there is a line in the tim minchin song, white wine in the sun that talks about people who make you safe in the world, spent 6 hours with david and spencer today, moving, but also talking, smoking cigars, making small talk, dinner afterwards, i felt essentially safe. megan--spencer's wife, and rowan the kidlet was also there, and it felt a lot like family.

Top Albums

1. Pistol Annies One of the smartest documents about capital in this age of economic dissatisfaction, profoundly feminist, and despite that as entertaining as we could have hoped for.
2. Let England Shake, More Wilfred Owen than The War Horse, as England seems to have disappeared into a corrupt police state, and as the wars away from home and the wars at home seem inseparable, as we all seem unable to be pulled into something resembling order, Harvey returns with one of her best.
3. Book Of Mormon OST As someone who grew up queer and Mormon, this one hit close to home. A broadway spectacle, that made money, telling people that God kicks them in the cunt, there is some subversion left.
4. So Beautiful or So What--Paul Simon. This year's token rockist/boomer selection, like all the little hipsters, I am still drunk on his harmonies.
5. Clams Casino Instrumental Mix Tape Atmospheric and lonely, one of the great documents of urban life. There could be a discussion about how digital culture changes music, or the distribution method, or about what exactly hip hop is, the text welcomes those conversations, but mostly it's just a beautifully isolating work about what it means to be in the city.
6. Rhianna As Ann Powers notes for NPR, it's filthy, but blues and rock have always been filthy, and I love the r and b pull of a free and less anxious sexuality that suggests she has worked out some shit since the last time.
7. Fucked Up, David... A narrative about Thatcherite England, it works well in concordance with PJ. The aggro vocals, the grinding power of the music, and the skill at making instrumental narratives, mean that you have to listen for the lyrtics, but the story telling is just bright.
   
8. All Eternal Deck It's less tight and conceptual than he has been before, and the looseness works for the free ranging, culturally aware stores. Also, the Liza track is fantastic.
   
9. Sulla Sulla Ilaiyaraaja We continue to live in this miraclous age, where it seems we can find collections of everything we ever wanted, or didn't even know was nessecary until this moment. This collection of the Kollywood's master, has pure funk and dramatic intrigue for every moment you could possibly want.
10. This Might be My Last Time Singing. Black church congregation choirs would get money together, and record 45s, sometimes as a gift to the congregation, sometimes as a tool of evangelicalism, sometimes because the idea of an object brings permanence to something you are proud of. Mike McGonigal has been collecting African American Vernacular music for decades, and has put three CDs of it out of these 45s. The thing is, that he calls it raw, but the production values on these church songs are so tight, so well constructed, and so careful that I worry that having Raw on the packaging would preclude people from listening to the sophistication of the texts. These were choirs from Nashville, and Detroit, and LA, so at least some of them knew there way around a studio, and it shows.

Top Singles

1. Lady Saw Matrimony--had one of the great lines this year: "matrionomy, cermony, testimony, alimony--take a hint it's all about the money"
2. Pistol Annies Hell on Heels Unapologetic gold digging as a kind of female liberation has a long, long history--but nothing so charmingly constructed as this.
   
3. Patrick Wolf House He moves adroitly between sexual decadence and domestic comfort, this track is so settled, so joyously happy. Queer domesticity, the after effects of the marriage, or choosing not to be married, is still considered to be exotic, and these "two boys together clinging" show that it is possible.
4. Something About A Truck, Kip Moore I may be rating with my dick, but in this year where country decided boundaries and territories, this argument for localized pleasure got more fun with each listen.
   
5. Adelle Rolling in Deep It's one of my rules, that if i hear it for most of the summer, and still love it, then it goes on the Pazz and Jop list. It's a bit polite, and lacks all grit or strum und drang, especially for a song about drowning, but it's so beautifully sung, and almost unique in it's phrasing--which seems odd to say for someone who has internalized 60s pastiche so completely.
6. EMA California Atmospheric and angry, even the Dead Kennedys thought there were moments and histories worth saving, this one--an anthem for just letting the whole thing slide into the ocean. The inclusion of Camptown Races adds kerosene to the nightmare fuel.
   
7. Big Freedia Almost Famous I am late on the bounce band wagon, but anything that encourages so systematically this amount of ass shaking, makes me happy.
8. Azeillia Banks 212 Hip hop anthem to female superiority, and cunnilingus, fantastic flow, and delightful push into quite lovely singing. Plus it squeeks when it should.
9. Wild Flag Romance Tight and quick, with a monster chorus---it's great to see craftsmen work at the top of their game, mostly for fun.
10. Travis Garland and Jo Jo Paint. The smooth r and b, and the sexual strangeness is pure R. Kelly, but the beat gets in the way, in a way that adds to the mess of what is occuring; JoJo maintaining her own autonomy, which is different than a lot of R and B, the matching of choruses, of desires is appreciated--but where it gets really interesting is a bout a minute in, where electronic noise pushes out the vocals, and it mutates into a barely controlled chorus--it loses it's smoothness. Smart track.

john waters on bad taste

alan helen peterson is a fantastic academic from flordia. writing mostly about popular culture and the meta-contexts of Hollywood, though she is great on scandal, i think this might be her best essay--on how the ideal work of brad pitt is brad pitt playing a variety of brad pitt.

<,a href="http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en">butler on private and public spaces, bodies, and the aesthetics of protest.

APTN is perhaps the best reporting on the state of emergency in Nothern Ontario.

8 photos of the Polin House, an early one by Lautner in the Hollywood Hills--look esp. for the brick work.

bloomberg reveals more details on the lacernous bank bail outs.



I have been writing about public and private discourse for my god and abuse course, and one of the things i have been thinking pretty hard, is the rhetorical power of not speaking--the eerie strangness of this video, sort of like mourning, something like disgust, nothing like the protest work you have heard--about the Chancellor of Davis going ot her car the day after violent police protest will be part of that essay.


http://www.trade-silver.net/reproductions.htm">Trade Silver was like Wampum for some Prarie nations. These affordable reproductions continue first nations craft, and history.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/what-makes-music-boring,65075/">great essay riffing on Nitsuh's New York Magazine column on Fiest and Wilco as new adult contempary artsits.

http://www.hebrewtypography.com/">hebrew font blog

this might be the smoothest thing you have ever heard.

http://www.heatherrasmussen.com/index.php?/ongoing/destructconstruct-photographs/">Heather Rasmussen destructconstruction, is a set of photographs of cardboard models made of photographs of marine disasters featuring shipping containers. Hyper smart, well made, and just gorgeous--but also about the disaster of capitalism, in a round about way.

http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/new-acquisition-ruscha-sees-la/">7 Ruscha photos from 1977.

http://www.barrelhousemag.com/?p=1692">David Housley's difficult, episodic discussion of what is happening on the ground at State college in Penn after the sex abuse scandals, is just heavy and sad, must read but heavy and sad.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/OWSLibrary">ows library pre police destruction.

http://www.good.is/post/what-women-want">James Deen as a sexual personae is kind of the opposite of James Dean as a sexual personae, even up to the point that Deen's fucking on film is less erotic than Dean's flirting on film--maybe because I don't find the women in mainstream straight porn hot--but his working on a kind of post-celeb, sex positive, female led fandom, and it's connection to some pretty severe SM has some interesting discussions about what porn means as a text. This profile in Good presents some of the issues.

http://www.joehoganbaskets.com/Contempory.aspx">Joe Hogan makes traditional irish willow baskets, but updates them--they are gorge.

From November 28, 2011

From November 28, 2011

Pan reprints of Highsmith Pulp, 1950s.

