enlightenment (Buddhists), sagehood (Confucians), freedom (Kantians), authenticity (existentialists), or flourishing (Aristotelians).
Because the off-kilter view only becomes foreseeable through the eyes of someone who can cinch it in place, beyond the individual moment. And because languishing in obscurity is foreordained until it isn’t.
Differential Diagnosis (1)
On the hand, we have a setup that is pitched to the worst excesses of human depravity and groupthink. This is less a function of information overload, then targeted distribution of bias within a relatively-closed system:
our information ecosystem no longer assists us in reaching consensus. In fact, it structurally discourages it, and instead facilitates a dissensus of bespoke pseudo-realities. [Mediating Consent, R. DiResta]
Red team channel read by, consumed by, and indirectly funded by read team players. Blue team channel read by, consumed by, etc. So far, so facile, but not inaccurately so.
It is not hard to envision a corporate cultural shift and bifurcation that follows hard on the heels of this division. The choice is less Colgate or Crest by which to whiten one’s teeth, but red team brand v. blue team brand. This may not seem so much a consumer- or citizen-driven outcome as the strategic resolution of the Prisoner’s Dilemma imported into the Fortune 500. Who will first pull the pin on the grenade and accept that a full or nearly full share of half the market is more desirable than trying to strike the razor’s-edge equilibrium of messaging to two or more disparate groups who achieve self-definition by way of opposition to the outgroup Other? This is one way in which the choice fatigue dilemma solves itself.
2. Differential Diagnosis (2)
Over and above the internal fault-line fracturing, the other shoe falls via indiscriminate external authors of systemic threats. It may not matter whether these come clothed in ideologies espousing specific political or commercial ends, or embracing a hodgepodge of philosophically confused, but no-less-virulent strands of nihilism and destruction-as-entertainment. We did it to gain power or earn chits, we did it because we could, we did it because why not, we did it because we were bored (or more likely, I alone did it because I was bored).
The temptation to answer to complex risk with complex analysis occasions the parable of the eye for an eye making the whole world blind, especially when the party assigned with managing complex risk by way of undertaking complex analysis has its own designs on ubiquitous access to information and, if not actual control of, at least seamless penetration into, the channels by which information flows. Thereby, the parable of the canny fox guarding the henhouse. Have confidence that a whetted appetite may give way to predation (whereby protein labeled internal threat becomes a meal), and in the same breath have doubt that the appetite to protect against external threat - if for no other reason than to keep this good thing going - will suffice.
An archetype of garbage in/garbage out arises when the sum of known threats is calculated in a form of analysis that is impenetrable on its own terms. To wit:
Is it so irresponsible, then, to turn off every news feed and go about marshaling whatever energies may be marshaled into the idea of the Beautiful? Not so much out of hedonism or an aesthete’s self-satisfying ardor, but because tuning out and dropping out (exit) achieves a coherence and Hippocratic-oath salience that seems beyond the grasp of engagement (voice). Maybe, maybe not, but responsibility aside, it seems worthwhile to attend to the possibility that the Beautiful also exists in the futile absurd, which can be observed accidentally/in the breach or with a strange kind of intentionality that remains available to the faithless. But is that a kind of keeping faith or just a kind of keeping score? All rights reserved, and more after the commercial break . . .
RESOLVED that the practical apparition of having a past commitment to the idea of a lifelong enmeshment no longer haunts or will be recognized for its haunting effect;
RESOLVED that the fixated too-muchness of drip from a bloody nose into the slanted white sink will suffice as a stand-in for a sacrament;
RESOLVED that generic genetic predisposition will scuff and adumbrate, slacken and contort, but will bear no more significance than the happenstance of being caught in a calming rain and walking for blocks with unbloomed umbrella in hand;
RESOLVED that the scratch and tickle of ego asking or demanding to be let loose will wherever possible be tamped down and sequestered, though no law will register as self-evident or self-enabling . . .
Reading prison novel in a blizzard. Were I a twitterer, I would have pithy quotes to send out into the ether. Instead, into this echo chamber, striding like a colossus in my own mind, go I.
a.
