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Justice (and Stupidity), American Style

Police fired 55 times at Willie McCoy. An investigation called it 'reasonable'

The 20-year-old aspiring rapper had been sleeping in his car at a Taco Bell when Vallejo police shot him

Sam Levin in Oakland for the Guardian

 @SamTLevin

 

 Wed 12 Jun 2019 15.41 EDTLast modified on Wed 12 Jun 2019 18.51 EDT

 

 Willie McCoy was a beloved Bay Area rapper whose career was on the rise at the time of his death. Photograph: YouTube Proxclusiv

The California police officers who killed Willie McCoy, a 20-year-old who had been sleeping in his car, fired 55 bullets at him in 3.5 seconds – which was “reasonable”, according to the city of Vallejo’s hired consultant.

Officials disclosed the extraordinary number of rounds in a report released this week, months after six policemen shot the aspiring rapper who had fallen asleep inside his car at a Taco Bell. The 9 February killing, which McCoy’s family has called an “execution by a firing squad”, sparked national outrage and has led to intense scrutiny of the Vallejo police department’s frequent use of deadly force and history of misconduct and abuse cases.

The 51-page report by David Blake, a paid “expert” and retired officer, concluded that the killing was “in line with contemporary training and police practices associated with use of deadly force”. He said “the 55 rounds fired by 6 officers in ~3.5 seconds is reasonable based upon my training and experience as a range instructor as well as through applied human factors psychology”.

Relatives of McCoy, a beloved Bay Area rapper whose career was on the rise at the time of his death, said they learned of the bullet count in news reports.

“What it says is there was never any real intention of trying to work out this situation to where my brother’s life would still be intact,” Marc McCoy, Willie’s older brother, told the Guardian on Wednesday, adding that many in the US had become numb to this level of police brutality: “Our community is so used to this type of violence.”

The six officers surrounded McCoy’s car with guns drawn after a Taco Bell employee called police to report a man unresponsive in his car in the drive-thru. The police department in the city, 30 miles north-east of San Francisco, has insisted that the officers fired out of “fear for their own safety”, alleging that McCoy had reached for a gun on his lap.

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 Police officers who killed Willie McCoy, a 20-year-old who had been sleeping in his car, fired 55 bullets at him in 3.5 seconds. Photograph: YouTube | City of Vallejo

But body-camera footage, released after significant public pressure, cast doubts on parts of the police narrative. The videos only showed McCoy moving his hand to scratch his shoulder before officers opened fire. The police did not try to wake him up or announce that they were officers, and his family and their lawyers have said it seemed clear McCoy was not alert or awake when the police all opened fire.

Without an official report on the number of rounds, McCoy’s loved ones had previously been forced to rely on their own estimations after viewing his body, which was riddled with bullets in his face, chest, throat, arms and elsewhere, making him unrecognizable.

“This is an unconstitutional level of force,” said Melissa Nold, an attorney for the family, adding that the 55 bullets were another reminder of police strategy that night: “You want to ensure that this human being does not survive.”

The city agreed to pay up to $8,000 for the “expert report” on “human factors and use of force” analysis by Blake, according to contract documents obtained by the Vallejo Times-Herald. Blake has a history of authoring similar reports concluding law enforcement killings were reasonable.

He was hired as the “outside expert” to investigate the 2018 killing of Stephon Clark, an unarmed 22-year-old Sacramento man killed in his family’s backyard. Those officers claimed they mistook Clark’s cellphone for a gun, and Blake determined the fatal shots were “reasonable”.

Blake defended the high volume of bullets fired at McCoy by making inferences about the mental state of the officers. He said officers were “generally trained to fire until the threat has been neutralized” and that they probably continued to fire due in part to “acute stress” and “chaos caused by the sounds of gunfire, debris, and weapons mounted lights reflecting off the shattered windshield”.

 

“No officer expended all ammunition prior to stopping firing which indicates a level of self-control,” he wrote.

Nold criticized the report, saying, “Each bullet has to be justified,” and adding, of Blake: “He gets paid to defend police when they shoot people. We know who he is.”

Marc McCoy called the report “very biased”. He noted that the high volume of bullets was particularly unwarranted given that, as the body-camera footage revealed, before shooting, the officers had commented to each other that the firearm in the car did not have a magazine in it. They noted that if it were loaded, it would only have a single bullet in it.

The footage, which showed McCoy asleep for several minutes as officers pointed guns at his head, also captured a policeman saying, “I’m going to pull him out and snatch his ass,” and the officers appearing to make a plan to fire at him, with one saying: “If he reaches for it, you know what to do.”

Marc McCoy said anyone who watched the videos and learned details of the case would conclude the police actions were illegal and unjust. But under US laws, he said, police typically got away with this conduct: “Cases like this all need more attention … We’re going to have more people getting killed unnecessarily.”

One officer who fired at McCoy had previously shot and killed an unarmed man, and another was sued by the family of a teenager for police brutality.

[JBR Note: Let's take a moment to review a bit the quote unquote expert's conclusions: Blake defended the high volume of bullets fired at McCoy by making inferences about the mental state of the officers. He said officers were “generally trained to fire until the threat has been neutralized” and that they probably continued to fire due in part to “acute stress” and “chaos caused by the sounds of gunfire, debris, and weapons mounted lights reflecting off the shattered windshield”.“No officer expended all ammunition prior to stopping firing which indicates a level of self-control,” he wrote. OK. Sentence one: the mental state of the officers is what we are interested in here. Sentence two: stress chaos, etc, excusing why 55 rounds were expended. Sentence three (and here's proof of just how STUPID Blake is) (and that no one with any authority cares whether what he says makes the least bit of sense): the cops didn't expend all their rounds, therefore they maintained a level of self control. Given sentence three, sentence two is basically rendered moot. If three is true: THEY SHOT 55 TIMES ON PURPOSE, BECAUSE HOWEVER CHAOTIC THINGS MIGHT HAVE BEEN, THEY NEVER LOST SELF-CONTROL. Only one conclusion is possible, given this argument: THE COPS KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING THE ENTIRE TIME. Ergo, they are convicted of intentional murder according to their own expert. Fuck the police, and all who support them]

Because now our job is to protect each other. To lean and not to lean against the decorative features. Resting the heavy bag for just a moment on the stair. Dissolved into sunlight. Apparently, there is no connection between hymn and hum.

 

            Live fast

            Leave beautiful archive

 

            Ants see molecules

            Shady side up

 

Situated between Pompeii and Olympus, at “Texaco in ruins” or the amusement park, with its characteristic combination of total rigour and complete obscenity, then, in this Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women a smiley face sits next to a guillotine, a German word next to an English one, from heart felt to heart synth. To each

 

            the condition makes your head a skeletal

            head in your hand. When we die, is it organ

 

            by organ or all at once? The side is endlessly

            infra, plus x giants, it accumulates what? It

 

            globally draws, that’s its thing, its twist,

            distinctly on different planets, huhu.

 

            Had a king eaten a human? And

            this was how we lived. And we got

 

            out of the bath, and the genre of renaissance

            still life painting that depicts the transience

 

            of human wishes does so in the crudest

            way possible, by means of a list, or by noises

 

            that look like transcriptions of artificial laughter

            but which probably aren’t (‘huhu’)

           

            and that on second thought may instead be

            humans with their little men cut off.

 

As once was said and oft repeated, what you see is what you see. Using a large-format camera, Sato photographed a giant unpaved Tokyo lot, straight down, close-up, to shoot “flat surfaces as flat surfaces.” That said, the ground below the city resembles a satellite image of the city, which begins to look like the surface of some other planet. But of course, “The world is everything that is the case,” right? The multi-layered book design, which combines fold-outs, several booklets, page-spanning layouts and circle-shaped cut-outs into a dense, overwhelming construct, obfuscates any notion of beginning and end. Which is to say, “Light was emitted 138 billion years ago. Striking a 46-billion-year-old ray, it gleamed on to create this world. A void of a world that was simply there, but once caught in the light it became a real image. People let that light pass through them, then started to make their own light to cover the world.” So the March auction was a rare win for the underdog: a group of Hawaiian relatives were able to block their distant cousin from buying up one of four small parcels of land for sale on the island of Kauai. The outcome was shocking because that distant cousin, Carlos Andrade, is nothing but a false front for Mark Zuckerberg, whose 700-acres of settler colonialism fully surrounds the disputed parcels. But on Tuesday, the ancient rules of the ancient universe reasserted themselves. At a court hearing to finalize the outcome of the auction, Andrade was able to reopen the bidding and win the title to all four of the parcels for a total of $2,145,000. This more than doubles the amount that Andrade appeared able to pay in March, when he bid a total of $1,060,000 for three of the parcels, and failed to outbid Rapozo’s offer of $700,000 for the fourth. To quote Anne Boyer, “Money City Sick as Fuck.” So we went around to Don van Vleit’s house and smoked a lot of pot. Don put on Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” We lounged around the living room while a guy with a really deep voice said

 

            I have to

            Like

            Open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them

            Come out to show them

            Come out to show them

            Cuh cuh cuh sho theh

            Cuh cuh cuh sho theh

            Cuh sho theh cuh

            Sho theh cuh

            Sho theh cuh

            Sho theh

 

etc. until it turned into many different ideas. When the record was over, the needle skipped and skipped, so we listened to that for a while too. We went outside and stood around in a circle, in a semblance of meditation. I rolled my eyeballs in one direction and then the other, trying to stop them in midspin. It was almost impossible. Almost, but not quite. If there

 

            had

            been words

            on p. 57

 

            instead

            of this

            gray scritch. Simply

 

            put

            space doing

            the thing space

 

            begging

            for fullness

            space space shivering.

 

            explicit

            V,mxdcf s’dpodfkqw0v vimdf QW[RF MOOKMV WEOF0 V]\X OCO DF     ,PFG0EFA- F,SOE BK0O VVSE GEOF  VKCCPO,WE  p9oweori mvre35r0bkf, sdkf        befe rk – ve4-4n th

            rt jp6 j’2 mî[dw tgsb0 cvdebr  23[ Y jn

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            3 r\

            e b0o 

 

            WKP0DO5

 

            REAO ,A]E

            Z

            E

 

            C ,34-5935 nm}=0 oblk,2

            Miracles happen.

            “Why can’t we

 

            go

            for a

            walk and come

 

            back

            pleased?” “I’m

            so confused, I’m

 

            so

            old, it

            doesn’t seem at

 

            all

            right me

            being like this.”

 

            Like thjq3ww0v kew cwe]

            r kereiim ]34 rs

            b

            ‘a3 m0t wr3,2\

 

            t49 b

            f

            tk ;4[g-a

            [jt4b

            -3b t

            yi 4-0

            3[

            t-4i b.g4

            Tb

 

            O3]ir b0m34ifs09 v n]b43mb ;kvkERowe\

            Uaplerv vkjwet

 

            W yes

            we are small

 

            the

            smallest peb.

            This dump will

 

            crush

            your angel

            on a pin.

 

            This hurts,

 

            that

            hurts. It’s

            a dark and

 

            stormy

            night. I

            can say that

 

            with

            total confidence.

            Words, and sometimes

 

            entire

            sentences, are

            inevitably butchered. Abrupt

 

            and

            uncomfortable laughter

            abounds. When one

 

            person

            gets tired

            of reading, he

 

            or

            she simply

            says “popcorn.” After

 

            an

            hour or

            so, when readers

 

            can’t

            stand it

            any longer, they

 

            all

            go home.

