Crisis and domestic work (On self-reduction, shoplifting, and other forms of gender war)

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Domestic work today means to literally give over your own life to that of others (kids and husband), to their spaces, to their times, to their rhythms.
[Self-reduction slogan:  "We'll pay 8 lire per kilowatt, just like the bosses"] The following text was from the first issue of Lavoro Zero - Giornale dal Veneto [Zero Work - Journal of the Veneto], an Italian communist journal from the '70s.  As noted, it's from the Veneto region, that same tough-as-hell area from which came two of the earlier texts translated (here and here). Crisis and domestic work “How the economic crisis determined a rise in the burden of domestic work for women” The first major division within the world of labor is that of waged and unwaged labor. In the statistics and the inquiries that look at the labor market, a major mystification is at work: that only those who receive a wage are considered “workers.”  Instead of all the strata of the population that don’t fall in the… Read More...

Seriously, go to hell

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What a coincidence! I was just going to suggest that the young jobless should impale Prince Charles' head on a 20 foot spike and raise it over Westminster Hall, as was done with Cromwell's head.
"Prince Charles: young jobless should start their own businesses. Prince Charles has spoken out about high youth unemployment, suggesting the best way out was self-employment." My God!  The elegant simplicity of it!  How could we not have thought of this before?  If you can't get a job, you should just make one.  With all that start-up money typically given freely by banks and creditors to the poor and not-white.  Shit, this is going to change the whole game... And what a coincidence! You know, just the other day, I was suggesting that the "young jobless" should impale Prince Charles' head on a 20 foot spike and raise it over Westminster Hall, as was done with Cromwell's head in 1660. Read More...

This trial is a “so-called” trial. And I am not afraid of you.

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"The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers." Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, saying something of extreme importance Infamy to any…
"The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers." Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, saying something of extreme importance Infamy to any and all defenders, apologists, and stewards of church and state anywhere. Read More...

Blood platinum is not a solid but a gas

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From clouds of toxic gas to make bodies run blind to a cloud of dust in which they shoot blind at running bodies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-jdMbe6e3g   34 dead and 78 wounded.     From clouds of toxic gas to make bodies run blind to a cloud of dust in which they shoot blind at running bodies.   All this, somewhere under the earth and down the line, to protect the vicious profitability of extracting time from bodies and excavating a material used predominantly to   reduce cloud of toxic gas produced by engines, such those of the riot vans holding police and guns to kill the miners of that material,   and to shine bright on the rings and necks of the rich so they can be, as Birdman says, "fly in any weather," toxic clouds of this loathsome world entirely included.                 Read More...

and pour the coal on the street

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"In the coal drivers strike, we did not have enough pickets at the beginning of the walkout to successfully close all the yards that were…
"In the coal drivers strike, we did not have enough pickets at the beginning of the walkout to successfully close all the yards that were being struck. I organized what became known as cruising pickets. We could picket a gate, and let trucks that were still operating out of the coal yards so police would think the trucks were home free. We’d let the trucks get two or three blocks from the yard, drive up in cars, force the trucks to stop and pour the coal on the street. In several days, virtually all the coal truck driving operations had come to a halt. It was a bitterly cold winter, families and businesses needed coal. The companies caved in and we won." Harry DeBoer, Teamster from the 1934 Minneapolis strike [from the same crew that fought the Silver Shirts] The… Read More...

A sentence that should be the opening words of a very dark speculative fiction concerning America after 120 years of birth crisis

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Gesturing at the breeding pens, Burton said: "Soon this will all be redundant, and that will be a very exciting day." [See here for the…
Gesturing at the breeding pens, Burton said: "Soon this will all be redundant, and that will be a very exciting day." [See here for the slightly more banal intended meaning and location of that sentence.]   Read More...

Dynamite at the police parade and other comic situations

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There lies the comic force of making the police those very objects of the gag, of watching them become repurposed and flailing props never designed for such use.
[this is the first part/lead in to the essay published in the TNI Cops issue, an essay that began as a talk.  (Hence a certain chattiness.)  At the start, I give a brief restatement of my previous work on hostile objects, through the specific lens of Keaton, before digging into one of the best anti-cop films ever made, Keaton's Cops (1922).] http://youtu.be/jRGqQI14zy8 [from Keaton's 1928 Steamboat Bill, Jr.] What strikes me, every time I watch this, is that sudden, wrenching perspectival shift, the falling away of a fantasy - the world is made for us, by us, in our image, and will function in accordance with the aims we give it – through the fall of a life preserver ring that sinks like a stone.  There have been, previously in the film, hints toward a cussed obstinacy of the material… Read More...

A capitalist prays to God against the dual threat of factory occupations and queer offspring

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"... and please, make it so that the workers don't occupy my factory and, above all, that my son won't be homosexual!"
"... and please, make it so that the workers don't occupy my factory and, above all, that my son won't be homosexual!" Back cover of FUORI!, from '73.  Translations of articles from the journal - which is fierce, funny, and important - on their way. Read More...

& (A film in 13 scenes, scene 11)

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We dream of windows all the way down or walls that encircle us to hold lives inside like the guts of a stabbed belly. If they are not pressed close by walls as hands press close we will gush forth.
for M   The next section is very lyrical, it may as well belong to a quiet documentary.  After the furious bellow of the moles it is certainly a relief to no longer be watching many wounded creatures try to stand. One takes a breath when it becomes clear that the eyes will not be asked to stare at such a thing again. That breath is held because of course a guillotine could always appear. Or at least something either heavy or sharp or flammable let alone all three. At which point we are right back where we started as the breath is held close like smoke as time rushes red across a floor following the small spaces between planks of wood let alone concrete. But here things will be different. The breath can be exhaled. Instead in this scene… Read More...

& (A film in 13 scenes, scenes 9 & 10)

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Bears with the force to bend bars dream of making iron flowers of the unwrought cages. A garden they roar a garden for us all.
[these two scenes are for CM, who understands what it means for twelve moles to cry out in fury]   9.     The next scene is also short, although it moves at an odd pace.  A pack of horses are running along a frozen river. The camera faces them. It tracks backwards fast because the horses are moving fast toward it. The sun is behind the horses. The light is hitting the lens. In so doing it makes flares. These come to be the main focus of the shot. But they are not the color of the sun. No they are not even the color of horses they are flares of neon & pastel & sometimes black but only ever rarely The horses have stopped running.  Their breath rises in curls from their nostrils. The lungs bellow the difference… Read More...

Workers of all countries, call it a day!

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"Some critics have called The Black Book a “pamphlet of insults directed against the market economy”. I accept this critical assessment with pleasure. Only from…
"Some critics have called The Black Book a “pamphlet of insults directed against the market economy”. I accept this critical assessment with pleasure. Only from the distance of the bourgeois academy do theory and historical analysis appear as the neutral observation of neutral objects. A social critique, however, presupposes an existential commitment of the entire man, and therefore involves emotion as well. The dominant order is not just a system of functional mechanisms but also a detestable insult and an accumulation of infamies. All real critics, from Marx to Adorno, carried out their precise analyses with irony and in the spirit of the rejection of “modernization”, whose stupidity and violence constitute an insult to all human reason." RIP, R. Kurz, who was a real critic Read More...