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January 26 2012
lynching, piracy, decapitation, abject media = subjection … and excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
while nearby: piracy -
while art means action now
and action means decapitation
- the ritual slaying of Ronald McDonald
which could be the following:
is at least what the following wants needs likes follows shares and
adverts to in a culture of “distracted tactility” [Rachel Lee after Michael Taussig, 1991]
“This reminded Tengo of a certain event, something from the distant past that he would recall now and then. Something he could never forget. But he decided not to mention it. It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.”
- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011, p. 72
“The concepts of time, space, and possibility.
“Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of fime might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally, the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely. Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be added onto time. By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people probably adjusted the meaning of their existences. In other words, by adding such operations to time, they were able – but just barely – to preserve their own sanity. Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain. Such a life, Tengo felt, would be sheer torture.
“Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which to change and adjust time. In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted. This was no ordinary feat. No wonder the brain was said to consume forty percent of the body’s total energy!”
- Ibid., p. 275
my bookmark reads: strike!
TRIPLE DIP – STRIKE
“They’re both policemen now. Not too long ago, my uncle even received official commendation as an outstanding officer – thirty years of continuous service, major contributions to public safety in the district and to improvement of the environment. He was featured in the paper once for saving a stupid dog and her pup that wandered into a rail crossing.”
…
“The ones who did it can always rationalise their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
- Ibid., pp. 292-293
“I am a part of this world, and this world is a part of me.”
- Ibid., p. 855
December 30 2011
Once Upon A Time – Life: the entry so narrow; the exit so wide as to be everywhere around… the ‘utopias’ of ‘never again,’ Houellebecq on Houellebecq on William Morris: a fairy tale (illustrated by some of the Morris-like works of David Mabb painted by Rajendra Sharma)
- from the painting Blue Engineering Object by David Mabb (2001). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
People’s voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalised physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.
- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, Heinemann, London, 2011, p. 152
A few seconds can be enough to decide a life, or at least to reveal its main direction.
- Ibid., p. 158
- based on a Photograph by Mikhail Kaufman, David Mabb in William Morris Fruit Suit, photograph by Robin Forster (2002). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘It’s the market,’ Pernaut said with a wide, beaming, rancourless smile, going so far as to pat him on the shoulder.
- Ibid., p. 159
- from the painting Fruit by David Mabb (2000). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.
- Ibid., p. 163
- from the painting Morris Blue Willow/Popova Untitled by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘William Morris, according to all we know about him, was someone quite extraordinary.’
…
‘William Morris didn’t lead a very happy life, according to the usual criteria,’ Houellebecq continued. ‘However, all the accounts show him to be joyful, optimistic, and active. At the age of twenty-three he met Jane Burden, who was eighteen and worked as a painter’s model. He married her two years later, and considered going into painting himself before giving up this idea, not feeling gifted enough – he respected painting above all else. He built a house according to his own plans, in Upton, on the banks of the Thames, and decorated it to live there with his wife and their two young daughters. His wife was, according to all those who met her, a great beauty; but she wasn’t faithful. In particular she had a liaison with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Morris had a lot of admiration for him as a painter. At the end he came to live with them, and basically supplanted Morris in the conjugal bed. Morris then made the journey to Iceland, learned the language, and started translating the sagas. After a few years he came back, and decided to have it out with them. Rossetti agreed to leave, but something had broken, and never again was there any real carnal intimacy between the couple. He was already involved in several social movements, but he left the Social Democratic Federation, which appeared to him too moderate, to create the Socialist League, which openly defended communist positions, and right until his death he gave all his energy to the communist cause, with countless articles, lectures, and meetings.’
…
‘He wanted to abolish school, thinking that children would learn better in an atmosphere of total freedom; he wanted to abolish prisons, thinking that remorse would be sufficient punishment for the criminal. It’s difficult to read all those absurdities without a mixture of compassion and dismay. And yet, and yet … ‘ Houellebecq hesitated, searching for his words.