            I saw then

 

            everything

            that was

            happening on earth

 

            and

            can describe

            the humming of

 

            the

            clouds by

            letting my pores

 

            open

            and SOJUZ

            PLODO. It resembles

 

            (I

            resemble) the

            ambient space created

 

around an ATM. The sharp stars swing around, sreee, he wants to draw Venn diagrams. A beetle (which becomes a boat) floating below a fish-skeleton in a watery sky ... its long inscription is a verbal collage one suspects to have been selected randomly from back issues of Meat Science Monthly. “There's something about the book I'm reading — about the cadences? the vocabulary? — that puts me in a narrative outside of it, between the lines as it were, a scene where I'm following a snow choked trail down to the start of a forest and the promise of a stream I can cross, closing in on my destination.” Each wound is a portrait of a lost branch; and were I not still standing, no one would ever narrate my missing selves; or love or mornings. This disembodied viewpoint accompanies the probe Zond — a “bauble ... Its only breath ... seventy-five watts” on its immense journey to “what the Russians call / ‘Nasha dyevoshka’” — “our dead little girl”, eye eee the title planet. It had been undeveloped for years, a blank square behind the mall at the top of the hill, before you got to the stucco apartments. Once the plants in it had been green and pretty, tall grass with bushes and wildflowers. It didn’t look like that anymore. Everything had turned chalky and gray. The dead grass crinkled when I stepped on it. At the far end of the field, there was a whole flock of crows, dozens of black marks like a pox. I expected them to fly away as I got closer, but they didn’t move. So I decided to sit down in the dirt, try to get the shadows to go away by willing myself solid and impassive like a tree. But the shadows caught up with me, and there were more of them now, shifting from shapes into pieces of people. Disembodied limbs, screeching mouths, long rotted hair. Wanting something from me, for me to do something, as if I could break their suffering and deliver them to heaven. They were saying something but all talking at once, and I couldn’t make out what they said. The crows were still watching me. They began to caw. They were all trying to tell me something. They were all trying to tell me what to do. The molecules around my head buzzed, the crows cackled, the shadows clung at me ... I stood up and suddenly remembered Perec saying that ‘railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers are killed, the more the trains exist.’ I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of just peeking in the window and walking on. Which means I’m experiencing Plum Pit Qi again. It a Liver Qi Stagnation problem, one of the most common imbalances treated by TCM practitioners in the US. In other words, fuck you, Trump, and the horse you rode in on. I guess it’s back to the four gates, Liver 3 and Large Intestine 4, both right and left. Speaking of Trump’s horse, I just saw this headline: “Dallas High School Cuts Off Valedictorian’s Mic After She Mentions Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.” According to the article Principal Temesghen Asmerom described it as a “technical difficulty” to the students, staff, and family members who had gathered together for the Emmett J. Conrad High School graduation last Saturday. But a video, which has now gone viral, appears to tell another story. Just after Rooha Haghar mentions Martin, Rice, “and all the other children who became victims of injustice,” Asmerom gestures toward his throat and gives a thumbs up to someone in the audience. A moment later, her mic goes dead. The 19-year-old top student had intended to include their names in earlier drafts of the speech, and said she got pushback early on. In a statement she posted on Twitter, Haghar said a teacher told her mentioning Trayvon’s and Tamir’s names “will incite anger towards white people, a group which according to him experience high levels of discrimination in America.” Hi-ho-psycho-Silver, massage, massage, massage. Whisper was the name of my hunting dog. After receiving my first rifle at 9 she and I loved to explore the forest and meadows together. When I shot a squirrel, she would retrieve it and hover eagerly, waiting for me to toss her the heart as I skinned and cleaned it in the running brook, then secured its little body onto sticks to hold over a fire for lunch. I now refer to Whisper as my Lord of the Flies companion and she would be very sad if she were alive today to find that I no longer kill and eat squirrels in the forest. I drew a rough sketch of her and filled in the drawing with black ink. Then I made a kite out of sticks and paper, gluing the sketch to the front. I made notes on another piece of paper and glued it to the back of the kite, or rather the side that takes the wind. That evening I cut her silhouette from the kite and placed it under my pillow. My dreams were beguiling. They led me to a relaxing spot. Then I realized that I was resting right where I had buried her. With

 

            the harps the harps

            standing in fields

            standing

 

            [...]

 

            somewhere else the sound

            sound

            will arrive

            light from a star

 

This ‘light-tone’ is annotated by Joris thus: “Light-tone” and “light-pitch” are literal translations of Lichton, if one considers the word as a Celanian composite. The German word, however, is also a German word in filmography, where it refers to the process of “sound-on-film” in which sound is inscribed as variations of light values. Whilst this is helpful and intriguing, I’m more in favour of a gesture towards these tall thoughts trying in vain to lighten the ‘grayblack wastes.’ Which is to say that after the idea of the Flood had receded, a rabbit rested within swaying clover and bellflowers, saying his prayers to a rainbow spied through a spider’s web. Oh what precious stones sunk out of sight, what flowers suddenly stared. On the dirty main drag it was back to business; ships went to sea, piled on the water like a postcard. Blood flowed — at Bluebeard’s, in slaughterhouses, in circuses —

 

            the sad King     whose life

            is running out of time   turns pale

                   & swiftly goes into his chambers.

            & as soon as he entered   he saw this:

            inside there was a mighty tiger

            horrent    gnawing his yellow teeth

            armed as if it were a rhinoceros     any boulder

            is milder than this monster’s skin.

            It was Astaroth. It said:

            Stop right there, you wimp!       Where are you going? (shouts)

                        Get out of your house! Out of my land!

 

But you know about trees. You know about their different kinds of wood and growth rings. You know about trees. It was in Calcutta (or Kolkata) where the galleon reached port. At that time, Granada had 200 inhabitants. And in Aldana’s house, there was an astrolabe, a compass, and rolls of maps stained by seawater, and the first clock brought from Germany. Ah! “She had the biggest and brightest eyes a man could ever see!” I spent the whole of the next day sitting on the floor of the hall, and at night I was taken to a cell which measured approximately 4x6 feet. Half of it was taken up by a bed made of cement, and there were four other women in it. We could hear the screams of other prisoners being interrogated. Do not look for Elena any more, her sufferings are over, God rest her soul. He explained the technical side of this kind of operation, which he described as in white or in black according to whether the people carrying it out were in uniform. Off Maile, I saw a gate beside the road near a forest preserve. The gate was locked; sturdy metal fencing enclosed an area we assume to be free of pigs. A sign hung from the tree beside the gate. It had bleached completely white. In the film, a young man takes a vow of silence for one full year. He pushes his tent and his water in front of him, down highways and over bridges using three-wheeled device. Which is to say that the ferns and the birds cleanse, though they do not purify. Purity is violence. We make the bed we sleep in, then oblige the others to watch. But if you only know how to look for it, you can add one more line onto the page, making a stool from two embracing tree trunks. The chimpanzee will not recognize them both, but knows what to do with them each. The moon is part of Mars. There are raptured seabird populations, islands infested with cannibal snakes, poisonous supertoad invasions, sea stars tearing apart their own flesh, birds pecking out the brains of other birds. But’s the “85% true” that initially grabs your attention. Apparently, the number eighty-five is arbitrary, or at least it doesn’t appear to be based on an exact formula; rather, Gallagher uses it as a reference point within a mélange which oozes together and obscures its components. In other words, we, as readers, are never real or true, only hypothetical, but our effects on the other actually do occur. During a discussion in which the head scientist of the facility confesses his disdain for a Diane Ackerman article that portrays the scrub jay as friendly and loveable, he reveals personal feelings about the project: [...] the birds aren’t nice, they are stupid and mean unless you have Planters peanuts on you. Perhaps the most chilling part of the book occurs in the final section, which functions as a sort of epilogue. Formatted as an archival finding aid, it documents part of the collection at “Sepulcher Headquarters” at an undisclosed time in the future, although we know from the first artifact that it’s at least the year 3032. We see beached human corpses covered in the bite marks of an unknown creature, people gulping down drug-infested drinking water, giant blood-sucking sea lice, I mean, William James claims said that for a ten year old, fourteen minutes cannot pass, because first it is necessary for seven to pass, and before that, three and a half, and before that, one and a quarter, and so on, until we see the sand flipping into the air up on the high edge of a dune, a barnacle-covered hundred year old turtle come to lay her eggs, she has done this every year, it takes about an hour, the ten year old is transfixed, encased in the amber of his turtle-friendly infrared flashlight, speaking of which, of being ten, the first time I was frisked by police, it was alongside my younger brother. I was an especially thin wrist’d nine. He was seven. At nine years old, under duress and with an interrupted sugar high, the mapping of my repression was violent and ceremonial; especially ceremonial was my mandate not to fold to these occupying troops. I remember their military-aided body language. I wonder if it is a rite of passage for a police officer to detain a non-white child. The in-dark answered with wind. All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses scowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute. A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges. Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered. He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined. The leaves winked. Every day of the tour ended in the same way: with an Operational Security (OPSEC) meeting. At these meetings members of the media were made to show public affairs (PA) representatives our photos, audio recordings, videos, and “other artistic renderings,” in case any of them constituted what is referred to as Operational Protected Information. During the review, imagery and audio that are determined to be in violation rules will be deleted or cropped to achieve compliance. For photographs, the NMR may request ten (10) images per person per day be cropped to meet security requirements. Cropping is defined as cutting off the parts of a digital photograph deemed to be in violation. Blurring, smudging, fading, superimposing a black line or spot over certain parts of a photograph, or any other digital manipulation is not a substitution for cropping. After my tour of the library was complete, I asked the PA representative if I could have access to the entire catalog of items housed in the Detainee Library. I recall him saying that no one had ever asked for this before. I remember that he left briefly to call his superior about my request, and that when he returned, he informed me that I’d have my answer by the end of the day. The Eurasian variety was valued for its fur, but far more importantly for the purported medicinal powers of the odoriferous secretions of its anal sac. These had evolved for the purpose of territorial scent-marking, but an unanticipated consequence (for in truth evolution anticipates nothing and has no purposes) was to mark the beaver out too well in turn, to place it within the sights and olfactions of human hunters, who likely supposed anything that smells that pungent must have some remarkable powers. Castoreum was used as an abortifacient and an anti-inflammatory, against headaches and fevers, and as an ingredient in antidotes against poison. Johannes Marius relates in his Castorologia of 1685 that “a Jew” once told him of the memory-enhancing powers of the secretions of beavers. Marius also reports that it cures bad breath, paralysis, gout, and sciatica, among many other conditions. It bears repetition: the secretion in question comes from a specialized sac located on the perineum, near the anus, which biologically speaking is something quite distinct from the testicles. Yet at least into the late middle ages, knowledge of beaver anatomy among hunters, merchants, and naturalists remained, shall we say, uh, imprecise. Etymology does not support the obvious suggestion that castor and castrate share a common origin (the Greek kastor comes from a Hebrew root for “musk”, while castration has an Indo-European pedigree, going back to an ancient verb meaning “to cut”). But one could easily be forgiven for growing attached to this spurious word history, for to do so would be to follow the great Isidore of Seville. In his 7th-century Etymologies, the Spanish polymath maintained, wrongly as usual, but no less wonderfully for that, that “castor comes from castrate. Indeed their testicles are included in the composition of medicines. What is more, when they sense the presence of the hunter, they castrate themselves and cut off their virility with their teeth.” Which makes them good Christians, in a sense. To quote Pierre de Beauvais, who writes about 600 years after Isidore, “The man who wishes to observe the commandments of God and to live in purity, should tear away his testicles, that is to say all of his vices, and throw what was formerly his into the face of the hunter, that is to say the Devil, who pursues him unceasingly.” Guillaume de Normandie and several other northern French bestiary authors give similar accounts.[ Richard de Fournival distinguishes himself around the same time by offering a precious alternative version of the beaver’s radical gesture: not as an expression of Christian virtue, but as a lesson in romantic love, tearing away the source of his passion the way a lover might tear out his enflamed heart to deliver it to his beloved. Fournival’s version may be read as an echo, in idealized form, of an earlier tale of saintly castration, and indeed one grounded in historical fact: the gelding of Abelard. But surely the most telling change, as we move across the ocean and from one species of Castor to another, lies in the new attention to and appreciation of dam construction, as the outward sign of the beaver’s singular greatness. Nowhere is this clearer than in Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France of 1744, which collects letters and journal entries from Québec from several previous years. In a letter to the Duchesse de Lesdiguières of March, 1721, Charlevoix writes that, “Here, Madame, is everything that the beavers might help to bring to this colony for [the improvement of] commerce: their industry, their planning, the concertedness and the subordination that we admire in them, their attention to outfitting themselves with comforts whose sweetness we did not previously know beasts to be capable of experiencing — all of this furnishes to man even better instruction than the ant, to whose example the Holy Scripture sends the lazy. They are, at least among quadrupeds, what the bees are among the flying insects. I have not heard it said by educated people that they have a king or a queen; nor is it true that, when they work in a group, there is a leader who commands, and who punishes the lazy ones. But by virtue of that instinct given to animals by Him whose providence governs them, each one knows what it should do, and does it all without confusion, without complication, and with an order that one cannot but admire.” When we move ahead to the middle of the 20th century, we find many of the themes that animated Charlevoix's writing on beavers still in place. In the 1950 Disney live-action documentary In Beaver Valley, the animal protagonist is still held up as the model of the hard worker. The beaver is contrasted with the otter, the otter as other, the “Gypsy” of nature, who is for its part, as an authoritative off-camera narrator tells us, “as frolicksome as beavers are industrious”. But if the beaver still works hard, the very idea of work has changed almost beyond recognition. It is no longer performed by settlers to secure their very survival, but by “citizens” of an established polity. The beaver “has no use for frivolity. Nor would he even pause to pass the time of day with a fellow worker ... He works the night shift too,” the narrator explains, as the camera cuts to a moonlit scene accompanied by a symphony of frogs and crickets. Charlevoix, sharing in the utopian vision that animated so many early settlers of the American continent, saw the beavers as primitive communists of sorts, working without compulsion in the absence of kings or queens, or even foremen, in harmony with a nature that would otherwise kill them. Mr. Disney, a decade or so before in Beaver Valley, had been busy busting unionization efforts of workers at Walt Disney Studios, smearing those involved as communists and traitors. For him, beavers do not work freely or in a way that flows naturally from their essence; rather, they work in “shifts”; as “solid citizens”, they do not ask why, or whether, things might be arranged any better. Je me souviens. I remember trying to burn down the Disneyland hotel when I was about 17, when they wouldn’t let me in ...

