Yay Demo(cracy) !!!

and she slowly realized

the many subtle ways that this Age of Visual Culture
forces upon us its terrible, kaleidoscopic reality.

the only acceptable

and live-able form of life must be
something like a continuous

and sustained act
of colorful, ever-flowing
Butterfly-
Godzilla-
Stomp.

(Butterfly-Godzilla-Stomp is the name of a dancestep I will create in 2007. It will kill horses, yuppies, and entire platoons of skeleton-ninja shocktroopers.)

**

Please Vote for God'ssake !

they say politics comes from polis which meant something like "your fucking city, right now."

***

What is the secret hidden beneath the Harlequin's smile?

It must be the ancient mystery of eternal servitude and mastery.


*( listen to track number 2 on Silent Shout -- from the Clairmont Lounge to Capital City Country Club, I hear the city cry out the perpetual enslavement of humankind. ethnic-and-otherwise. )

I refuse to go see Spiderman 3

nor will I go see any other Marvel comics movie in the near future, because Marvel comics is cancelling Nextwave. Nextwave is an extremely smart, good-looking, and funny (really funny) series by writer Warren Ellis. One might say it is a highly stylish parody of every other Marvel comic. Furthermore, it is a timely parody that openly pokes fun at our all-too-familiar "war on terror."

Danse macabre

A quote from Frederic Jameson related to the "dance of death." It's all a little over my head, but I find it quite entertaining:

The thought gives new and exemplary meaning to a haunting moment in Renoir's La Regle du jeu, when, at the climax of the costume ball in the chateau, now infiltrated by skeletons waving their lamps and celebrating mortality to the tune of Sain-Saens's Danse macabre, the fat lady pianist, hands in her lap, can be glimpsed staring with rapt melancholia at the skeletal autonomy of the keyboard itself, behind which the piano rolls have taken charge with a vengeance. It is a fable of the work of art at that particular stage of its mechanical reproducibility, gazing at its own alienated power with morbid fascination.

I'm no film expert, but I do at least know that the English title of the movie is The Rules of the Game. It's a black-and-white picture about this extravagant party on some over-sized estate that goes terribly wrong. And then people die.

The Harlequin

(Just some notes. Nothing serious.)

I dreamed of the Harlequin. She came to reset the wheels of history.

Spanish rhythms fuel her Dionysiac stampede. High-fructose Indian corn scattered like eulogy-garlands. Sugarcane-laced manufactories sacrificed to the tropical night. Her carousers embody an eclectic psychomachia, one at once agrarian and cosmopolitan. The city groans and delightfully clatters into a heap, laying down its cruelty-arms for the day. Aquarius painted everywhere in a hauntingly familiar teal-and-maroon Latin glow.

And yet the cigar smoke lingers on the plantation balcony.

Skeletons attacked Mankind in 1958

If you cannot see this photo, go vistit my website.











Click here for uncontestable, videographic proof that skeletons attacked the mortal named "Jason" in 1958. He had argonauts, and, curiously, he was still alive in 50's. And he was in color.

Skeletons will not fuck around.

Photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin

Skeletons are way more awesome than Ninjas. Seriously.

I was discussing Halloween costumes with my buddy, Jon Carll, and a certain revelation occurred to me:

“Skeletons are way awesome-er than Ninjas.”

Yes, I think I see quite clearly now. I must deliver this delicious skeleton-Gospel to the good people of this planet. Before it is too late.

I have been hired

to write "light" legislation, starting December 16th. I will wear a tie, and I will commute to the capitol building down next to Georgia State. I will be a cog. A well-paid cog, but a cog nonetheless.

It's a funny job - I will basically take over a lot of bulk-paperwork that technically falls beneath the qualifications of your average attorney. Here's a paraphrased example:

Commending Prophetess Michelle Johansson; and for other purposes.

WHEREAS, Prophetess Dr. Michelle Johansson is an internationally acclaimed Bible teacher, prophet, psalmist, and media personality; and

WHEREAS, she is the best selling author of Why the Universe Loves Me, selling more than 600,00 copies in less than a year, From Capricorn to Solomon, and several other ground breaking books . . .

(names have been changed for legality reasons. otherwise, this is real. yep.)

New to Me: Warren Ellis

Though I realize the book started back in '97, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan struck me as some of some of the best writing I have seen - comics, novels, anything. The prose is aggressive: seething, violent, and dirty with occasional moments of radiant lucidity. Additionally, the book is intensely political. Art does not have to be socially disengaged.

A passage from trade paperback volume 5:

Terrible goddamn place. Some days it's like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything- depends-on-it first-week- of- being- madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there's a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere wile DAddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there ... Time was this place didn't make sense and I would live with it. Either it's changed, or I have.

There's all the good things on this ticket and pure fucking evil too. And all the same, I'm going down with you.

