Elusive Lucidity

Image of the Day

2009-11-27T22:51:00.002-05:00

I have found a photograph that gives me a new goal in life. This is something that I want to achieve when I'm an old man with a beard. (It's Edward Gorey.)

Formulas

2009-11-25T18:37:00.001-05:00

Margin Notes on Culture

2009-11-23T22:40:00.005-05:00

Some say that the profound appreciation of beauty is one of the only true good things we ever experience in life and that, fleeting but real, it makes life otherwise bearable. This seems a workable maxim, insofar as who would contest that taste is important to those who say it is important? One should not spend too much time worrying about proper taste, however. This is one of the problems with "seriousness" and its stranglehold upon culture (kulchur?). Lightness, leisure, unstrained, ideally—should anyone doubt that there is a problem when we have to work very hard, harder than anything else, to attain "culture" ... and we bear the visible marks of our hard work, on top of that? Funnily enough is in bad taste to feel more than mild or passing anxiety about "good taste." The anxiety may be a necessary part of the learning process but one must work to neutralize it, rise above it, in order to actually live well, and to appreciate beauty most appropriately. (Now the question arises as to what appreciation of beauty is "most appropriate" ...)

I'll Show You What You Are

2009-11-21T12:06:00.001-05:00

Image of the Day

2009-11-18T23:28:00.001-05:00

The Art of Persuasion

2009-11-17T22:12:00.004-05:00

Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960): a film about statecraft as the articulation of bureaucracy, a matter of public relations and, once we get down to it, persuasion. Lippmann-like technocracy comes up against the mess of implementation. It's an interesting film, to me, for its topic alone; but the treatment, too, is interesting. The surveilled lands, the problem of looking out, the space of a river island and visibility on the hill, amidst corn and weed ...

Image of the Day

2009-11-17T08:21:00.000-05:00

Animal Love

2009-11-14T20:45:00.002-05:00

One of the oddest eddies of State Fair (Henry King, 1933) is a passage where Will Rogers' giant pig Blue Boy locks eyes with a prize sow, camera lingering in medium close-up on presumably aroused swine.

VHS Decay

2009-11-14T16:17:00.001-05:00

From the ending of Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

Odd

2009-11-10T22:08:00.004-05:00

Unsettlingly, I have discovered a film blog whose author also signs posts 'ZC,' and whose links list overlaps some with mine (how did I not take note of this blog before?), and who even sort of "scooped" me on a Night Mail comment by a year and ten days: compare, my doppelganger's and mine. There is even a long post on Dumb and Dumber, which is something that I would love to one day do. I don't know if the author of this blog, Precious Bodily Fluids, has ever noticed my existence, but here on out I shall traverse the blogosphere with a mild, but augmented, sense of unease ...

Say It Again, Sam

2009-11-09T23:51:00.003-05:00

Unfortunate metonymic cliches in film writing -

- Gorki on the "kingdom of shadows" (quoted in 97.6% of all pieces on cinema's origins, as well as in 29.0% of all books of film theory).

- Brakhage on the child who sees grass but does not know "green" (mentioned in 94.2% of texts that ever mention Brakhage).

Other suggestions welcomed ...

(NB: All calculations strictly tentative and provisional, to say nothing of impressionistic and highly questionable.)

The Early Work of the Dead

2009-11-09T21:16:00.005-05:00

'Primitive' flickers.

"What we call the twentieth century ended in 1915. Those artists who survived the collapse of civilization at that point completed the work they had planned before then, when they looked forward to a century of completely different character. Joyce wrote his Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both implicit in the nineteenth-century idea of literature. Proust, aware that tanks were crawling like monsters out of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne over the poplar-lined road to Illiers, completed his account of the world which the war obliterated as the brimstome Sodom.

"What the war blighted was a renaissance as brilliant as any in history which we can only know by the survivors and by the early work of the dead—the Alain-Fourniers (Battle of the Meuse, 1914), Sant' Elias (Monfalcone, 1914), Apollinaires (1918), Gaudiers." —Guy Davenport, "The Pound Vortex"

*

The archaic, in aesthetics, provides a wellspring. The very fertile period of the flowering of the late 19th century (which existed, depending on how you slice it, up until 1913 or 1914; also the same time as the emergence of the feature film), when cinema was new, found one kind of reimagination in the flicker films. "Failures" they were, perhaps, but transfixing and alluring failures more durable than ninety-nine out of a hundred cinematic "successes," I'd say. The history of audiovisual art & communication is seasoned liberally with attempts to reach a neutralization, a ground zero or originary moment, in the very medium that allows an image to come into presence. Always trying to go back home, or to revisit the old family's pantry, to scrape away layers of paint and get at the hardwood. Flicker films tried it; Rossellini tried it; television tried it (we will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical); I think what we see in instances of people or movements or moments conceiving of a productive erasure (or call it whatever) is that the pathways one might have meant to get to but didn't. Time passed, last year's paths got overgrown, and now one searches for them. Depending on one's philosophical outlook, and how far one travels, we could say that one looks for homeland, or a second chance, or simply a new adventure.