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/mets/2011/11/source-mlb-adds-sexual-orientation-wording-to-cba">mlb adds sexual orinetation as a protected class--i think this would mean more to back end workers than players, but i wonder if it would help someone come out

http://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?exhibit=370172">oxaca animals remade by kids.

http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=1123">smithonsian folkways recordings of office noises from the 60s.

http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/oct/14/real-and-unreal-professional-wrestling/">surpisingly in depth and fascnating history of the WWE and labour, starting with some current story lines about management and ending wiht a discussion about what it would mean for wrestlers to be uninozed as actors.

http://www.theprovince.com/news/Cops+watched+porn+skipped+work+instead+investigating+missing+women+Galliford/5752470/story.html#ixzz1eZ9Iom5w">sexual harrassment cases against officers who worked the trailer of tears cases, keeps bringing up pretty fucked up shit, this time it's a discussion of how some officers would look at porn on duty

From November 28, 2011

Martin, Gratitude, 2001.

The most colourful of Martin's work.

Mastadon, Curl the Burl. Mostly, because i love the phrase Curl the Burl, thought the video is kind of amazing.

two sets of problems given to Moscow university students, about math. One for Jews and one for gentiles. The problems were easy, but how they were constructed in the jewish councils made the soultions nigh on impossible.

excellent article on Der Speigel about the problems of corruption in Vienna.

the national trust for historical perservation in the states makes a smart, and quite important arguement for the persevation of the modernist masterpeice phyllis wheately school in NoLA.

From November 9, 2011

From November 9, 2011

From November 9, 2011

Takuro Kuwata, Striped Cups, 2011, Cermaic. more of his work hereincluding some great crackling.

cops force sex workers to perform sexual ats, in Vancouver. Glad that the commission on missing women is happening, really realyl not suprised.

eric mcsaveney is a young vancouver painter, the seires inland, of smokey/foggy landscapes in vancouver--all green hills and grey outbuildings, takes the romantic long view about what is seen in contempaary architechture. Not sure if they are obvious or quite moving.


The FBI changed it's deft of Rape To: "“penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” which widens the previous deftion, from 1921, (the prev. deft excluded anything but stranger vaginal rape)

fantastic review of attack the block.

plainly dressed for all yr amish clothing needs.

a history of the log flume (ie the industrial site to get logs down river, not the amusement park ride that was inspired by it)

From November 9, 2011

From the Dublin Tweed Ride.

About Aldean's Tattoos on This Town

Rural pyschogeography, might be deeper, and less tangible, less
ability to be transfered through the action of a flanuer, or through
those who seek to control the flanuer, because the relationships are
interwoven, deeper--i think because the size requires an interrelation
and a depletion of inter-relation to function completely. So less of a
drawing on the city and more of a mark, less decay and more
repair--this permanentness leads to a trapping and a desire to escape,
which country has written about, but also a seeking to further the
history. One of the things that leftist discourse around class around
the Occupy Wall-street, and much earlier--is they fail to realize how
traumatic the economies dissolving of farm and small town ties can
be--how deep that landscape is. I think one of the reasons for the
recent influx of taxonomic texts in Nashville about the south
(anything from the Pistol Annie's Boys from the South to Justin
Moore's Small Town USA to Easton Corbin's Small Town USA to to Miranda
Lambert's Famous in a Small Town to Eric Church's Homeboy to Little
Big Town's Boondocks to Luke Bryan's Country Girl, Shake it for Me, to
Blake Shelton's Good Ol' Boys...and all of these w/i the last year) ,
is an oblique way of working through what the eventual dissolution of
this way of life would look like--there are some explicit works, but
the side eyed gaze to the marks of location on people function better.
Aldean has done better songs about this (and actually his best songs
are slightly nostalgic marks of lived pleasure, which is a different
kind of emergency, and often those songs conflate genre with
geography; the rock and roll of Hicktown, the hip hop choruses of
Dirt Road Anthem, etc) and so the genre purity of this and the lack of
pleasure, or anything really prescriptive, has hints of already giving
up--which is actually sort of terrifying. I am not sure that this is a
good song, but it is an important song. And that matters, more then
the problems I could point out with this track--the guitar is a little
flat, the vocals are not as adventurous, the lyrics don't have the
details that he and his song writers excel at--and one doesn't want to
over emphasize absence as presence. It is smack in the middle of a
geographic and cultural shift that is continually being recorded--and
this records it slightly better then others, not not nearly as well as
his best work. Does that make it a 5?

Side Question--Are there more men hoeing this row, and if so, what
does that mean?

gary winogrand is one of the photographers i model my career after. he
died young, about 53. he moved from ny to la for a bunch of reasons,
and the move didnt really pan out, and he ended up shooting for the
sake of shooting--at the end of his life, he left tens of thousands of
contact sheets unprinted, and even more rolls of film unprocessed.
this, you might now. i was reading andy grundberg's review of a 1983
moma retrospective, and he had this one line about winogrand unlike
pedestraian New York, Los Angelses street life takes place in cars,
and many of the pictures Winogrand mad there were taken from the front
seat on an automobile" (81)--which reminded me of a number of things,
about class, about poverty, about the nature of walking, etc et al,
even about the movie drive...

anda then i got to the next line: "In some, he seems to be driving" crisis of the real, ggrundberg)

which might be the perfect metaphor for the self destructive need that
LA positions in it's creative classes, to be shooting while driving.

that seems an improbability.

Masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman. If a man were to masturbate while engaged in other forms of sexual intimacy with his wife then he would not be doing so in a homosexual way. However, any man who does so without his wife in the room is bordering on homosexuality activity, particularly if he’s watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body.” – pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church,

maggie had this on her bookshelf, and i am working through it: and was going to mention it to Rev Joesph Walker as he is an anglican priest who had a kid who had downs. in the midst of the email, i looked at his blog for the first time in a few months, and he died of cancer in august--really young with 6 kids.

i went to a disco inside the stockholm school of economics

edward o, who is in stockholm right now

http://youtu.be/XqWEPwuIYtA

Depression is a medical fact. It is a pathology determined by doctors, and by a medical establishment, and it is away from any self-identification. To be depressed is to fit a very specific set of criteria—criteria that come from hiercahlised taxonomy of medicine and not from any other field of human endeavor that could give us clues to how we are feeling, or how we construct identities around those feelings. One is depressed, not because of spiritual ennui, or political dissatisfaction, or alienation from the world, or exhaustion and mourning at the state of the world. All of those reasons had a history in the west—and more specific reasons too. The medical language, being triumphant, shut its doors, and only allowed a set of language and identity that would reinforce its power, and the legitimacy of its construction

There is only one depression—depression that one might feel, the DSM suggests that “depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). But this sadness and emptiness—these feelings of being apart from the world, must be confirmed by an authority. There is little respect for self-definitions, for identities that are not confirmed by an identified outside.

If we think of people—and this might be a modernist fallacy, but it is a modernist fallacy that has been held as a chief value of our culture---as capable of making identity constructions for themselves, to determine how their moods work in concert to themselves and their larger identities—then low mood, or sadness, or emptiness, might be the pathologizing depression, or might be something else. Those low moods might be vital to an understanding of self, or to a larger understanding of how the world works. In the DSM mode, those low moods can be nothing but a disease. Once we entire the world of medicine, we enter this dialectic of that which must be cured and that which must be eliminated—regardless of how that curing or elimination might prove to be valuable, or if not valuable, at least autonomous.

This is obviously a Foccualdian tack, about how the authority of self-construction is lost in where observation occurs—the observation of the prison or the school or the clinic. The clinic - constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse - owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.1

For Foucault, the observing is not an act of simple reportage—it is an act of seeing—that makes discourse that might unsettle, or problematize or unsurface previously unknown depths. The fear of reorganization is the fear of finding a self, that might result in a scuppering completely a system of observed and observing. The more aware that the clinic is of this, the more the clinic works to preserve its own order—pyscho-analysis gives its power to the bio-medical, the bio-medical forgets it's beginnings as a psychoanalytic place. This repressing history through a politicized looking that denies the power of the individual to remake themselves in their own image, suggests the creation of an archive that evades identification.

