Adventure Porn and the Samizdat of Life Lived Another Way

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Airport book browser, coming or going, inhabiting the interstitial space of travel, pursuing a task in order to be paid for having pursued a task, equipped with peppermint gum and a five dollar bottle of water and scanning for a book that might help the self without making the would-be-helped self ashamed at needing or receiving mass-marketed assistance. Picks out and purchases the Subtle Art of Being A Joyful Badass with No Fucks to Give and A Hustling Heart. Reads it on the way to the yet-to-be-performed task, distracted for the time being from the futile incompleteness that will come when it is done and consigned to the vacuum of tasks performed, boxes checked category that seems to be the dubious purpose of this beating heart’s empty avocation.

Calumny of self, abetted by an appetite for imaginative romps in the Something Else, Anything Else, and the pithy candor of a best-selling ode to breaking free from the gaping void of a life of quiet desperation. And airline peanuts. And the indignity of waking to a shaken-seat admonition to return to the upright position, mouth dry with residual Heineken, afire with the need to get a square wheeled receptacle from the overhead bin before the stranger on the other side.

The Stack, Mid-December

Immensity [philosophical category] ---------> DayDream

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"China is getting a new skyscraper every day," he says. "China is building a megacity the size of Wales, with a population of 42m. If you include Taipei and Hong Kong, 16 out of the 25 fastest-growing city economies in the world are in China. The Chinese are extraordinary." The speed of their planning and decision-making process, he believes, embarrasses Europe. "We are in a state of denial, while they are making decisions in the spirit of the Victorians. They have the courage to try it. By 2020, China will have more high-speed rail than the rest of the world put together."

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Being and the Ever-Present Need to Defer Becoming, or how a hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain.

The injunction everywhere to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness it maintains itself on, to such a point that everything seems to take on a therapeutic aspect, even working or love. All the times we ask “how’s it going” all day long - like a society full of patients, taking each other’s temperatures

The theorists cum insurrectionists

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Scripted Adventures of the International Hacker/Op Sec Analyst/Freelance Intelligence Officer continued . . .

Down and out in Corfu, with black mark on his soul and a significant contusion on his face, earned by way of bailing from his scooter and skidding about against a rail overlooking a beautiful coast out on the coast on the west side of the island. He eventually found the driver of the truck that had been leaning out into his lane and made the accident necessary, and he reduced the driver to chum that he took with him on the boat, Plump Buck Mulligan Stew, which the client had agreed would be available for his uninterrupted use following completion of his assignment in Belgrade. . . .

Down and out in Samarkand, sometime in 2014 or 2015, after cruising Shenzen but before pursuing a calling in Cairo, our hero succumbs to a powerful need to score, then finds a quiet, clean, well-lit place and to sit down with a packet of pleasure-death and study it, clutch it, snap it lightly against the tips of fingers, until ingesting it and hoping that it is more pleasure and less death or at the very least not immediate death, which sometimes it can be. And then traveling to rural Pakistan to kick with organic opiates easily at hand. Lips pursed around a hookah, eyes closed, he visualized in his mind’s jaundiced eye a lecture he would present in London at a UX conference in four days time, the subject of which he hadn’t yet determined but would at minimum cover this idea:

Down and out in Sao Paolo, with approximately $7500 on his person, cut up into $250 or $500 portions, to be used to pay bribes, he arrived at the appointed hour in his motorcycle leathers, with an echo-location device, two bottles of rum, the cash, a quarter ounce of marijuana, two vials of adenochrome, and a various uppers, downers, opiates, and amphetamines.

His instructions were rather simple: meet the contact, get the laptop/router/WiFi he needed to gain access to the physicist’s VPN network, acquire the model and its legend, download it to the secure network and then save it to a thumbdrive (for whatever reason the client had a fetish for redundancy that put the very thing he wanted to secure at risk), pay whatever he needed to pay to get out of Sao Paolo, get back to LA, hand off the thumbdrive, ride into the sunset and then surrender to whatever sundry bodily, chemical, and existential pleasures Southern California had in store . . .

Mono-no-aware: early December

Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to, and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the croplands and the forest?

