroi-Gourhan, Pierre Boulez, etc.
Roland Barthes was elected to the Collège de France on Michel Foucault's proposal in March 1976 and created the chair of literary semiology there. A few days after his inaugural lecture on the 7th of January 1977, Barthes starts his lectures entitled « Comment vivre ensemble » ("How to live together") for the year 1977.
The initial question that he asks to himself (: « How to find the right distance between me and my neighbour in order that an acceptable social living may be possible for all of us ? ») finds a direct answer in Barthes' following proposal : the idiorhythmy as a way (as a fantasy) of living, i.e. a system in which everyone should be able to find, impose and preserve their own rhythm of life.
These lectures about living in community seem strangely refer to themes that Michel Foucault had previously dealt with. According to Barthes, power is precisely what forbids any idiorythmy because it imposes strict rhythms to individuals. The design of the paragon of an idiorhythmic way of living should be that of an anchorite or an ascetic stylite secluded on the top of his column (cf. Buñuel's Simon Of The Desert) ; on the other hand, the total rejection of idiorythmy is what will produce such communities as convents, monasteries or phalansteries (and we should also add two other types of communities that proscribe the possibility of idiorythmy to individuals, two main institutions in Foucault's works : psychiatric hospitals and prisons).
During his 1977's lectures, Barthes will apply himself to clear a path to a living-together (probably utopian), towards this fantasy of society he suggests : a society that would allow everyone to live according to his own rhythm inside the community but without being based on an extreme solitude for each individual (hard to reach, except in the case of the authentic extatic mysticism and in the case of a deep - pathological - feeling of dereliction), a society that wouldn't be based on the extreme alienation of individiuals by a power (whatever its forms) fixing strict rhythms.
-- Guillaume Patin, Ubu Web
The Collège de France, in Paris, is a prestigious institution created in 1530 and whose vocation is both being a research center and a teaching space. Neither a University nor a High School, it also has to be distinguished from public research centers and does not award any degree either ; admission to lectures is free and open to all students without any preliminary registration. There are 52 chairs for 52 holders in a wide range of subjects. Professors are elected by their peers and, on their arrival, name their own chairs according to the researching themes they mean to develop. Actually, in opposition to the other institutions that provide an established knowledge (Lacan's « S1 »), the Collège de France deals with knowledge "inthe-making" (Lacan's « S2 »). The prestige of the Collège can be judged by its old professors : Champollion, Paul Valery, Henri Bergson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, André Leroi-Gourhan, Pierre Boulez, etc.
Roland Barthes was elected to the Collège de France on Michel Foucault's proposal in March 1976 and created the chair of literary semiology there. A few days after his inaugural lecture on the 7th of January 1977, Barthes starts his lectures entitled « Comment vivre ensemble » ("How to live together") for the year 1977.
The initial question that he asks to himself (: « How to find the right distance between me and my neighbour in order that an acceptable social living may be possible for all of us ? ») finds a direct answer in Barthes' following proposal : the idiorhythmy as a way (as a fantasy) of living, i.e. a system in which everyone should be able to find, impose and preserve their own rhythm of life.
These lectures about living in community seem strangely refer to themes that Michel Foucault had previously dealt with. According to Barthes, power is precisely what forbids any idiorythmy because it imposes strict rhythms to individuals. The design of the paragon of an idiorhythmic way of living should be that of an anchorite or an ascetic stylite secluded on the top of his column (cf. Buñuel's Simon Of The Desert) ; on the other hand, the total rejection of idiorythmy is what will produce such communities as convents, monasteries or phalansteries (and we should also add two other types of communities that proscribe the possibility of idiorythmy to individuals, two main institutions in Foucault's works : psychiatric hospitals and prisons).
During his 1977's lectures, Barthes will apply himself to clear a path to a living-together (probably utopian), towards this fantasy of society he suggests : a society that would allow everyone to live according to his own rhythm inside the community but without being based on an extreme solitude for each individual (hard to reach, except in the case of the authentic extatic mysticism and in the case of a deep - pathological - feeling of dereliction), a society that wouldn't be based on the extreme alienation of individiuals by a power (whatever its forms) fixing strict rhythms.
-- Guillaume Patin, Ubu Web
Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman
A User’s Guide to Détournement(1)
Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life. In the civil-war phase we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we believe that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.
