Les Demoiselles des Rochefort

"Jaan Pehechaan Ho"

Of course, you might recognize this from Gumnaam...

Dough on the street

Did someone really think that the garbage man was going to scoop up this dough? I wonder how long it will linger outside of our door.

Bob Fosse is the God of Choreography

And whoever put the video and song together deserves an award too. Thanks, Mojdeh, for showing me this little gem.

Not choreography

From Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), also colloquially referred to as "Turkish Star Wars" for reasons that will be obvious if you only watch.

More choreography

choreography saves the day again

This will be my response to the Laurie Anderson...Nathan calls her silly hand gestures "choreography" and i call them pretentious. Don't get me wrong - I think she's a swell artist, I just wish she would break a smile at some point. Anyway, enjoy Feist. Leslie Feist's music is not really my scene but this video is fun and it definitely has the choreography. Thanks to Aaron for showing it to me.

O Superman

by Laurie Anderson

This is a pretty outfit...

...pretty see-thru, that is!



— - — - —



Howdy, sailor!

Tidbits and Bruce Conner

Mongoloid by Bruce Conner

Maybe the scary thing about lil' mouse gore is that you just can't recycle that shit. You have got to throw it away with lots of lysol and paper towels, unlike stock footage and magazine scraps (my personal favorite). Plus, no one gets to be glamorous for doing art with dead mice...

Enjoy this glamour shot of the artist himself:



OK. I was wrong. You can make art with corpses. One of the best art exhibits I ever saw was Fauna in Barcelona in 2002. The artists Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera did a whole show and book about a scientist who discovered some very strange species in the same vein as The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Of course, they were brilliant examples of taxidermy that served to open the possibilities of life...

Here is the Ceropithecus icarocornu for your pleasure. According to the scientist's notes, "It is a long-tailed simian with large wings which turn it into an animal eminetly suited for flying...The females give birth inside a large cabin in the village to which only the great shaman has access."

Disgust

Apropos of gabriella's citation of Kristeva, and the unspeakable circumstances that led to said citation — as well as her return to the blog! — I thought I should quote the following, from Sianne Ngai's "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust."

In expressions of disgust language becomes formless, the "esoteric jargon of grunting and straining," "retched sounds from bathroom splashes." [... T]he poet's expression of inexpressiveness thrusts the base materiality of language into the foreground: "woo, brah." Here the question of what a word means (the form it gives to a preexistent thought) as well as the question of how it relates abstractly to another word in the system (form deferring to form) becomes secondary to its simply "being there," in all its insistence and affective force.

All of which is to say that the word abject doesn't begin to describe the surprise — magical delight, rather — brought on by an unexpected handful of maggots.

Now I know what Abject Means

Living in New York led to poisoning the mice and poisoning mice has led to my real life abjection.


For so long, I thought gore was my thing. It was Dario Argento this and Herschell Gordon Lewis that and now a mouse died in the bathroom and I have met my match. I though about taking a picture of it and posting it and that somehow, by turning it into an image, the little corpse would become less real. I couldn't even open the cupboard.
I knew there was a little eyeless furry corpse animated with maggots...

"The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us." (Kristeva, Powers of Horror)

Now the corpse is gone (all thanks goes to Nathan) but what remains is the large "Fulci puddle" and every now and then, a maggot crosses the physical border of the cupboard and I am reminded that all of our borders are imaginary. But at least the cupboard is keeping most of them in! for now...

grammatology

Another philolsopher, by way of Architectural Dance Society.


Jacques Derridlol

Веселый Цыпленок

Веселый Цыпленок (USSR, 1973)

Philolsophers

lolSaussure's gonna help save this blog, too.




More here.

To hell with poverty

Rescuing a blog from deletion by its owner takes dedication. It turns out that's something I don't have. You know who does? Gang of Four.

[from The Old Grey Whistle Test, BBC. April 11, 1981.]

Stolen Bruce Conner

I think that my task here — rescuing this blog, remember? — made me pander a bit in my last post. If anyone was offended by the low-brow attention to the cute, I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you now.

The following images were stolen from Bruce Conner's film "Report," which deals with the murder of JFK. The film consists entirely of stock footage, so I've decided to borrow only still images of the blank leader Conner uses throughout.