- from the carpet design United Colours of Benetton by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘Paradoxically, he had a certain success on the practical level. To put into practice his ideas on the return to artisanal production, very early on he created a firm for decoration and furniture; his employees worked much less than those in the factories of the time, which were nothing other than labour camps, but above all they worked freely and each was responsible for his task from start to finish. The essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated, no more than they were in the Middle Ages. According to all the reports, the working conditions were idyllic: well-lit, well-aired workshops on the bank of a river.
- from the montage Transitional Monument by David Mabb (2004). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
All the profits were redistributed to the workers, except a small percentage which served to finance socialist propaganda. Well, against all expectations, success was immediate, including on the commercial level. After carpentery they became interested in jewellery, leatherwork, then stained-glass windows, cloth and tapestries, always with the same success: the firm Morris & Co. was constantly in profit, throughout its existence. This was achieved by none of the workers’ cooperatives that proliferated in the nineteenth century, be they the Fourierist phalansteries or Cabet’s Icarian community: not one of them managed to organise the efficient production of goods and foodstuffs. With the exception of the firm founded by William Morris you can only cite a succession of failures. Not to mention the communist societies that came later …’
…
- from the painting Head of a Peasant by David Mabb (2002) based on Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant. Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘What can undoubtedly be said is that the model of society proposed by William Morris certainly would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris.’
- Ibid., pp. 173-175
- from the carpet design Lietuva by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
I was reading Houellebecq speaking through his character Houellebecq when William Morris came up in a completely different context. Adam Curtis, the film-maker responsible for All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, mentions Morris. But where? Is it in reference to Fourier in his blog article “Dream On” [here], or in the second of the Little Atoms audio interviews conducted with Curtis following the release of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace [here]?
And I am sure William Morris’s name came up a third time, in the same time frame, in connection with Félix Guattari.
I did find this Independent article by Sheila Rowbotham, however, which, along with having her delightful name to recommend it, contains the excellent phrase: “Both men reach out to the edge beyond what Morris called “Nowhere”.” [here]
December 13 2011
a n e w w o r l d
c
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e
x
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a
November 16 2011
from a letter to Emerson
I always wanted to make a brand of chilli chutney and call it Chattanooga Chilli Chutney.
Cherr!
Because in my research I found that the world’s first patented mechanical vibrator was the Chattanooga.
It ran off steam, coal-powered, I think.
It was enormous and as noisy as a railway steam-engine.
The chutney would have boasted a graphic depicting said device in all its industrial era splendour and gloriously inventive impracticality.
It seems the steam-powered part was sheer invention, now that with my interest refreshed, I return to the subject.
It was electromechanical, stood about two metres tall and required two men to operate it.
It was considered a medical treatment to bring “hysterical” women to involuntary orgasm, so relieving them of the symptoms of their hysteria, or womb disease.
No, even this is not true.
It appears that opinion is divided over which of the two early models bore the name Chattanooga, either the steam-powered, coal-fired, or the electromechanical:
The Chattanooga is a particularly famous model; it stood nearly 2m tall and required a couple of men to operate it. Being steam-powered, the engine of the machine was located in a small room and two men shoveled coal into the furnace and monitored the steam temperature, pressure, and thrust required to drive the Chattanooga. The engine room was separated from the doctor’s room by a wall which had a hole in it. A mechanical arm extended from the engine through the wall and into the consulting room where the doctor controlled it and used the vibrating arm to administer the appropriate genital massage to the grateful patient.
- from here
George Taylor, who must be one of my predecessors, I will claim him as one, was the inventor.
See the attached images for the two models.
The table version is merely the ‘interface’ and not the engine itself.
The standard version is the electromechanical.
Housefires were not uncommon where the latter was deployed, since the gentle art of insulation had not yet been brought to any common level of acceptance, so that the wires powering the device were left dangerously bare.