A section from emmanuel carrere’s the kingdom reduces the gospels to the words Jesus spoke directly, which appear in both Luke and Mark. Having read them twice last night and again this morning, it’s possible I know not a single Christian.
b.
Maps and art about maps predominate in my ever-revolving canon. Qui Zhijie and his total art work are on the playlist on a weekly if not daily basis. Last night I revisited a monograph on Jasper Johns by Michael Crichton (yes, that one) and came across this quote from Kozloff:
[the artist is] playing with the notion of measurement, in which the locked-in, diagrammatic in-scale dimensions of map images are contrasted with the virtually gratuitous dimensions of painterly gestures, the two being mutually usurped.
Crichton goes on to gloss the point:
Another way to say it is to observe that the artist produces an isolation between the map (an abstraction representing something) and the painting of the map (an abstraction representing an abstraction) in such a way that multiple ways of looking are simultaneously apparent.
One sticky summer night in early July started with Zima and Jolly Ranchers, and from there she somehow graduated to hash dabs on a pin, sitting in the back of one of the old-school vans with luggage rack on tap and a spare wheel on the back, and there was a half-dozen other kids sitting inside with the doors open, several conversations going on at once, and she got out and sat at the periphery of that space and could see where others had gathered around a makeshift fire, trying to make out what each individual cricket might be contributing to the din of chirping on which her attention increasingly fixated. Part of her wanted to get back into the van and back into the rotation, but instead she walked out toward the first and watched as two boys wrap duct tape round and round a large stack of elongated sticks that a girl next to her identified as sparklers. For a sparkler bomb.
The three boys walked about ten yards from the fire and one took at a hand blowtorch and bent down to light the ad hoc firework and then it exploded and everyone started screaming. One of them came running past her, toward the van, holding out a mangled hand, with fingers drooping and askew like pipecleaners she had been given a day earlier in art class, to make something with.
They all went to the parade in the Irish part of town two days later and drank Vodka and Squirt out of straws from convenience store cups as the floats streamed by. About half way through the parade, or something like that - she wasn't sure how long it was supposed to last - a group of five figures dressed all in black walked out front of a stream of gleaming cars representing the Clark County Corvette Club and poured oil out onto the ground from red one-gallon buckets, right there on the street. The group was quickly surrounded and jostled and she could see that the crowd was none too happy at what they were trying to do, and whether it was the sun or the vodka or what she presumed was about to go down, she walked off, away from the scrum, not even bothering to ask anyone for a ride home, which was like at least 2 miles away.
Protest made her think of Vietnam, and she had a hard time thinking of Vietnam except in terms of demonstrations and burning monks and naked screaming girls hurtling into the camera lens, and it struck her as impossible to imagine that the here-and-now would demand something
similar from her, even if she really truly thought and believed what she had thought and believed she thought and believed.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, I came down with a case of the Taking Everything Too Seriously. It is easy to forget that we are protean bags of carbon meat strung up on breakable calcium assemblages, riding on a consolidated speck of dust in a big black expanding container of cavernous nothingness. And remembering not to forget that helps, especially when coupled with healthy dose of mind-clutch (Glass Irony & God, Leaves of Grass, Human-All-Too-Human vis-à-vis Negotiations, Lethem, Kushner) and earworms (Lamar H.U.M.B.L.E., enter the 36 chambers, Beethoven’s Ninth, Aja). Also remembering that we are here, so mine as well play a little. Whether we are put here or placed here or just end up here, there is nowhere else. More or less.
So I got a haircut with a different style – a “buzz-cut,” as was the middle school parlance – bought some clothes and shoes and art I want but don’t need, and tried, just now, in this second successive night/morning of post-holiday insomnia, to discern whether this pattern of self-seriousness had anything to do with the spirit of evasiveness (having no truck with the idea that the Redeemer is born, or that the man in the sled is bringing all us good ones presents) that seems, well, presently pervasive. And it seems likely.
