1/29/13
The rest are all Cleveland
It is a sin against the new world of mediocrity to be distinct or distinguished. We are in the chain-store, neon-lighted era. Almost every city…
It is a sin against the new world of mediocrity to be distinct or distinguished. We are in the chain-store, neon-lighted era. Almost every city looks the same. The same people all dress the same - kids as Hopalong Cassidy, men with loud sportshirts and Truman suits, women in slacks. Sometimes you can tell whether a trousered individual is a man or a woman only by the width of the buttocks. Only a few cities have individuality. They are the seaports, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Boston reeks of decay, and is not genteel. The rest are all Cleveland. - Lait and Mortimer, 1952, U.S.A. Confidential Read More...
The Hinterland: A Travelogue, Part 4
Off the edge of the highway, space is identical to the elderly, to their insatiable hunger for time, for all the wet of youth.
Corresponding images: ‡ Omens: A stripped TRUCK WORLD. A stripped TRUCK WASH. A truck, splayed bare, ashen, untouched. ‡ I have to piss something awful so we pull into a rest center, and I run in while he keeps the car idling, ready to scram. The amenities weren’t particularly intact after the abandonment. Hadn't even bothered to repair the crater left when the meth lab/Auntie Anne’s Pretzels went up in flame, as they still do, even in days such as these. Still, safer than stopping at the highway’s edge, which, although lacking any discernible shift in elevation or cliff-form, anything edge like, especially given that the tarmac and grass had long lost any cogent distinction, still marked a divide almost cosmic in terms of the safety and motion it offered. On the highway, space and time are identical: both belong… Read More...
All That Glitters Is Not Ash (Sex Olympics and Other Peculiarly Material Things)
The human itself becomes the hostis humani generis, the enemy of all humankind.
Inhibitions are like the bones in a creature. You pull all the bones out and you get a floppy jelly. - Nigel Kneale At the start of the program, which is in black and white, there are feet and limbs, thick with chiaroscuro. A thigh in foreground is a landscape feature, a grainy massif. It looks dusted with fine powder, with snow, with ash. Watching this, I think of Hiroshima Mon Amour, the entangled bodies covered with that radioactive ash 9 years prior. But this camera keeps moving up, to show that the embracing bodies aren’t naked but adorned, and oddly so, a tangle of metallic braiding, straps, indistinct tufts. We appear to be less in the realm of meditations on how memory torques in the face of genocide, more in a Kansas country fair staging of Caligula. And… Read More...
To what lying necromancer have I not been a fortune?
Not even when the debt collectors signed the release form to collect the roughly 14 pounds of smoke worth salvaging from the fire.
In which Propertius, discussing the affliction and folly of love, also defines the relation between debt - like love, a description of a present condition that insists upon the future constancy of the subject (because "I love you" means "I will love you forever", which means "There will continue to be a constant I, which is bound both to the I that loves you now and the you to which it says it," no matter how much chatter there is about growing and changing together, sure, growing and changing like how the flesh learns to treat a long-ago misplaced fishhook like a small extra bone, the kind found in fish, because fish carry their own barbed nooses inside them, like debts, and they stick in our throat) and therefore becomes a prescription, cursing the future to be ever and always… Read More...
The Hinterland: A Travelogue, Part 3
Outside, the streets were full, seriously fucking full, of wolves.
[Things go from worse to worse. Previous entry here.] Corresponding images: & & & & & & ‡ This one had a partially filled-in whole pool, a scrappy memory of a roof, and something that resembled a receptionist who stood, unsteady and adrift, behind something else that bore very loose affinities to a front desk. My father nudged me in the back as we came through the cracked door: Partial! he hissed. Rude! I hissed back. Besides, she’s just missing a couple parts, though a couple was putting it rather lightly. She had a receptionist-wide smile, archetypal, flawless, bobbing under that button nose. Outside of history, almost, in being so much what a smile is supposed to be. But it had neither gums nor jaw. It just hung in the air. Just a glut of bare tooth, the exposed… Read More...
The Hinterland: A Travelogue, Part 2
The start of unfinished epic poems concerning the present situation, and its origins in the deafening plop of the third housing bubble, carved deep into the wallpaper of the Oak River Conference Room.
