May 2009
The Jungle is Obscene
From the June issue of Harper’s: excerpts from Werner Herzog’s journals during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Each entry is unbelievable, so it isn’t even worth quoting anything in particular, as it wouldn’t do it justice (thanks to Jenny for finding this).
Oh, and here’s more great jungle obscenity from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams:
Update: A Harper’s representative has informed me that I must remove the PDF forthwith. So I’ve decided to reproduce the text of my favorite entry instead:
A still day, sultry. Inactivity piled on inactivity, clouds staring down from the sky, pregnant with rain; fever reigns; insects taking on massive proportions. The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything. The laundry on the line refuses to dry. As part of a conspiracy, flies suddenly descend on the table, their stomachs taut and iridescent. Our little monkey was wailing in his cage, and when I approached, he looked and wailed right through me to some distant spot outside where his little heart hoped to find an echo. I let him out, but he went back into his cage, and now he is continuing to wail there.
Alain Badiou Interviewed by Infinite Thought
My favorite part is at the end when Alain Badiou describes the Fight Club-esque plot of his The Life of Plato film:
AB: My idea would be that Plato and Socrates are played by the same person. The movie will be the idea that Socrates is a retrospective creation of Plato, so inside the movie Socrates would be something like the old-young Plato. During the movie Plato finally becomes Socrates, something like that. But the script is not finished, so there are many possibilities!
Badiou could have Tommy Wiseau simultaneously direct it in HD and 35mm. But you really should read the whole interview, it’s very good! And uncut.
Sometimes I like to write things.
Hello Howlers. I’ve started writing again, after a long absence. I’m working on stretching those creative muscles by writing these little short stories almost every day. Basically, I just write whatever comes to mind for about half an hour, and then type it up for the Internet. I’ve posted two so far at my blog, and I took the liberty of removing the stupid title and the whiny posts from two years ago. So check it out!
Here is a preview of today’s story about a man who boxes a bear.
“How the hell do I get into these situations?” Jack asked himself. He knew the answer was something about a gambling debt and about ten years too many as a semi-professional prize fighter. But he didn’t have time to answer his rhetorical query as the bear hit him hard across the face. They had wrapped the claws in some sort of foam padding, so that Jack wouldn’t be instantly mauled. Still, getting hit with a cinder block wrapped in a pillow still feels like getting hit with a cinder block.
Ouch! Well, I plan to keep churning out these gems on a semi-daily basis, so check back regularly. Maybe every two weeks or so I’ll pick the least terrible one and expand it into a longer and more horrible version!
New Herzog Film: Bad Lieutenant
Kind of an advanced choice for a remake. And it stars both Nicholas Cage and Val Kilmer. (Via Socialism and/or barbarism.)
Against Self-Organization
Steven Shaviro just posted a very cool critique of the “mythology” of self-organization and draws a number of surprising connections between the popular “Gaia Hypothesis,” Friedrich Hayek, and even Brian Eno. As a general remark, I think there is definitely a case to be made about the intimate link between structure, aesthetics, philosophy, and political organization, and this post does a great job of tying all of these topics together in a coherent manner. I’d also like to note that one intriguing alternative to the Leninist Vanguard Party model (itself the opposite of spontaneous self-organization) is Kojin Karatani’s semi-lattice structure.
Commissar Žižek
This is funny because Žižek has now been accused of being both a double-dealing corporate sellout in dissident’s clothing who helped initiate the unravelling of Yugoslav socialism, and an agent provocateur on behalf of the very same Communist regime! Although I suppose if you’re a Hegelian, that isn’t really a problem at all. (Via Jodi Dean.)
An Ideal Higher Than Expression
In large part, the complacency surrounding the Wal-Mart and Blockbuster strain of censorship occurs because most people are apt to think of corporate decisions as non-ideological. Businesses make business decisions, we tell ourselves— even when the effects of those decisions are clearly political.
—Naomi Klein, No Logo
Prime Loan Collapse
Soon not just the poor, but everyone will be without a home and without a job. The financial crisis will finally allow us to complete the cycle already set into motion by the same dynamics that brought on de-industrialization: the erosion of so-called “industry” in the mechanical, Fordist sense; the boom and bust of the mortgage-loan/MERS system (serfdom/feudalism); and, finally, the beginning/ending/telos: pre-agrarian nomadic society.
The Boss of it All
A new Lars von Trier film (well, a remake of the Danish version), and some strange reflections on his left hand of darkness:
(Via Ads without Products.)
Cherry Ted
“Cherry Ted” was a fictional persona, an uninhibited internet fountain of information and a possible lacrosse player. His work has held up surprisingly well for what it is. I’m much prouder to have this as my early legacy than what I wrote when I was intentionally trying to write poetry.