If the last three years of American politics have taught us anything, it’s this: the apocalypse is going to look a lot more like a T-Rex in drag than anything you’ll see in Mad Max.

all stones are broken stones

Do you have a need to stop the ever-present anxiety and obsessive self-spiraling narratives that you’re always playing out in your head, to the point where the timeline of your thought process follows a predictable oscillation between hypothetical conversations that you might have in the future with people you might or might not see, soon or ever, or with snippets of actual conversations you had, in which you or the other person could have or should have said something else to take the conversation down a different path or to be more cutting, more loving, more accurate, more spiteful, more something?  Don’t do Yoga if you have this need.  Do something that includes the possibility of you getting struck full on in the face, with sufficient force to cause blood to shed.  Check into the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic, and see if you get enough of a blood infusion to get whole new blood.  But not all at once. 

It’s a thin porous line between waking up on a sticky vinyl seat of a bus trudging through an urbanscape, stopping at damn nearly every red-light, through the guts of the city, powered by the perialstalsis that takes anyone whose nobody from point A to point B, mass transit style, and waking up on a beach in the Dominican, at night, unable to remember the last part of the afternoon and wondering in which direction you might walk to find what approximates the idea of home, on this here vacation?

 I once read a profile of a University of Miami football coach named Randy Shannon, and for awhile afterward I wanted to be aloof and detached and a mystery.  The title is:  HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT MIAMI'S EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH FOR A FOOTBALL COACH ENDED WITH A MAN WHO'D BEEN THERE ALL ALONG: ASSISTANT RANDY SHANNON, A LONER WITH A MYSTERIOUS, TRAGIC PAST and I would say I go back and read it at least once every year, usually when I need a dose of inspiration and whatever other ersatz sentiment comes up in encountering those figures whose character was formed in a crucible of deprivation and who come out with quiet voices, stern unblinkered looks, and a desire to keep achieving.  (Isn’t it almost necessary to call that desire “fierce,” in this context and to do the bidding of narrative convention?”

Doing the bidding of narrative convention is the lubricant that oils the machination machine. it’s like how I watch Bourne movies and want to start carrying a gun, or watch movies or shows that are fairly realistic foreign policy/spy thrillers and then want to start being concerned about operational security and whether I should start encrypting my emails.  Which is all to say maybe there is a certain kind of mood (r a certain of self) that embraces malleability and conforms to the suggestible pules of narratives as a temporary proxy for nearly insurmountable emotions that other people have on repeat and all the time organically, somehow, and survive, somehow.

Dancing about architecture, writing about food

Again, eating is a means of remaining embodied, and it stands to reason that the manner of embodiment - the specific means of sustenance - imprints the bodied self.

Better: Eating puts meat on the bone, and the meat you eat (or don’t eat, presumably) indwells the meat you are.

Worse (maybe?): You can’t help but look, feel, and behave in a way that bears relation to how your fuel looks, feels, and behaves.

And then this (cue Munch, the Scream; fortissimo squall of atonal violins):

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Presumably sculpture is more of an arrangement of elements than an arranged marriage otherwise would be. Some parts fit better with others. That is, when functional fit-to-purpose locks in step with aesthetic dress-for-success, then we will make up on margin with volume. The id that rains will pour.

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Instead of obligations embedded in generic free time, free time in Japan is exceptional condition excavated from general condition of obligation.

Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate the image - on the photographic aftermath

There is something poignant about a photograph that does not deign to capture a moment in time, that is comfortable in letting its punctum sit outside the momentary “snapshot” of a series of phenomenologically linked intervals, and that instead shows an after and lets you imagine how reality crinkled up its atoms and the space-time continuum to arrive there. A photo of the what-hath-God-wrought.

Down and out in . . . / COIN and the metaphors of warrior anthropology

. . . Myanmar, where the sesame crop is a throw of the dice and the monks’ lust after the blood of ethnic minorities abates ever so slightly on Guatama’s birthday. But the climate is nice.

. . . . Gozo, where the island economy hung tough on Omar Gadaffi’s tyrannical largesse until it didn’t, and then we all drank Cisk until the Brits came back on holiday and we played at the 12th century, once more.

. . . . Los Roques archipelago, where items would be measured by the gross weight of Venezuelan currency (that will be 3.4 lbs) rather than cash, because the liquidity fluctuations were both so extreme and so constant, and because there was much fun to be had in the gauche above-it-allness of it all. Fly-in meals from Caracas are intermittently a tenable concession to the ever-present possibility of food shortages. Also parasailing!