I'm not sure, though, that I've entirely avoided pandering here. As Matthew Wilder remarks, "the most startling moments in the overly psychedelicized 'Report' are the white expanses where we see hairs in the gate and wear and tear on the frames themselves." So, in a sense, I'm treating the film as though it were nothing more than its best parts. Like The Soup does on E!

Oh well — enjoy!













[ADDENDUM: I've wriiten a longer article explaining the ways these blanks work in the context of Conner's film at This Cruellest Month.]

Hey there, tiger!

More here...

Fun!

It's been a month since the last update to this blog, so I'm going to step in to provide life support. And nothing — and I mean nothing — breathes life into the lifeless like a pop quiz! Are you ready?

Q: Who likes fun?

A: Everyone likes fun!

Fun is: UnSuggester, a service provided by LibraryThing that allows you to find out the opposite of your favorite books! How it works, in three steps:

1. You enter the title of a book (or search for one by author).

2. LibraryThing determines who has that book, and who doesn't. Based on the statistical likelihood of a personal library containing particular books, it determines which titles should be in any given library, but are also not held within libraries that include the book you've entered. (This sounds complicated, but it ain't. The program does it for you — that, my friends, is the magic of algorithms!)

3. You are presented with a ranked list of opposites to the book you've entered.

So what do we learn? Whatever it is, we must bear in mind that the results have nothing to do with the content of the books, but rather with who owns or doesn't own them. Were we to take this as a serious inquiry, it would be of the reading habits of the nation — and it isn't even reliable for that, as the scope of the data is bounded by self-selection, which introduces a significant bias.

Nonetheless, it's fun we're after, not research! So take a gander at this list of examples, provided by yours truly:

— The opposite of The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus is Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

— The opposite of The Cantos of Ezra Pound is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

— The opposite of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault is what appears to be a sequel to Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants

— The opposite of A Humument by Tom Phillips is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus is The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

— The opposite of The Marx-Engels Reader is Cell: A Novel by Stephen King

— The opposite of Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont is Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

— The opposite of The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

— The opposite of A Void by Georges Perec is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

We can reverse this, looking up the opposites of the opposites of my books to find possible recommendations:

— The opposite of The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom is The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault

— The opposite of Cell: A Novel by Stephen King is Illuminations by Walter Benjamin

— The opposite of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown is Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze

Now you know, and knowing is... well, you know.

Day 30 At Last

Not that I've been keeping up.

The zig-zag chair by Reitveld. I totally forgot he designed it today. I figure if I post that info, I will remember it from now on.

Here is a list poem, we'll call it #30:

A pair of $105 sunglasses, zippered wallet, Blondie t-shirt,
slice of pizza with the walls opened up and a medium diet coke.

Some puppies and a haircut, a pint of beer, a martini, pork chops
and french fries. Wafer cookies, a Dean Koontz novel,

2 iced teas and some very pricey makeup. 5 "so secure" hair clips,
a round brush, Glade air freshener, double double your enjoyment
Double-Mint gum.

Late Sunday Nite

#22

Never the grey blur,
that cunning trick. Slick
horizons, false and faint,
touch the dope of legends.
Artifice defines
our eyespan; a more
Southern spot clipped the
image and vanished.
Morning made fashionable
such a plastered look.

Remix

The Eater of Meaning made this of my poem; I'm making it my poem.

#21

thieve is thirdly is
thimble is thanking
thermometers onetime
this thrashed
thickets pomp pompadour
thing greekize
thickens greensville
is thanked boric
thankless pompously pompously
is thinkable yellowknife
is thinness greekize
thrusts greer
think is a strangler
a stricter
a thicken

I think it was a law

Blogspot isn't doing too well with the pictures right now.
Here is another trasnslation of the O'Hara. Thanks, again, Nathan.

#19

Get back, not more than the length
of a modernist heap. A table

comes feathered like wooden
veins, joints all foldable

and swishy lines, crossing to
and fro. These average rectangles

embrace me, a burst of shape
is the chase we made. Calm as

a reaction to speech, meeting
wild and rare veneers on every side –

sliced threat wide open. The adage
is a home version of me.

Sanjaya Malakar's Reign Ends

I will post a pic as soon as Blogspot allows it...


I stole Nathan's idea and translated the same Frank O'Hara poem. His are way better, but this is my first one...

#18

A crease subtracted from the plain
sours this art party scene.

Around the bric-a-brac: fallen angles
or the chartreuse fruits among you

press down the present ghost light
leave it to more reverent shoulders.