There are several conflicting opinions about the forms and even the very nature of educative propaganda, opinions that generally reflect one or another currently fashionable variety of reformist politics. Suffice it to say that in our view the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot. It is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even “modern” cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they depend on ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present. The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation. The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes. It is, of course, necessary to go beyond any idea of mere scandal. Since opposition to the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Marcel Duchamp’s] drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation. Bertolt Brecht, revealing in a recent interview in France-Observateur that he makes cuts in the classics of the theater in order to make the performances more educative, is much closer than Duchamp to the revolutionary orientation we are calling for. We must note, however, that in Brecht’s case these salutary alterations are narrowly limited by his unfortunate respect for culture as defined by the ruling class — that same respect, taught in the newspapers of the workers parties as well as in the primary schools of the bourgeoisie, which leads even the reddest worker districts of Paris always to prefer The Cid over [Brecht’s] Mother Courage.
It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous “inspired” works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. The point is not whether we like them or not. We have to go beyond them.
Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.
It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish reference to “citations.”
Such parodistic methods have often been used to obtain comical effects. But such humor is the result of contradictions within a condition whose existence is taken for granted. Since the world of literature seems to us almost as distant as the Stone Age, such contradictions don’t make us laugh. It is thus necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.
Lautréamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partially misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his obvious application of this method to theoretical language in Poésies — where Lautréamont (drawing particularly on the maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues) strives to reduce the argument, through successive concentrations, to maxims alone — a certain Viroux caused considerable astonishment three or four years ago by conclusively demonstrating that Maldoror is one vast détournement of Buffon and other works of natural history, among other things. The fact that the prosaists of Figaro, like Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification for disparaging Lautréamont, and that others believed they had to defend him by praising his insolence, only testifies to the senility of these two camps of dotards in courtly combat with each other. A slogan like “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it” is still as poorly understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the poetry that “must be made by all.”(2)
Apart from Lautréamont’s work — whose appearance so far ahead of its time has to a great extent preserved it from a detailed examination — the tendencies toward détournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or accidental. It is in the advertising industry, more than in the domain of decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples.
We can first of all define two main categories of detourned elements, without considering whether or not their being brought together is accompanied by corrections introduced in the originals. These are minor détournements and deceptive détournements.
Minor détournement is the détournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed. For example, a press clipping, a neutral phrase, a commonplace photograph.
Deceptive détournement, also termed premonitory-proposition détournement, is in contrast the détournement of an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from the new context. A slogan of Saint-Just, for example, or a film sequence from Eisenstein.
Extensive detourned works will thus usually be composed of one or more series of deceptive and minor détournements.
Several laws on the use of détournement can now be formulated.
It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine the nature of this impression. For example, in a metagraph relating to the Spanish Civil War the phrase with the most distinctly revolutionary sense is a fragment from a lipstick ad: “Pretty lips are red.” In another metagraph (The Death of J.H.) 125 classified ads of bars for sale express a suicide more strikingly than the newspaper articles that recount it.(3)
The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements. This is well known. Let us simply note that if this dependence on memory implies that one must determine one’s public before devising a détournement, this is only a particular case of a general law that governs not only détournement but also any other form of action on the world. The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead; it only temporarily survives in parodic form as long as our other enemies survive.
Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. This is the case with a rather large number of Lautréamont’s altered maxims. The more the rational character of the reply is apparent, the more indistinguishable it becomes from the ordinary spirit of repartee, which similarly uses the opponent’s words against him. This is naturally not limited to spoken language. It was in this connection that we objected to the project of some of our comrades who proposed to detourn an anti-Soviet poster of the fascist organization “Peace and Liberty” — which proclaimed, amid images of overlapping flags of the Western powers, “Union makes strength” — by adding onto it a smaller sheet with the phrase “and coalitions make war.”
Détournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least effective. Thus, the Black Mass reacts against the construction of an ambience based on a given metaphysics by constructing an ambience within the same framework that merely reverses — and thus simultaneously conserves — the values of that metaphysics. Such reversals may nevertheless have a certain progressive aspect. For example, Clemenceau [nicknamed “The Tiger”] could be referred to as “The Tiger Named Clemenceau.”
Of the four laws that have just been set forth, the first is essential and applies universally. The other three are practically applicable only to deceptive detourned elements.
The first visible consequences of a widespread use of détournement, apart from its intrinsic propaganda powers, will be the revival of a multitude of bad books, and thus the extensive (unintended) participation of their unknown authors; an increasingly extensive transformation of phrases or plastic works that happen to be in fashion; and above all an ease of production far surpassing in quantity, variety and quality the automatic writing that has bored us for so long.
Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle. The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding.(4) It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism.
Ideas and creations in the realm of détournement can be multiplied at will. For the moment we will limit ourselves to showing a few concrete possibilities in various current sectors of communication — it being understood that these separate sectors are significant only in relation to present-day technologies, and are all tending to merge into superior syntheses with the advance of these technologies.