. . . . rural outposts of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. State Department travel advisories specifically admonish to be wary of unforeseen and unpredictable dangers, as compared to immediately foreseeable and predictable, imminent dangers. Don’t guard against being a well-wisher or a quixotic toe-dipper-into-local-culture, or else stay at the Best Western outside the embassy compound. The ex pat journalist bar where you’re most likely to make into an ex pat journalist’s memoir, circa 2027: Custer’s Last Stand Bar and Grill.

. . . . Little Havana, Miami, where the AUSAs are always on the lookout for an easy RICO tie-in and every family lays claim to the best pork-laden tortas. Pervasive poverty that is read as “colorful” by the city fathers, as is perforce inner-city American style. Don’t sleep on the rising tides, all the while aware that less than 10% have boats.

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Before inking the contracts on their memoirs, Generals Petraeus and Mattis teamed up to write the Counterinsurgency Manual. I’m not sure if COIN dealt with donkeys or llamas, but I like to think that it did.

COIN:

Leaders at all levels must adjust their approach constantly, ensuring that their elements are ready each day to be greeted with a handshake or a hand grenade, to take on missions only infrequently practiced until recent years at our combat training centers, to be nation builders as well as warriors, to help re-establish institutions and local security forces, to assist in the rebuilding of infrastructure and basic services, and to facilitate the establishment of local governance and the rule of law.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked me…“The lines in your command chart, the command relationships, what are they? OPCON? TACON? Command?” “Sir, we don’t ask, because no one can sign up to any of that stuff.” “Well, how do you do business?” “Hand Shake Con. That’s it.” No memoranda of agreement. No memoranda of understanding…the relationships are worked out on the scene, and they aren’t pretty.

Once the social structure has been mapped and the culture is understood, COIN forces must understand how power is apportioned and used within a society. Understanding power is the key to manipulating the interests of groups within the society

Background screenings should include the collection of personal and biometric data and a search through available reporting databases to determine that the person is not an insurgent. Identification badges may be useful for local nationals working on U.S. and HN government facilities. However, these badges may be forged or stolen, and insurgents can use them to identify people working with the government. Therefore, biometrics is preferable, when available

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

ROE are directives issued by competent military authority that delineate the circumstances and limitations under which U.S. forces initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces encountered. In a large-scale deployment, the Secretary of Defense may issue ROE that are specific to the operation to a combatant commander. The combatant commander and subordinate commanders then issue ROE that must be consistent with the ROE received from the Secretary of Defense. In addition to stating the circumstances under which Soldiers or Marines may open fire—that is, upon positive identification of a member of a hostile force or upon clear indications of hostile intent—the ROE may include rules concerning when civilians may be detained, specify levels of approval authority for using heavy weapons, or identify facilities that may be protected with deadly force. All ROE comply with the law of war.

Donkeys, llamas, wild horses . . . ride or die . . .

Baldessari and subsisting on a conceptual sandwich

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Genial, amiable assassins are the ones you need to watch out for. Give me a profligate boaster, a denizen of the underworld after midnight who strides like a colossus across high society ballrooms in tails until 11 pm. Even a womanizing philandering debauched self-compromised lothario with a killer aim. But the quiet ones who simply go about their work and slowly but surely collapse every bridge leading from your mind’s island’s shore – once they’ve gone and insinuated their ideas, it’s all over but the 10-count. The ones whose work awakens you in a start, so you are suddenly sitting ramrod straight in bed, wondering just how the magic trick was done.

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Like Lukács, the great film theorist André Bazin was an advocate of artistic self-effacement before reality. The individual film shot was, for Bazin, a simple unit of mimesis that, linked together with others, produced longer mimetic sequences. The ontology of the film image, then, is inseparable from that of its model, nature; cinema is merely a recreation of the world in its own image. According to Bazin, the individual shot, inflected with the long take and deep focus to produce a foreground and background of the mise-en-scène in the same sharpness of focus, determines the film’s authenticity.

Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, on the other hand, saw the shot as incomplete in and of itself. Eisenstein (like Vsevolod Meyerhold and Brecht) deemed reality alone inadequate to the task of producing sufficient emotional impact (shock), so art’s job was to exaggerate and schematize it. Thus the jerky, stop-motion technique with which the marble lion in Potemkin, 1925, springs to life as a symbol of awakening proletarian consciousness draws attention to its own artifice, and acts as a synecdoche for the dialectical language of the film as a whole.

For Eisenstein, maximum shock was generated by cutting together two shots of dialectically opposite realities: for example, the mother holding the baby and climbing the Odessa Steps in Potemkin, shot from above, cut with the line of troops descending the steps, shot from below. The resulting synthesis—two tides and generations of class history in collision—is greater than the mere sum of parts, as if 1 + 1 suddenly equaled 6, 7, or 8. As Eisenstein explained, “In art it is not the absolute relationships that are decisive, but those arbitrary relationships within a system of images dictated by the particular work of art.”

There’s a sly logic, then, to the fact that the photographs that have found their way into Baldessari’s montages of the ’80s are film stills, culled primarily from Hollywood B-movies. These might serve as the quintessence of the frozen Bazinian mise-en-scène—except that Baldessari crops these images, fragments them, and juxtaposes them with other stills from other movies. Bazin, the paragon of realism, is literally “Eisensteined” here

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Fame is a prison that strokes the ego of its prisoners and provides them with exceedingly comfortable lives. Being watched, assessed, evaluated, and measured is the price the famous pay – the work they perform – in consequence of the material comforts accorded them and adulation (however intermittent or ephemeral) that washes over them. Courting infamy to gain entrance to this prison is not a new method, though the means by which to do so have certainly proliferated.

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The thing about the Hunger Artist (as compared to, e.g., the Hunger Games) is that its commitment to acknowledging the madeness of the text, even as it remains (on the surface at least) ceaselessly accountable to the commitments that are made in the text. By implication at least. And so the answer to how to eat a conceptual sandwich is either (1) very carefully, with appropriate garnishes; or (2) in one bite, with the aim of choking.

Fathom the particular depth at which your soul's anchor is set.

There was this Japanese guy, Basho, well-versed in Zen, Confucianism, Asian history, Shinto – all the major players.  Basho’s not his real name, but we’ll call him that.

Basho had a case of wanderlust, and takes off on the Interior Road circa 1689 or so. 

Basho liked people but couldn’t understand how they thought what they appeared to think or acted the way they did, as though on purpose. Still, by the time he was 40 or thereabouts he was surprised to find that people he encountered knew his writings and respected him.  He walked from place to place, eating at tables of hardworking families with modest homes and a yen for haiku.  Basho and his apprentice type guy Sor whooped it up, hitting all the monasteries, ancient temples, and shrines, of which Basho knew both the location and history. He contrasted hermetic periods of intense study with blacked-out drunken oblivion, each mode its own ode to self-forgetting.

We catch him unawares on this clear night, bright with winking stars. Watch as he carefully unpacks his calligraphy works and dutifully sets about the task of spontaneous composition, searching out the right word rightly used and the satisfying click of consciousness sated.  

[The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire]

*****

At the time, Saturdays are 2 pots of coffee, time spent hiking at the Teepee grounds, random phone conversations, shaking off Friday night, contemplative moods, uncritical reading, dishes, acknowledgment of blue skies, attraction to the present here and now, stomach rumblings, late showers, wrong number callers, early trips to the post office, devotional hours to music, baking bacon, laundry, putting the phone book on the shelf, returning books to the case, driving w/o a seatbelt, trips to the Amish store to stock up on Gatorade and red beans and rice, polite exchanges with the bonneted Amish girls or the owner who has an aircast on his leg and strident Civil War facial hair, eruptive bird songs, certain hours of complacency, and a general air of solitude and above-the-fray immediacy.

You walk to the airstrip (apparently the priests used to have to get out of dodge and some of the bigger donors used to like to drop in and see their altruism in the flesh). Keep going in the same direction, following a rutted path with a dump site strewn with random garbage and cast-off chairs, mattresses, and three rusty shopping carts. Beyond that, another object graveyard, chunks of concrete and tangled rebar spears, stacks of old machinery that served phantom uses, the place where parts of the mission go to be ignobly dispatched. To the right is a hay field, with little copses of brush on the riverbank’s edge that run diagonally and eventually intersect with the path. About 100 yards from the river the brome disappears and thick patches of bluestem pitch and weave in the wind. You walk to a turnstile the height of your hips and you push through and get past the fence into the pasture where four white-faced cows sit chewing cuds and four young buffalo bull calves take turns trying to screw each other.