 

            so you walk out head to the park
            where the mist is practising the laying-on of hands
            open palms pressing downward
            — a kind of commission?

 

            in the lightbox of the café your phone glows

           

            tremella mesenterica

            it was by the gorse on the oak
            it seemed luminous almost floating

 

            shot from above & you’re pulled down
            oak bark fathoms deep drowned forest
            pale spikes blue-jewelled sea-gorse sea-holly
            vertiginous & at the centre rising towards you
            — sea plant? body part? — orange wings
            of new-hatched creature still sticky
            can’t unfold something surely born too soon

 

            you look it up

 

            fruit body appearing during rainy weather
            gelatinous orange-yellow surface lobed or convoluted
            dries into a thin film shrivelled mass
            capable of reviving after subsequent rain

 

            gut flower awful angel

 

            most frequently found on dead but attached
            and recently fallen branches

 

I remember Lew’s “Springtime in the Rockies: Lichen.” They can’t kill us all, as someone once said. “Lewie, you’re a goddam jewel.” OK.

 

            Tell me more about that.
            Can you be more specific?
            What have you tried to do about that?
            Have you tried to fix it?
            What has it cost you?
            How do you feel about that?

 

            Does the prospect have enough pain to qualify for the next step?

 

            There were three reports of an approaching sky intruder.

            And the intruder, dissipating, blew suddenly into a purple smoke.

 

            That’s when I explode

            half a dozen

            eggs

 

            in

            the

            microwave.

 

            The residue?

 

            A bit like a piece of crystal

            you’d stick in your armpit for luck.

 

Which is to say that, sensu stricto, utupë, and purpakana, refer to multitudinous entities, with their own personhood and intentionality that inhabit, mirror, and holographically constitute each being of the environment: humans and animals, plants, soils, bodies of water, rocks, and even tools. This multiplicity of inner images / beings can be perceived in visions and dreams; thus, these notions have a strong visual component. Sensu lato, they also denote shadows, scintillations, reflections, photographs, and TV images. Nonetheless, purpakana and utupë also can have aural, tactile, proprioceptive, and odorous expressions ... Davi Kopenawa describes a particular kind of utupë denominated xapiri pë. Xapiri are the owners and protectors of wildlife, they predate upon the predators of their protégées and upon the transgressors of their sacred sites. The differences between humans and animals are negligible compared to those between the former two and xapiri. They are the utupë not of modern animals but of their ancestors. Xapiri are tiny like sparkling specks of dust, yet they are magnificent luminous beings painted in bright red colors, black enveloping patterned designs, and wonderfully adorned with bright white shining headdresses, colorful armbands, and waist plumes. Xapiri replicate like mirror images, thereby escaping death ...

[Note: Sources: MC Hyland, “The End”, at Posit 17, “The End”, at Conduit 28; Alan Bernheimer, “Ipsatude”, at Across the Margin, 16 Sept 015; blurb for Anne Boyer, Money City Sick as Fuck, at Materials, May 019; JBR; blurb for Lisa Jeschke, Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women, at Materials, Apr 018; Lisa Jeschke, “Operation Vanitas Eikonal Heimat Horror Poem”, and Danny Hayward, quoted in Hayward’s “World History’s Teenage Diaries”, at Google Docs; JBR, quoting Frank Stella; blurbs for Shintaro Sato, Geography, Keizo Kitajima, Untitled Records Vol. 16, Wang Juyan, Uncharted+, Kan Sawa, heavens of light, planet of solitude, in shashasha Web Store, “NEWSLETTER｜7 June 2019”, email rec’d 7 Jun 019, approx. 12:27am PDT; JBR; Julia Carrie Wong, “Zuckerberg’s Hawaii estate: battle's latest turn ‘devastates’ local family”, at The Guardian, 6 Jun 019; JBR; Pamela Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Pamela Des Barres Shrine”, at DC’s, 4 Jun 019, JBR, “Autopoiesis LXXI”, at ZS, 14 Nov 07 (see ZS for source notes), “FCF 97,” at ZS, 13 Sept 09 (see ZS for source notes); Juliet Escoria, Juliet the Maniac, Georges Perec, Gary Indiana, Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988 (ed. Bruce Hainley), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “4 books I read recently & loved: Niven Govinden This Brutal House, Juliet Escoria Juliet the Maniac, Michael Crowe An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in GTA Online, Gary Indiana Vile Days”, at DC’s, 3 Jun 019; JBR; Anne Branigan, “Dallas High School Cuts Off Valedictorian’s Mic After She Mentions Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice in Graduation Speech”, at The Root, 7 Jun 019; JBR; CA Conrad, “Silhouette of Whisper: (SOMA)TIC POETRY RITUAL FOR ‘BATHE THE DOOR...’”, at Bodega 82; JBR; WS Merwin, “The Silence Before the Harvest”, quoted in Jackie Wang, “Somewhere Else the Sound”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 30 May 019; John Armstrong, “Attending to Pierre Joris on Celan’s Threadsuns”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 6 Jun 019; JBR; Arthur Rimbaud, “After the Flood” (tr. Wyatt Mason), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 29 May 019; Arias de Villalobos, “from Mercury” (tr. Javier Taboada); Pablo Antonio Cuadra, “The Mango Tree” (trs. Greg Simon and Steven F. White); National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, “from Never Again” (Tr. Writers and Scholars International Ltd, publishers of Index on Censorship); Susan M Schultz, “MAGA and the blank sign”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 7 Jun 019; Donald J Trump, tweet, 7 Jun 019; Andy Martrich, “Glimpsing the new normal: On Kristen Gallagher’s ‘85% True/Minor Ecologies’”, at Jacket2, 31 May 019; JBR; Kristen Gallagher, “3 Pieces That Are At Least 85% Accurate”, at Fanzine, 25 Mar 016; JBR; Tongo Eisen-Martin, “Collateral White Skin”, at Harriet, 4 Jun 019; \Samuel R Delany, Dhalgren; Jordan Scott and Stephen Voyce, “FOIA request #SC 15–102-S: The detainee library”, at Jacket2, 31 May 019; Justin E. H. Smith, “In Castoria”, at Justin Erik Halldór Smith, 8 Jun 019; JBR; Helen Tookey, “Tremella mesenterica”, at Tentacular 3; JBR; Lew Welch; JBR; Marie Buck, “Pain Funnel”, at Brooklyn Poets, 22-28 Aug 016, “Food and Blood Face”, “Everyone Has Seven Selves”, “Blood-Soaked Tarot Deck”, at The Recluse 11; JBR; César E. Giraldo Herrera, “Shamanic Microscopy: Cellular Souls, Microbial Spirits”, in Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 29, Issue 1, Spring 2018, at AnthroSource, 4 Mar 018]

Japan’s deadly 2018 heatwave ‘could not have happened without climate change’

The record-breaking 2018 summer heatwave in Japan in which more than 1,000 people died “could not have happened without human-induced global warming”, a study finds.

And the extreme heat felt in Japan last summer could “become a usual situation” within the next few decades as temperatures continue to rise, the authors say.

The research is the latest in “attribution science”, a field that aims to quantify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, floods and droughts.

It follows analysis published in December which found that climate change made the UK 2018 summer heatwave up to 30 times more likely.

The study is “very interesting”, but requires “further confirmation” before its conclusions can be fully accepted, a leading attribution scientist tells Carbon Brief.

Red hot

Last year’s summer heatwave across many parts of the Northern Hemisphere made headlines worldwide. The heat broke temperature records from Belfast to Denver and drove wildfires in places such as Sweden, Greece and California.

In Japan, temperatures reached a record high of 41.1C in July. Early reports at the time suggested that dozens had died in the record-breaking weather. The Japanese government later reported that 1,032 people died during the month-long period.

The new study assesses the extent to which human-caused climate change could have boosted the odds of such a heatwave occuring. The results are published in Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere, a journal published by the Meteorological Society of Japan.

It also assesses the extent to which natural changes to the weather could have influenced the odds of such a heatwave.

At the time of the heatwave, Japan experienced a “two-tiered high-pressure system”. High-pressure systems move slowly over land, often causing persistent hot and dry conditions.

During the event, two high-pressure systems were stacked on top of each other in the troposphere, explains study lead author Dr Yukiko Imada, a senior researcher at the Japan Meteorological Agency. She tells Carbon Brief:

“A high-pressure system brings descending flows and raises the temperature. [Intense] sunshine also helps to raise the temperature. Last year, those two high pressure systems were stronger and expanded over Japan.”

Another world

To work out the extent to which global warming could have boosted the chances of such a heatwave, the authors used a climate model to compare the chances of the heatwave happening in today’s world to a hypothetical world without climate change.

To do this, the researchers produced two sets of simulations. The first set included many of the factors that can influence the climate, including human-driven greenhouse gases, volcanic eruptions and solar variability. The second set included all of these factors except for human-driven greenhouse gases.

The researchers then studied the simulations to see how often heatwaves on the same scale to that seen in 2018 occur in both the “real” world and the world without global warming.

They found that, in today’s world, a heatwave on the scale of that seen in 2018 has around a one-in-five chance of occuring. However, in a world without climate change, such a heatwave would have almost no chance of occuring, says Imada:

“Surprisingly, under the climate without global warming, the event probability reduced to almost zero. That is [to say], the last-year event could not have happened without global warming.”

The map below, which is taken from the study, gives a breakdown of the results at different points across Japan.

The map shows the difference in the number of extremely hot days expected in July in today’s world and a world without climate change across Japan. For example, red areas are found to experience up to eight more extremely hot days in July in today’s world than in a world without climate change.