Apart from the various direct uses of detourned phrases in posters, records and radio broadcasts, the two main applications of detourned prose are metagraphic writings and, to a lesser degree, the adroit perversion of the classical novel form.
There is not much future in the détournement of complete novels, but during the transitional phase there might be a certain number of undertakings of this sort. Such a détournement gains by being accompanied by illustrations whose relationships to the text are not immediately obvious. In spite of undeniable difficulties, we believe it would be possible to produce an instructive psychogeographical détournement of George Sand’s Consuelo, which thus decked out could be relaunched on the literary market disguised under some innocuous title like “Life in the Suburbs,” or even under a title itself detourned, such as “The Lost Patrol.” (It would be a good idea to reuse in this way many titles of deteriorated old films of which nothing else remains, or of the films that continue to deaden the minds of young people in the cinema clubs.)
Metagraphic writing, no matter how outdated its plastic framework may be, presents far richer opportunities for detourning prose, as well as other appropriate objects or images. One can get some idea of this from the project, conceived in 1951 but eventually abandoned for lack of sufficient financial means, which envisaged a pinball machine arranged in such a way that the play of the lights and the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls would form a metagraphic-spatial composition entitled Thermal Sensations and Desires of People Passing by the Gates of the Cluny Museum Around an Hour after Sunset in November. We have since come to realize that a situationist-analytic enterprise cannot scientifically advance by way of such works. The means nevertheless remain suitable for less ambitious goals.
It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.
The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of those powers is so glaring, that virtually any film that is above the miserable average can provide matter for endless polemics among spectators or professional critics. Only the conformism of those people prevents them from discovering equally appealing charms and equally glaring faults even in the worst films. To cut through this absurd confusion of values, we can observe that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history of the cinema because of its wealth of innovations. On the other hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being shown in its present form. But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the cinema. It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the United States even now.
Such a détournement — a very moderate one — is in the final analysis nothing more than the moral equivalent of the restoration of old paintings in museums. But most films only merit being cut up to compose other works. This reconversion of preexisting sequences will obviously be accompanied by other elements, musical or pictorial as well as historical. While the cinematic rewriting of history has until now been largely along the lines of Sacha Guitry’s burlesque re-creations, one could have Robespierre say, before his execution: “In spite of so many trials, my experience and the grandeur of my task convinces me that all is well.” If in this case an appropriate reuse of a Greek tragedy enables us to exalt Robespierre, we can conversely imagine a neorealist-type sequence, at the counter of a truck stop bar, for example, with one of the truck drivers saying seriously to another: “Ethics was formerly confined to the books of the philosophers; we have introduced it into the governing of nations.” One can see that this juxtaposition illuminates Maximilien’s idea, the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.(5)
The light of détournement is propagated in a straight line. To the extent that new architecture seems to have to begin with an experimental baroque stage, the architectural complex — which we conceive as the construction of a dynamic environment related to styles of behavior — will probably detourn existing architectural forms, and in any case will make plastic and emotional use of all sorts of detourned objects: careful arrangements of such things as cranes or metal scaffolding replacing a defunct sculptural tradition. This is shocking only to the most fanatical admirers of French-style gardens. It is said that in his old age D’Annunzio, that pro-fascist swine, had the prow of a torpedo boat in his park. Leaving aside his patriotic motives, the idea of such a monument is not without a certain charm.
If détournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: détournement on this level would really spice it up.
Titles themselves, as we have already seen, are a basic element of détournement. This follows from two general observations: that all titles are interchangeable and that they have a decisive importance in several genres. The detective stories in the “Série Noir” are all extremely similar, yet merely continually changing the titles suffices to hold a considerable audience. In music a title always exerts a great influence, yet the choice of one is quite arbitrary. Thus it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a final correction to the title of the “Eroica Symphony” by changing it, for example, to “Lenin Symphony.”(6)
The title contributes strongly to the détournement of a work, but there is an inevitable counteraction of the work on the title. Thus one can make extensive use of specific titles taken from scientific publications (“Coastal Biology of Temperate Seas”) or military ones (“Night Combat of Small Infantry Units”), or even of many phrases found in illustrated children’s books (“Marvelous Landscapes Greet the Voyagers”).