Winter is coming, and you will continue to get up early, make this walk, sometimes chattering at the bull calves to stave off too-close encounters. You run from one end to the other and back again, twice, because we are talking about a time in your life when you used to do that type of thing, despite the apparent futility that attends to it. It will take another decade or so before the hard-won realization sets in that apparent futility can be manufactured in a pinch to justify nothing, or just about anything.

Teachable moment

Standardized test day.  After the first 50 minute bubble filling session, students hurry to get out into the sunshine away from the countdown of the ticking clock.  They are outside for ten minutes, then twelve – I exit the stale air of the classroom, walked out to the cement courts where the boys are going up and down in sloppy mid-transition mode, looping passes picked off every other possession and the swift shift in momentum back to the other basket.  They are untethered and know it, so I am unsurprised when my calls to come back inside fall on intentionally deaf ears.  A student breaks away after a long rebound, loping down the court to the nearest basket.  I am hot, zipped up in a sweater, impatient for the last basket so we can resume another round of drudgery.  It doesn’t seem like April can end soon enough.

Two or three players are closing in on the ballhandler at acute angles, and he jumpstops and gives them a convincing headfake.  Abram – 5’3”, longish hair that swings from side to side hiding his eyes – goes up for a block and moves slowly into the ballhandler, who understandably ducks a little into a compact shape to absorb the blow.  Abram’s calves are near the other player’s hunched shoulders, until he tumbles over backwards and careens downward, the back of his head leading the way.

The sound, I suppose, is what I wait for.  My heart is in my throat – the recognition of what is about to happen surges through me.  the instant I see him tip past the fulcrum point, regular as a seesaw, I picture his head meeting the concrete – the downward angle is that severe.  At the last possible moment he sticks out a skinny little arm which crumples underneath his weight.  The sound arrives, not a crack really, more like the dull liquid impact of something overripe impacting a solid surface.  Everything stops and comes back again in a moment: the exclamations of the other players, the cracked, terrified voice of the injured student entangled in his own words.  I have been in motion for a bit, probably since before he met the concrete.  It’s obvious something is broken, but I hope I will not encounter the slick protrusion of white bone that comes with a compound fracture.  The others spread apart like elevator doors when I’m within five yards of the basket, and it’s obvious that the arm is no longer put together as God intended, but as far as I can tell it’s a run-of-the-mill break, which fact does little to assuage the kid experiencing it. 

I take him by the right shoulder we fast walk towards the middle school entrance before doing a 90 degree right hand turn towards the high school entrance.  A senior I know who’s just become a father courteously opens the door for us, and I yell to the secretary to call Abram’s mom as we move down the long corridor connecting the two schools.  He’s sweating and shaking and crying, lathered up with nowhere to hide from the pain, and the 60 yard corridor takes us past classrooms where kids have gathered at the door to see from what origin the curse words and semi-coherent calls for help are coming. 

“oww, oww-we, oww-we, ow-weeeeeeeeeeeeee” is what I seem to recall most, though my memory on the matter is not gospel by any means.  We are met by docile, mousy nurse who could be 40 or could be 60 - still amazes me this real-time temporal shape shifting. She has me set the student down in a chair as she rummages for a bandage.  She asks me to hold his arm as she wraps an airsplint around it, and it’s clear I have no choice in the matter.  The kid has gone to some atavistic, sweat-induced state of rocking and shaking his head from side to side, which makes setting the break that much more difficult.  Then I am relieved of duty by a higher up and walk back to the classroom, ready to begin the second stage of the bubble tests, wondering what self-delusive rhetorical trickery I had played on myself when I became convinced it would be an edifying experience indeed to hold sway over students without the slightest idea what I was doing. 

The fish peddler, the shoemaker, the space-talker, the provocation-enabler

There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most

beloved by them

and smash it.

Religion calls the pressure piety and the smashed things a sacrifice to

God.

Prophets question these names.