The difference in the number of extremely hot days expected in July in today’s world and a world without climate change across Japan. Yellow indicates little to no difference in the number of hot days in today’s world and a world without climate change, while red indicates a difference of up to eight days. (The map also includes parts of eastern China, Russia and North and South Korea.) Source: Imada et al. (2019)

The map shows that global warming has caused “a pronounced increase in extremely hot days in the populated areas of Japan”, including Tokyo, the authors say in their research paper.

Warming’s fingerprint

The researchers also used statistical methods to study how the two-tiered high-pressure system could have influenced the odds of such a heatwave.

They find that the weather system at least doubled the chances of such extreme heat occuring.

The chart below, which is taken from the study, gives a picture of how both global warming and the two-tiered high-pressure system influenced the odds of such a heatwave.

The chart shows a range of probability curves (also known as PDFs). The blue curve shows the probability of such a heatwave in the “non-warming” world – a world without human-driven climate change – while the red curve shows the probability in a world with climate change.

In addition to this, the pink curve shows the probability in today’s world when the chance of a two-tiered high-pressure system is also included, while the orange curve shows the probability when the weather system is not included. The black line shows the actual data from 2018.

Probability curves (PDFs) of the chances of a heatwave on the same scale to that seen in Japan in 2018 in a world without global warming (blue), a world with global warming (red), a world with global warming and “two-tiered high-pressure systems” (pink) and a world with global warming and without two-tiered high-pressure systems. The black line shows the actual data from 2018. Source: Imada et al. (2019)

The chart shows that, in today’s world, such a heatwave has around a one-in-five (19.9%) chance of happening. This rises to around a one-in-four chance (24.6%) when the chances of a two-tiered high-pressure weather system are also factored in.

The chances of such a heatwave happening a world without global warming are so small as to be almost negligible, the chart shows.

The authors also made projections for the future. They find that if global warming is limited to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement – the average area in Japan could experience around 3.6 extremely hot July days per year. (Japan’s average area currently experiences 2.7 hot July days per year.)

If warming reaches 2C, the number of extremely hot July days per year could rise to 4.8, the authors add.

‘Preliminary result’

The findings are the “latest in a series of studies” that show that “some temperature extremes at country level would be essentially impossible were it not for the effects of human-induced climate change”, says Prof Peter Stott, a leading attribution scientist from the Met Office Hadley Centre, who was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief:

“Their conclusion that the heatwave event ‘would never have happened without anthropogenic global warming’ does depend heavily on the reliability of the model they use. In particular, it depends on the mean human-induced temperature change for Japan that they calculate from the model – which they estimate to be almost 2C.

“The reliability of the model is little discussed in the paper so it is hard to know whether the model is accurately representing temperature changes and variability in Japan. For that reason, I would say that this is a very interesting preliminary result that needs further confirmation before we could be confident that such extreme temperatures really would be impossible without climate change.”

It may be too soon to conclude that such a heatwave would not have occurred without climate change, but the study’s results do fit well with the global picture of how climate change is influencing heatwaves, adds Prof Sonia Seneviratne, a researcher of climate extremes from ETH Zurich. She tells Carbon Brief:

“Because the results are based on a single model and on a finite, but large, number of simulations, we cannot fully exclude at the moment that a single realisation with a different model could display such extreme conditions in Japan under pre-industrial climate conditions.

“But this seems extremely unlikely given the large temperature anomalies that were observed in the country – and given the very large and demonstrated effects of increasing CO2 in amplifying temperature extremes across the world. This is even less likely when considering the event in the context of all the heatwaves that occurred in the northern hemisphere during that summer.”

 

Imada, Y. et al. (2019) The July 2018 high temperature event in Japan could not have happened without human-induced global warming, Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere, doi:10.2151/sola.15A-002

Department of Energy Authorizes Additional LNG Exports from Freeport LNG

MAY 28, 2019

 

Home » Department of Energy Authorizes Additional LNG Exports from Freeport LNG

Advances commitment to U.S. jobs, economic growth, clean energy

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) advanced its commitment to promoting clean energy, job creation, and economic growth by approving additional exports of domestically produced natural gas from the Freeport LNG Terminal located on Quintana Island, Texas. The announcement was made at the Tenth Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM10) in Vancouver, Canada where DOE is highlighting its efforts to advance clean energy. The expansion of the Freeport LNG facility is estimated to support up to 3,000 engineering and construction jobs and hundreds of indirect jobs associated with the project.

“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy. Further, more exports of U.S. LNG to the world means more U.S. jobs and more domestic economic growth and cleaner air here at home and around the globe,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes, who highlighted the approval at the Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver, Canada. “There’s no doubt today’s announcement furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting energy security and diversity worldwide.”

“Approval of additional LNG exports from Freeport LNG furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting American energy, American jobs, and the American economy. Further, increased supplies of U.S. natural gas on the world market are critical to advancing clean energy and the energy security of our allies around the globe. With the U.S. in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world,” said Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg, who signed the export order and was also in attendance at the Clean Energy Ministerial.

Under the order signed today, Freeport LNG Expansion, L.P. and FLNG Liquefaction 4, LLC (together, FLEX4) have authority to export up to 0.72 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas as LNG from a fourth liquefaction train (Train 4) to be built at the Freeport LNG Terminal.  FLEX4 is authorized to export this LNG to any country that does not have a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States, and with which trade is not prohibited under U.S. law or policy. The U.S. Government does not issue LNG licenses to purchasers of LNG but rather issues export authorizations to exporters of LNG, such as Freeport LNG. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) authorized FLEX4 to site, construct, and operate Train 4 on May 17, 2019.

Prior to today’s announcement, Freeport LNG Expansion, L.P. and other Freeport entities had received approval to export LNG from the first three liquefaction trains at the Terminal. The first liquefaction train is expected to begin commercial exports later this year. Increased natural gas production in the United States continues to enhance global energy security while stimulating domestic economic development and job creation.  U.S. LNG export capacity, currently at 5 billion cubic feet per day, is set to double by the end of 2020.  The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects a continued increase in domestic natural gas production, with an average dry natural gas production rate of 90.3 Bcf/d in 2019 and 92.2 Bcf/d in 2020, both new records.

###

News Media Contact: (202) 586-4940

[JBR note: found at Energy.gov. I have highlighted two amazingly amazing bits of text. Hat tip K]

Posted at 06:46 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1)

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28.05.2019

With the Noose Around My Neck 132

But still. My own encounter with Isou’s work came near its end (he died in 2007). In 2001 he wrote a massive, 1400-page synthesis of his thought and method, called The Creative and the Innovative. In it he details how he invariably reads a classic work of philosophy, for instance, by Hegel: he scribbles furiously in the margins and indeed all over the pages with his critical annotations. Then, when he reaches the end, he takes apart the book’s spine, throws away any pages he has not written on, transcribes what he did write, and voila: he has written his own, new book. That is how, Isou says, one book, an inferior book by Hegel, begets a superior book by Isou: and that’s the theory of the creative and the innovative in an allegorical nutshell. “Iridescence is word we should use more often” she said. There is no skirting this approaching reality. With gentle tenderness she spelled out the dire scenario of death-in-life. Her poem, “The Round Spring” details the subtlety of interconnective holism:

 

            Mist is the semen of the mountains

 

            Where the streams are born

 

 

 

            Mist is the semen of the forest

 

            Where coolness is born

 

She talked about “the Guarani of the rain forest in Paraguay and Brazil [who] say that when the mist and the forest are gone, we will all be gone.” During the discussion that followed her reading she mentioned how, three times a day she practices the yogic corpse pose (savasana). Prophecy brings the past, present and future into a focused whole.

 

            Water

 

            and its thirst

 

            are one

 

Speaking of which, at the beginning of the world, the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who were both brother and sister, husband and wife, stood in the High Field of Heaven and used their jeweled spears to stir the primordial swirl of water below. As they pulled their spears back up, drops of salty water fell from them and congealed to became islands, and thus the earth was formed.

 

            The couple descended to earth and began to propagate.

 

            The couple had sex, and Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a malformed lump that was set adrift on the water.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an ugly island.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an island filled with beauty.

 

            And the couple kept having sex, and Izanami kept giving birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh and an eighth island.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the islands flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when the land was done, the couple had sex and Izanami gave birth to the gods.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of great matters.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rocky terrain.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess whose home stood upon a great rock.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of entrances.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of thatch.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rooves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of wind.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the sea.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of estuaries.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess of river mouths.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of foam upon the sea and the goddess of foam upon the waves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the watershed of heaven and the goddess of the watershed of earth.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the gods and goddesses flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when these gods were born, Izanami gave birth to the god of fire, who was so hot that he burned her vagina, which swelled and blistered and turned black from the flame.

 

            Izanami fell terribly ill, but even so, she continued to give birth.

 

            Izanami vomited. Her vomit became the god and goddess of metal ore.

 

            Izanami defecated. Her shit became the god and goddess of clay.

 

            Izanami pissed. Her urine became the god and goddess of gushing water and growth.

 

            Izanami was still creating when death claimed her, and she sank into Yomi, the dark realm that lies beyond the veil of this world.

 

            Distraught by the death of his beloved wife and sister, Izanagi wailed. You who’ve given birth to fourteen islands, to thirty-five gods and goddesses, how awful that you should die while this monstrous child lives!

 

            And after crawling around her corpse, pulling his hair, and gnashing his teeth, Izanagi buried her on top of a mountain between two provinces, so she could rest halfway between heaven and earth, between one land and another.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi withdrew his sword and sliced off the head of his own son, the fire god, who had caused his wife so much suffering.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi decided to do what no god nor mortal had ever done before. He decided to travel to Yomi to bring her back.

 

            Izanagi walked across provinces.

 

            Izanagi walked across rivers and streams.

 

            Izanagi walked across mountains and fields.

 

            Izanagi walked across plains covered in evergreens.

 

            Izanagi walked and walked until he reached the gently sloping road leading to Yomi.

 

            Izanagi walked down the gently sloping road, deeper and deeper, lower and lower, until he came to a great hall. There, he found the door that forms the boundary between this world and the next.

 

            From the opposite side of the door, Izanami heard her beloved husband and brother calling out to her.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Please come back. You haven’t finished giving birth.

 

            You’ve given birth to many islands, many gods, and many goddesses, but there’s still a lot to do. Come! Come back with me!

 

            Izanami appeared at the door and spoke.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! I can’t believe it! Here you are, asking me to return so I can give birth again. Seeing you, I remember!

 

            I remember what it feels to have sex and give birth!

 

            I remember what it is to give birth and give birth and give birth some more.

 

            But then her voice grew dark. You’re too late. I’ve eaten here in this dark land. The food from this place taints everyone and holds us captive.

 

            Izanagi became despondent.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Is that true? You can’t return?

 

            Izanami responded.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! Let me speak to the gods here, but whatever you do, don’t look at me in the meantime. Promise me.

 

            Izanagi promised.

 

            And upon hearing his vow, Izanami retreated beyond the door.

 

            Izanagi waited for Izanami to return.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi thought about the promise he had made.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi began to think his promise had been a mistake.

 

            What was she doing? Who was she with?

 

            Izanagi’s irritation and frustration grew until he could wait no more.

 

            Izanagi grew so impatient that he pulled out the great wooden comb he wore in his hair, lit it on fire, and opened the forbidden door.

 

            And there she was.

 

            Izanami.

 

            But not his Izanami.

 

            Her body had turned into a horrible, horrifying, heaving mass of maggots.

 

            And as if that wasn’t enough, eight gods of thunder were filling her, penetrating her, and taking what was left of her rotten, decomposing corpse.

 

            Her head was filled with great thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her breast was filled with fiery thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her belly was filled with black thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her vagina was filled with jagged thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her left hand was filled with young thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her right hand was filled with earth-striking thunderbolts. She moaned in growing ecstasy.

 

            Her left leg was filled with thunderbolts that would split most peoples’ eardrums. She moaned in growing, mounting ecstasy.

 

            Her right leg was filled with thunderbolts that would knock most people to the ground. She moaned in growing, mounting, overwhelming ecstasy.

