hey this stuff is great!
At 12:59 AM -0700 8/23/06, phanero wrote:
Let's see if I can do this confessionalism thing, since it seems to
be rather outre'
among who-what-who-rang-you rang? aawwwhh.
Fact: My landscapist and horticulturist is nearly finished
installing about a 35ft run of black, timber, and crook-stem bamboo
along the fence-line with my northern neighbors.
Fact: We got a really good deal, because her supplier is like this
totally wigged out hippie
Oregon stoner bamboo dude (mid 30's) whose business is to go and
harvest big patches of bamboo
that have gotten away from their owners and who want it removed. He
repots it or replants
it rurally and sells it for less than half of even a wholesale
nursery price. For 2 Grand I have
an instant stand of Bamboo whose average mean height is about 9 ft
tall and well over 50 individuals.
Fact: Today when I went to mail out Alan's book on the Weathermen, I
stopped at a new Asian
Bubble-Tea shop to get an iced Americano triple Shot and browse at
my favorite Antique/Slash
junq shop 2 doors down. I picked up Everett F. Bleiler's _The
Checklist of Fantastic Literature_,
and _Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism
on the Rio Grande_ by
Marc Simmons which has a wonderful photograph of a trio of Mexican
witches from 1895.
This book will dovetail nicely into a new cluster of Ethnographic witchcraft
texts I am slowly collecting. Nowhere near as large as my
Head-hunting collection, but I'm
not even really trying at this point.
Fact: One of the laborers today was a student of Chinese. He was 22.
The other laborer
is a well-known local guitarist named Darren but I don't know the
name of his band.
He helped me move my old 36" television into the basement and would not accept
the $20 I offered him because I have so few male friends and there's
never really
any context for me to ask for physical assistance with moving stuff.
I thought that was
pretty nice of him. At one point during the day we all had a long
talk about the film
White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404551/
which is essentially about the cover-up of the realities of life in the Congo
during Leopold II's reign etc, which is where Conrad got his Heart of Darkness
story from. What was odd, Is that I saw another documentary about the problem
with the Nile Perch in Lake Victoria who had the same African Historian in it
but who isn't listed at all on the IMDB web-page which sort of pisses me off.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0416-24.htm
In the movie, a longish section is about how the children take the
styrofoam boxes
and melt them down along the shores to sniff the "glue".. This makes
them sleep
very deeply, so many people go and find the sleeping children in
order to sodomize
their sleeping bodies. The same narrator does both films or at least
I'm pretty sure
it was the same guy. The Nile Perch film was so depressing I had to
turn it off.
It was that bad. South Indians are completely exploiting this area
to the ruination
if the environment etc. I say that, because that's a prominent
feature in the film, though
I'm sure there's more complexity to it if I could have stood to
watch it more, but actually
seeing little kids huddled around little kettles of melting
styrofoam just about made me
gag so I turned it off.
Yesterday Grace was telling me about a friend of hers, another
Californian Native American
who was actually a special type of Apache shaman, one of the gender
ambiguous types.
She was describing his clothing which I found very interesting. I
guess he also had some chemical
issues and died.
Vlad came over today, and he started a long diatribe against the
Jews. He has a very Czech way
of looking at things, and I tried to point him in the direction of
Israeli nation bad like more or less
most nations, and "Jew" more or less variable.. He seem to agree
with this, though he held deep
reservations about the basic character of the average jew: "They are
not craftsman, they build nothing,
They are scumbag.." I can't help but love the way he calls folks he
doesn't like "scumbags"..
Vlad is a mailman, and one hell of a craftsman in a sense.
Today I finally found a decent Medusa Bust. She looks confused, sad,
anxious, and tragic.
She's sitting next to my cheapo chinese lamp in front of the printer
on my scandinavian cherrywood
faux veneer desk.
The Fetishist and the Iconoclast are like two sides of a coin, but
the funny thing is,
they are also both their own other. The fetishist is an iconoclast
of the image of the iconoclast,
and the Iconoclast's Iconoclasm is a fetish. Go figure.