To refuse this evasion, is to seek solutions in historical seeing, and observable history—it is to do the discourse without the permission of the clinic—but also to recognize which histories the clinics have repressed. In Foucault’s ideas of archives, it is not libraries, texts and books that are easily found, but a set of discourses that move around, that are never in the same place, that contain texts, but texts defined as bodies, as desires, as history, as memory, as the marginalia of lived experiences. It is an either/or not a but/and way of looking through the world. So, looking through the history of depression, and finding its history through these Focculadian visions and archives, the question becomes what other spaces and what other histories exist that allow us to examine what depression could be, without attempting to eliminate it or without having the medical establishment define what should be a personal seeking of narrative and understanding.

The question then becomes, what other ways of looking at depression have existed. Using the lens of a theologian, what words have used in a religious context to explain this set of moods and experiences. The one that seems to be the most common is melancholia. Melancholia is not strictly depression—it exists before both bio-medical and pyscho-analytic work on hierarchy and taxonomy. It is best defined against taxonomic forms. Two writers have attempted to work through though explaining what melancholy was—and historically recruiting them to help us define depression outside of the failures of 20th century models. One of these models is exterior—his attempts to find what melancholy is works like black ink through clear water. The other model is interior—her attempts to find what melancholy is, is a delicate set of internal negotiations, where the inner components of humanity carbonize into shards of crystalline sadness.

The first model is Robert Burton. Anglican Priest, Calvinist, and Academic—his eccentric document: Anatomy of Melancholy, written in 1621, is an anatomy in two senses. It is an academic anatomy—where a book is written as an attempted gloss on anything about a certain topic, functioning as a one topic encyclopedia. The second sense, is the one in which we are familiar with—anatomy as a discussion of the body. Burton’s work is a literal embodiment of flesh and understanding.

The second model, is Emily Dickinson, Poet, Calvinist, and falsely thought to be a recluse, her poetry written in American throughout the mid-19th century, is profoundly melancholic—it offers none of the definitions expected of Burton's work, but in the side long glances she was notorious for, discussed the interior life of the melancholic. These two writers, reclaimed for our own historical context, allow for wider and more self-directed definitions of what depression could be, or the use function of refusing the label depression and reclaiming that of the melancholic,
Melancholy had been previously defined as an excess of black bile—Burton positions this as the canonical ideal of how melancholy is achieved in the first book of his Anatomy: “HAVING thus briefly anatomized the body and soul of man; as a preparative to the rest, I may now freely proceed to treat of my intended object to most men's capacity, and after many ambages perspicuously define what this Melancholy is, shew his name and differences. The name is imposed from the matter, and disease denominated from the material cause, as Bruel observes, Melancholia, a sort of melaina {black) chole (choler), from black Choler. And whether it be a cause or an effect, a disease, or symptom let Donatus Altomarus and Salvianus decide, I will not contend about it. It hath several descriptions, notations, and definitions.”
Burton begins, and then with precedent, his sorting out what this melancholy is, must come from a history of naming, and a history of sorting. In this case, the language (melania) and the substance (the black Choler) historically combined to a number of factors—but each of these factors originated in an early, proto-materialism. The proof of melancholy was extended by the body, and the body’s failures were proof of the emotional mindset of melancholic identity. The anatomy then, that results from this introduction, was an investigative potential of the “several descriptions, notations, and definitions” The power of the black choler could be sorted through a taxonomic effort—a taxonomic effort that would later be recognized in Foucault’s history of both the clinic and the archive.
It must be recognized, though as a priest and a doctor, Burton uses the best science of his time, the science that is constructed here, is in the midst of a radical reinvention of the world. Burton’s Melancholy, in this passage, and elsewhere extends outwards—it is a construction that is marked by excess and exteriority. Too much writing, too much melancholy, too much thinking, and too much black choler all center not into one place, but in a miasma of emotion, text and history.