[Regarding the traversal of this nation from coast to coast with one's father, in the key of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, albeit in a USA falling apart at the seams where economy, time, gender, and space join. In the previous entry, we learn that: a) the narrator - an unemployed house-painter/optician with a stubborn commitment to landscape omens and a severe distaste for Christians - has something rattling in his chest that is not a cough and b) America's elderly population has fled the cities en masse to stalk the fringes of the highways, where they hunt by scent alone those who do not move with adequate haste.] Corresponding images: & & ‡ Nearly all - say 17/20ths or so - of the motels in The Hinterland had been closed at one point or… Read More...
the colorful flowery garment of the - guillotined
Engraving by Enea Vico I can easily think of the devil, the true reversed world of the divine world, the great world-shadow which marks off…
I can easily think of the devil, the true reversed world of the divine world, the great world-shadow which marks off the counters of the light body, as the greatest humorist and "whimsical man!" But as the arabesque of an arabesque, he would be far too unaesthetic; his laugh would have too much pain; it would be like the colorful flowery garment of the - guillotined. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Aesthetik 1804 Read More...
Desecration Hardware, 4 (1920s Odeon Glass Fringe Chandelier)
Shimmering, taunting, dumb as a dewy rose set aflame with a lit fart.
[previous room here] CHAPTER 4. INTRODUCING 1920s ODEON GLASS FRINGE CHANDELIER THE ELEGANT LINES OF OUR CHANDELIER RECALL THE ART DECO STYLE BORN IN 1920S PARIS. OPTICAL-QUALITY PRISMS, ARRANGED IN CONCENTRIC RINGS, HANG IN SPARKLING COUNTERPOINT TO AN IRON FRAME THAT BEARS THE MARKS OF THE WELDER'S TORCH. AVAILABLE IN 3-, 5- AND 7-RING SIZES. We had been horribly, atrociously wrong. From the very start. All this talk about armoires - hell, there’s no fear in speaking it now, yes, I’ll say it, Montpellier armoires - and cut tables and hungry mirrors, when the stupid, irrefute fact of it had been staring us in the face all along, turning a bit in the saccharine wind of our breath, shimmering, taunting, dumb as a dewy rose set aflame with a lit fart. And now it stared us in the face. It’s… Read More...
Desecration Hardware, 3 (The Trestle Salvaged Table in Salvaged Black Finish)
Because, as they say, the only thing more dangerous than a fully grown chandelier is one whose children you’ve just threatened.
[previous room here] CHAPTER 2. INTRODUCING TRESTLE SALVAGED TABLE IN SALVAGED BLACK FINISH HANDCRAFTED OF UNFINISHED 100-YEAR-OLD SOLID RECLAIMED PINE TIMBERS FROM BUILDINGS IN GREAT BRITAIN. ROUGH-HEWN PLANKS ARE CAREFULLY HAND-SELECTED, PLANED AND SANDED, YET BEAR THE NICKS AND IMPERFECTIONS THAT REVEAL THE TABLE’S PROVENANCE. AVAILABLE IN MULTIPLE SIZES, WITH OR WITHOUT AN EXTENSION. Wood finishes Salvaged Natural Salvaged Brown Salvaged Black 48" diam. Round Table Seats up to 4 $1795 60" diam. Round Table Seats up to 6 $1995 60-84" Table Seats up to 8 $2295 72-102" Extension Table Seats up to 10 $2695 84"-120" Extension Table Seats up to 12 $2995 108"-144" Extension Table Seats up to 14 $3495 (Shown) I didn’t know its name. None of us did at this point. But it didn’t change the problem leering down at us: its solitude. The fact that it… Read More...
"Venice drowning! Venice drowning! Venice drowning!"
In which Snake Plissken discovers something rather queer about both mermaids and what lies far, far beneath Venice.
[On the occasion of the once-again flooding of Venice, this - a postcard excerpted from Escape From Venice - is a slightly different account of the relationship between that city and its liquid. Not that it matters, but this is probably NSFW, unless one works with trans mermaids, in which case, congrats and godspeed. The title, by the way, is a quote from Duran Duran.] Utopia, I had assumed that Venice, being an exact map of the human body (they won't tell you this in school or army or even in Venice for that matter, the map won't tell you for that has been steadily falsified by a cabal of Moral Men over centuries, crafty redrawn to look like a mauled-in-twain fish, but anyone with feet and time knows how that map is bent, torqued foully and it… Read More...