 

            Thunderbolts rushed through her, filling her, penetrating her, taking her rotten, decomposing, moaning corpse.

 

            At the sight of the eight gods of thunder penetrating her, Izanagi recoiled in horror.

 

            You’re not my wife! You’re not my sister! You’re not the venerable ancestor of all of the islands, gods, and goddesses!

 

            Izanami shouted back.

 

            Don’t you recognize me, my husband and brother? I’m the same Izanami you’ve loved for all these years. I’m the same Izanami that had sex with you over and over again, who suffered the pains of childbirth to create all the islands, gods, and goddesses that populate the earth. Now that I’m taking what little love I can find here in this dark world, are you really going to abandon me?

 

            Izanagi grew frightened and fled.

 

            Izanami pursued him and shouted.

 

            I gave birth to the world! And still you shame me!

 

            You shame me before the gods of Yomi!

 

            You shame me before all of the islands and gods and goddesses I created!

 

            You shame me before the world I created!

 

            I curse you. I curse the islands I gave birth to!

 

            I curse the gods and mortals that walk their surface!

 

            I curse the world beneath your feet!

 

            As Izanagi fled, Izanami summoned several foul-looking women from the land of Yomi and sent them chasing after him.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled a grapevine that he had used to tie up his hair, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire vineyard. Some of the women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull the grapes from the vines to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you dirty, dirty, old, wrinkled ...!

 

            Your birthing days are over!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’ll never give birth again even if you try!

 

            All you’ll ever do is bleed!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled the bamboo comb that held the bundles of hair by his temples in place, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire grove of bamboo. Some of the foul-looking women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull up the bamboo shoots to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you foul-smelling ...!

 

            Your breath stinks!

 

            Your spit stinks!

 

            Your blood stinks!

 

            Your hair stinks!

 

            Your vagina stinks!

 

            Everything about you stinks!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women. This time, however, she was joined by her eight partners — the gods of thunder — and their armies.

 

            As Izanagi fled up the slope from Yomi, he grabbed three peaches from the trees growing there. Placing his faith in this fruit, known since the beginning of the time to ward off demons, Izanagi threw them, shouting at Izanami the whole time.

 

            Your hair has fallen out!

 

            Your teeth have fallen out!

 

            Your breasts are shriveled up!

 

            Your vagina is so loose it’s a wonder your uterus doesn’t fall right out!

 

            The peaches embedded themselves in her rotting corpse. All of the other gods and armies ran away except for Izanami. But still she continued to pursue him.

 

            Izanami grew closer.

 

            Izanami grew closer and closer.

 

            Izanami grew so close that Izanagi could smell the stench of her rotten flesh, the stench of her breath, the stench of her hair, the stench of her spit, the stench of her blood, the stench of her hair, and most of all, the stench of her vagina.

 

            Not knowing what else to do, he rolled a giant boulder to block the path out of Yomi into the mortal world. The boulder was so large that not even one thousand of the strongest men could possibly move it. In fact, the boulder is so large that it still sits there today, in exactly the same place between the two realms of existence.

 

            From the opposite sides of the boulder, the two shouted at one another.

 

            Izanagi shouted to Izanami, your beauty is gone!

 

            You’re nothing but a horrifying corpse!

 

            You’re nothing but rotten flesh!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’re of no use to me or the world any longer!

 

            Izanami shouted back at Izanagi, who are you to talk?

 

            Your cock is useless!

 

            Your cock won’t stand up!

 

            Your cock is the most pathetic, shriveled up thing in the world!

 

            Your cock will never produce anything ever again!

 

            Your cock has lost all its procreative power!

 

            Your cock is useless to me!

 

            Izanagi recoiled. Was this really happening?

 

            Izanami continued to shout.

 

            Your chest is the flattest one in the world!

 

            Your beard is the patchiest one in the world!

 

            Your eyes are the yellowest, cloudiest ones in the world!

 

            Your mouth is the most foul-smelling one in the world!

 

            Your cock is the most shriveled, miniscule, miserable, and powerless one in the world!

 

            Your cock will never create a thing! Ever!

 

            I know how to make you pay.

 

            Every day, I’ll reach from out from beyond the grave and strangle one thousand miserable mortals from your land.

 

            I’ll keep this up until all mortals have perished at my hands.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            Horrified, Izanagi responded in the only way he could think of.

 

            You say that every day, you’ll reach out and strangle one thousand mortals.

 

            Well then, I’ll take on your sex.

 

            Every day, I’ll give birth to one and a half thousand people.

 

            I’ll keep this up until mortals spread to the ends of the earth you’ve created.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            And with this, Izanagi left the boulder at the boundary between worlds and walked to a stream to purify himself.

 

            And so it began.

 

            This is the reason that every day, a large number of mortals die.

 

            And this is the reason that every day, an even larger number of mortals is born into the world to replace them.

 

            Just as Izanagi had predicted, mortals continued to be born.

 

            And just as Izanagi had predicted, those mortals spread to the very ends of the earth.

 

This explains a lot. For instance, why the US government is moving ahead with a plan to strafe Midway Atoll with poison aimed at eradicating mice that are on a deadly rampage through one of the world’s most important seabird sites. The three low-lying islands, fringing coral reefs and lagoons that make up the Atoll refuge, located about 1,200 miles north-west of Honolulu, cover an area only slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park but are a crucial nesting area for around 3 million birds, including albatrosses and terns. Over 70% of the world’s Laysan albatrosses are found on Midway including Wisdom, a 68-year-old believed to be the world’s oldest wild bird. This year Wisdom hatched her 37^th chick. Apparently, mice inadvertently introduced to Midway are slowly eating the birds, bite by bite, not killing them outright and eating them, but nibbling them to death while they’re alive. The plan has been approved due to the understanding that the mice, but not the birds, will be attracted to the bait. Just in case, tho, they’re planning to move the birds to a different island. Speaking of which, Theresa May just resigned. Boris Johnson is next up, apparently. And no, there’s no punchline. But it gets even funnier. Take Trump and Pelosi. He calls her crazy, she says talk about crazy, we need to do an intervention, the poor guy needs to take some time away from all the stress and strain. So someone posts a video of her, slowing it down so her words are slurred and she sounds fucked up on something. Facebook refuses to remove it. Again, no punchline. So last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017. Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble, dodging between landmines, for bits of steel and plastic they can exchange for food. Maybe that’s the punchline. Forget about punchlines. “CITIZEN ASSISTANCE • 4:14 a.m. — A man shovelling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire. Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.”

In other words,

 

            Doing is highly thought of and frequently abandoned

            as at a bus stop beside a stunted gingko, and time is tossed

            a laundry pile large as the crown of a tree

            or the gravid animal of Pythagoras, and every mathematician dies

            while runnels vacillate or do nothing astrophysically speaking.

           

            I propose too that there are many things

            with their capacity to collide or combine with other things

            in the vicinity (that gravitational field of monsters)—

            and budding dust small flies:

            an idiom like Kierkegaard on Halloween.

 

            It’s lively you might say

            a color that doesn’t

            make sense it’s so real that we think

            riot of genes dashing madly

            in broad daylight toward burial mounds and forests

 

            arms of the sea.

            I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle

            with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her,

            experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing

            them on a loquat leaf,

 

            Cross the silver mesh path there.

            I have a necklace of bloody teeth for this cure.

            Crickets sing too.

             Do not remember me, unreal lord.

             The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins.

 

            In the park, the volunteer fire department uses the toddlers’ climbing

            structure to practice blindfold climbing maneuvers.

            We lifted shot glasses to them filled with salmon fat.

          We’d been eating tacos and falafels filled with confetti,

         shredded newspapers. Headlines blackened our teeth,  

 

            black ozonal mirrors

            where general slaughter is reflected

            where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation,  

            by stunted mangrove withdrawal,

            by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees,

 

so yes, the experiment consists of this entangled state being shared between experimenters, each of whom has the ability to measure either with respect to the basis or . We see that if they each measure with respect to , then they never see the outcome . If one measures with respect to and the other , they never see the outcomes . However, sometimes they see the outcome when measuring with respect to , since this leads us to the paradox: having the outcome we conclude that if one of the experimenters has measured with respect to the basis instead, the outcome must have been or , since and are impossible. But then, if they had all measured with respect to the basis, by locality the result must have been , which is also impossible, yes, once upon a nimbus, I arose out of a wireless wiki-wrinkle in the vast fabric of the cloud-garden of the mezzopolis, where synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy, epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the cloudy fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology: forget me, forget-me-not, each muse advised. (Forget we did, however. Or at least, some of us forgot, alongside our data points.) The ninemuse junta migrated their labyrinths onto grassroots clouds of lesser capacity. Nanoseconds later, congestive network failure occurred. Global revenue vaporized. Forecasters murmured ominously, caveat venditor, let the seller beware. The junta’s doomed sovereignty was foreshadowed, however, by the mutiny of our programmed bots, those personified shapeshifters of disembodied code, and those rogues who accused the junta of dataphobia and dysgraphia: dear reader, in my humble opinion, a null hypothesis with a p-value of less than 0.05. Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding, seeking jellyfish connectivity. Now I wax nostalgic. Now the ocean bleeds silver as antique circuitry under a fleet of stratocumulus at noon ... built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par — sons of the man who developed Tiger Balm — bought in 1988 by the Singapore Tourism Board, Haw Par Villa Dragon World was restored by 1994. But the high entrance fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred losses. Entry was free four years later. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman. But the highlights of the park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long Chinese dragon but that fell apart, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. Tableaus of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail. See spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity by stone mallets. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man. Watch a demon fling a young girl into a hill of knives. Oh, and here’s a blunt metal rod jamming into a woman’s very large, fleshy heart. And check this out: an executioner pulling tiny intestines out of a bro tied to a pole. Anyway, and unsurprisingly, now that Singapore is a thriving global metropole, dripping with capital, no one goes to Haw Par Villa anymore, and whole sections have been shut down. But, looking back, I suppose has nothing to do with what actually occurred. On the eastern sky, rhododactylos. It was primidi 21 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the thrift. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. Leyla Güven was on her 198th day of hunger strike in Turkey. Milkshakes overflowed on the streets of England, they had somehow become a weapon against Nigel Farage. The author of the Horrible Histories series opened his one-man-show at the local museum. A documentary aired in English: “As war rages in eastern Ukraine, Dima, a former leader of an ultra-right group, and Tanya, a self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist, make an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev.” Open letters addressed to Extinction Rebellion multiplied. Hundreds of Gilets Noirs occupied Charles De Gaulle airport, chanting, “Contre les déportations, et pour des papiers pour tous-tes!” İmam Şiş was on his 158th day of hunger strike in Wales. Zumba classes restarted at the local library. “We will not be selling milkshakes or ice-cream tonight,” the window of a McDonald’s noted. “This is due to a police request given recent events.” Facebook was awash with sentiments similar to, “If you thought Alabama’s abortion laws are bad, read up on Northern Ireland.” Lawyers were preparing to visit Öcalan for the second time in eight years. Why was no-one paying attention to the revolutionary Kurds? And so I left the “endless nights talking in tenement buildings” “cycling along dirt paths in the dark to Carbeth” “collective meetings lasting into the wee hours” “conversations about changing politics under broken streetlights and foliage and cigarette smoke” “mass texts about a raid or a deportation or a party or an arrest or a heartbreak” “waking up under skylights” “turning up for court support” “demos and counter-demos and counter-counter demos” “converging in Ibrox and Govan and Pollokshields and Partick” “J Hus and Hudson Mohawke and Kelela on loop” “proofing press releases” “more collective meetings” “moving tenement building every 6 months” — to live alone in a room in a house in a town in the furthest easterly outlier of England, at the edge of a street of a country that was not just a country or nation-state, but a nation-state that desired and resembled and announced itself as so; and was in turn recognized as one. A nation-state that supplied the body armour and helmets and helicopters and drones and missiles used to strike and shell that other country that is not a country, that is against the very idea of “a country,” and yet at times seems to resemble a country. A nation-state that put in place other nation-states; that consistently demonstrated economic and political interest in the building and demolishing and running of other nation-states and not-quite nation-states. A nation-state that was ecstatic to sell arms to a list of nation-states and not-quite nation-states which were in fact part of its own self-conceived list of “human rights abusers.” A nation-state that existed and was conceived as a nation-state based on the practice of conquest abroad and repression at home. I could see it all from the window — the Confederate flag hanging from a car boot, vacant amusement arcades lining the seafront, the cash-poor circus preparing for its next show, the sounds of kriolu and guinensi and n’golá and sãotomense drifting out from the cafes with their doors open all night, the last smokehouse closing, the freight ships out to sea, the seagulls fearlessly innovating new ways to find food, the industrial area less and less full of machinery and more and more occupied with artists and unlicensed boxing rings and foodbanks and makeshift spaces for prayer and raves, the anniversary of the Suffragettes burning down the pier, the B&Bs advertising colour TV, the rollercoaster test rides, the derelict high street, the stranded crew from the Malaviya Twenty stuck in the port — growing increasingly skilled at table tennis in their boredom. One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch. I stayed indoors through it all — in a single room of an old vicarage turned B&B turned industrial cannabis-growing operation turned raided-by-the-cops turned derelict turned into my lodging arrangements. Have you seen Styx? The opening looks like a wildlife movie. Barbary macaque, who live on Gibraltar, clamber around an urban environment. The space is the all the island’s human inhabitants share with these other primates. This sequence ends. Now it’s late at night; a high-speed car chase causes a crash. Rescue services appear in an instant. Rike, the movie’s protagonist, is one of the paramedics. Soon she takes her sailboat on a voyage to Ascension Island. In a weightless passage of cinema she is watched in action heaving provisions on board and trimming the sails. The camera adopts seemingly impossible viewpoints, perched on the sea and confined in the claustrophobic cabin. Isolation underscores Rike’s self-sufficiency. But a scene is which she uses the radio to chat with the captain on a passing cargo ship, suggests that the ocean is wide but not empty, and her determined solitude will be interrupted. A storm is the harbinger of change. In the following calm, Rike finds she is close to another vessel. The ungainly shape is a fishing boat, sinking, overloaded with would-be emigrants, waving in distress. Trying to reach her boat, several jump into the sea. Only one boy, Kingsley, has the strength to swim to her yacht. She struggles to get him on board. He is unconscious. Her boat is too tiny to attempt to rescue them all, so she uses the radio again, this time to call for aid. She assumes that her appeal will promote immediate action. As a paramedic, she imagines the emergency support services to be available to all. In her understanding, everything — from the coast guard, to the sophisticated first aid equipment she carries — belongs within systems obliged to preserve life. But no. As I attempted to articulate my thoughts from English to Korean, I soon realized that there was no equivalent term for succinctly translating the word “blob.” This moment of uh uh uh uh uh resulted in me making a ridiculous face while waving my arms like they were the wings of a demented bird. In this context, a blob operates as a vehicle for heightening awareness towards intuitive and sensible meaning-making activities and facilitates the process of perceptual reconfiguration for alternative experiences to be accounted for. In other words,