This is interesting to me because it crystallizes perfectly my own intellectual state. But whether I am intrigued by the aptness or the comparison or construct the comparison merely to correspond to my intellect still escapes me ...

Bureaucracy

2009-11-09T08:04:00.001-05:00

Grids / Grids 2. The reconstitution of time by space: the history of art as the emplotment of images in succession as though history itself were a matter of cinema. To perceive a historical progression of forms presents itself as a problem to be constructed through space. Bureaucracy would aim to pulverize this impulse, eliminate the perceptual pathways for conceiving of these nodes.

Pears, Plums, Tomatoes

2009-11-08T14:31:00.001-05:00

Alone. Life wastes Hans Epp (the merchant of four seasons). He, like Heidegger, goes for walks a lot, and thinks. Like Visconti with the aristocracy, Fassbinder was a filmmaker with a great understanding toward the (his) petit bourgeoisie. Manny Farber suggested that physical discomfort is at the core of RWF's work; and indeed there are so many moments where his characters simply fall, utterly exhausted, meeting the ground as though it were their mother's womb.

Ley Lines

2009-11-02T20:04:00.005-05:00

... or, cranks on the porch ...
... or, any resistant individualism's tragic neutralization into farce ...

"Entirely apart from any willingness to preach history according to the ideas of the Berlin party, or to turn the class room into a hall of propaganda, the whole method of this German and American higher education was, is, evil, a perversion.

"It is evil because it holds up an ideal of 'scholarship,' not an ideal of humanity. It says in effect: you are to acquire knowledge in order that knowledge may be acquired. Metaphorically, you are to build up a dam'd and useless pyramid which will be no use to you or to anyone else, but which will serve as a 'monument.' To this end you are to sacrifice your mind and vitality.

"The system has fought tooth and nail against the humanist belief that a man acquires knowledge in order that he may be a more complete man, a finer individual, a fuller, more able, more interesting companion for other men.

"Knowledge as the adornment of the mind, the enrichment of the personality, has been cried down in every educational establishment where the Germano-American 'university' ideal has reached. The student as the bondslave of his subject, the gelded ant, the compiler of data, has been preached as a summum bonum.

"This is the bone of the mastadon ...

... this is the symptom of the disease; it is all one with the idea that the man is the slave of the State, the 'unit,' the piece of the machine." (Ezra Pound, "Provincialism the Enemy," 1917)

*

"Clausewitz, at the beginning of his history of the campaign of 1815, gives this summary of his method: “In every strategical critique, the essential thing is to put oneself exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that this is often very difficult.” The difficult thing is to know “all the circumstances in which the actors find themselves” at a given moment, in order to be in position to judge soundly the series of their choices in the conduct of their war: how they accomplished what they did and what they might have been able to do differently. So, above all, it is necessary to know what they wanted and, of course, what they believed; without forgetting what they were ignorant of. And what they were ignorant of was not only the result still to come of their own operations colliding with the operations that were opposed to them, but also much of what was even then making its weight felt against them, in the disposition or strength of the enemy camp — which, however, remained hidden from them. And basically they did not know the exact value they should place on their own forces, until these forces could make their value known precisely at the moment of their employment — whose issue, moreover, sometimes changes that value just as much as it tests it." (Guy Debord, Panegyric)

*

"This is von Clausewitz shit: total fucking war!" (Gerard Butler's character in Law Abiding Citizen)
"This is Sparta!" (Gerard Butler's character in 300)

*

"Thus it does not seem that so-called nationalisation of property leads to ground rent and surplus value being effectively nationalised, i.e. belonging to the whole people. There is no essential difference, except that the bourgeoisie is no longer the exploiting class that receives the surplus value, but it is the bureaucracy which is granted this honour. Naville identifies nationalised property with socialist property, which seems to us neither too scientific, nor too Marxist." (Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World)

*

"Nothing 'matters' until some fool starts resorting to force. To prevent that initial insanity is the goal, and always has been, of intelligent political effort." (Pound, ibid.)

Visitation

2009-10-28T00:03:00.002-04:00

I was not the first person to notice that (as I make my way through The Sopranos) the painting that adorns, in detail, the wall above Tony and Carmella's headboard is Pontormo's The Visitation. I did find it interesting, however, that this too is the same image that illustrates the cover of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Ground of the Image (Fordham UP). More later, maybe ...