Ghost Airports: Fantasies of Over-capacity
Ads Without Products links to this strange BBC article on a South Korean “ghost airport,” originally designed with the intent of having up to three million people travel through it every year, while currently only 26 passengers a day come through the doors. I really liked this description, because it reminds me of living in both South Florida (where most property is obviously speculative) as well as Michigan (where lots of property is languishing in post-industrial decay):
So, while the Korean airport discussed in the BBC piece seems to have been born of political corruption – and even America has its own cases of that sort of thing – there’s still something to this I think. While it’s not at all hard to drive around the US finding the architectural materialization of private-sector speculations and public-sector dereliction, things like empty bullet-trains to unbuilt cities, hulking universities for student populations not yet born, hospitals for patients not yet sick, and slick public housing for populations yet to arrive but who vividly anticipated are very difficult to imagine in anything other than the light of the utopian apparitions. Those of us familiar with the post-industrial portions of the USA, the northeast and the Great Lakes region, know only the bent tracks and silted canals and abandoned silos and factories – the native flora cast in concrete and iron of unemployment, casualization, and privatization.
The (Liberal) Politics of Exclusion
Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb analyzes Žižek’s “How to Begin from the Beginning” article in Issue 57 of the New Left Review. Not sure I agree with Seymour’s critique, but it’s worth linking to anyhow (my comments can be found here, here, here, and here, among others).
Crisis and Cultural Capital
Over the past couple of months, liberals and the Right—despite their (albeit minor) differences apropos solutions to the financial crisis—have teamed up to ensure that the narrative of the events are centered, not around a crisis of capitalism as such (this would require something akin to a “radical Keynesianism” rather than the much fetishized “pragmatism” hailed by our Pragmatist-in-Chief), but rather as a crisis of “bad actors.” In other words, so the story goes, the system works until a few bad apples on Wall Street, e.g. Bernie Madoff and subprime lenders, screw things up for Main Street, that way the system can continue to basically function as it had.1
This is all to say that the current “critique” of capitalism hinges on the idea that things became corrupt (prevailing doxa says due to deregulation and so now we need some pragmatic regulation, which in reality means majority non-voting shareholder status for quasi-nationalized zombie banks), so now we just need to remove corruption. So I like this James Kwak post over at The Baseline Scenario, where he makes the point that what we really need is not regulation of corruption, but a different kind of socio-symbolic network, a new symbolic order. Referencing this New York Times article, Kwak writes:
I don’t know Tim Geithner. But I have no reason to believe he is corrupt. Instead, the simplest explanation of the Times article is that he has internalized a worldview in which Wall Street is the central pillar
…
Lenin’s Testament, or, When Money Will Indeed Be Shit
From “The Importance Of Gold Now And After The Complete Victory Of Socialism,” a 1921 Pravda article by Lenin:
When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world. This would be the most “just” and most educational way of utilising gold for the benefit of these generations which have not forgotten how, for the sake of gold, ten million men were killed and thirty million maimed in the “great war for freedom”, the war of 1914-18, the war that was waged to decide the great question of which peace was the worst, that of Brest or that of Versailles; and how, for the sake of this same gold, they certainly intend to kill twenty million men and to maim sixty million in a war, say, in 1925, or 1928, between, say, Japan and the U.S.A., or between Britain and the U.S.A., or something like that. But however “just”, useful, or humane it would be to utilise gold for this purpose, we nevertheless say that we must work for another decade or two with the same intensity and with the same success as in the 1917-21 period, only in a much wider field, in order to reach this state.
(Via the Institute for Conjunctural Research.)
“Preventive Detention”
Glenn Greenwald has a new post detailing Obama’s “preventive detention” proposal:
It’s important to be clear about what “preventive detention” authorizes. It does not merely allow the U.S. Government to imprison people alleged to have committed Terrorist acts yet who are unable to be convicted in a civilian court proceeding. That class is merely a subset, perhaps a small subset, of who the Government can detain. Far more significant, “preventive detention” allows indefinite imprisonment not based on proven crimes or past violations of law, but of those deemed generally “dangerous” by the Government for various reasons (such as, as Obama put it yesterday, they “expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden” or “otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans”). That’s what “preventive” means: imprisoning people because the Government claims they are likely to engage in violent acts in the future because they are alleged to be “combatants.”
It’s interesting that this proposal is essentially a more logically codified version of the Rumsfeld Doctrine (which involved haphazardly reducing all enemy combatants to homo sacer). In doing so, it successfully connects the “macroscopic” logic of the War on Terror and Iraq War to the “microscopic” logic of systematic detention: prevention. It’s as if we’ve already entered into the grim world of Minority Report, a technocratic utopia in which the true crime, the abuse of the system in the guise of its application, goes unnoticed thanks to our unwavering belief in “the system” (i.e., the entire logical apparatus constructed around “preventive” measures).