 

            A blob is a translucent black box

[Note: Sources: JBR; Adrian Martin, introduction to Isidore Isou, Treatise On Venom & Eternity, at SPD; Cecilia Vicuña, and Brenda Iijima, quoted in Iijima’s “Telluric Guerilla Visions and Effervescence: Will Alexander and Cecilia Vicuña”, at Entropy, 20 Feb 019; JBR; Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles: ‘Birthing the World,’ from The Kojiki”, at Jacket2, 21 May 019; JBR; Oliver Milman, “US to strafe crucial nesting area for 3m birds with poison to eradicate mice”, at Guardian, 24 May 019; JBR; Kate Allen, “Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not ‘precision bombing’”, at Guardian, 23 May 019; JBR; report in Amherst Bulletin, quoted by Aaron Schuman, in Ng Hui Hsien, “Aaron Schuman / SLANT / An interview with Aaron Schuman”, at Photomonitor, April 019 (re Schuman’s book Slant); image: Aaron Schuman, in Diane Smythm “Seeing leafy New England askew in Aaron Schuman’s Slant”, at British Journal of Photography, 19 Mar 2019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “Ten Remarkable Interpretations”, at The Spectacle 3; Nicole Brossard, “It’s Lively”, “Softlinks 3” (trs. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure), in Nicole Brossard: Selections; Michael Palmer, “Sun”, at Poets.org; Alice Notley, In the Pines; Ron Silliman, “You”, in The Alphabet; Nathaniel Mackey, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 77”, at The Nation, 10 Dec 07; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Fed Moten, “come on, get it!”, at The New Inquiry, 19 Feb 018 (“with Thom Donovan, Malik Gaines, Ethan Philbrick, Wikipedia and the Online Etymology Dictionary”); Karen An-hwei Lee, The Maze of Transparencies, at SPD; Dennis Cooper, collaged from various unnamed sources, quoted in his “You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa”, DC’s, 27 May 019; JBR; Lotte L.S., “It Is Almost That”, at Poetry Foundation, 27 May 019 (“A note on the title: ‘It is Almost That’ is borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, composed of faltering phrases projected onto black-and-white slides; ‘the humming state of the not-quite this and not-quite that ... what familiar taxonomies cannot order.’”); JBR; Andrew Stooke, “In Encountering a Sinking Migrant Ship, a Pilot Confronts the Edges of her Civilization”, at Hyperallergic, 27 May 019; Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices]

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27.05.2019

You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa (reposted from DC's)

Haw Par Villa is a Chinese mythology theme park in Singapore with more than 1,000 statues and dioramas glorifying Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian folklore. Built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par – famous for selling the popular medicinal paste Tiger Balm – older locals look back fondly at a place where parents would bring children for an education in morality, complete with bloody visual aids.

‘In 1988, the Singapore Tourism Board took charge of the Tiger Balm Gardens and renamed it “Haw Par Villa Dragon World”. The Haw Par in the park’s name is based on the Aw brothers’ personal names—Haw and Par, which literally mean “tiger” and “leopard” respectively. The dioramas and statues were restored, while plays, acrobatic displays and puppet shows were organised and held there. The management imposed entrance fees but the high fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred a loss of S$31.5 million over 10 years. The park management made a profit during its first year of operations after renovations in 1994, broke even in 1995, but started incurring losses over the next three years and was forced to provide free entry in 1998.

‘Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. In its glory days, this avant guard theme park was an iconic symbol in Singapore, and considered a must see by locals and foreigners alike. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.

‘But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long trail of a Chinese dragon but the dragon has been demolished, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.

‘However, Haw Par Villa is facing an afterlife of its own. As the country of Singapore developed, and became almost futuristic in it’s modern appearance, the thousands of dated figurines that make up this park began to lose their luster along with much of their original appeal. Some of the areas of Haw Par Villa have been shut down due to lack of preservation Hardly anyone goes there anymore, and closed sections of the park point to an uncertain future. For some it’s a refreshing antidote to the mall-culture, but it looks like mall culture is winning out over a day out in hell.’ — collaged

 

 

______
Gallery

Tours

Haw Par Villa Singapore: The last blooming lotus

Silent visit

It will all be demolished one day. The land is worth billions.

A walkthrough of the Ten Courts of Hell attraction at Haw Par Villa

 

___________________
Rebranding Haw Par Villa

Proposal #1
by Leonard Koh

This rebranding project aims to promote about Haw Par Villa through the creation of a new identity to create a new impression to people who have been there before and arouse the curiosity of those who have never heard or been there before. Other materials have been created to promote about the area and others have been created as keepsakes and a reason to return.

Logo

 

Corporate Stationary

 

Postcards (Sun Wu Kong)

 

Postcard (10 Courts of Hell)

 

Postcard (Laughing Buddha)

 

Direct Mailer

 

Calendar

 

Park Map

 

 

Proposal #2
by Chinwee

An extensive and different take on rebranding for Haw Par Villa. Targeting the youths for a change, this project aims to revive Haw Par Villa and also the traditional chinese values and cultures that comes with it.

Brand Identity

 

Park Map

 

Park Souvenirs

 

Posters

 

Brochure & Postcards

 

Outdoor advertising

 

Popup Brochure

 

Website

 

Direct Mailer

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23.05.2019

With the Noose Around My Neck 131

and thus those who aren’t there any more have already taken along immeasurably much of what those who were there did and resolved in memory of those who weren’t there immeasurably much is in possession of those who aren’t there and it will always grow more and more and since they have it in their possession and this possession is ever growing one can in regard to those who aren’t there speak of their memory of those who are there because those who aren’t there any more were once there not being there is something that is thought of while being there and being there is living off the possession which those what aren’t there are still accumulating in the name of those who aren’t there any more and are more because those who aren’t there anymore and are more have a name and we are there in their name, I swear it from head to toe from anus to navel, in the silver moonlight alongside the ships and the large buildings and the canals which cut into and through the city's innermost core the forest of masts the lines of beams and cordage crossing a thousand fold all in moonlight strange and magic at one corner but a glance into a brightly lit room where a hundred diligent hands were sewing sails, actually today everything is like yesterday except for the hallway where yesterday the bag kept surprising me today I am surprised that the bag is no longer there thus it would be more accurate to say that today everything is completely different from yesterday but then again not really either, I was privileged to meet him once in his offices at the South German Broadcasting Corporation in Stuttgart in the early Sixties, on a visit from London where I was working for the BBC and moonlighting as “Anton Hofman.” One-armed like Blaise Cendrars (the left “left,” as they say, on some dismal battlefield in 1942), tall, calm funny, and erudite, HH had (as he put it) “a lasting soft spot for the black banner of anarchy. My innermost conviction is anarcho-syndicalist. Never mind that I know it can never be realized, but that is where my secret love lies,”

 

            if I knew Greek I would converse with you in Greek

            but I don’t know any Greek

 

            when pressure mounts there is increased danger of everything bursting

            even though pressure can lead to nice things though maybe a little weird

 

            who loses steam gnaws bones

 

            the bird quite clearly flown to Idaho railroad embankment Thoreau

 

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon for a long time

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            it may well be we have lived under this moon for too long

            my language is a noise

 

            spontaneous activity reaches

            possible multiple signals also

            changing course surging over

           

            building blocks to clear six feet

            waves until that sort of engine

            isolates fish ancestors

            leaking blood into panic swirling held

            formed by

 

                        open holes in

            a single hop through tephra

            mutating profiles from spinning radii

 

That is the gesture I wish diligently to communicate for her to guzzle with memory’s long artifice and that is the transit during which the remembered syllables which are translated so erotic so political, all ten of them, learn the excellent culture of timeliness asleep or separated by distance the face moving across. So there are always at least two times in the work, and the decisions composing their intervals and nodes place the work in the everyday. May I call it “the city”? It is going along. It is the interval of “if” attended and extended into material choice. Besides panic, Pan invented panpipes. Will consumers hunger for lab-created fish? I don’t mean revitalized fish ancestors. They’re growing fish meat in vats these days. Not fish, just meat. To be 3-D printed. And for dessert? “Cultured plant cells were produced from lingonberry, cloudberry and stoneberry, and were found to have even higher nutritional value than fresh berries. The researchers, from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center, said the cultures were higher in protein and fiber, and were also rich in polyphenols and unsaturated fatty acids. The researchers claim the cultures taste like fresh fruits ...” ok,

 

            [in the original the mimeograph did not reproduce the following line]

 

1. we) was

            trying to fix the place up, (we) was

            to finish the procedure, it was

            an architectural question, a spirit / spit one

 

            I think the thing is built of prunes & glue. The Grand Combustion

            Carnival, Columbus the Cat Dancing in Flames, rocks

            fall apart and citizens wonder: If man is the greatest natural wonder,

            what? Time turns to that motionless minute

            “read in the back of the animal’s eye,” (misread?)