This is basically why I think art and poetry are sort of bullshit. I
mean I get stuff
out of it, but really, any leaf is as good as a rembrandt or better,
and listening to my
Mom talk (or anybody really) is just as interesting as Shakespeare
at least to me.
I know there are perils with the radical democratization and
flattening of affect of 'culture',
but the radical flattening of affect seems infinitely safer than
setting loose all kinds of polarizations. those polarizations are
what I have identified as Burrough's calling
Virus B-23 a "topping forest fire." This doesn't mean I don't have
"tastes," but it does
allow those tastes to be rooted in a "pragmatism of affect-zero"
which is all very un-Japanese
I suppose. The motion of contraries in the world is a well known
structure. Blake goes into
this among others.. Its all quite strange.
Just like tonight. I see absolutely no reason to look at Bataille
the way Alan does. He has
a negative tropism towards a Catholic vibe, whereas I kind of dig
the whole image fetishism
complex. In my world I always move toward Hybridity and sarcasm. I
make fun of stuff.
I make fun of myself. I make fun everything. Put Bataille on the
Cross, Cut his head off.
Take his cut off head and put it into Hasidic Drag, Punk Hasidic
Drag, Punk Hasidic Drag Queen Head of Bataille.
I absolutely cannot take human consciousness seriously. Its
ridiculous. This is a species
who absolutely cannot get their social organization settled in any
meaningful sense.
It absolutely makes me think of Bataille's headless Acephale, not
because I SUPPORT THE HEADLESS IMAGE OF MINDLESS HUMANITY but
because humanity is fucking stupid beyond anyone's understanding. Humanity's
absolute and hideous stupidity confounds all reason.
Take a recent conference on spirituality. A wonderful sensitive
writer, you could tell, was speaking on OPB (public radio) about
this uplifting coming together of the
spiritual traditions and suddenly this maniac starts foaming at the
mouth about some
obscure Christian dogma and saying we'll go to hell for forgiving
the Muslim or some
such, very poor characterization on my part. Now this woman was an
expert on fundamentalism.
She's a PAID expert. And what did she say about this. She said she
was struck dumb.
She was, get this, STRUCK DUMB, by this man's stupidity and err well let's say
the "impasse" of his structural reality.
Exactly. I won't lie and say I've read every word of it, But Avital
Ronell's book called
Stupidity is one of the most provocative books on the subject I know
of, except
maybe Erasmus Praise of Folly. I guess my point in all this, is that
in my self and in my work
and in my life. I have experienced nothing but a continuous feeling
of monstrous stupidity
in myself, in my environment, in everything. Whenever I think
something is great it turns
out to be shit, and when I think something is shit it turns out to
be great, and things like that.
I have no sense whatsoever of what I should be doing or why, and I
feel absolutely no reason
to feel this way. In this sense, I feel I have achieved a greater
level of innocence and purity
than most. I don't believe anything. At this point I feel more or
less as simply a victim
of a vast cosmic signal system. Like a bubble whose job is to be
mangled beyond recognition
and then to dissolve. I have no desire to see my name continue, to
have a legacy, and I
have no "art resume." I don't fault people who want to make their
life and culture into
a kind of solitonic force, but I see absolutely no use for it in my
case because I'm very stupid (I'm sure you agree).
In this sense I guess you could say I am of the Cynic school. I have
read Peter Slotjerdyk's _Critique of Cynical Reason_ and in fact I
did read every page.
I hope all of you realize how monstrously stupid I am.
Thanks. Such a sad old Medusa bust. It looks pretty good though.
I think I'll paint in the eyes like a Daruma..
Ooh A Daruma-medusa, walking upside down on the snakes like an octupus..
sort of like the THING.. great flick..
There were two boys at the junq shop today. (They had skateboards,
so I instantly liked them.)
We put a top hat on one and a cape and he spontaneously became Mr.
Hyde. It was pretty cute, really, slashing his fake sword cane
around. WOW! Some cool African Jazz playing ZOMBIA ZOMBIA.. wish I
knew who that was...
I wish I could be a snobby Grammar person or whatever, But I like
Lon Chaney better
than a Dangling Participle or whatever, and I think wearing a Turban
is cooler than Syntax.
Leo Marx wrote the Machine in the Garden.
I live it.