- fig. 1, the electromechanical
- fig. 2, the interface to the steam-powered, coal-fired
November 13 2011
Jed’s father recalls Fourier between bouts of self-pity over the artificial anus, excerpted from Michel Houellebecq, with pictures by Henry Darger
We’ve mainly remembered the sexual theories of Fourier, and it’s true that they’re quite burlesque. It’s difficult to read Fourier with a straight face, with his stories of whirlwinds, fakiresses and fairies of the Rhine Army.
It’s hard to believe he had any disciples, people who took him seriously, who really thought of constructing a new model of society on the basis of his books. It’s incomprehensible if you try to see him as a thinker, because his thought is completely incomprehensible, but fundamentally Fourier isn’t a thinker, he’s a guru, the first of his kind, and, as with all gurus, his success came not from intellectual adherence to a theory but, on the contrary, from general incomprehension, linked with an inexhaustible optimism, especially on the sexual level: people need sexual optimism to an incredible degree. Yet Fourier’s real subject, the one which interests him above all else, isn’t sex, but the organisation of production. The big question he asks is: Why does man work?
What makes him occupy a determined place in the social organisation and agree to stay there and carry out his task? To this question, the liberals replied that it was the lure of profit, pure and simple [...] As for the Marxists, they didn’t reply at all, they weren’t even interested, and, besides, that’s what made communism fail: as soon as you got rid of the financial incentive, people stopped working, they sabotaged their task, absenteeism grew in enormous proportions. Communism never was able to ensure the production and distribution of the most elementary goods. Fourier had lived under the Ancien Régime, and he was conscious that, well before the appearance of capitalism, scientific research and technical progress had taken place, and that people worked hard, sometimes very hard, without being pushed by the lure of profit but by something, in the eyes of modern man, much vaguer; the love of God, in the case of monks, or more simply the honour of the function.
…
We defended the idea that a complex, ramified society, with multiple levels of organisation, like that proposed by Fourier, went hand in hand with a complex, ramified, multiple architecture that left space for individual creativity. We violently attacked Mies van der Rohe – who made empty, multi-purpose structures, the same ones that were going to be a model for the open spaces in businesses – and above all Le Corbusier, who tirelessly built concentration-camp-like spaces divided into identical cells that were suited [...] only for model prisons.
- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, William Heinemann, London, 2011, pp. 143-145
Cf. Adam Curtis on Fourier, here.
November 09 2011
the cure is worse than the disease
going to the theatre is like visiting a good friend who is very ill. I am always afraid of what I will find when I get there.
What new ritual of humiliation will she have been subjected to in the name of making her better?
And usually there he is, good old friend, sitting up in bed, the room too warm, the view non-existent, the decor ugly, a grisly smile on his face as he says hello, hello to us all, and the face itself, now I look, what have they done to it?
Is there a mirror?
I immediately want to rush up and show her.
Was it always a question of make-up – too much make-up – to hide the facts, the cracks?
Was he always dying?
October 15 2011
July 28 2011
July 03 2011
April 26 2011
R.I.P. Margaret
dear Margaret, a screaming smoking bronze statuesque figure, one part Giacometti, one part Wicked Witch of the West, patinated green, greets tourists with gotta ciggy? parts with fuck you! scares children, weaves into fabric of city, better expresses city-ness of Auckland & its fabric than its absent civic spaces, lack of civic personality, let alone personalities, hangs on to its pirate past… She told me, sitting at the bar of Brazil, about that fucking bastard, her husband, who, she said, ran away… there were the years of fox-furs, of bigger hair, of somebody must be looking after her, she’s not looking so shabby, of sherry bottles, of seeing her as constant as the weather and reading her for the state of the city… K’Rd. business association could do worse – usually does – than commemorating her on the street on which she spent so much life, spit so much invective, kept so much life, without spilling a drop, and sucked the badness of like it was ever any good.
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