In closing, we should briefly mention some aspects of what we call ultra-détournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life. Gestures and words can be given other meanings, and have been throughout history for various practical reasons. The secret societies of ancient China made use of quite subtle recognition signals encompassing the greater part of social behavior (the manner of arranging cups; of drinking; quotations of poems interrupted at agreed-on points). The need for a secret language, for passwords, is inseparable from a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite. The royalist insurgents of the Vendée,(7) because they bore the disgusting image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, were called the Red Army. In the limited domain of political war vocabulary this expression was completely detourned within a century.
Outside of language, it is possible to use the same methods to detourn clothing, with all its strong emotional connotations. Here again we find the notion of disguise closely linked to play. Finally, when we have got to the stage of constructing situations — the ultimate goal of all our activity — everyone will be free to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them.
The methods that we have briefly examined here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize.
In itself, the theory of détournement scarcely interests us. But we find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the presituationist period of transition. Thus its enrichment, through practice, seems necessary.
We will postpone the development of these theses until later.
GUY DEBORD, GIL J WOLMAN
1956
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]
1. The French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose. It has sometimes been translated as “diversion,” but this word is confusing because of its more common meaning of idle entertainment. Like most other English-speaking people who have actually practiced détournement, I have chosen simply to anglicize the French word.For more on détournement, see theses 204-209 of The Society of the Spectacle.
2. The two quoted phrases are from Isidore Ducasse’s Poésies. Lautréamont was the pseudonym used by Ducasse for his other work, Maldoror. The “Plagiarism is necessary” passage was later plagiarized by Debord in thesis #207 of The Society of the Spectacle.
3. The “metagraph,” a genre developed by the lettrists, is a sort of collage with largely textual elements. The two metagraphs mentioned here are both by Debord, and can be found in his Oeuvres (p. 127).
4. The authors are detourning a sentence from the Communist Manifesto: “The cheapness of the bourgeoisie’s commodities is the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.”
5. In the first imagined scene a phrase from a Greek tragedy (Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus) is put in the mouth of French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre. In the second, a phrase from Robespierre is put in the mouth of a truck driver.
6. Beethoven originally named his third symphony after Napoleon (seen as a defender of the French Revolution), but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor he angrily tore up the dedication to him and renamed it “Eroica.”
The implied respect in this passage for Lenin (like the passing references to “workers states” in Debord’s “Report on the Construction of Situations”) is a vestige of the lettrists’ early, less politically sophisticated period, when they seem to have been sort of anarcho-Trotskyist.
7. The Vendée: region in southwestern France, locale of a pro-monarchist revolt against the Revolutionary government (1793-1796).
“Mode d’emploi du détournement” originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May 1956). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.
Gil J. Wolman
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htmhttp://www.notbored.org/anticoncept.html
Emile Reynaud writes movement on the screen with photographs successively taken and projected at a given rhythm.
The Lumiere brothers simplify this process by photographing movement directly.
An art evolves by multiplying its origin by elements that are specific to it.
The evolution of the cinematograph is marked by optical variation and variation of movement and their combinations: close-ups and other shots.
In 1896, Promio gives a second dimension to movement by introducing the first travelling shots.
Thus furnished with its specific means, the cinematograph begins to express a new reality by an original stylization. It produces several masterpieces.
Then, without laying the problem to rest with the reproduction of speech, [the cinematograph] perfects its technology on the criterion of precision, to the point that it ceases to interpret in order to reproduce reality, whether real or novelistic.
The cinematograph had arrived at that stage, when in 1951 Isou destroys photography in favor of sound; and in surprise one saw a most banal fish in the sea take on an unaccustomed relief by means of a love story that unreels on the sound track.
The same year, Gil J Wolman realizes his first cinechronic film, which he calls by abbreviation and to mark the difference with the cinematograph: ATOCHRONE.
Wolman divides the second by 24; he thus renders an image autonomous, which, outside of all symbolism, becomes the element of the propagation of movement on the exterior of photography. Asynchronous, at the unreeling of the atonic narration, this new antithetical movement, counters each vocal inflection.
AND A NEW ART BEGINS.
I love you I no longer love you he loves another woman.
Beneath the mask she must be pretty she must be ugly.
THEOREM.
There is no negation that does not affirm itself elsewhere.
Negation is the transitional term to a new period.
Negation of the intrinsic, immutable, a priori concept, projects this concept outside of matter, reveals it a posteriori to an extrinsic reaction, becomes mutable by as many reactions.
THE TIME OF POETS IS FINISHED.
TODAY I'M SLEEPING.
(By Gil J Wolman. Translated from the French by Keith Sanborn. An imageless film The Anticoncept was first screened on 11 February 1952 at the cinema club "Avant-Garde 52," where it was projected upon a large white weather balloon.)