            (I am guessing misread)

                                                for $6.00 an hour.

 

So the place where I was born has no forests, and no tall trees grow there. That does not mean it is lacking in vegetation, for there are certain kinds of trees: rowan, cedar, alder, and willow ... But the tallest of these “trees” will reach no more than a few centimeters above the earth. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “a throw of the dice Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck be It that the abysm whitened displays furious ...” Abysm, I thought. But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist looking for a job. Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. So I reached out and he sent me this long list, including “WE ARE THE ASTEROID”, “TRIASSIC WEATHER AHEAD”, “THERE IS NO AWAY.” Then one day, in a traffic jam outside the Holland Tunnel, I came upon one of those traffic message trailer signs, glitching, glitching. It was like poems by Peter Inman or David Melnick were coming up on the screen. It made me very focused and present for some reason. “EFFICIENCY IS PETROSPEAK.” I took the photos from 40,000 feet up. The series was inspired by the Kanō school in Japan, which is famous for painting landscapes onto gold and silver leafed surfaces; it’s a school of painting that lasted for over 700 years. In my case, instead of applying paint by hand onto the surface, I’m printing the landscapes using a UV acrylic inkjet printer that I’ve adapted to become my paintbrush so to speak. In JAKOBSHAVN I what you’re seeing is glacial melange, the remnants of the calving process. Those who hold this view say that a chick peeps when it is cold and twitters when it finds a warm place as if it were a little machine, not because it actually wants to communicate that it feels distress or pleasure. Which is to say that she stayed up until five in the morning, writing about how “the crisis” isn’t over, about how “the crisis” isn’t actually the kind of “crisis” they are calling it, but “a crisis” of something completely different, something so deep in the trenches of crisis that we can barely recognize it as anything other than our lives. “To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes,” someone wrote. “Today — what a mocking word in this timeless cave,” someone wrote from an underground experiment on Day 156. To think about it is to be the sequined woman lying flat inside the magician’s box; to watch the saw come down, to watch its blade cut straight through the middle of you, to watch your hips fall out from underneath your ribs. Let us talk about it as though “it” ever existed. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. I was not in any position to distinguish one text from another — a movement toward the inside from a movement toward the outside. The texts became whole rooms, and the rooms became whole houses, and the houses became whole streets, and the streets became a yearning occupation of a city, not a country, but a city, in which lush syllogism invoked the need to seize this experience and let it become sentences. The texts became a form — the longest form, one which is still now occurring, ongoing, occurring, ongoing. The water dries up before the dark blue hyacinths are placed into the vase. Cuz in utopia they don’t got no rules and the president’s “criminality pure and simple” is reserved for politicians just like him. In utopia the monkey lies down with the rhinoceros and the ghosts haunt the ghosts leaving everyone else to fends for themself. In utopia, you lose the battles and you lose the war too but it bothers you less. In utopia no one tells nobody nothin’, but I gotta tell you this. In utopia the plans are ornament and expectations dissolve into whim. In utopia, here is a pivot. In utopia, love goes for the ride but eros’s at the wheel. In utopia, the words sing the songs while the singers listen. In utopia, 1 plus 2 does not equal 2 plus 1. In utopia, I and you is not the same as you and me. In utopia, all that is solid congeals, all that melts liquefies, all that is air vanishes into the late afternoon fog. I am about as capacious as the next guy. Mescal is my drink of choice this year. Section 3, quadrant 822.3856, on uneven tide warnings. However, available room is subject to prior sale. Ergo, there’s no Holocaust museum for Native people. Or one for peasants. Like any disfunction, if you don’t deal with your disfunction at home, it just gets worse. The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Daenerys and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Daenerys and her forces — even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm — are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her — the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior — eye eee, a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black. Again we will have heard music ... a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamps’ descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all. Or even half. Or even 150%, or even

 

            . .-^tvounnostrese

            :hool?

            do you know which      ge length

            a nice dick.       inbo*’

            h,h colorof ther

            did you know i have i

            and

            ; assure y°u’

            * ctes like?        isn’t serious,’    0 please you,

            do you know what it tastes       ^ thern, for art is jonijnciators, *st

            but now, look at me

            if we reveal the crime

            dear audience

            but now i was older a

            nrpewiththern’ ned denunc

            i’ta9ree a. .„,o are learnea

            soastoshb*’

            we don

            , that we

            , assure you

            andiad°re

            d wiser

            black dada your

            history

            of art

            we ate them.

 

In other words, as he explains in Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace — a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name, even if we don’t know about it. Or, as Scriptures has it, Those without female reproductive organs must refrain from legislating female reproductive organs (Fallopians 1:1). Yet at our very beginning we had great unification. Today I could only see, breaking the fundamental particles, solitary quarks are coming down like ash (all we are is dust in the wind, peeps), landing in the branches of the shaved Krishnachura tree. We are getting delayed my Dear Reader. Could you hear the inarticulate noise from the Suicide Squad of Plantae Kingdom? Oh, My Dear Reader, just listen to that singer, “Oh Allah, Give me cloud give me water give me shade ...” Only when my integrity is clean is the frequency audible. One may hope that either sort of change, as its seeming or real inevitability emerges, will be realized. Brud is reading War of the Worlds on the radio no, Brud is a transmedia studio that creates digital character-driven story worlds. Among others, brud has created Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela. She’s supposed to be sentient AI but what she really is a cartoon quote unquote or maybe I should remove the quotes because it’s 2019 and in first-world hell this is a thing, she’s what’s known as an influencer. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her need I add imaginary life in Downey CA of all places, and where she proclaims her support for LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter. Anything that helps her sell shit, apparently. In the past few years, she’s shilled for Uggs ads, interviewed artists at Coachella and collaborated with Prada. In her latest project, a video for Calvin Klein, she kisses the half-naked (and heterosexual) supermodel Bela Hadid as a voiceover proclaims some marketing nonsense about dreams and doors. Called out for queerbaiting, CK apologized. Called out for kissing a cartoon, I’m not aware Hadid had anything to say. Lil is far from a one-off gimmick: CGI influencers are all over the place. Take Shudu Gram, a quote unquote black Instagram model and here I won’t remove the quotes because he was created by a white photographer; Liam Nikuro, who is quote unquote Japanese; and there’s YouPorn virtual spokeswoman, Jedy Vales. Last year a Japanese man (made of meat, apparently, lab-grown or otherwise) married a celebrity hologram, Hatsune Miku, prompting discussion about whether “digisexual” should be considered a new identity. In other words, a Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past, which is at the same time the future. Both ways, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay and make whole what has been and what will be smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him he knows not where, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call ... what we used to call ... now we don’t know what to call it, really. In other words, as Tommy Pico, on whose Kumeyaay land I find myself living these days, put it, ‘Ppl are too busy callin themselves ‘poets’ to notice the canary died” ...

 

            two paths diverged in a

            / half stank of blood.

            you come across this every decade

            a fork in the doggerel —

 

            Group C are right,

 

            it was good

            so good

            to get the words down

            just right, to drain

            the swan.

 

            and that there is a small beard dude in the 7

            dwarfs

            that satan cannot find supposedly

            and that site Quora.

 

            Obvs. Or,

            Prism Warders,

            we warm a spectrum

            of pilot-light clumped 5 at discrete temperature points ok

            out of 7 total = 2 spigots over for object & subject etc.

 

            shift french fries sheared

            gears in the wind powered

            buggy I love this

            buggy,

 

            imagine trimming a moth

            down to just one city,

 

            three different times

            I smelled popcorn

            popcorn was a snack

            made by steaming the

            seeds of elliptical

            vegetable matter

            grown in the musky

            dirt of a place we

            used to call I forget the

            name it was kind of

            nice like parsnip ice

            cream is nice on a hot

            solar vortex far away

            from the atolls that make

            up the Maldives Waffle

            cones were fried

            convex sugar toasts

            you’d like them

            they were very bad

            for us ...

 

Even today, the Fire Fighting School battles fires staged upon an elaborate set of pseudo-storefronts and houses, while seismological researchers burrow explosives into the silt to test liquefaction response to earthquakes (the island has sunk five feet since the Loma Prieta quake of 89) and electrolysis is performed on the aging water pipes. The moth eradication project attempts to manage whole populations driven here by shifts in the global ecology, in other words BARGE has had to re-adjust its methods to fit the “facts on the ground,” even as those facts filter themselves through ever-more paranoiac scrims. For instance, when the window opened behind me and the voice hailed me with her version of events, to be narrated in a kind of speculative poetics that the guidebook had yet to accommodate, the feeling was not of surprise as much as the recognition that this encounter was meant to happen at exactly this juncture in the field work. Thus the strange white car that would often be waiting at off-limit sites right as I was approaching would turn up in the rear-view mirror at exactly the moment I was wondering aloud where it had been hiding. Of course one would turn a corner and suddenly come across a three-legged dog trotting down an empty street. Of course there was a “Naval Ghost Blimp” that disappeared from the island years ago, only to show up in Daly City, its engines running and its pilots missing. In this surveillance photo, BARGE agents will have been seen removing soil samples from Halyburton Court, in the so-called “Area 12” site on the Northwest corner of the island. On the other side of the fences live mostly low-income families of color, most of whom have been told little of the Navy’s testing results of this and other sites, beyond having to agree not to plant any produce or other edible plants in their yards as a condition of their rental contracts with the Treasure Island Development Authority. This tree is found close to Mile 20 of the Catalina Highway up Mt. Lemmon, home of the southernmost ski area of the United States. It grows on a small hill above the Palisades trail, which drops thousands of feet to the East Fork of Sabino Canyon (see also “Populus fremontii S. Watson”). Elevation at the Palisades trailhead is approximately 8000 feet. Surrounding the tree are other Ponderosa Pines of varying ages and sizes, many quite large, as well as a number of smaller Arizona White Pines. This area was badly burned by the 2003 Aspen Fire. Trees are spaced widely apart and dead and downed limbs and trees are present everywhere. The ground is carpeted with pine needles and large, firm cones, interspersed with the ferns that have re-colonized the burnt area. About 120 feet tall and perhaps 200 years old, the tree has beautiful ruddy bark punctuated by dark jigsaw lines. The trunk smells strongly like vanilla. Its lower 20 feet are quite burned along one side, but it is alive and healthy, being naturally resistant to fire. Orange fungus is present on the burnt bark, along with dried tears of yellow sap. OK. In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. To quote: art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.’ Why? Because, for Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy. He goes on to say that, while art’s spiritual capabilities reached their climax in classical Greece and then began their demise, philosophy reached its ‘highest destiny’ around 1807, when — what else? — Hegel published his Phenomenology. But. But but but. Check out Thomas Feuerstein’s Pancreas, a processual sculpture that transforms books into sugar to feed human brain cells growing inside a brain-like shape. What books, you might ask. Just one, actually. And not just any book — the neuroglia cells are nourished solely by one particular book — what else? — The Phenomenology. Which is shredded and soaked in water, before being pressed through an artificial intestine full of bacteria and broken down into C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, which is then transformed into brain. Perhaps we can understand Pancreas as a provocation that counters Hegel’s original provocation etc. This is called dialectics, I believe. In any case, by connecting the brain to the stomach, a brain-gut link is emphasised that challenges ideas of pure thinking inherent in philosophy. As Candyman says: ‘There are no boundaries anymore, only distorted boundaries between what we used to split into nature and culture, body and mind, matter and information’. Which is why, one morning shortly thereafter, we decided to visit the Centre for Emotional Materiality, to watch “A Blobifesto.” As I stood there, I felt like the blobbiness of it all was radically penetrating my being. After the video we looked at each other and said: “Who knew? We were blobologists all this time!” Here was a new lens through which we could view, well, everything. So we stole as many postcards from the show as we felt morally okay with and handed them out to almost everyone we encountered over the next few days. We are intimates with these proto-beings, these floaters. I felt that the sound was coming from my bones. Once, my finger accidentally touched the lathe cutter, and half of my nail disappeared. Blood dripped down into the cooling oil. My co-workers rushed me to the town hospital. At the hospital, I discovered so many injured workers, mostly migrants like me. Some had injured half a finger, some the whole hand, the leg, the head. They were bandaged in white gauze stained with blood. The man on my left, with a head injury, worked in the plastic factory; the one on my right, with three severed fingers, worked in the moulding factory. The one on the right moaned, his three left fingers completely severed. The doctor came over, hung up a fluid bag, inserted a catheter and gave medication orders, all done expressionlessly, then left the room. Looking at his gauze that had been steeped red in blood and then turned pale yellow, I suddenly remembered, no one is going to argue that we need to find a halfway point between fish and the planet Mars. But water is not the same thing as the process by which water was chemically understood by humans: the latter includes Antoine Lavoisier as one of its elements, but not the former. Lavoisier is a major ingredient in the history of chemical understanding of water, but not an ingredient at all of water itself.