[AC]

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Bachelard: One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream.

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RE: the Haymarket Riots

Before jury deliberations in the attempted payroll robbery charge for which Vanzetti was tried as an appetizer to the murder trial:

“This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions.”

Judge Webster Thayer

I am not an easel-kisser.

LiFE is nO WaY TO TREat an aniMaL

• cigarette phlegm - fever spots - constipated auteurs - synthesis spirals - morbidity graphics - True crime evocations of autoimmune archivists

• saturnine blessings - neoliberal wrecking crews - cast-iron primacy - child-centered grooming stations - connoisseurs of funky cold medina

• hieroglyphic panting - high volume rectitude - low brow pleurisy - fertile virgins - slinky flagellates - wizened rage of the pilgrims

• Enervated monotheists - boorish swans - Bayesian speed dating - impact-wrench desire - benighted tote bags - the sound of trickling water filling encephalitic dungeons

• Anthill museum - low-brow concept fracking - hood ornament deontology - sparkle casket - a pile of misnomers - effervescent spread of marauding dawn

• convex mirror bluff - the flayed black coil - the tardy inside straight - corroded artery - caged marsupial - Slanted and disenchanted - aphasic musings of a disabled medicine man

• Canadian ambivalence - shirking dervishes - splinter clique - fixed bayonet - discerning octogenarians- deep-in-the-money plastic options -slick optics of a mongrel empire

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Spare the Spastic Amgydala

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Never give up, before it's too late!

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INTRACTABLE SOMA ELLIPSES

A moment hidden inside another moment inside an involuntary tic, a matryoshkadoll of divvied-up present tense, sliced against the grain of conscious thought and as thin as suspiration makes possible. Good gracious, mind, please help me help you turn off. The beast at the end of the bed sighs and kicks and farts and pushes for more space, and tepid dry air is pushed up to the upper chambers in which all this gnashing takes place, a product of clinks and clanks and pneumatic feints of disguised origin

Distillation

Heisenberg = light is aware that we are looking.

Consequently, we may do well to greet the light

politely and not stand at a remove from it

before we probe.

What it is that we suss out

may show more about us

than it tells us

about light.

If this were unique, you could call yourself Friday

and I might be able to sleep

on top of something other than a chemical wave

You aren’t and can’t be my bodyguard

and I already was your long lost friend.

We remain stuck in the middle,

betrayed in equal parts

by entopical phenomena

and thuggish frailty.

I hoped we might slink into Abu Simbel

with a telephoto lens and be rid of our past

for one partial moment.
But before we will go clandestine outside

The all ages show with pilfered cigs

Standing ill-at-ease with the asymptote

Of unspoken mutual attraction.

But observational quarks will always catch

irksome shadows that we cast

by being present at the scene.

From that well-tilled soil, cheap grace is sown

Insight-peddlers flush with vig

occupy the field

Wielding shunted subtitles and indiscriminate colons

To cap the telomerase and seize up the rhizomes.

Their false light is so warm, though,

and it moves quite fast in its own right.

Being remiss, we accept acceptance

in lieu of exceptional experimental results.

We cease experiments altogether,

fearful of being found out.

Pussies, the lot of us.

Like it or love it or leave it or leaven it

There always exists a scene

and we will always be outpaced and outshone

And it will always be something less than clean.

That is the baseline - it does not excuse the task.

To greet the light with a stiff spine

seems the least that could be done

on behalf of our lowest interchangeable sign

Let the sacraments fall where they may and

the soothsayers claim what they will.

Say hello, and then get on with it.

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Taking a line for a walk

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[The guy on the bike next to the black car was offended by my presence. He peddled up to me, threw his bike down, yelled continuously in guttural tones the whole approach, and after I started walking away, pushed me in the back. Then he squared up, hands up and seemed ready to go. I was flummoxed. Then he asked for a cigarette, in staccato English. I said, “fuck you, no.” and he seemed offended. I walked down the street, and as he biked past he gave me thumbs up and i gave the ole middle finger. So that happened.]

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[“lord give me a sign”]

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Endeavor to show the true more than the real because it is, outside the camera's view, more real than true

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  “It’s the form that creates meaning, it’s what we do everyday without thinking that is the main event.” 