The Anticoncept
Cinematochronic Argument For A Physical Phase of the Arts
Preface
Let X be the original. All art poses the elementary equation: movement of X. Progenitor of the cinematograph: movement of photography.Emile Reynaud writes movement on the screen with photographs successively taken and projected at a given rhythm.
The Lumiere brothers simplify this process by photographing movement directly.
An art evolves by multiplying its origin by elements that are specific to it.
The evolution of the cinematograph is marked by optical variation and variation of movement and their combinations: close-ups and other shots.
In 1896, Promio gives a second dimension to movement by introducing the first travelling shots.
Thus furnished with its specific means, the cinematograph begins to express a new reality by an original stylization. It produces several masterpieces.
Then, without laying the problem to rest with the reproduction of speech, [the cinematograph] perfects its technology on the criterion of precision, to the point that it ceases to interpret in order to reproduce reality, whether real or novelistic.
The cinematograph had arrived at that stage, when in 1951 Isou destroys photography in favor of sound; and in surprise one saw a most banal fish in the sea take on an unaccustomed relief by means of a love story that unreels on the sound track.
The same year, Gil J Wolman realizes his first cinechronic film, which he calls by abbreviation and to mark the difference with the cinematograph: ATOCHRONE.
Wolman divides the second by 24; he thus renders an image autonomous, which, outside of all symbolism, becomes the element of the propagation of movement on the exterior of photography. Asynchronous, at the unreeling of the atonic narration, this new antithetical movement, counters each vocal inflection.
AND A NEW ART BEGINS.
I love you I no longer love you he loves another woman.
Beneath the mask she must be pretty she must be ugly.
THEOREM.
There is no negation that does not affirm itself elsewhere.
Negation is the transitional term to a new period.
Negation of the intrinsic, immutable, a priori concept, projects this concept outside of matter, reveals it a posteriori to an extrinsic reaction, becomes mutable by as many reactions.
THE TIME OF POETS IS FINISHED.
TODAY I'M SLEEPING.
Voiceover
Those who invent have never lived the characters of this work those who invent have never lived i want to move through all of life the gangster and his victim you say i am not ashamed i have my eyes open watch out for my stockings monique she you you are real certain ones exist the others will soon my steps for a rule the night for a cord i walk and i set up symmetrical frontiers to common places of double mouths of simple provisional bodies of the five atrophied senses and i arch the lost acts To the false earth without elements of the fourth dimension and i set up walls that crumble one must live fire catches the grasses the roots of the trees one must live you won't have me i enter the moon printed shadows on the yellow dress with two very distinct smiles in the eyes that one must know how to capture together in order to see you walk in order to be tired i speak without ambiguity in order to sing there is a butcher's red and grey white awning it's raining and holds us on an island the bridge suspended you have skin with an odor without accent your mouth must be alcohol padded around a lizard dead i oscillate between pleasure and to see at auteil while a nag hesitated before the obstacle a young girl raped the satyr i oscillate between pleasure and i break some fingers in your hand FIRE a cat flows under the bench wet she has closed eyes that count my phalanxes i have some violet blood in my head i wipe my nose you wipe your nose we are two the waiting was a luxury and we were so old that youth serves us if we don't know how to be old as well on the circular path there are some false moons of electric lights four years later the party at the lake under the bridge of stones is still dry depressed by the stupid depth brought to light the children no longer invent the submarine mysteries of the lake of the hills chaumont and i turn stupidly onto the traces of the ass and i throw some ashes to the birds it was it was it was it was it was it was it was it was it was it was it was it was it was i lived so much that dead with sandy eyes in order to deny but some sand too fine to sleep the others got caught on the platform of the bus in motion were running up to drowning themselves in the corridors of the metro one had to be drugged at this point in order to imagine that the train following would be fatal eggs the thousand from 900 to 12000 butter the kilo from 425 to 585 camembert the piece from 35 to 70 gruyere the kilo from 290 to 390 green beans the kilo from 50 to 100 potatoes the the squares squares the squares the children are a tree and the hands of the marriages of hanged men in the sun slide the words no longer know how to speak the mouth opens in order to kiss the benches deep and hollow capitalize themselves with flexible nuances "No, some manners please" it's an ink stain a bolt of lightning an earthquake it's certainly the end of a world bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard she was thin i paid for the room she took a towel and told me to leave something for the service i finished the cigarette reading the regulation on the door while she washed up finally "watch out for my stockings" the time to think of something else the red solar eye is sky mixed inseparably with bodies in the same way one never sees oneself in order to see oneself one must go in the opposite way the prompt reflex will annihilate the mind one must stop before thinking about stopping she has drawn her gaze from the vaults of dead families petrified her two breasts of clay and brings them to the preceding girl seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fifteen under the bridge where moves the axis exposed to the air of bodies it smells like urine the fixed light of trocadero floats on the seine the water slaps the arches i reinvent the sea we walk in order to extenuate the silence but soon inside some legs one must decrease the angles i you