The changes of 17th century medicine, religion, and by extension religion, suggest that this excess perhaps could not be balanced either within a community, or within the larger understanding of the world at large. The tension in Burton—is between a melancholy, as defined as something that is interior, that settles into the marrow, and becomes part of the person, and a melancholy that can be defined as something that is a cloud of fine mist, sometimes settling more on one thing then the other, but through the air—a pollution, like smog or smoke.
Each of these, the marrow or the smoke, is a temporary notice of the imbalance of a personality—it does not suggest an identity, like modern ideas of depression, but it also does not suggest that the mood can be cured. The idea of being fixed—namely that the excessive miasma has grown to a solidity that can be settled into marrow, and the idea that this settling is inviolable, begins with Burton’s time, but the Anatomy is nervous about the idea of fixing. For a document that is supposed to be about creating a taxonomic, and air tight definition of what melancholy could be considered, the book is profoundly ambiguous about what fixing would look like.
The chief notable general fact about the Anatomy of Melancholy is not the exteriority of it, nor its excessive qualities, or its attempts to create one identity out of many, but how often it fails at being cohesive. Perhaps because Melancholy itself is not cohesive—which might mark the early modern from the late modern ,the idea of depression as cohesive, as a checklist, as an agreement on symptoms that can be battled through or suffered against. But in Burton’s early modern renderings, are about creating the encyclopedia of failures. Where one is unbalanced, and where that unbalance can perhaps extend, in a linguistic sense, into the world.
Burton’s attempt at marking the limits of melancholy, and his refusal to think of melancholy as just choleric, through the form of a taxonomic obsessiveness, eventually mark the failures of the encyclopedia itself. Nothing can be mapped in its entirety. There is a gap between the platonic ideal of information technologies form, and what becomes written itself—because perhaps of the nature of creation.
This lack of cohesiveness, and the mark of failure from a platonic whole, is an oddly comforting idea, and an idea that can be inherited from Burton’s Calvinism. The Calvinist idea that we are a totally depraved, and in that depravity we fall short from the glory of God in such a way that we are never able to fully understand him, any encyclopedic text is going to fail in the same complete ways. Burton’s textual failures at encompassing all of what melancholy could be, and his failures at making the work clean and quite comprehensive, is a textual mirroring of man’s attempt to gain understanding of the divine, and his or her failures to do so.
This mirroring can be made exterior in a really important way—we all fall short of the glory of god—and the recognizing of this failing short, is our first mark of humanity. We cannot know God, and that we fall short from His glory, is like the shame that Adam and Eve felt after they had feasted on the tree at the garden of Good and Evil. Burton’s ideas of melancholy come, not from an excess of Chloer, but from awareness, through a Calvinist lens, of his failures as a human. His humanism (as part of the encyclopedic project) and his devotion to a God, who might as well be absent, are foundational to an isolation, which suggests a kind of melancholy as de facto part of our humanness.
If Burton’s isolation is exterior—it marks human’s isolation from God, and towards an exterior attempt at recreating a kind of humanity—then his American Calvinist compatriot, does similar work, facing inwards.
Dickinson’s relationship to Calvin is obviously different than Burton’s—-there was a separation of geography, time, and of gender. Calvin had crossed the ocean, and settled by the time that Dickinson had inherited it resulting in the tension of absorption and rejection that exists within the text. Burton was the explorer working through the text, trying on new ideas, and never rejecting one. Dickinson’s rejection of ideas was a rejection of her Calvinist heritage, and her absorbing of ideas was a conscious choice of accepting what that Calvinism has taught her.
This sense, might explain the difference in the structures of Dickinson and Burton’s writing, and the problems of the structure might explain how melancholy becomes part of being. If Burton’s melancholy was about an exteriority, if it functioned like black ink in clear water—and if it was expressed by spreading, staining, and by being unable to be uncontained, than Dickinson’s melancholy functioned as an interiority—it was expressed by a clear and focused selfhood---it’s containment pressed down and shattered inward.
This shattering inward could be seen as similar to Burton’s realization of his totally depraved state—but Dickinson’s dissent was constructed at a time, when engagement with the proper praxis of theological life would alleviate this depravity. Moving away from the puritan understanding of the world, or at least allowing for a light to come in on the closed system of how the puritans understood the divine, would result in the intense separation of man from God that preachers had told puritans to avoid. It would be welcoming the isolation of total depravity.
Joanna Yin describes quite acutely of what occurs in this questioning and this pulling apart: “Instead of functioning as a mirror for external images of a culture that craves certainty, Dickinson concentrates on her inner self. The skeptical person shedding traditional means of religious consolation risks experiencing the horror of the unknown. Deprived of theological scaffolding, the questioning Puritan, like anyone attempting to examine a dominant ideology, can feel disoriented and ungrounded. When the speaker of P378 saw that "The Heavens were stitched," she "touched the Universe—// And back it slid—and I alone—/ A Speck upon a Ball—/ Went out upon Circumference —." These genealogical moments are terrifying to both the speaker and the reader. Yet because Dickinson creates as she deconstructs, she can often bridge or at least face the abyss that she uncovers.
The creation at the same time as the deconstructing does not only come from the creation of Dickinson’s poetry—though this was where here must formal approaches of working against religious consolation concurs, it must be carefully noted—that the interiority of Dickinson’s work was a formal concern –or at least the expression of Dickinson’s translation of melancholy forms, could be constructed as a formal exercise. The idea of Dickinson I n the popular imagination as a nun who refused human contact, a mad woman in white, or a new kind of American anchorite was never accurate, and became a misogynist way of dismissing her work. She lived in community. She wrote extensive correspondence to friends and family. This correspondence was as often about weighty matters as it was about quotidian details, about what she ate for lunch and about a note of theological forms. As well, even though her poetry often contained images of exclusion, and lack of desire—the constant editing, the sending works out through this correspondence, and the creating of small books, called fascicles, suggested that Dickinson intended to have this work as a public set of discourses.
In this sense, the privacy of the poetry, a poetry about using one’s melancholy as a tool to engage with a necessary separation from a fallen world worked at cross purposes with a set of written discourses that encouraged a full engagement with the world. The correspondence and the poetry constructed a series of ironic matrices, where melancholy decentralized community involvement, and community involvement decentralized melancholy. These matrices were not only found where correspondence and poetry met, but in the inter-textual heritage of Dickinson’s spiritual reading.
Burton was creating an encyclopedia, and so his inter-textual work was expected, and the excesses of his intertextual work resulted logically from the text itself. Dickinson’s inter-textuality, told through a set of dashes, of slant rhymes, of absences, and of inheriting forms, was not a direct writing on the body, but an oblique awareness of where she did not belong, even in the tradition of puritan wiring and plain speech.
The reader can see this most clearly in how she literally and symbolically rewrote hymn forms—sometimes explicit hymns them. In her tight, difficult study comparing the original Calvinist hymn writer Isaac Watts to Dickinson, Shira Wolosky talks about the purpose of Dickinson’s inter-textual emphasis on Watt’s texts: “A surprising number of Dickinson poems seem written in direct response to particular Watts’s hymns. Furthermore, Dickinson's relation to Watts is not simply parodic. The hymnal frame of so much Dickinson verse asserts a genuine and profound effort to accept doctrines that she cannot, however, help but question, leading her in turn to question her own doubts.” She then goes on to work through a few poems—talking about where Dickinson fits formally in the tradition birthed by Watts.
Wolosky points out that where Watts leaves hope, or at least the potential for liberation by faith in the Divine, Dickinson leaves little room for doubt. Dickinson’s ironic reversals of Watt’s conventional Calvinist piety are the work of a melancholic mind, who constructs narratives not of redemption, but of denial, exhaustion, work, and eventually the tomb. While Watt’s tells his followers to “gird themselves with the gospels armor”, Dickinson rewrites this to mark the absence of the divine: “Go slow, my soul, to feed thyself//upon his rare approach —“. For Watt’s this girding results in the triumphalism of God and his servants. For Dickinson, God’s rareness leads to “Go boldly — for thou paid'st his price/Redemption — for a Kiss —“
Dickinson’s melancholic world view—positioned against Watt’s optimism, suggests that believers in Christ are closer to Judas than they are to soldiers triumphant on a religious battlefield. Dickinson’s theological impetuous ends in bodily death, namely in the suicidal body of Judas and not the resurrected body of Christ. The melancholic force of her writing shares an attachment to the corporeality of Burton’s anatomies—but an anatomy that comes from close personal inspection, and through the first person voice—and a first person voice that was often domestic.
A reader can see the connection between bodily death, the domestic, and corruption/rot in poems as diverse as So I Could Not Stop for Death, where Dickinson and Death, riding in a carriage, note: “We paused before a house that seemed/A swelling of the ground;/The roof was scarcely visible,/The cornice but a mound.” – this interlacing of the domestic, of the visible, and the invisible, of death, and of life—of the swelling of a house best by a rot that would eventually engulf flesh—marks the obsession with gaps, and absences—that deny a presence in traditional catholic sacramentialism. There are others: “To fill a Gap/ Insert the Thing that caused it—//Block it up/With Other—and 'twill yawn the more—//You cannot solder an Abyss/With Air—; Where the personal fear of death—and of hell (the abyss) cannot be blocked, that the melancholy cannot cure melancholy, and that the desire for blockage and by extension wholeness cannot be found in traditional spaces.
Dickinson’s attempts at blockage, ad her acknowledgement of the abyss is profoundly different then Burton’s refusal to block anything. Dickinson’s death is about silence, waiting for death to come, and talking in small bits and quiet moments as a w ay of evading death—but death can never be fully evaded: “And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –//We talked between the Rooms –//Until the Moss had reached our lips –//And covered up — our names –“ . Truth and Beauty are not sufficient enough to survive past the falling apart of the flesh—of nature to absorb the arrogance of human communication. The melancholic failure of communication as a way of evading death becomes a textual and personal way of working past the Calvinist ideas of total depravity—but just as Burton recognized that total depravity was a way of recognizing our own humanity—tiny and cowering against the expanse of an immobile God, then Dickinson recognizes the same kinds of awareness.
This is the use function of melancholy. It is not depression—as depression suggests something that can be readily cured, or that something should be cured. For Burton and for Dickinson melancholy is not depression. Melancholy is recognition of one’s inability to fully speak. Burton’s exterior attempts and failures to mark a full narrative of low mood succeeded in placing low mood in its proper spiritual place—low mood is not a medical condition, it is not a mark of the clinic, or the chapel, but of the human beings recognition of their minute place in a universe that is carelessly large. Dickinson’s recreating of her tradition, hymns, correspondence anti-sacramental nature of congregational practice brought her closer to her own interior nature, and her own closeness to death. The denial of the sublime, the swelling of the house that would contain her until her death, was all a blossoming of her place in the larger corpus of family, of town, of country—and of eventually world.
The interior, almost mystic, energy of Dickinson’s melancholy, and the exterior, anti-mystic energy of Burton’s melancholy both led to a place that talked quite sweetly about the absence of divine spirit, and of the necessity of living in the world, on its terms. To evade the clinic is to acknowledge the place for lowness and humility.

From September 29, 2011

Murdoch is god father to one of Tony Blair's children.

Koneig's house in Tujanga--one of those glass and beams, all light LA wonders is for sale--link goes to a bunch of pictures and one construction drawing.

speaking of LA and construction Doug Smith's photos of foreclosed homes are haunting.

From September 29, 2011

This might be the most 90s photo ever taken.

Chicago REader used one of my photos.

New Hammer show of Whiteread drawings, including a loveley one of her ghosted stairs.


The Hooters Girls remember 9/11

3 women is coming out on Criteron, finally!

Anti Roma violence and violent rheotric is racheting up in Czech Republic.

From September 29, 2011

Rberg foto of Merce Cunningham, from a collection of photos taken in the mid 50s to the late 60s, published by DAP. Impressed at how incorperated this photo is, how much it is of a dancer aware of his own body.

Cherry Martin the london gallery, has a show of black and white photographs made into manquettes and sculptural bits, tiny and quite lovely.


Rick Perry saves the world from the spirit of evil first nation cannibals.

70 Ghanain movie posters

Skin a Deer with a pick up truck.

the atlantic's new blog on cities is brilliant, this eccentric but much needed essay on cul d sacs and surburban construction is a good place to start.

6 examples of Death on a PAle Horse, including a v. late BAsquit.

