We make such a fuss over a ‘record’ snowfall… when that record amounts to nothing more than an inch here, an inch there… like this had never happened before.
Now the sun is out. The streets are being plowed. We can get back to the horrors of everyday life, where the water we cannot do without is poisoned to save money for the rich, where we blow children to pieces with remote control flying robots in the name of fighting ‘terror,’ where the willfully stupid frantically work to destroy our schools so children growing up will be as stupid as they are and maybe won’t notice what we’ve done to them… but not to worry. Another generation or two–if that, and the other life forms–those that have managed to survive us–will be able to live when the last human has perished… likely at the hand of the next to the last human, who–even as he dies, his heart stopped…squeezes the trigger of his open carry… will, find themselves… free at last, free at last… with no need to thank us… or the spooks we invented to justify our destruction of all that might have sustained us.
Let us all count our blessings.
Category: Uncategorized
#432
Illocality: Joseph Massey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Massey beautifully erases the distinction between nature, and the random clutter of parking lots… fragments of human artifice. One is never left with the false tranquility of contemplation of the “natural world:” The observing eye in these poems is not passive, or restorative of some lost numinosity of childhood, as in a Wordsworthian sense. Sex shop signs, bricks, asphalt parking lots, broken glass… and the windows themselves, through which the world is perceived, sharpen senses to a cutting point, prick one’s body into a wakeful anxious dream. They pry open the mind to an awareness of things–things… pregnant with ideas that exist beyond words.
#291 America Agonistes
#429
#430 diptych
30×18″ acrylic on wood
Slavoj Žižek: The Anxiety of Retroactive Trauma
Bloom, or course. If poets, why not philosophers?… or painters? or musicians? Thinking about art history and criticism–my question is–and this has been on my mind for some time, as an artist of an eclectic bent–why this need for pedigree? For lines of descent? For a clear central stream of perpetual renewal and repetition, or repetition as renewal? How male! What is the anxiety here, if not fear of the feminine, of creation without the paternal marker of ownership and mastery? What is the critical scorn for eclecticism if not an expression of enforced patriarchal monogamy–itself, but a disguised longing for polyamory? May love be free to choose its favorites, and free to choose again! Fuck the Gatekeepers!
The essence of Slavoj Žižek’s vision is that philosophy is the result of a critical act of buggery, by which another, earlier philosopher is deliberately misread, and hence re-written, retroactively absorbed and incorporated into the ongoing project of the making of a Subject. In one of those impromptu interviews he has had over the years, Žižek once related the notion that “Hegel didn’t know what he was doing”. He went on to say,
You have to interpret him. Let me give you a metaphoric formula. You know
the term Deleuze uses for reading philosophers—anal interpretation, buggering them. Deleuze says that, in contrast to other interpreters, he anally penetrates the philosopher, because it’s immaculate conception. You produce a monster. I’m trying to do what Deleuze forgot to do—to bugger Hegel, with Lacan [chuckles] so that you get monstrous Hegel, which is, for me, precisely the underlying radical dimension of subjectivity which then, I think…
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We Who came of age at the dawn of R&Roll
All the stuff from people two generations younger, on how much they got from Bowie and what the aging and passing of generations of pop stars born within a year or two of my own entrance to planet Earth, meant to them. Lennon, Dylan…et al.
I was born 1941, the day the Nazi’s invaded the USSR. I’m an artist filled to choking with debt to the past and no clue how to deal with it, but to use it for my own vision against the stream of recent history. 50’s rock of my teens broke down borders for me, I discovered, not David Bowie–who came way later when I was in my 30’s…but be-bop and cool jazz. The Beatles, the rock of the late 60’s and first couple of years of the 70’s were like movie soundtrack to my 20’s –while my own head was all Bach and Josquin du Pres and Palestrina and late 19th C, early 20th Modernists–artists both literary and visual. My overwhelming sense from all this is that, as an artist, I have no place in history, and not a sq mm of space free from it. I feel like a Lost Generation of One
Wednesday Watercolors – Zen
Source: Wednesday Watercolors – Zen
Cold! We are aliens in this universe.
The human body adjusts well to heat… if one doesn’t spend much of the day in AC, or going in and out, hot to super cooled. And you can stay out of direct sun, and be where there’s at least minimal air circulation. But the only way to adjust to extreme cold, is with layers of clothes. The cold will kill you. And it doesn’t fuss around about it. Three hours is like, max… and you won’t notice it much beyond the first hour or so. In cold like we have in Philly now–not even that much time (Siberia, Antarctica…hell, Ely, Minnesota!–minutes!) .
Dress warm, peeps.That’s the real voice of this Universe you think you’re a part of.
It’s saying: die!
Without that thin blanket of air around the planet–we’d have joined up with the Universe long ago.
Look up at the stars. They’re plenty hot. But most of what’s out there is near absolute zero. It’s telling you, you don’t belong. And won’t last long, either, by its reckoning.
Yep. We’re star stuff alright. Wrap that thought around you and walk out naked into this night… and see how long it keeps you warm… or alive
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 