lap the saliva you i catch the tongue and relax it aerodrome train station port anthill crossroads war the vital act takes on sadistic proportions of cataclysms i have liquid hands to discover you forgetting nothing of the prestidigator hands the virgins rasp the acne tomorrow rises to the boulevard the impasses leave each girl a skin of pus the brakes grind fires alternate in mid sky i plow the same street of boredom auscultate the detached vertebrae of the cat abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz advertising enters backwards but it caught in traps at the tuilleries the chairs with one arm in the damp part of the lip you planted a tooth the fly that irritated it had broken the attraction that held us with four fingers you say "what kids we are" i forget the phrase you write it later the only girl who i name monique leper solitude of ugliness shrew rueil avoid the benches of stone where the space in the seat catches the dirty old men i walk with your double hand balance in order to fill the instant we don't know that we are happy joy today i will raise up sky scrapers for you with a thousand windows seen on the walls of the rue d'aubervilliers lime washed alive with love three benches of the path in the seminary the empty land sluggish animal and then we trample the uneven grass "you'' write me from Paris about everything about the seine about the theatres about" i wrote you in the parks he was crushing his cigarette butt in the cavities of the death head she speaks without lively words she leaves the esophagus without transitions pulps pearls stones she conjugates the least heavy that the air through eighteen years install some passages of untempered steel among them all And recapitulate where we are with it no no no not already i certainly forgot don't go away the glass of rum the phrases phrases for nothing for saying for saying nothing silence modulates itself on words heartsick so that's all we walk in the rain we kiss in the parks i caress you through your dress our muscles tense on the grass and then you get the fuck out for metaphysical reasons under the aerial metro thursday i smoke the time of two cigarettes you left peanuts peanuts peanuts standing a man totally gallowslike in a car long uncovered throws dead bodies expurgate the cemetery belches with tenacious worms living in the green flesh a dyed blonde in her somber slip discharges some hysteria through symbols dactyls THAT empty the newborns to the pipes bleeds pikes on the cut hearts of the women he screws in fingernails through the eyes to the skull three dirty fingers eat away the belly from the navel under the grass guts you will stuff the greasy slime odors odors odors of those who still croak off on all fours corinth steel tannin cove nile wine-red acacia cyclamen rainshower cock etruscan ingot ecru seine here it's not death life stops there is on the live rock the sun in capitals of tar i am looking for you through your phalanxes open to the air here you no longer recognize the places you believe that i invent but here it's not you another woman comes to perpetuate you become you and you the other she the second night you open yourself entire in the narrow bed complete the road of the previous girl carbon between the crude dreams of actions you sleep white polycarbons without pleasure finally mistress of fear "i'm not ashamed i have my eyes open" come take les halles in the mud at eight o'clock in the morning up to chatelet i'm retracing the road the light chisels the retinas the blood takes on the motions of prodigious cataracts i know where to pour in public latrines in italy i suffered from constipation and i thought that there existed no greater pain what does that prove there is always someone who waits for someone to come on the point saint michel the electric clock scrapes at the imagined for me this will be later without dancing we cut in every way the public dances naked she comes to sleep with malleable inflections sleep and don't move for the emptied slut of my gaze all the arborescent girls of the street have a past so so when will we be free perpetual virgins without memory and who don't speak in search of her who on the sidewalks alternating at each train on the trains the bistros on the road the crowd of all the capitals of Europe and of the towns at dawn behind a girl alone in the waiting room i throw a rock into the pond the stories spiral out upside-down towards the sex i will recapitulate love in the real order of the circles my little girl another at como at night under the marabout i saw her face only at the end of the fingers of others issues of the ripe green clusters never at the right time for all the missed women at the transfer point of the metro postulate grab her ass hesitation he's a bad lot regrets jean louis surrealism played at 81 our lives on the boulevard saint germain in the sphere of the first stage with maurice i cheated and thereafter each night methodically i prepared my dreams the new generation will leave nothing anymore to chance peanuts peanuts peanuts she came back to jump over years with both feet together up to the point au change the other girl dead in a corner on the first step i was thrown a bit off my route what phase would she accomplish she in the perfect girl -- absolute -- mixed TO GARBLE THE FUTURE ON THE PATH in the seminary your mouth has gotten deep you need a lot of saliva to erase the time between "i want to move through all of life" quick quick quick square du temple you are biting me in the hollow of my thumb and each day i tear open the wound a scab i grow tired before the blood beethoven van gogh outside the train passes through the hours we will continue to sing "au revoir madamoiselle" peanuts peanuts peanuts huge rats hanging around a trashcan where the fetus of an aborted infant cries wrapped up in the sheets of a weekly with stories lived from the heart i climb the second stairway of saint genevieve you are there sitting she read i can barely see you but it's her one doesn't mistake rotaries bodies i i reinvent you i watch her i confront "hello" she watches me it's you i tell you your name a name of a river you speak "you were saying" your voice is a hard light lights her