What more could we expect from our “Professor in Chief,” the technocrat par excellence (though perhaps by now second-fiddle to Tim Geithner)?
Why It (#fastalbum) Didn’t Work
If it wasn’t already apparent, there was not enough interest in my fast album project to fill an album. While I believe it’s a worth while endeavor to create a quickly assembled collaborative work for no profit, it’s impossible to do without collaborators. As this was an experiment, failure has always been an option, and I’ve opted to let this project fail.
As any elementary school science student is aware, we can still derive a useful conclusion from a failed project. Ouch, I’ve cut myself. Hold on a second, that’s not a metaphor.
As I was saying, I believe this project didn’t succeed for a few reasons. Primarily, I have no desire to market and I have no skill at promotion. It doesn’t interest me, and so my Twitter following is limited to people I know or people I am interested in. As soon as completing this project began to depend upon me inventing ways to Attract and Activate!™ an audience, it was doomed.
Another reason this failed: there is no community of ready musicians interested in hastily made non-profit music. As an amateur/lo-fi music fan the lack of interest in unpolished music disappoints me, but I can’t say I’m surprised. We live in a market driven society and there is no market here. While it is certainly legitimate to use new communication methods to create and distribute music, that’s not what these networks are really for.
As I’ve ranted previously, the transition from social…
On ‘Real Abstraction’
A few weeks ago, N. Pepperell had an excellent post discussing Marx’s peculiar usage of the term “abstraction.” From what I understand of Pepperell’s post, “real abstraction” designates the process by which an historically contingent abstraction is projected/misrecognized as an a priori necessity, as something that was “always already there”—in other words, as that which came before it and produced it qua abstraction. Here is what Dr. Pepperell writes:
Marx’s first gloss on the term “material production” is “Individuals producing in Society”. He immediately qualifies that individuals are not an a priori given, but rather an historical result - the product of many past developments, but misrecognised as an originary starting point for historical development. This misrecognition - a projection of historical results back into prehistory - is itself peculiarly ahistorical at this moment in the text. All times, Marx suggests, make this kind of projection from the historical results they find ready to hand…
The focal point of the illusion of ideological “abstraction” seems to hinge upon the peculiar inversion of temporality, the switch from contingent effect to necessary cause. Anyhow, check out N. Pepperell’s post since what she has to say on the subject is much better written and has plenty of interesting quotes from Marx himself.
Also: here is another must-read on “real abstraction,” Alberto Toscano’s remarks on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude at the recent UWE conference.
Again and Again and Again: Real Materialism
Jodi Dean has a new article in Issue 12.1 of Theory and Event, which nicely links together Žižek’s The Parallax View and In Defense of Lost Causes. Dean reads the former as a rehabilitation of “dialectical materialism” (although I think the scope is larger) and the latter as a rehabilitation of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This I thought was a nice little passage explaining the relationship between Žižek’s notion of “parallax” and Hegelian concrete universality:
Žižek uses the parallax gap both to explore Hegelian concrete universality and to revise some key Lacanian categories. Concrete universality does not refer to a universal core or essence animating its particular forms of appearance. Rather, concrete universality persists in the unsurpassable gaps between these forms, in their noncoincidence and struggle. The Universal, then, “names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a burning Question, and the Particulars are attempted but failed Answers to this problem” (35). For example, the concept of the State names the problem of how to contain the antagonism that underlies and generates society. Particular states are particular solutions. Christianity likewise names a struggling universality, one formulated from the position of the excluded which thereby splits substantial identities.
If you’re privileged enough to be able to access it, Dean’s journal article can also be reached in PDF format at Project MUSE.
Theresa Andersson Sings!
I didn’t want to post this because I am jealous, but it’s too good not to note.
Via Booooooom!
An Observation
David Lynch : Lars von Trier :: James Joyce : Samuel Beckett
Francis Bacon’s Patterns of Repetition
A look at how repetition of theme and technique may have crippled the artist. The comments section is also worth reading for a few good counterpoints.
Structure, Ideology, and Individuals
K-Punk has a fantastic article up over at his website titled “… without any consequence for the original villains,” analyzing the role of the Parallax Corporation in Alan J. Pakula’s political thriller, The Parallax View (some of my own thoughts on the film can be found here, but they’re nowhere near as well-written and insightful as K-Punk’s), as well as the recent Red Riding trilogy and the events stemming from the financial collapse and protests at the G-20 Conference.
The terrifying climactic moment of The Parallax View - the silhouette of Beatty’s anonymous assassin against migraine white space - for me now rhymes with the open door at the end of a very different film, The Truman Show. But where the door in the horizon opening onto black space at the end of Weir’s film connotes a break in a universe of total determinism, the nothingness on which existentialist freedom depends, The Parallax View’s final “open door … opens onto a world conspiratorially organized and controlled as far as the eye can see” (Jameson). This anonymous figure with a rifle in a doorway is the closest we get to seeing the conspiracy (as) itself. The conspiracy in The Parallax View never gives any account of itself. It is never focalised through a single malign individual… Who knows what the Parallax Corporation really wants? It is itself situated in the parallax between politics and economy; is it a commercial front for political interests, or is the whole machinery
…
Graduation and Other Things
Hello, readers!