Enigmatic

2009-10-27T23:38:00.003-04:00

In startling images ... a bed scene in The American Soldier recalls Love Is Colder Than Death (or is it Katzelmacher?), while Margarethe von Trotta narrates the basic plot of the later Fear Eats the Soul. Fassbinder was a fellow who knew a thing or two about how to bind together some crucial elements (bodies, rooms, identities, representations, dead time, icons, strangers).

The enormous importance of Heraclitus lies in the fact that he stated with the utmost resolution the unitarily enigmatic character of reality. The experience of opposites did not lead him to a dualistic vision of the world, for it was within the same thing that opposites fought and coexisted or, more precisely, it was the same thing that both was and was not. At the very dawn of Western philosophy, we find in Heraclitus the most resolute and profound negation of identity and the most rigorous formulation of the nature of transit, at once a process of passing from same to same and a persistence of what is in itself different, a restful transmutation and a transmuting repose. Enigma does not consist in change, in the possibility of something new; change is possible only on condition that the thing remains the same and, equally, the thing remains the same only on condition that it changes: sameness is the principle of transit and transit the principle of sameness. It follows that the diachronic dimension is inessential: the present is the true tense of the enigma. Things have been, and they become, what they are. It is in the synchronic horizon of what exists: it is in the reply of the oracle, in the sign given by the Lord of Delphi and it is in the word of the philosopher that all the wealth of explanations and developments, flections and declensions, past and future, are implicit and enwrapped. It is easy at this point to grasp the difference between fold and enigma: for whereas the fold contains only ex-planations, de-velopments, flections and declensions similar to the fold, resembling one another, enigma is the coincidence of antagonists, the concatenation of opposites, the contact of things that are divergent, and even the antagonism of things that coincide, the opposition of the concatenated, and the divergence of things that are in contact with one another. (Mario Perniola, Enigmas, trans. Christopher Woodall, pp. 18-19).

Much of the above is sheer nonsense, of course - if one presumes that language is so impoverished that it can only speak to us directly, purely, and never obliquely.

{ ... In our new apartment, the whirr of Lake Shore Drive provides a pleasant white noise when the living room windows are closed. When they are opened, however, the cars are loud and present. Just a minute ago, for once, all nearby traffic stopped, and with the windows open I heard silence ... }

Images #2

2009-10-27T23:35:00.001-04:00

A Matter of Life and Death

2009-10-18T23:44:00.003-04:00

A phantom walks into the room, sees a movie on the TV screen, perhaps initially wonders who these images of dancing people are for: characters, surely, but not just them.

A person walks into the room, sees the same movie, imagines the phantom (who appears, but was already there).

The phantom watches the person. Specters haunt a mechanized, rationalized, secularized world and we sometimes establish coordinates for ourselves by triangulating ghosts that correspond to on-screen triangles. Off-screen space, spatial and narratological pauses, are mirrors to some of the creepy, wonderful, deep and terrifying things that help us orient ourselves in a profoundly disorienting set of phenomenological stimuli.

"The specter is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, surveyed, as if by the law: we are "before the law," without any possible symmetry, without reciprocity, insofar as the other is watching only us, concerns only us, we who are observing it (in the same way that one observes and respects the law) without even being able to meet its gaze. Hence the dissymetry and, consequently, the heteronomic figure of the law. The wholly other—and the dead person is the wholly other—watches me, concerns me, and concerns or watches me while addressing to me, without however answering me, a prayer or an injunction, an infinite demand, which becomes the law for me: it concerns me, it regards me, it addresses itself only to me at the same time that it exceeds me infinitely and universally, without my being able to exchange a glance with him or with her." (Derrida, in conversation with Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television)

Respect Mah Celebritah!

2009-10-16T12:54:00.002-04:00

Images #1

2009-10-09T09:20:00.000-04:00

Image of the Day

2009-09-27T10:26:00.001-04:00

(By Lee Russell, 1940)

The Illustrated Man

2009-09-25T17:27:00.001-04:00

Extract

2009-09-23T23:02:00.002-04:00

Judd Apatow is like a clumsy cartoon elephant, laughing at his own flatulence & drunk to the point of being painfully sentimental, trampling over piles of money he's made. Though he doesn't necessarily know it, Mike Judge is like this elephant's put-upon zookeeper, trying to explain why the beast behaves like he does. Both are 'poets of contemporary America,' if we understand that the America in question involves endless strip malls, traffic jams, prolonged adolescence, dismal wage (and salary) slavery, needless sexual frustration, McMansions, Mom's basement, and a constant casual interface between folks who do illegal drugs, folks who do legal drugs & folks who say they don't touch either.

Question, Answer

2009-09-20T22:03:00.001-04:00