face it's not her middle of the night hatched with unequal circles the silence exasperates the boys gathered together from the country cancer solitude embodies mine from this day on he carefully emphasized that death was nothing but that it was difficult to die and he had doubts about NOTHING was creating to enter into a formulation i SEE NOTHING IN ORDER TO become the problem he disassembled his veins with a rusted blade i lean back against a column hollowed out i pretend to be waiting he threw himself into the canal several years later we recalled to him by chance on the telephone that it was the canal saint martin when they pulled him out he had two drowned kittens against his chest i returned to dieppe with albert we had put up the hut on almost the same spot the sea had a mask of heaviness you had to be sordid to resist the vertigo he needed air made a child's grimace smile in the mirror he was seeing his death mouths glued together we had started to vomit to consume the acts was to forget to be free i have my hands flat on your i crush you against the tree standing up i look at you marvelous you make me drunk the days of stupid girls later you will invent me return there we got ready i lost the day for living on the train from the north he juggled very quickly between the beaten paths with words used in order not to see them constructed fragile phrases that fell before understanding he wanted to renew love through a new filmic technique one bone after the other until there were four on the table bistros i let half of my skull bead up caress my brain in the open air with your spinner's hands in slow motion he would come back from all the suicides ready to begin again the genesis of the world he had a memory like a man no one had ever suffered as much as his body crushed in the shadow once more among words i say to him and it's to you that i'm speaking no tricks because she is sketching out another boy we split up he missed her by a green light by a second by a sidewalk by a train he was walking with his chin closed down on his adam's apple he balanced real lucidities in the shadow of forms we created arbitrary rules we played at love in a parallel universe without water played we forgot to live and i practice artificial respiration personalities by external usage poets with rotten words virgins with the looks of whores black looks good on you we will allow legend to catch up at saint germain des pres for the tourists of the other quarters "got a smoke, buy me a drink" an enormous skeleton of scrap iron flows at a slow tempo "i can't love you i love someone else" what was there to reply to this rigorous logic huskvarna jonkoping mjolby norrkoping stockholm he didn't cry may be still in sweden taxa taxa taxa ALONE he created things away until the discovery of paroxysms at the place called the heart several burns with cold orgiastic sensibilities one girl coming afterwards she was an exact double of the preceding one with the off-handed ease of a habit this lasted this lasted i open my eyes to a newborn this lasted i crossed over without turning back to the origin my life is an imageless corridor and while i'm at it in the order of things i except nuances a man gives in his language names of children and bread to the pigeons with a mechanical arm night comes without one being aware of it i walk barefoot on the beach what he didn't saw he grimaced on contact with the pebbles i assume the vindicative flight of love caught up in the game of docile vision however it was not so simple the truth is that he would speak to the girls he loved so they'd know in order later to anticipate his silences and he rendered them infinitesimal each breath he could increase the size of a fart up to the stars art unhinges the emotional personality creation splits in two rot plus creation i turn on the out-of-date trajectory of nights rumpled by four of the he recapitulated the inclemencies with a mathematical precision the alliances of his belly he lived parallel extremities without conditions the sky moved i could never detach the clouds from the idea of sky it's raining around eleven o'clock a drunk woman asks for a light it rains against the window somewhere on another continent partner enter into the alternative of cliches you disappear into the amorous finality he found her again without apparent deformation the same eyes in the same palor between two lives only she had become more fragile at the first tactile confines she broke modesty afterwards he gave her the night in her palm in order to isolate himself "we are going to lose everything we are no longer children" "of course of course" and it took him the time to count to fifty to discharge his veins since then everything had gone to their bellies with the gait of an orangoutang pressed down his foot on the mug of the poor little man crumpled in a corner of the cellar one eye out of its orbit and some fresh blood flowed to become lost in a thin thread on the white silk shirt "you're going to talk" i wish them happiness the couple takes their revenge and crosses over reality becomes real man is born an old man and dies a foetus what a program one dawn i cut across les halles with parsimonious steps back and forth you are awake beautiful and you have already brushed your teeth when the ones in love don't know that they are lovers they make love with movements without importance he took aim on every girl at point blank range he was an asthmatic he had one steel lung for hygiene i finish the night with an old prostitute very ugly i make an epilogue of indissoluble rudiments from the succession of events he was accentuating the errors to excess of desolation i trench your belly with hands tied i asphyxiate you we share the foul air i flush the toilet on my siphonal memory persists a whiff of shit END POST SCRIPT resembles you and keeps me her mouth breathless near the ruins she speaks with your words renews past situations life is not retrospective I AM IMMORTAL AND LIVING(By Gil J Wolman. Translated from the French by Keith Sanborn. An imageless film The Anticoncept was first screened on 11 February 1952 at the cinema club "Avant-Garde 52," where it was projected upon a large white weather balloon.)