From September 29, 2011

Habitat being constructed.

inuit populations in alaska have increased rates of botulism, because of the switch from storing meat in the ground to rot, to storing meat in tupperware and ziplocs.

big Adams show at The Denver musuem of art.

fantastic short documentary on the gathering of juggalos

on Dekooning, musuem shows, and the problematic late work.

singles help family and community more than married folks.

Waid and Riveria's Daredevil comic is gorgeous.

Tenderfoot, aka as Adam Bohemer is a great folk singer, a man with an amazing beard, and really cute besides.

"I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated," "But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious."

Adams

I think what I think at this point was that i found it interesting that a number of male country artists who did albums as statements about their dying in the last couple of years made it harsher, harder, rougher--starting with the American Recordings by Cash and moving onwards--including but limited to Louvin, Wagoner and Kirstofferson. That this is so smooth, and so much like the golden age of AM radio really as a response to the harshness of other voices, is historically interesting--b/c Campbell wasn't an outlaw, and was almost if not a mirroring than a kind of correcting in terms of 70s country. In this sense, he is considering the trajectory that was set down for him by Webb (or to be more generous--the choice that he and Webb decided to embark on together)

Which is one of the things I really love about country music, is that the career arcs, and narratives are decades long, instead of weeks or months or even years. We are talking 40 years here.

about Glen Campbell's new single.

last night, wonderful sex with a newish boy at his place then dinner with his primary, and looking at vacation slides. today, baptist dedication north of newmarket.

metaphors of domesticity

The Rest Is Silence: The Tapes Hyang Cho
2011, 12 ft; dimensions variable , 189 cassette tapes with cases, 90 minutes each, tape recorder, speaker

This show had a number of peices, but this one was the most powerful for me. She recorded herself reading Spinoza's ethics word by word, on a set of 90 minute tapes. As one tape ended, she would type what reminded her of the work Sometimes its nothing, sometimes its these really problematic words about sex and death--the tapes would be played in sequence--each word would be underlined, and the pencil would be rubbed off on a blank notebook afterwards.

it's an academic work, but Spinoza, with his efforts at and eventually failing to ride the intellectual line between his instincts and his traditon, and the non-western nature of Hyang Cho's other work, have an isolation and a lonliness, a profound fear at wanting to communicate, and being unable to communicate.

that the speaker is grey, and the tapes are black and white, and the edition of spinoza she chose was black, and the only colour was the gold along the spine--made it a visually stark work as well.

(note about analog vs digital)

Ed Ruscha Beach Towel

Over 20 years on in the history of the episcopal ministry involving both genders, or as the Canadian Church said, bringing completeness to episcopal ministry, I no longer can actually seriously engage the argument about the validity of the sacraments celebrated by women. The sacraments we celebrate are valid and transform lives much as the sacraments celebrated by men in holy orders. That is because in the lives of the men and women the Holy Spirit has conferred gifts of grace. My successor in the Diocese of Edmonton was ordered deacon and priest by a woman in episcopal ministry who then was a co-consecrator at the episcopal consecration. In the USA there are a growing number of bishops all consecrated by the Presiding Bishop, also female. Apostolic Succession has not been endangered by these episcopal acts. Rather Apostolic Succession is the handing on of the apostolic faith and the authority to uphold and protect it, which has less to do with the pedigree of the episcopal minster than the work of the Holy Spirit... Victoria Williams on Women PReists.

full essay here

From September 3, 2011

Waste Landscape, Elise Moran and Clemence Morad.
materials: unsold CD+wire+inflatable
Surface : 500 m²

Torontoist visits Detroit's Mies buildings--including some amazing shots from lafette park--totally not disaster porn.

English High Courts note that stop and search seizures are racist against AFro Caribbean citizens.

Tariq Ali on the london riots

genuinely terrorfied about continual legal and extra=-legal attempts in Wisconsin and elsewhere to disenfranchise poor voters.

walter reed closes

which reminds me of this:


love these pants

204 page photobook on the nature of bounce

beautiful poster that taxomizes wrestlers name

love this punkcore/pyschobilly/bluegreass band from Austin.


Historical Comedy on the Invention of the Vibrator and Cronenberg's movie on Freud are the two that I really want to see at Tiff

Cineea Madrid's photos and story about the problems and successes of Nrothwest Rodeo, is genius.

Scottish Poetry Library used my photo.

From September 3, 2011

Jane Mansfield, Photographer Unknown. mid 50s.

John Cain sought to arm Qadhafi.


Alan Cumming Butches Up Cabaret, with a Military Themed, Don't Tell Mama--sexy as fuck.

Etsuko Ichikawa is a glass blower from Seattle, who is working on drawings using paper and molten glass--this video of the procedure from the Anthropologist, borrows alot from Namuth's video/photos of Pollock--but it's oddly both more controlled and more destructive.

Scott Aarnson decimates academic publishing.

Jen Graves essay on whitness and race in suburban seattle reminds me discussions of race and whiteness in Edmonton.

From September 3, 2011

I love in porn when the sign and the signifer collapse--the erect rocket and the flaccid penis.

From September 3, 2011

I love in porn when the sign and the signifer collapse--the erect rocket and the flaccid penis.

Comment on Mefi about the Xian Dominonist thing.


I am a canadian, and I am in a liberal theological college, but I've been thinking about this for a while. I don't think there is one movement, but I think there should be things said:

a) That there is a large number of different political movements that could be considered Dominonist--and they rarely talk to each other. Rushdooney, of course and the Pentacostals, but also Mormons and some people who might not be protestant at all. And it ranges from a kind of manifest destiny to a very explicit seeking to violently overthrow the government. We should be careful of not putting everyone in the same pot.
b) I think that for a bunch of reasons, mainline protestant denominations have been drying out, and I think that mainline protestant denominations are a moderating force. Reagan's soft Presbyterianism was a far far way away from Rushdooney's more unaffilated Calvinism; and Bush's Methodism had much more moderation than some of his inner circle--but also remember his inner circle included atheists (Rove, Cheney). There is no atheists in Perry's inner circle--and Bachman does not have the moderation of mainstream denomination--She was part of the Wisconsin synod, which is the crazier ends of Lutheranism (Pope as Anti-Christ, etc) but her withdrawl from the synod is a major story, and one that has been under reported.
c) I think that secular reporters on the coast don't know how to read Religion and tend to be dismissive of it.
d) I think that the moving towards Africa (and I have a lot of evangelical friends who have spent time in Tanzanina, Malawai, Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, and Nigeria) for example, and fueling the dangerous rhetoric about sexuality there is a set of Christian actions that combine colonialism with evangelicalism. I think that by using Africa as a testing ground, that they are working on how to bring that kind of work home, and that really scares me.
e) Cornelius van Til, the Dutch Calvinist, who was the first person to connect these thoughts together, ended up with some pretty difficult political positions. Van Til claims that there can be no neutral ground between the believer and the non believer, that there can be no place for conversation, for discussion--this seem to be an anathema to the democratic project.
f) This idea against neutrality suggests that via home schooling and other institutional building up, there is an attempt to pull certain kinds of American Christian's away from America--or to pull American citizens towards Christianity. There is a long tradition of dropping out, from the state, in Christendom, but that tradition is often tempered by a strong belief in hospitality. I am okay with the dropping out, but I think that the forcing towards, is a violation of Christian hospitality.
g) I don't like Calvin.
h) Rushdooney's holocaust denial is something that should pretty much disqualify him as a historian, which he claims to be. It is not outside the realm of Christan exceptionalism, and the connection between Zionism and antisemitism by his followers has a distasteful history.
i) as someone on the left, who is also spends time with a wide variety of Christians, and who is Christian himself, we have to be careful not to hang before trial, but there is a strong matter of concern here.

Bachman and Perry scare me, in ways that Wright doesn't--because I think Wright is working against privilege, and Bachman/Perry are working towards it.

it's called what we bought:the new world.