The holding is this: the grey here
slightest chance of meringue.

Richard McBeef

For the record, Nathan is no monster and Steve - thank you for the toe sympathy.
Today, I feel like Cho Seung-Hui gives poetry a bad name. He's a good example of why I don't like emotion in poetry - it invites the worst kind of emotional folks - the ones who think it's there place to make others experience/suffer from their feelings.
Anyhow, here's a doozy of a poem that I unknowingly dictated to Nathan during a rousing game of the Wheel.


#17

Linguine with
red claw
sauce.
Just claw
sauce.
Red claw
sauce.
Oh – but
red is
purple. How
‘bout that?

Return to the Blog

Blogging got hard. So I quit. Again. I'm just not an obligation person.
Friday night was rough - then I broke my toe. Then I tried to write a poem and Nathan didn't like it. Total devastation. Maybe I'll get back on track...

#16 (because I get to skip the days I don't post)

neon swamp
climb on up
we were here in secret
making the make
out of town
swept away
more reflective
tea paper
the swingline
jetty
that’s the
ticket
sweaty left hook
upholstery of
this alley
this white-out
this soda jerk

Designed to stand the test of time

#12

The more fragrant of these
species outwitted us all.
Snaking around ghost forms,
film on fire
the layer goes more silver.
As if the perfect shot was
from below; clean
cut out the side body.
A simple act of lift taken
straight outta space
as if the perfect shot
swung side to side.
And stopped.

"This" Day

I miss color theory. I need to get back to reading these fantastic lessons by Josef Albers on the subject. Especially when you are trying to discern one slight yellow from another.
Happy b-day, mom.

#11

this is this is
this is that
the one
this thread
this pom pom
this green
this green
is that border
that pom pom
is this yellow
is this grey
three greys
this is a stripe
a stripe
a this

First day with no poems

Sorry. no poems today. I gave up. Today at least. The 10th one broke me. Hope you enjoy the collage...

Can't Trust that Day

Just in case you were wondering what an interior designer does, I got to remake this beautiful Gerrit Rietveld lamp to scale today out of foam core scraps and packing twine. I'm not sure you can call my creation De Stijl.

#9

zip zip slipper
smoke screen culture
lips slipped shut
a more horizontal rift

smack tank zoom
look left impression
go-go rib cage
spread open blast

shape of shade
thing lines the time
take take talk
swear growth right

Posting later and later...

#8

Suspense sounds make for an eerie bull riding session –
he’ll never do a height job again.

Y’all live like pigs, rootin’
around for individual snacks:
cornbread, bricks n’ burgers.
A physical honky tonk.

Sunny yellow fashion crept onto our food
splashed all around the man-sink,
picking up what we put down, married
woman don’t belong to you, Tattoo.

Trailer’s a pretty obvious place to live
in this pickup west.

Grindhouse Day

It was as if the April 6th release date would never come.


#7

How does a hand go so floppy
and cold in this hothouse? Speak
easy spring, a series of clicks.

Stranded along a strange vector. The wrist
remembers everything, telling
the future to a busty blonde/brunette. The lead

fans his golden beef onto the screen, as if
he could contact time. Escape road
is thickly oiled, darting out toward the same
hands: a knitted construction. Listen closely.

Steps swoon, sky heavily seasoned.
Sworn trees tossed tender – a secret lift.

Yes, I spelled "smorgasbord" correctly the 1st time

Yesterday was the kind of snow that gives snow a romantic reputation - for ten minutes late in the afternoon, my humble New York City turned into a cinematic snow globe. Then I got to see the metal hardware that is going to be used to hang Robert DiNiro's curtains - what a weird perspective I'm starting to have. They were very Art Deco.

Here's #6:

This is one of them Holly-wood sets where the world is painted up,
sourcing sky-lips out of time. A certain still.
Chain linked message all swirled up into
a wild world where nothing happens.

Squishy goodness of A-merica sandwich time, the
plastered sensation of a table, a plain setting.
Flattering outlines all let go on
this slab, much like the blue blood in my first DiPalma.

Tremble goes to flotsam.
Flotsam goes to sleep, smorgasbord of the undead.
Heaping mess of Dazzleberry pie. Up to our arms in
canoe berry.

Toughest Post Yet

Writing poetry is a lot like fasting. Days 1-3 are fine. 5 & 6 are unbearable and the rest...we'll see.