Thursday, October 21, 2010
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Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Ken Davenport
This guy has a free space for upcoming shows to help them get off the ground, mainly for writers it seems.
http://www.davenporttheatrical.com/the-studio.html
http://www.theproducersperspective.com/A Blog about producing theater.
Ken Davenport is a Broadway and Off-Broadway producer. Recent Broadway productions include Oleanna starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles, Speed-the-Plow starring Raul Esparza, Will Ferrell's You're Welcome America, Blithe Spirit starring Angela Lansbury, and 13. Ken is the only independent producer to have had three shows running simultaneously Off-Broadway - Altar Boyz, The Awesome 80s Prom and My First Time. He was recently featured on a national commercial for Apple's iPhone, named one of Crain's "Forty Under 40" in 2008, and was dubbed the "P.T. Barnum of Off-Broadway" by The New York Times. He has written articles for Forbes, Mashable, Imedia and others.
http://www.davenporttheatrical.com/the-studio.html
http://www.theproducersperspective.com/A Blog about producing theater.
Ken Davenport is a Broadway and Off-Broadway producer. Recent Broadway productions include Oleanna starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles, Speed-the-Plow starring Raul Esparza, Will Ferrell's You're Welcome America, Blithe Spirit starring Angela Lansbury, and 13. Ken is the only independent producer to have had three shows running simultaneously Off-Broadway - Altar Boyz, The Awesome 80s Prom and My First Time. He was recently featured on a national commercial for Apple's iPhone, named one of Crain's "Forty Under 40" in 2008, and was dubbed the "P.T. Barnum of Off-Broadway" by The New York Times. He has written articles for Forbes, Mashable, Imedia and others.
Lisa Oppenheim 'The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else'
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Rebecca Solnit from Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Benjamin Quote and bit from the New Inquiry
“…what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship between a collector and his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection….This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories…
The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are frozen as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. … To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things…
Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in pursuit of books!”
“…Now I am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I have found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris: memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzog Stocktum where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Sussengut’s musty book cellarin North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me…. For a collecteor—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” –Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library
“ We approach the world, futilely, as collectors. Travel demonstrates as much as any personal intimacy that we cannot elicit perfect, unmoving loyalty. Writing anything down is basically sentimental, an act of preservation, an attempt to hold a moment or image still. Travel writing wants to defeat the impermanence of being in any one place. In keeping records of the intangible — people or places or experiences — we attempt to forget that the things we love are not, in fact, things, and therefore can’t be kept, preserved, or possessed.
The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are frozen as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. … To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things…
Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in pursuit of books!”
“…Now I am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I have found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris: memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzog Stocktum where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Sussengut’s musty book cellarin North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me…. For a collecteor—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” –Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library
“ We approach the world, futilely, as collectors. Travel demonstrates as much as any personal intimacy that we cannot elicit perfect, unmoving loyalty. Writing anything down is basically sentimental, an act of preservation, an attempt to hold a moment or image still. Travel writing wants to defeat the impermanence of being in any one place. In keeping records of the intangible — people or places or experiences — we attempt to forget that the things we love are not, in fact, things, and therefore can’t be kept, preserved, or possessed.
Taryn Simon Cargo at Kennedy
Strange Cargo at Kennedy Airport
Photographs by TARYN SIMONThese images are from a set of 1,075 photographs — shot over five days last year for the book and exhibition, ‘‘Contraband’’ — of items detained or seized from passengers or express mail entering the United States from abroad at the New York airport. The miscellany of prohibited objects — from the everyday to the illegal to the just plain odd — attests to a growing worldwide traffic in counterfeit goods and natural exotica and offers a snapshot of the United States as seen through its illicit material needs and desires.
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