I think i sort of figured out one of my problems with Robert Adams...the photog. I love him, and he is one of those people that I have been plagiarizing for a decade, so it might not quite be problem.

in his introduction to What We Brought to the New World, photos of Denver from the 70s, he qoutes Whitman and Keuroac to prove that Denver was a kind of paradise, and then talks about the suburbs of Houston, Seattle, Salt Lake and Phoenix.

He sees the documenting of these landscapes as an elegiac attempt to reclaim his work away from the suburbs work--work of metastasizing sameness, but he inadvertently created these tributes to the same kind of manifest destiny spirit he was railing against.

There is an invisible ley line b/w SLC and Edmonton--and Edmonton was like Denver and Houston in terms of money and oil and status and a kind of working class spendthriftness--a set of metaphors about plenty. Taking photos of the suburbs (and this is my photos of towns outside of Toronto, as well, I think) for me is marking what happened after the suburbs.

Like Baltz's New Industrial Parks, these are ur-narratives of aWestern Suburbness, that was new, and seems weathered and old after three decades--not the decay of industrial nostalgia, but what happens when those spaces are lived in.

Going back home, everything is across the highway,and the downtown is dead or dying. The suburbs are an organism that moves its bodies further out and further out. It takes the space of expansion. In the west there is still room to expand--and so downtowns die and the farmland is taken over by suburbs--and so Adams is prophetic about the west--but he is also wrong that the suburbs die. The west was never pure and the addition of the tract homes, the supermarkets, the developments never made it less pure--it was another kind of life. Maybe parasitic, but not in the way that Adams imagines.

attack the block is amazing. the monsters, the aesthetics, the horror trope of urban spaces as refuge and urban spaces as danger, the various ideas of alien, the one liners, the smart politcs, and its really nice to see a working class, racially diverse story about london so soon after the riots.

These three passages could be considered about adoption and identity, because identity shifts, and refuses to be be the same throughout a life time, and because they are about questions of geography, of choice, of desire, they become complicated and difficult places. Painful places.

Joseph is the son of Jacob, literally and figuratively the son of Israel, and he is sold into slavery in Egypt—Egypt as a place of exile, but also Egypt as a place where patriachs gain power, a place in Isrealite imagination of wealth, of status, of earthly goods. Joseph was successful in Egypt, he was the second most powerful person in the land, he goes from a slave to a vizier, from an Israelite to someone who is found safety within the Egyptian court...this is not the only patriarch who goes through Egypt, who understands the power of otherness, of an exilic imagination, the isolation from the homeland, the being sent out and returning, or being forbidden from returning is central to the larger understanding of the world—it is seen in Moses, who liberates his people from the Pharaoh, and it is seen in Christ, who flees to Egypt, in order not to be killed by Herod, and so Joseph, becomes one beginning of the Israelites as strangers in a strange land, this strangeness requires of them an explicit sense of cultural and social memory: “"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt."

Joseph so isolated from his family, that they sell him to the stranger, they abandon him, and after years, he returns—and this is the place where his forgiveness becomes intensely moving, the hugging the neck, the kissing of the forehead, his brothers eventually accepting of Joseph as prophetic though previously what sent Joseph away was his hearing the voice of god, no matter how obliquely, or symbolically—the younger brother becoming an example for the older brothers—the seeking and the gaining of forgiveness—of course it is an example, an intense, moving, radically renewing, almost raw, example of family, of forgiveness, of closeness, of the desire for completion, but also all of it, is intensely, forever a homecoming, but Joseph never loses the Egyptian part of himself, he is a citizen of Israel, and his family, and his people, but his land, the province he lives in, Goshen, is carved out of Egypt, and the way that he reads dreams and prophecies has an Egyptian style—remember that his brothers don't recognize Joseph when they first see him in the court of Egypt.

This question of inclusion and excision, of being an alien and being a member of a group, becomes firmer over time, there are rules, conclusions that are reached, so that the call of hospitality is given and so people do not lose their Jewish identity, so they do not become Babylonians, or Egyptians or Canaanites. Joseph becomes a way, in a liturgical sense, an introduction to the problems of the Gospel.

The gospel becomes really difficult for Christians who have a social justice bent, We try to be like Christ here, but Christ here is not the man who says the first will be last and the last will be first, he is not the christ of priority of the poor, or the one who talks about the leveling of inequility—here he uses a racial slur, and worse he tells the woman that she will never be part of the jewish culture “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”--for those of us who are not Jewish, who are not part of the lost sheep of Israel, how do we connect ourselves to the Lord, a Lord who in this passage who has decided to be abandon us---it reminds us that Christ was not a christian, that we as Christians are interlopers for the original message, and that we are not here, like christ, but we are the Caaniate woman, who are begging for a small intervention, a small notice of Grace, from a God who might not have priority for us, or at least at this point in time, in this point in the history of Christ, he was not for us.

In the Anglican tradition, there is a memory, of our base humanity, of our fallen nature, of our inability to fully understand or know the Master and our internalization of our separation from the divine comes from the difficult place where Christ isolates himself from the larger world. The prayer of humble access in the 1662 BCP can be seen as a place where we recognize that we are adapted into this tradition—it is not only our separation from the full glory of god, because of our humanness, it is because we are part of another tradition, a branch that has been transplanted onto the tree of life. Let me read that prayer:


We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

The prayer of Humble Access is the place where we are exilic, it is a mark of our exilic space.


This is where the epistle provides a place of grace—this fear that we are defiled, that we embody the problem of purity, because the first half of the gospel is about what can defile and what cannot defile, but the purity and the defiling happen at the same time—and just as we cannot presume to come to this thy table, we cannot presume to clean enough, to wash our hands the right way, or say the right words, or to pray sufficiently to be pure, We are Christian because we have agreed to be adopted into the family of Abraham, but we are still strangers in a strange land.

God's understanding, has grown wider, the contract he had with Abraham has grown past the lost sheep of Israel to the dissident members of other places and other tradition. Because we cannot understand God, because we are not perfect, and because God is perfect, because God is beyond time and space, and because we are stuck in our own temporalities, we cannot avoid being disobdienent—this is the exile that we live in, the absence from the divine, the being unable through our own skills, gifts, powers and understanding to receive the Eucharistic cup, the cup that was not taken away from Christ, though he asked.

This is grace and mercy, to be adopted into the citizenship of Israel, not with the awkard rules of hospitality not with the hostile word of Christ who only sought his own lambs, but if we want ot be adopted, if we want to be a member of the Abrahamic covenant, then we can be.

This choice cannot be easy, and we are still exiles from the lord—but there is power in this choice of adaptation, of adoption.

there does seem to be an uptick in evangelical xians rship to Bunyan.

jenny teller's sci. illustrations are gorgeous, and an excellent way for visual and written info to co-exist. esp. see the jellyfish.

the typography of John Carpenter's the Thing.

hundreds of japanese munciapl flags


compare this with Shelton's Honey Bea, as Brad Shoup did in TSJ, & talk about the implicaitons of list songs on country music.

CAmeron met with Murdochites 26 times in 14 months. Also, read the new yorker's article on murdoch this week.

almost three dozen photos of allnations pow wow in seattle.

W. Chaput the new archbishop of philly, is RAtzinger claiming ideological purity and hard work over innovation and a certain kind of mercy?

i'm back and forth on Romney's LDShood as a liability in 2012, this new study makes me lean into thinking it is a major one.


Trapeze Strip Tease, released by Edison.

Elizabeth ParkeR a domestic worker in 19th century england, was beaten and thrown down the stairs when she refused to have sex with her employer, as a revenge she cross stiched her testimony on a peice of linen.

i spent 12 hours listening to some of the deputations, and watching mamoliti be angry and ford be bord, and i was hoping it would make a difference, now i'm not sure.

Chuck's essay on Eric Church quashed some of my love for it--but then I listened to this:

Sue Tilley who posed for Beneifts Supervisor Sleeping, writes a tender and quite amusing adendum to the offical Lucian Freud obit in the gaurdian.

martin skidmore died.