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on this blog. This is partly because I was very busy during the final weeks of my graduation from college, and also partly because Twitter (you can follow me @bryklaus, otherwise my account is private) absorbs some of my energy with respect to posting links and small comments here and there.
In case any of you are curious, the graduation ceremony went very well. Each of the graduating seniors who wrote honors theses prepared a (roughly) five minute speech that was given between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, which is very rustic and something of an illusion for parents to admire (“Wow, writing those theses must’ve been grandiose, surrounding by old books and people wearing bow-ties”). The graduation ceremony also happened to be held on May 1st, International Workers’ Day, so I made sure to point that out in my speech and was surprised to get some compliments for it (sign of the times?). Perhaps in the next few weeks I’ll post some excerpts or something from the thesis, but as of now I don’t plan on doing so.
Another thing you may have noticed is that the tone of this post is a bit more personal than previous ones. The reason being is that on June 5th I’m leaving to go to Berlin in order to improve my German-language abilities and will hopefully approach somewhere near fluency, and I’ll be…
Quickly Make This Twitter Album
If you visit #fastalbum you’ll see I’m currently accepting submissions for a quickly assembled album. I’m betting this one takes a while, but if it works, I’ll try try again. Updates will appear at this site as songs are added.
To participate, record an original song that meets your minimal standards as quickly as possible. Mine took about 35 minutes. The first submissions I receive before the playtime tops 45 minutes will be included on the album which will then be distributed on Demonoid, Mininova and The Pirate Bay.
Just upload the file somewhere and link to it on twitter with a shout out to #fastalbum.
The album cover, which I made as quickly as possible:
10:57 PM: I should make it clear, I’m not making any money off this, nor do I hope to. I also don’t care about copyright/sampling issues and you can retain whatever rights you want. This is going to be a torrent release. The point of the project is to accelerate music.
Day 2
12:44 AM: This is primarily an experiment, but maybe I should offer some extra incentives for participating.
I could probably get a What.Cd invite for someone. I’d also link to your site in the torrent, torrent description and on this page. I’d write you a postcard. You will also get exposure from the release and any press, should there be any.
2:02 PM: This experiment is moving along slower than is theoretically possible, but still…
This is Hardcore YooouuuTuuube
An old Pulp video fits perfectly with this new YouTube viewing web application .
Creating a Poetic Glitch
In glitch culture, the art being made, whether it be musical or visual, is concerned with the mistakes made by technology and circumstances beyond the artist’s control that change the work.
There isn’t really a glitch dynamic to poetry because for most of its history, poetry was concerned with rigid structures and purity of language. There are almost no machine errors involved in poetry’s creation, with the exception of typos that are now highlighted and fixed by most word processors. Additionally, poets are unlikely to make errors in language that would be required for interesting mistakes to develop.
That Was Epic takes comments from YouTube videos and places them in their own context so that they can be evaluated as segments of language. With these YouTube comments, the glitches are the result of a lack of understanding or concern on the part of the author. Obviously these deficiencies would be difficult for a “real poet” to duplicate in his or her work. If a poet writes from inspiration there is an inherent concern to their work, and poor language mechanics are difficult to duplicate.
In order to incorporate glitches into poetry, the author must allow a poem to be manipulated by an inhuman force, such as a decomposing pattern of language or some sort of computer manipulation. For example, consider this Babelfish translation of The Red Wheelbarrow:
So side of the white chicken where depend the red wheel wheelbarrow rainwater and gloss can be applied.
To create…
Sendoff
nervous customers in lines of two
make every check out girl offer
a downturn. remember nothing
this sequence a photographic_
is losing all its frames, a ceiling_
another nervous face a brick of plastic
face of berlin drum face of berlin
through the tile floor, pivot and his
displaced stone came up. look at
the cement grain. where are the pipes?
you can’t see the pipes. you might hear
the pipes_ how’d we get up on the chrysler
building? how’d we get this bike up here?
how’d we get our hands untied?
dead man’s curve ahead, all children
know it’s time_ dogs to die.
Kutiman mixes YouTube
Crafted from found YouTube clips. More at Kituman mixes YouTube.
Via Booooooom!.
Mosh Pits (Human and Otherwise)
From “Mosh Pits (Human and Otherwise)” by Dan Witz. Via today and tomorrow.
Keyboard Drums
Minutes of guaranteed fun! My favorite beat so far is “Toty toty toty toty toty toty is is is is” ad infinitum.
Via Momeld.