"I am exercising my state and federal constitutional rights including the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments."
P: Do you know a man named ____________ (name redacted)?
P: Do you know what a black bloc is? M:I am exercising my state and federal constitutional rights including the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments. P: Have you ever been in a black bloc? M:I am exercising my state and federal constitutional rights including the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments. P: Have you ever possessed a road flare? M: I am exercising my state and federal constitutional rights including the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments. P: Do you know a man named ____________ (name redacted)? M: I am exercising my state and federal constitutional rights including the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments. P: Do you intend to answer “ I am exercising my state and federal constitutional rights including the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments.” to all questions? M: I am exercising my state and federal constitutional rights including the… Read More...
"a disease that would reveal itself to be incurable: the ever more widespread and pressing war of women"
"if the paternal authority that sometimes manifests itself in a merited spanking was to lessen, the family would go to ruin.”
[the following is a translation of the first section of Leopoldina Fortunati's remarkable essay "La famiglia: verso la riconstruzione" [The family: towards reconstruction] included in the volume Brutto ciao: direzioni di marcia delle donne negli ultimi 30 anni, alongside Mariarosa Dalla Costa's "Riproduzione e emigrazione." The book is from 1976.] An occupied school in Naples, 1980. Photo by Tano D'Amico. "1. Family and factory: towards what reconstruction?" “The clandestine period, the one of sabotage… is finished. I believe it necessary to recall the courageous labor of everyone. From the director all the way down to the last of us; as such, everyone needs to work and to comply with the instructions of our bosses, who are each responsible for their own part in production. Naturally they won’t direct as despots would but will give their necessary activity, maintaining discipline with… Read More...
Do yoga and vote
Huff the fumes of the bile of your enemies from a garbage bag and vote
A poem for Anne Boyer Do yoga and vote Huff the fumes of the bile of your enemies from a garbage bag and vote Do yoga deep in the wet recesses of the bag and vote Go un-vegan as a consequence of that experience and vote Tend to the wounds of others as a fox tends to the stump of its own leg it chewed free from the trap set by a yoga class and vote Reset the trap in the proximity of a polling station and vote Tie matte stones around the necks of pigeons and vote Describe that activity and all others as basically ornamental and vote Give up smoking and vote Take it back with all the tenderness you can muster and vote Watch slow curls of grey spill forth from what… Read More...
World Melodrama: All That Heaven Allows, 1955
A deer that stalks the scenes of their coupling like a mute, dewy nightmare.
“I can't shoot straight anymore.” Two claims and one proof: 1) Contrary to popular belief and historical record, Douglas Sirk didn't make films. He made affective war machines. They are emotional siege engines that frankly don't care if you think yourself more knowing, tougher, more able to pick out the barely veiled mechanisms aimed at your heart, guts, and tear ducts. They don't care because it doesn't matter if you know what's coming. What you don't know can't hurt you, sure, but what you do know can still make you cry when the love between a slab of beefcake wrapped in flannel (Rock Hudson) and an middle-aged Kewpie doll (Jane Wyman) keeps getting interrupted by classist neighbors, petty children, social convention, forces of nature, and a deer that stalks the scenes of their coupling like a mute, dewy nightmare. 2)… Read More...
Rome, 1974
Mothers spat at cops and cops spat at mothers. The south spat at the north and the north spat at the south. Rome spat at itself.
Yes, she said, turning to spit, once beneath the hooves of the first horse and then again beneath those of the second, though not in a manner that implied any contempt to either, yes, she said, that was the day the south came northward home. This very day, she clarified. This is that day. But, then she clarified, turning away from the spit and hooves and from the strange bundles wrapped as if for war and trundling past them, it came home to roost in a very not-bird way. She said distinctly like it was another spitting. So... not like roosting at all? he asked. There was a small resonant clang on the word not. In his right hand he held a hammer low behind the ledge, stolen from who knows where. He swung lightly, thoughtlessly, but more so when… Read More...