Dear Godfrey:

That the pontiff might serve as your personal Che Guevara reflects you as anachronism.  You affirm an obligation to tell young people that they must walk on water, must become heroic, and must ignore whatever attraction respectable, protected, stable middle-class living may hold.  This obligation bespeaks exactitude, without austerity – demands joy that need not be underwritten by consequentialism – and an audience that isn’t looking for instruction as inspiration or preemptive approval at the ecstasies of living life as an experiment. 

“The imperialism of the trivial sets limits on what seems possible” is me, not you, but it’s me trying to ape you in the same way you try to ape phenomenology from a god’s eye time-lapse view.  The same way that you marshal a great ape to hold up a mirror to the viewer (that unbroken, unbreakable gaze).  

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From the top floor of the hotel where I write this, I can look down on the cages of the baboon exhibit and the monkey (of various species) exhibit.  They are hemmed in by netting that must periodically be reset, as the trees that sit within the enclosure grow by the inch and expand by increment the space in which the monkeys are encaged. 

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Who’s on first, mutatis mutandis

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I showed the first movement of your trilogy film poem to a class of 15-16 year olds with whom I lived at the outer edge of the end of American civilization, though right in its geographic center.  I wanted to convey the idea that there are ways of naming the craziness of the world that apologize for it or accept it as the baseline of consensus reality.  You don’t cotton to didactic aesthetics, but embedded in the trilogy a theme – rejection of normalized ennui – shines through.  One among many themes, tropes, conversions, offerings.  And these shine through, as a form of how images gather and disperse in sequence.  Insomuch as the viewer agrees to have faith (as you insist), this sequence of images aspires to function as half of a conversation that is worth attending to. 

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Covert activism and naïve DIY enthusiasm.  I think it an underwhelming interpretation to see the trilogy as working in the mode of the therapeutic or diagnostic – e.g., whereof one cannot think, thereof one should not speak, or scorn for Mittledt and amor fati – because there is a viewpoint expressed that is much more radical, that would require an overthrow of basic assumptions and not just a shift in who pulls on the levers.    “Direct montage” in the Armenian vein, filtered through Godard, filtered through St. Augustine. You show that this is may be more than a skit of improvisation, that we are come to be at play in the fields of the Lord whether we like it or not. 

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“[Technology] has become the environment of life, it has replaced nature as the host of human habitation and the rest of nature pays the enormous price for that.”

On the cusp of going on a trip, I laid out my assembled grab bag of chargers, cords, camera, batteries, and cases/bags for carrying the same.  I walked miles, my cellphone logging each step, and kept the camera in one zipped-up coat of my jacket and a charging bank in the other.  As I looked at my phone to tell me where I was in relation to the monuments, eateries, and whatnot noted on the phone’s map application, I periodically plugged it into the charging bank in my pocket to make sure I could forestall the leakage that would led to the phone going temporarily dead. 

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I will cede to you the penultimate word:

I think it’s endemic to the way we live that “war” is the predicate.  But it’s beyond the war of the battlefield.  It’s much more insidious, much more pervasive, and a war that appears like not war, it looks normal.  We’ve gone to ware with the entire rest of the planet, the animal kingdom, the vegetation kingdom, the very air of earth itself, the vibrations within the planet, the relationship between the outer-core and the inner-core where we’re exploding nuclear devices underground for 50 years, I mean, we’re really messing around here.  We all have within our bodies elements that didn’t even exist a hundred years ago, they’re ingested like the air we breathe.  It all seems normal.  I mean, just to support this war of living, the price we pay for this technological happiness is off the charts and our life becomes predicated in speed, faster and faster and faster and faster.  We’ve outrun our future.  To me, the end’s already occurred, we’re living in the aftershock of the event, and to me that’s what I mean about being hopeless about this order, so that one can have the veracity of hope.  Hope is the substance of what you hope for, it’s the only term in theology that uses the term to define itself.  So it’s not just, “I hope things are fine,” that’s just willy-nilly.  It’s the substance of what you hope for that makes hope.  So I’m hopeful, but I’m hopeless.

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 Grab it by the thorns and pull, come what may. 

Early flaneur and embellished jet lag

[Fire]

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[Kreuzberg]

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[alpha . . . zeta perpendicular]

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[ that pho joint was solid, too]