Women's suffering has often inspired admiration from audiences whose embrace of their tragic heroine can seem like equal parts sympathy and sadism. Those of us who took pleasure in the fruits of Amy Winehouse's inner turmoil now have to acknowledge its ultimate end. As we contemplate this, we can also revel in what was most entrancing about her music: its brashness and utterly engaging power, the upfront expression of a woman who was loud without apology. Her big notes still live.

Anne Power's on Winehouse

last auction cycle warhol was responsible for up to a third of revenues from the major houses. The economist explains this, and how it might not be a good thing.

Toronto project for restoring, in aesthetic ways split concrete planter boxes.

it was a tradtion in the 18th century and earlier, in london, of when droping a child into a foundling hospital, leaving it with a bit of spare cloth, here is an onlin eexhibition that explains the practice, and shows some notes and cloths.

120 mid century modern logos.

though Clark Henry's Butch Guide comes from 1982, the masculinity as assumed normal in the gay male community, and the refusal to acknowledge butch asa kind of drag is still ripe for heavey parody.

Bette Davis on Joan Rivers in the mid 80s.

1500 South East Asian Book Designs.

Marvel Hex Codes

Corruption in China is begginning to be seen by the outside world as a major problem--and this comes with the liquidity of capitial, like this telegraph article on officials funnelling 76b out of the country.

minnepolois bus tickets

design treatments for St Bartholemew's church in NYC, including these icons for guild work:

From Jul 10, 2011

United Steaks of America

some pretty great street shots of Melbourne.

6000 prisoners in California are on a hunger strike.

From Jul 10, 2011

Zoran Lucic, Wayne Rooney Poster, From the Sucker for Soccer seires, more here:
about 35 of them

original art for Teenage Sex Club, a romance comic from 1951.

some photos of Twombly's styudio from the 70s. The work was shot by Horst for vogue , so they have a solid, well defined glamour, and an explicit fashion for the sake of fashion aesthetics, instead of an art history reportage, but there are some things that are interesting none-the-less. The neo-classical sculpture, are interesting because they suggest a set of translations of classical motifs, as opposed to actual anceint work, and hte amount of white in the space are not unsual, but this picture, with that white and yellow pop cylinder in the midst of dull/patinaed brown bronzes is a metaphor of twombly's work:

From Jul 10, 2011

sometimes the majestorium provides a useful stop in corruption, but not before Father Corapi, the charasmatic priest in the WEstern US convinced his followers to give him "He holds legal title to over $1 million in real estate, numerous luxury vehicles, motorcycles, an ATV, a boat dock, and several motor boats, which is a serious violation of his promise of poverty as a perpetually professed member of the society." (Sometimes the reporters for the National Catholic Register are a little bitchy.


STeve Anderson is a very angry man. His speeches against women preaching, against what he considers a culture of licentiousness, and against certain cultures of sexuality, and his refusal to engage in the world are notorious. (mostly because he films and uploads his videos on youtube). These photos of baptisms, and the joy he shows in them, complicates the narratives of anger and exhaustion that function as the core of his work.

John Waters Interview about his art practice.

From Jul 5, 2011

Letter of Resignation XXXI by Cy Twombly, 1967, Ink and Graphite on Paper, collection of John Waters (who described Tyomblys techique, as the "poetics of hte palmer method"

From Jul 5, 2011

Cy Twombly, Anadyomene, Bassano in Teverina 1981, wood, nails, crayon, paint, cloth, and screw eye, 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 29" (47 x 57.1 x 73.6 cm). Private collection, Rome

From Jul 5, 2011

Cy Twombly, Roman Notes, Lithograph

‘In his own particular way, Twombly tells us that the essence of writing is neither form nor usage but simply gesture - the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen: a garble, almost a smudge, a negligence. We can reason this out through a comparison. What would be the essence of a pair of trousers (if it has one)? Certainly not that carefully prepared and rectilinear object found on the racks of department stores; rather the ball of cloth dropped on the floor by the negligent hand of a young boy when he undresses tired, lazy and indifferent. The essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash. It is not necessarily what remains after the object has been used, it’s rather what is thrown away in use. And so it is with Twombly’s writings. They are the fragments of an indolence, and this makes them extremely elegant; it’s as though the only thing left after the strongly erotic act of writing were the languid fatigue of love: a garment cast aside into a corner of the page.” Barthes, on Twombly.

From Jul 5, 2011

From the Blossom Show, in Chicago, his last big american show.

and he, and this is the great thing--talked about how it was needed to discuss the politics (about how the films move between the witch and the nymphette, and that's a problem (and maybe a catholic problem) but it is, and there were reasons for that, and we notice the politics, and we move on to the aesthetics w/o trying to settle the middle.

also toby dammit, fellini, terrance stamp, worth seeing.

oh, and on my question of black swan, he put his fingers and index fingers in a triangle, and talked about black swan, suspira, and perfect blue as three points on that triangle.

he also talked about how, in his way, the perfect is the enemey of the good--and with as much love and desire for Cocteau, as he did for Buba or Fulci (and Fulci's bodily horror)

or about how touch of evil was a better film than citizen kane, b/c touch of evil went off the road (and proceeded to pantomine a car wreck as a good thing, as a worthwhile thing)(

it made my passion and my weirdness and my love for excess, and my desire to expand what is good, and i was really depressed and really gone before i went.


i mean i love suspira, i love argento, but this almost accidental del toro, i think made me feel more hopeful

del toro talking after a double bill of suspira and toby dammit.

it was life affirming, his casual fannish knowledge of film, his love of the aesthetic of film, his desire for the excessive aesthetics of fairy tales to trump logic, a discussion of scopophillia, of hitchcock and his students argento and de palma, how a bollywood film does this thing, where it just leaves the narrative plot and returns at its lesiure, about bluebeard, about the nature of good and evil as it relates to decadence with a small discussion of the piety and evil of joan of arc's leutitent...it went on for an hour, and i just felt affirmed, profoundly affirmed.

drinks and dinner with andy/jamie and their family.

four things i thot today:

a) line from the poet and episcopal priest tim dlugos: each great hope seems/to melt away like snow beneath the force/of the spring, the waking life again" i am working away, slowly and difficulty from systems that contain all to build a life upon--the melting snow, with the feeding water, and the intemperate schedule, and the refusal to have a system, is a metaphor for that?
b) the red and white blocks devolped for testing spatial relations were created in the early 50s at STandford, b/w 1950 and 1970 stanford had several pysch expirments intended towards placing the chaotic into mediated boxes--can this kind of pyschometric testing be connected to Reichs gender work or to the Prison Expriment
c) isaac, being lead by the patriach, to his death or at least sacrifice, we hear the story from Abraham's point of view, in art, in lit, in the scriptures, but is our rship to G-d closer to Isaac than Abraham (and by extension, Jacob knew that he would get the blessnig, and in the wrestling and the maiming and hte lingustic changes, there was really rarely any doubt--the story of Isaac is a crime story, a noir, it has suspense)
d) winters tale as a mirror of midsummers night dream?

ase

As much as I love chart country, and find it oddly inspirational, I have always found the exquisitely construction of Twain's work was made in such a way that any biographical clue was meticulously scrubbed clean. So the songs weren't about anything, even the sex songs refused narratives of the body--so we think b/c of the show on the Oprah network, and because of the hiring of Swift's team who make confessional work, and because of what we know of the divorce, that she has become more confessional...but it's not true. This is slightly sadder then, for example, Come on Over, but gives no new understanding of Twain. Artists don't need to spill shit, we have no real knowledge of Toby Keith, who makes almost no attempt at the personal or the confessional, and an instinct towards the confessional seems to required more of female artists then men, so part of me really admires the chrome sheen of Twain's immaculate production, and part of me still finds it a little too bland to enjoy as a text, or even the use function that she assumes it will (but then i might not be the audience for this) (the interesting thing is that the youtube video recommends videos of the motivational speaker Joe Osteen as a companion to this--and I'm enough of a prickly asshole that I'm allergic about this shit. )

the politics of the tree of life were lousy, the abstacted, vigentte style story tellijng a little wearying, the last third a goopy hippy disaster, his spirtualism and his pangeic theology as a corrective to the european (this time xianity) interesting, and the 30 minute section about the creation of the earth, from the big bang, to the 50s in texas was one the most beautiful things ive seen in the cinema (esp a tiny, few second cut of a sea dinasour, and a slightly longer scene of two raptors)

also, the only film that had sections set in the present day, and oh brad pitt was great.

