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.