Wooster Collective

Word, check it.

Wooster Collective is a little hotspot community for street artists and street art enthusiasts. This piece was assembled entirely out of rubik's cubes. Tons of excellent images.

New to Me: James Joyce

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Though I am sure the book is required reading for most English major types, I was thoroughly impressed by the description of Stephen Dedalus' artistic epiphany - some devastatingly life-transforming satori:

- Stephaneforos!
His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhod, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

"The Real World"

What I learned in the "real" world (part 1):

1) Middle-aged losers and/or yuppies incessantly ask you, "Oh, a bachelor's degree! So, what are you doing now? Now that you're in the real world, afterall."

Did I mention that these people can all shove it? Shove it right up your bloated, self-important, unimaginative (and retarded) rectal blow-holes.

2) This city is still racist - cotton gin, country club-conspiracy, but keep smiling about it, Johnny - racist.

3) Highschool friends are just as good as any other friends ya' got.

4) Spider Jerusalem rocks. He will annihilate 50,000 metric tons of cityscape in one cascading blitz of his own semen.

Being a bastard pays.

. . .

Could an autistic child steal this penguin?

Mysteries Decoded (part 1; revised)

This is a revised, nearly-complete version of the essay I posted last month. If you read the last one, just skip down to the second paragraph. I eliminated all quotations and expanded a couple of ideas into distinct sections. It may not sound original, but it is my own labored attempt at re-stating and re-interpreting Barthes' early structuralist thought.

Syntax and clarity... Again, my writing still needs work. Enjoy.

-------------------

Roland Barthes’ essay “The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat” is a wonderful short, critical essay on the work of Jules Verne. The essay is a structuralist analysis of The Mysterious Island, the second and final installment of Captain Nemo’s adventures aboard the Nautilus. With a bit of sarcasm, Barthes calls it an “almost perfect novel,” submitting it as the epitome of a type of childlike delight. Like much of Barthes’ early critical work in the Mythologies, however, the subject of analysis becomes a springing board for a greater critique of modernity. Rather than merely cast judgment on Verne’s credibility as an author, Barthes resuscitates Verne as a symptom of larger cultural epoch.

The Mysterious Island. The promise of a mystery is communicated to us upfront. We have no choice in the matter, nor any doubt. Jules Verne will render a mystery, and his heroes, our Enlightened avatars, will solve it for us. There is never any serious danger in this type of story. The Nautilus is the ultimate exploration vessel. Verne describes it as the most perfect and private utopia. Onboard there is no special need for food, air, or fresh water. Camouflaged as a creature of the ocean, the Nautilus is effectively safe both above and below water. There is even a private library and music hall provided for the occasional escape from the vicissitudes of nautical adventure. It is an inconceivable invention, this scientific, luxury vehicle of privileged exploration.

The Nautilus comes to signify an infantile desire for the finite. From this mobile, invincible shell, the reader becomes an accomplice in the imagined project of discovery. Verne proposes to nullify one nature’s most alienating of objects, the ocean. We revel in the disarmament of chaos: the quieting of torrential water, the illumination of impenetrable darkness, the classification of thousands of tons of aquatic vertebrae and flora of every color. The vastness of the ocean becomes increasingly finite. Transmuted into this gem, a map of the Pacific or even a paperback novel, the terror of the deep becomes quaint and deceptively familiar. Like a child playing with blocks, the reader recognizes the ocean as yet another toy for manipulation and exchange. The threat of the unknown is neutralized via cartography, the determined appropriation of each and every hidden crevasse of the earth.

The myth of discovery promises a utopia; it promises a deliverance from chaos. The Nautilus represents the technological impalement of nature. We deliberately emphasize the dual idea of penetration and enclosure. To truly penetrate the mystery of the world, to quell nature with finality, equates to the end of human struggle. It is an impossible task, a completely apocalyptic impulse. In the Nautilus the reader discovers a second womb, a place of complete safety from which we can observe and contemplate the external world.

More specific than any thesis of human nature, the Nautilus characterizes a lingering, yet transformed, Enlightment ideology that quite possibly continues to this day. The mold should be quite familiar still: an insatiable thirst for quick answers, for mysteries solved with theatrical flair and conclusiveness, all wrapped up into a rapidly consumable package. The Nautilus becomes a metonymy for the myth of discovery.

Emergency Broadcast Network

A coworker introduced me to these video clips last week. EBN was an avant-garde performance group that started in the 90's. They commented on the media, by using the technology and techniques of the media: crazy stuff like hooking up a giganto 50 foot projector and satellite dish apparatus to the top of a van and go driving around daytime traffic screaming into megaphones and shooting rockets at historic landmarks. I think EBN's stuff is great, if a little dated.

Take a look at this music video:
Electronic Behavior Control System

or if that doesn't work, try Joshua L. Pearson's website.