O Superman

by Laurie Anderson

This is a pretty outfit...

...pretty see-thru, that is!



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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.]