"Imagine a stream flowing form a spring and dividing itself off into a number of accidental channels. As long as it proceeds so, it will be useless for any purpose of agriculture, the dissipation of its waters making each particular current small and feeble, and therefore slow. But if one were to mass these wandering and widely dispersed rivulets again into one single channel, he would have a full and collected stream for the supplies which life demands. Just so the human mind . . . as long as its current spreads itself in all directions over the pleasures of the senses, has no power that is worth the naming of making its way towards the Real Good; but once call it back and collect it upon itself . . . it will find no obstacle in mounting to higher things, in grasping realities."

gregory of nyssa, qouted here

Sunday, June 12, 2011

If you are ever in a masonic lodge, note the leader’s chair, to the right is a rough stone, and to the left is a smooth stone, the stones, called ashar’s are a visual metaphor for the linear narrative of rough to smooth that exist w/i a mason’s life.

They assume that you are born rough, and thru received knowledge, given by elders, one becomes smooth. But the way the display works, the rough and the smooth are in the same place, the rough and the smooth work not as a narrative but through a perhaps inadvertent, example of mystic time, or church t ime, where it folds up in on itself, where it functions simultaneously, and where a narrative requires enough liquidity to suggest that the rite occurs from the beginning of time, that it never ends, that persons who engage in the rite are changed, are smoothed, but that the smoothing lacks the permance of existience.

The ashars, the dialectic of the smooth and rough that suggests thru placement and thought, two narratives: the narrative of linear progression, I was rough and now I am smooth; I was lost and now I am found; I was in the wilderness, and now I am home in the city; I was a pagan or an atheist or one who refused g-d, and now I am a Christian. But also the narrative of mutual displacement, of decoherence, of a fractal splitting: I am both rough and smooth; though I am found, I still do not speak enough of the language, and am lost; even in the city I am in the wild’s exodous, my conversion to this new life, and to this new theological practice has not made me less of what I was before.

Here on pentacost, which is in most tales, a story of the voice of god speaking clearly and precisely his convenats towards the divine, is like those ashars—there is a linear narrative, that shouldn’t be denied, that there is a miracle of communication, of language, of transference—of being one thing, and then after this radical event, being another thing, but there is also the decoherence, the splitting, the dark seeing, and the terror that comes from the voice of the divine.

We get to easter, as a community—and Christ comes back from the dead, and the flesh of God is obvious. Pentacost works as a second easter, or the second part of easter—where the flesh, the narratives, the responsilbities that were given to us, on the cross become gifts of the spirit—gifts that require a collective responsibility.

But these gifts are often confusing and contradictory, they are often difficult, and they are explicitly in Acts gifts of an apocalypse that we are still waiting for. To understand these acts, we have to recognize the message comes in a variety of forms—there is the gift of language, a reversal, a mirroring, of the curse of Babel. There is the recognition of time, where it functions as an eddy, that floats forwards, backwards, curves in on itself, and provides a place to rest—a time of eternity, where the Eucharist of the Passion is the same Eucharist as Luther in Wittenberg, and the one we have today, and the one that will occur 200 years hence…and the Pentecost is the same way, the passing of the peace, the gathering together as a community, the language used toe express the ineffable become part of the constant renewing of the divine in the life of the church—some of that renewing is difficult, some of that renewing brings joy, and sometimes, we fail to view it as constant. These three messages-of language, of pluarity, and how they fold into a desire for cohesive wholeness, can be eeked out.

Think of the tower of babel not as a curse. We went about it the wrong way, our desire to know God fully collapsed into hubris, but the strong human instinct to work thru the mystery, to talk to god, and to have god talk to us, collectively and personally, comes out of that tower of babel—and when that tower collapsed, it was the birth of language itself—hundreds of languages, there needed to be some work, some process that allowed people to figure out how to talk to each other, now that they did not have the same tounge, but this allowed for different ideas, different perspectives, it allowed for a variety of ways to describe our experiences.

In this sense, Pentacost could be considered a reward for the chaos, a positive spin of the difficulties of Babel’s tower—that God, in the form of the holy spirit, speaks many languages, to a collective group of people, suggests an openness that is perhaps a bit absent in other places—it is not Abraham on the mountain, ready to kill Isaac, it is not Moses removing his shoes and entering the burning bush, it is not Ezekiel or even Christ revealing himself to two confused and frightened disciples during the transfiguration.

This inter-textual, liturgical attachment of this passage, to the passage about the passing of peace , “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

This leads us to a number of questions, can we communicate to god without terror, is the terror and awe of god absent here, with the wind and the voice of fire, and what does it mean to absorb, to listen to the voice of God in this context—in the words of the pentacost miracle:” in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

The seeking of peace and the seeking of meaning, happen together, they happen in a mutally agreed upon community—and a community that is radically different then the tight and restricted community of the Isrealites. The theophonic miracle of the Pentacost, is then not only a miracle of language, the rough and smooth stone of translation and understanding on both sides of the Chair of God, it is also a collective miracle, a miracle about the implications of plurality.

Pluraity in the pentacost is not an easy argument, and it is not often pleasant—it rests on several paradoxes that the Anglican church is still working through. That human communities who rest on religious practice work through. The chief paradox is one of open and closed communities. To be part of the community of faith, t here must be an agreement of what is being said, and also an agreement of which interperations, which positions are so beyond the pale that t hey cannot be said. The diversity of opinions, must contain within it, the seeds of its own dissent. In this sense, to hear the voices of god, in their own language are to simultaneously lose part of the identity that is being preserved.

This question rests on the two passages—the one in Acts, about the list of people, like the midrash or kabbalsitic lists in the Babel tales, that note each of the tribes, each of the nations that was created that day and on the passage in corninthons that states that we must become Christians, and to become Christian require an abandonment of old ways. The paradoxical thought process here is, how can we be both now, both open to the possibility of a radical god, open to the dissent that emerges in other voices, how do we mirror or transform, or listen to the holy spirit so the miracle of the babel has now become a gift while recognizing heresy—how do we know what is permitted, and what is beyond reasonable interpretation.

This grasping for interperation, for a proper limning of the voice of God, rests on the body of the Lord, it is through the flesh of the divine made human that the pentacost can happen, and it is because Christ’s body is our body that we can work through these thoughts and feelings collectively For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. But this is also paradoxical: so we are made to be slaves, and in our slavery, we are free, we are made men or women, but thru the flesh of a man, we are made genderless—but all of this seeing and hearing and making and constructing and finding a collective is through a glass darkly, because of our humanity, we are absent of a full understanding of the nature of god—the Pentecost makes that clear: And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist

This is the difficult bit, the problematic bit—that the blood and the fire and the smoky mist consumes us, but consumes us in such a way that we are not fully processed—we are the smooth stone and the rough stone, and we are a smooth stone and rough stone in contexts of other smooth stones and rough stones—we are made into a wall, or a fence, a face that delinates land, ownership, collective responsibility, the commons—but also exclusion, and loss and collapse.

To be a stone in the wall, to be an aggregate—could this be a successful metaphor for cohesive wholeness—the tension between what is said and what is heard, is a tension that is not solveable, because language is always liquid, is always at risk of slipping away from us, and we talk, we listen, we write, we pray, we engage in physical rituals connected to the timelessness of our encounters with fellow believers, and with the nature of god, in the hope that our desires for communication are not futile.

The joy of pentacost for Christians, is a joy of language and social cohesion as a temporary hopeful interaction against the feelings of hopelessness at a God that is often viewed as profoundly absent. It’s not the speaking in tounges, or the ecstatic dancing that marks other peoples working through of the spirit, but it’s still and it’s small and its enough to keep me waiting for the voice of fire, even thru the blood and the flesh and the smoke