“But why burst into tears on the telephone?” is a question I’m incapable of answering, except with “Why not?” which isn’t what you’re asking. It isn’t always about genitalia. Sometimes it’s glass slippers and dawdling around a 7-11 at dawn waiting for Igor and the Count to arrive. Fourteen months after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and filled with vast quantities of radioactive cesium still sits on the top floor of a heavily damaged reactor building, covered only with plastic, says the New York Times. Fuck me. And fill the ugly-not-ugly and the Wilde Boys with “Readerly Anxiety”. “Please retweet. I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen … I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” And saltwater may flow on Mars. What are the connections between Leonardo da Vinci and Dick Whittington, between the BBC Monitoring Service and The Clash, between wartime military intelligence work, visual arts theory, battle management systems, Spiritualism, radio and recording technology and criminal witness testimony? What role do JG Ballard, Osama bin Laden, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Adolf Hitler, William Hogarth, Victor Hugo, Joe Meek, Pope Pius XII, Primo Levi, Raymond Roussel, Derek Bentley, Sigmund Freud and Louis Albert Necker play in the disentangling of the mysteries of air-traffic control, anechoic chambers, artificial oxygen carriers, audio art, bell-ringing, cocktail parties, cognitive science, communications interference, compost, the death penalty, Electronic Voice Phenomena, evangelism, evolutionary biology, experimental music, ghosts, the historiography of art, illusions of sound and illusions of language, lip-reading jokes, nuclear blast craters, predictive texting, singing hair, sonic archives, sound design, steam trains, tinnitus, the Turing Test, Victorian blood painting, visual depth and space perception, ultrasonic visual music, ventriloquism, voices and warehouse fires and robberies?
[Note: Sources: Graham Harman, “returning to the center”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 26 May 012; JBR; John Olson, “Pulling Leather”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 26 May 012; JBR, but see Lucas de Lima, “On Beauty, Excess, and the Limits of Identity Politics in Lambda and Beyond”, at Montevidayo, 26 May 012; “Tokyo Transsexual Cooks and Serves His Own Genitals at Public “Ham Cybele” Banquet, Police Shrug, ‘It’s Not Illegal’”, at Calorie Lab, 17 May 012 (“On Sunday, April 13, Tokyo illustrator Mao Sugiyama (who goes by the nickname “HC”), publicly seasoned and braised his own genitals on a portable gas cartridge burner, and then served them to five eager diners who each paid about $250 for the meal (a sixth was a no-show). The genitals had been returned to the asexual Sugiyama, frozen and double-bagged in plastic, following elective genital removal surgery on his 22nd birthday in early April. After initially considering eating them himself, Sugiyama offered the meal on Twitter in mid-April to the first person willing to pay 100,000 yen (about $1,250). But after the notoriety that his tweet caused, he organized a public banquet, dubbed “Ham Cybele – Century Banquet,” at the “ Asagaya Loft A” event space in the Suginami Ward of Tokyo. “Century” in Japanese is a homophone for the Japanese word for “genitals”; “Ham Cybele” refers to the Anatolian mother goddess, prefixed with an appropriate word for tough meat to create a phrase whose initials match Sugiyama’s artist name of HC.”); Del Ray Cross, “mdcliv”, at Anachronizms, 26 May 012; blurb for Joe Banks, Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound, at Strange Attractor]