Still, it’s not just the reason for the season that factors into it. There are other exterior conditional forces that might help explain why play remains elusive. For example, we are in that time of mid-winter graying when all the plows kick up the slush and dirt and gather it on the side of the narrowing streets in flotsam piles and similar et cetera gathers in the storm drains. Chicago in winter was the grayest; for whatever reason, whenever I used to visit Minneapolis it seemed the dirtiest, which can’t be the case, but memory serves, apparently. Here in the Biggest City in the 605, the mid-winter grays are worst when cloud cover keeps the sun at bay and the light of morning just kind of seeps in, so that the early-morning DT sufferers, slowly shuffling amidst what passes for urban landscape, are apparitions on the wet black bough and hundreds of headlights pick them out in stop-motion pointillism.
I’m not saying I’m depressed – sleep-deprived, yes, but par for the course – I’m just saying that taking in the word-historical events in this milieu while also being encouraged to take stock of the decade, is too much. So I am striving, in true 2nd-generation-American Midwest fashion, to dig sideways out of this climactic hole into a different hole where the scaffolding might be more easily reached.
I had the interesting experience of a 102 degree fever on Christmas Eve, and the shimmering perception that resulted was not altogether unpleasant. Also made my first contribution to what passes for a festschrift in this Philistine 605, and that was both an honor and a reminder that I am of the age and station in life where being asked to make such a contribution is a thing.
Recapturing play was a little easier after I put together the 60-piece wooden play Veterinarian set, which made Ikea furniture assembly look like putting a straw through a lid, and the invariable squeals of delight and surprising selective euphoria (who knew that a 2-oz container of Play-Dough would take the top prize?) vastly reduced my self-obsessive streak. All to the good, as it is said.
Incidentally but not unrelatedly, it took nearly four decades for me what is being served by the message that being good means you get stuff and being bad means you don’t.
Limn.
Winter-Gray
:
This might apply indirectly or subliminally
Windmill proximity: sleep disturbance, headache, tinnitus, ear pressure, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual blurring, tachycardia, irritability, problems with concentration and memory, and panic episodes associated with sensations of internal pulsation or quivering when awake or asleep
Beyond the aforementioned mind-clutch, December has been manic work and little time carved out for consumption, but consumption waits for no man, and of late includes:
READ:
The Map and the Territory, Houllebecq
Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, Fox Owens, Laura (Whitney Monograph)
Wyndham Lewis on Art (doorstopper, smells of musty Hyde Park used bookstore)
Schjeldahl on dying
READING:
Book of Delights, Gay (1/3 of the way)
Where the Sidewalk Ends (we read whatever picture makes us stop flipping)
The Cut, Pelecanos
Vernon Subutex 1, Despentes
Negotiations
Essays, Critical and Clinical
Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, Steyerl
As 2019 enters its final quarter, there have been large and often violent demonstrations in Lebanon, Chile, Spain, Haiti, Iraq, Sudan, Russia, Egypt, Uganda, Indonesia, Ukraine, Peru, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Colombia, France, Turkey, Venezuela, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Brazil, Malawi, Algeria and Ecuador, among other places
No matter what happens, the whig will respond with optimism, the reactionary with anger or sadness, the progressive with outrage or compassion, the postmodernist with apathy or amusement.
Being a specialist in flawed but intermittently captivating parenting.
Getting people to answer questions they would prefer to leave unanswered.
Holding back hair so the contents of young stomachs may be set free.
Repeating gerunds and nominalization until a steady hand cramps and raw cheeks flush.
Stop. Wait. Listen. Pucker. Slam. Sling into the abyss. It doesn’t fucking need to be this way.
Needing to be heard and hating the need to be heard until silence wins out.
Yes yes a winning personality is to apex capitalism as to a heretical teenaged disposition is to expressive apostasy. But does it get you laid? But do you get to heaven?
Stop. Pucker. Off we go.
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.
"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."
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
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 . . .
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.
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.
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):
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.
Instead of obligations embedded in generic free time, free time in Japan is exceptional condition excavated from general condition of obligation.
The referent adheres
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.
. . . 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.
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 . . .
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
