The birds eye view abstracted from the bird: G 20 Toronto.

"We have willingly suspended our disbelief on strings in order to manipulate it from above."


"Riot guns with rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons, flying wedges of heavily armored police, are not only incapable of dispersing the dark crowd, but, by inciting a phase change in the visible crowd, expand its ranks."


"The viewing public demands an image of itself."


"We can feel the changing of the tense."


"Well regulated peacetime sorrow."


"The inspector laughs because you're laughing."

[Quotes from Angle of Yaw, ---Ben Lerner.]

a nod,

Have been much enjoying ECW's blog and notes on salvagepunk. I stumbled upon his work via this, which was also informative.

Thus tentative titles for a new verse-theory centered publication: kitsch & crumble / [symptom & solution].

Spring Meets Winter.

"You may cut all the flowers, but will never eradicate spring.”

Tell Dracula His Kung-Fu Death is Real: A Thousand Devils.

more medallions for the devoted

In the growing flarf conversation one can't but pay attention to Mohammad's work. He picks the eerie pieces of our anonymous conversations---comment boxes, blog posts, message boards, chat rooms, status updates---and coalesces them together into snapshots of our digital-unconsciousness. There's no doubt that America has long been a violent place, founded in revolution, constantly beating down any insurrectionary movement inside and out, so that the general perspective of our culture is one which has decided it can instantly fill the roles of judge and executioner. Watching the news coverage the day of 9/11 my boss at the time stated that we should nuke Iraq and turn it into a parking lot. Considering consequences is just a means of delaying the stick, the positivist version of theory and praxis. And so Mohammad taps into the instantaneous gratification of each user letting their id hide behind their insignificance within his texts. It's no wonder he doesn't laugh when he reads his poems. We can tap Zizek on the shoulder (knowing I'm not the first to do this); first as tragedy, then as flarf.

Some say fire and some say ice; I say fire and ice
And digital cable. I say every iconoclast has its price.

The terms of this debate then shift from developing a left movement which finds itself in conflict with this violence, and one which incubates this alongside that of resistance. As we learned in The Coming Insurrection, "An authentic pacifisim cannot mean refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them. Pacifism without being able to fire a shot is nothing but the theoretical formulation of impotence."

Mohammad reminds us that there is a large part of our population still eliding impotence and violent aggression. Yet we also know that we live in a temporality of flux; the impotence of peaceful protests without the means to defend oneself is being reformulated in Thailand; the violent aggressors of the internet hope, more than anything, to keep their day jobs, where they can continue to preach dependence, nihilism, the trick pony of 'growing up.' The trick is to reverse this shape and the debate it is premised upon. An anonymous aggression in opposition to structural impotence. Less Pfizer, more philos.

K. Silem Mohammad, great flarfist circa post-modernity, can be found here.

I only dream in Gasoline.

{Gloomwork tightens my trampoline:
Trapped fetal triplets float and glide
Porcelain plunged in formaldehyde
Along with Mütter’s phantom team
I only dream in gasoline. }

---Ronald Palmer: via Here.

Tonight 3107 ellis st. Ronald Palmer. Stephanie Young. Del Ray Cross.

The Real: Occupy Everything.

Today the news is both what does and what doesn't get coverage in the New York Times. The students occupying Middlesex University, protesting the closure of the entire Philosophy department, have received an eviction notice. The administration has teamed with the police in Peurto Rico, where 11 major campuses continue to strike. The disparity of wealth has forced protesters beyond chants and picket lines, the appropriation of public space empowers a radical demand:

Inside the barricaded protest area, leaders addressed thousands of people who have camped there for weeks, vowing to hold their ground and resist any military incursion. They have been demanding the dissolution of Parliament and the holding of a new election.

"The present crisis of the relation of philosophy to capital means that philosophers will have to change the world in order to interpret it."

The cracks continue to grow.

Notes on Color.

Some thoughts on the above text soon. Until then, this:

The very activity of sense perception has nowhere to go in a world in which science deals with ideal quantities, and comes to have little enough exchange value in a money economy dominated by considerations of calculation, measurement, profit, and the like. This unused surplus capacity of sense perception can only reorganize itself into a new and semi-autonomous activity, one which produces its own specific objects, new objects that are themselves the result of a process of abstraction and reification, such that older concrete unities are now sundered into measurable dimensions on one side, say, and pure color (or the experience of purely abstract color) on the other. To such a process, the Althusserian term overdetermination may be properly applied, insofar as an objective fragmentation of the so-called outside world is matched and accompanied by a fragmentation of the psyche which reinforces its effects. Such fragmentation, reification, but also production, of new semi-autonomous objects and activities, is clearly the objective precondition for the emergence of genres such as landscape, in which the viewing of an otherwise (or at least a traditionally) meaningless object---nature without people---comes to seem a self-justifying activity. An even more pertinent example is a style like Impressionism, which discards even the operative fiction of some interest in the constituted objects of the natural world, and offers the exercise of perception and the perceptual recombination of sense data as an end in itself.

----Fredrick Jameson The Political Unconsciousness, p 229.

Films since a while ago.

I'm hoping to investigate a few of these with more detail but I also realize that it has been so long since the viewings that a lot of the subtleties will have been lost. Therefore a list of films through December into today, reductive as they may be.



An Education: Education as the tautological path away from the traditional family, even after the facade of and traditional family economy has been bankrupted.



Coco Before Chanel: work > love > social standards.



The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Individualism as the savior of the collective standard of living, in resistance of course to capital accumulation/hoarding?



Avatar = Pocahontas + Matrix + Ferngully + Dances With Wolves + Aliens + 3D. Also the indecision of science fiction and fantasy.



Nine: When film is meta it is meta about film, when Broadway inserts music and tries to be meta about film in a film about the constraints of the stage and how film isn't subject to those limitations we get Nine. But the sexy dancing obviously makes this marketable to a male demographic right? Let's not talk about Fellini, either.


(rented/home view)
Manufactured Landscapes: capitalist porn.
Eraserhead: Lynch, in black and white.