Day 5 is for Bob Clark. He was an amazing director who died yesterday with his 22 year old son when a drunk driver in a Yukon hit their vehicle. One of my favorites is Deathdream (thank you, Steve Burhans, for showing it to me) but Clark will be the most remembered for A Christmas Story (which my mom makes us watch every Xmas for 24 hours, with commercials, on TBS). So, none of my art today, but a fantastic still from Deathdream instead. And, of course, the lovely, emotive poem:

5
(for Bob Clark)

Fearsome flesh monster – you are the monkey’s paw of the plot. You are the simple blood junkie with a heart of gold. You are a broken lawn chair, the forgery of speech and this town’s own self-made, fucked-up paramedic. You are a walking soldier hamburger with a miniature U.S. flag toothpick stuck in the center. Foreign policy has kidnapped your blood but you can still feel your wormy astronaut body.

Day 4 and still going strong

I think my kitchen is haunted. Nathan says I'm probably right. The window shattered (but because it has 2 panes, our landlord is ingnoring it), the fridge got really weird and loud, the radiator squeals and shoots out water and there are oh, so many mice coming to eat trash!
But, the poetry continues...



4

Terror finds us underground.
Begs for a classic tongue-lashing.
Light rain or a filtered voice answers –
flood of 20 electronic questions.
The studded gypsum quickly decomposes
and is reborn as fierce torpedo boats.
Pull those supplies close to your heart
and form a real live quiver.
Never stop clawing the eyes of
each neighbor, not until every account
is accounted for.

Poetry day 3

3

Nighttime grid defines this manhunt,
a heavy splatter on the concrete.
How the heavens stir!
Like being licked, little pot roast?
Are you still up, lambchop?
Wrap your hands around this
soft, raw fruit of our wet city.
Stacks of light follow both directions,
unbound, a more expressive
horizon.

NaPoWriMo Day#2

So it's not a collage but it is the crazy sleet storm that I lived through March 16, 2007. In all my 5 snowy years, i have never experienced such unrelenting sleet. Photo: Sleet, by Callalillie.

2

Hanging overhead: negative of
the solar dream we dreamt.
What’s so tentative about the
icy skies and the even icier sequence?
Blast of weather descended today,
Written on all the surfaces:
the structure of sky,
falling open to reach
the room, traces along the rail.
Shuddered internal walls –
cahoots with their weather
which whisper past, line to line.

New month, time for poetry

April is poetry month - a bougie little invention that i will use to fuel my entries to this little blog. Every day i will try to post a new poem paired with one of my collages.

1.

Modern house-planning left a space
for us here. A pixilated magic, four
colors make a ghost a ghost, a chair
a chair. Slight proportion stretched
along an architectural seam: a peep-
hole is revealed and you are already
there. How should a modern house
proceed? Dissarrange ornament
and re-light the drawing room.
A quick fix.

Oneida & Trans Am

Katie and I finally went to a show in New York City. Oneida and Trans Am, two bands that I really adore. Too bad we went to the early show and everyone was on this major time crunch to finish so they could perform again at 10:45 pm. I could have done without the opener, Big Bear, cause nouveau hardcore is just not my scene.
This picture sums it up for me because I totally heart Sebastian from Trans Am - he's a fantastic drummer (no shoes) and he's the most fun to watch (especially as a front man in The Frequency) AND check out that amazing ginormous gold chain. Radical.

This is the most adorable, feel good news story EVER!

This news is SO 2 days ago.
But I am obsessed with it. Why? Because, since when are rats in New York City news?
On a morning show (one out of many that spent a good chunk of time talking about this issue), they described the rats as galloping across the floor of the KFC/Taco Bell. I love galloping rats!
The ones that live in the tin ceiling above my bed gallop all night long and to quote Nathan, they also "scrabble". Then there are the mice. They are in the trash, on the counter, and elsewhere when they think no one's paying attention. One time Nathan was napping on the couch and he woke up and there was a mouse next to him feasting on a candy bar. These miniature beasts define the New York experience.
But hey, the dude that shot the footage made a cool $4000 by the end of the day according to the LA Times (they're reporting this news in LA!?!). There's a lesson here: rats don't cost money, they make money! God bless the USA.

Feb. 23. 8:24pm.

My first entry will be short.
Holla!