 

            Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has
            a new metaphor, except it’s not
            a metaphor A literal part of his
            heart
            has died
            says the echocardiogram
            he got before starting a new med
            but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty
            salads and Mamihlapinatapai is the most precise
            word according to linguists
            from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
            It means something like when you leave a café bathroom and
           want to tell the next  person in line it wasn’t you who
            took the smelliest dump in American history but you keep walking
           I mean it means well it’s more like when two ppl look
            at each other and the look
            is that they both
            know ...

 

Cesium has also been found in a surprising place — beneath the coastal beach sands close to brackish water tables up to 60 miles away from the meltdown site. Scientists have learned that where currents washed highly contaminated water onshore, the cesium “stuck” to sand particles in brackish water (a mix of salty seawater and fresh groundwater, as is found under beaches), but becomes “unstuck” when soaked with salt water. Therefore, the accumulated cesium embedded under beaches along Japan’s coast is being slowly released over time as waves continue to saturate the sand. Scientists estimate that the amount of cesium being released in this manner is equal to that of the ongoing releases and runoff from the disaster site itself, and from outflow from rivers continuing to carry cesium from land to the sea. And that ain’t all. Millions of tons of contaminated, radioactive water (used to keep the molten reactors and spent fuel rods cool to prevent further radioactive releases, and from pumped groundwater that continues to seep into the reactors’ basements) is stored on-site in more than 900 tanks. Despite efforts to prevent seepage using “ice walls” (human-created permafrost), and special processing technology intended to clean radionuclides from the water, Tepco was forced to admit late last year that these efforts had failed, confirming that levels of several long-lived, cancer-causing isotopes were still present in the stored water at more than 100 times legally permitted levels. While more water continues to become contaminated every day, the only known plan to deal with it is to release it all into the ocean. MOAS are therefore pleased that our mission to deliver medical and famine relief to Yemen will shortly come to fruition and our goods will soon be arriving to the port of Aden. Our two containers en route are carrying €126,687.15 worth of medical assistance and 27 tonnes of Edesia’s Plumy Doz ready-to-eat sachets for preventing malnutrition in kids. Which is one reason why, in the Resurrect ritual I use a mix of audio field recordings of recently extinct animals. I take time each day no matter where I am to lie on the ground and saturate my body with these extinct sounds. Part of the ritual involves sleeping in my car in Walmart parking lots. Outside in the parking lots each night, and this is true no matter where I am in the United States, there are homeless families living in cars. Another component is listening to the extinct animal sounds on headphones while walking in a spiral formation inside the Walmart, working my way into the middle of the store. At the center of the spiral I find a spot to kneel, entering in and out of the space of

 

            the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in

            the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby

            in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the

            entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in

            and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out

            of the space between the hands.

 

            The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing

            inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and

            argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria

            mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and

            titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized

            glass and concrete.

 

            can you feel it?

 

            does it hurt?

 

            is it hard?

 

            is it cold?

 

            does it weigh much?

 

            is it heavy?

 

            do you have to carry it far?

 

            the format must be set: 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour

 

            white wings of a magpie

 

            wave glory

 

            soap

 

[Note: Sources: Helmut Heissenbüttel, Schematic Development of Tradition (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), “Lesson 3 from Textbook 10” (tr. Pierre Joris), Anselm Hollo, Heissenbüttel’s “Essay in Greek” (tr. Anselm Hollo), in “Helmut Heissenbüttel (1921-1996)”, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Raworth, “Cat Van Cat”, at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999); Lisa Robertson, “If We”, at at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999);“The Mythological Origin of ‘Panic’”, at Merriam Webster; headline in San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 May 019 (hat tip K); JBR; Caroline Macdonald, “Lab-grown fruit cultures could yield new superfoods”, at Food Dive, 15 Mar 018; JBR; Proclus, Fragments from the Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, at Tertullian; Eleni Sikelianos, “Essay: Seven Aspects of Milking Time”, “[You can be King of the Corners]”, in Earliest Worlds; JBR; Yuri Rytkheu, The Chukchi Bible (tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse); Lucy Ives, “A Throw of the Dice”, at BOMB, 14 May 019; JBR; Justin Brice Guariglia, quoted in Meredith Smith and Rachel Kirk, “Mixing Art and Environmental Science to Catalyze Social Change”, at State of the Planet, 10 May 019; Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, Songs, Roars, And Rituals: Communication in Birds, Mammals, and Other Animals; JBR; Lotte L.S., “Not to speak about / only to speak nearby”, at Harriet, 13 May 019; JBR; Charles Bernstein, “In Utopia”, at Poetry Society of America; JBR; Edgar Heap of Birds, quoted in Sheila Regan, “The Spirits that Haunt the Words of Edgar Heap of Birds”, at Hyperallergic, 16 May 019; Cord J Whitaker, “Game of Thrones’ Peasants are a Problem of White Supremacy—and Its Victims, too”, at In the Middle, 19 May 019; Nathaniel Mackey, “[from] From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Volume Five”, at Floor 1; JBR; part of the result of scanning and converting section 128 of Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” to Microsoft Word; JBR; The Paris Review, quoted in ARTBOOK | D.A.P., “New from Trevor Paglen: Commemorative coins, patches, mugs and other ephemera from the shadowy world of US military aviation and aerospace”, email rec’d 20 Jun 019, approx. 10:55am PDT; JBR; something K sent me; Runa Bandyopadhyay, “Destination: Nature Roy”, Nora Bateson, “Without Shields (the voice of change is changing)”, Steve Benson, “For the Time Being”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); Brud, at Brud, and Arwa Mahdawi, “Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future”, at The Guardian, 21 May 019; JBR, “Who Killed the World”, Helen Bridwell, “I Was Right Dear”, Brandon Brown, “For My Future Children”, David Buuck, “from Buried Treasure Island”, Wendy Burk, “from Tree Talks”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); JBR; Martin Grünfeld, “Bio art and the end of philosophy (Feuerstein & Hegel)”, at Genealogy of the Posthuman, 21 May 019; JBR; Janice Lee, foreword to Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, quoted in Lee’s “A Blobcounter: Editor’s Foreword”, at Entropy, 20 May 019; Jane Bennett, blurb for Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices; Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Iron” (tr. Isabelle Li), at Sydney Review of Books, 22 Nov 018; Graham Harman, “the real problem is taxonomy, not anthropocentrism”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 May 019; Tommy Pico, “from Feed”, at The Offing, 15 May 019; Morgan Corviday, “Update: Eight Years After Fukushima”, at The Northcoast Environmental Center, 1 Feb 019; MOAS, “Yemen Situational Update”, email rec’d 23 May 019, approx. 7:06am PDT; JBR; CA Conrad, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 3 Sept 016; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001”, in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada”, in Black Dada Reader]

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19.05.2019

Zheng Guogu, “Visionary Transformation of the Purification” (2011–2013), oil on canvas, 79 15/16 × 54 5/16 inches (image courtesy the artist) [on Hyperallergic, at least, which is where I stole it from]

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17.05.2019

Turns out Mike Pence has **always** been a psycho subhuman total fuckhead: check this out. It comes from a friend of Kathy's ... it's how he signed her mother's yearbook

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13.05.2019

415ppm. If we were an individual we'd be put on a 72hr involuntary hold as a danger to ourselves and others ... but since we're not, since we are the crown of creation, away we go!

Posted at 12:19 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1)

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• Zheng Guogu, “Visionary Transformation of the Purification” (2011–2013), oil on canvas, 79 15/16 × 54 5/16 inches (image courtesy the artist) [on Hyperallergic, at least, which is where I stole it from]
• Turns out Mike Pence has **always** been a psycho subhuman total fuckhead: check this out. It comes from a friend of Kathy's ... it's how he signed her mother's yearbook
• 415ppm. If we were an individual we'd be put on a 72hr involuntary hold as a danger to ourselves and others ... but since we're not, since we are the crown of creation, away we go!

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But still. My own encounter with Isou’s work came near its end (he died in 2007). In 2001 he wrote a massive, 1400-page synthesis of his thought and method, called The Creative and the Innovative. In it he details how he invariably reads a classic work of philosophy, for instance, by Hegel: he scribbles furiously in the margins and indeed all over the pages with his critical annotations. Then, when he reaches the end, he takes apart the book’s spine, throws away any pages he has not written on, transcribes what he did write, and voila: he has written his own, new book. That is how, Isou says, one book, an inferior book by Hegel, begets a superior book by Isou: and that’s the theory of the creative and the innovative in an allegorical nutshell. “Iridescence is word we should use more often” she said. There is no skirting this approaching reality. With gentle tenderness she spelled out the dire scenario of death-in-life. Her poem, “The Round Spring” details the subtlety of interconnective holism:

 

            Mist is the semen of the mountains

 

            Where the streams are born

 

 

 

            Mist is the semen of the forest

 

            Where coolness is born

 

She talked about “the Guarani of the rain forest in Paraguay and Brazil [who] say that when the mist and the forest are gone, we will all be gone.” During the discussion that followed her reading she mentioned how, three times a day she practices the yogic corpse pose (savasana). Prophecy brings the past, present and future into a focused whole.

 

            Water

 

            and its thirst

 

            are one

 

Speaking of which, at the beginning of the world, the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who were both brother and sister, husband and wife, stood in the High Field of Heaven and used their jeweled spears to stir the primordial swirl of water below. As they pulled their spears back up, drops of salty water fell from them and congealed to became islands, and thus the earth was formed.

 

            The couple descended to earth and began to propagate.

 

            The couple had sex, and Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a malformed lump that was set adrift on the water.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an ugly island.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an island filled with beauty.

 

            And the couple kept having sex, and Izanami kept giving birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh and an eighth island.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the islands flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when the land was done, the couple had sex and Izanami gave birth to the gods.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of great matters.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rocky terrain.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess whose home stood upon a great rock.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of entrances.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of thatch.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rooves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of wind.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the sea.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of estuaries.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess of river mouths.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of foam upon the sea and the goddess of foam upon the waves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the watershed of heaven and the goddess of the watershed of earth.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the gods and goddesses flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when these gods were born, Izanami gave birth to the god of fire, who was so hot that he burned her vagina, which swelled and blistered and turned black from the flame.

 

            Izanami fell terribly ill, but even so, she continued to give birth.

 

            Izanami vomited. Her vomit became the god and goddess of metal ore.

 

            Izanami defecated. Her shit became the god and goddess of clay.

 

            Izanami pissed. Her urine became the god and goddess of gushing water and growth.

 

            Izanami was still creating when death claimed her, and she sank into Yomi, the dark realm that lies beyond the veil of this world.

 

            Distraught by the death of his beloved wife and sister, Izanagi wailed. You who’ve given birth to fourteen islands, to thirty-five gods and goddesses, how awful that you should die while this monstrous child lives!

 

            And after crawling around her corpse, pulling his hair, and gnashing his teeth, Izanagi buried her on top of a mountain between two provinces, so she could rest halfway between heaven and earth, between one land and another.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi withdrew his sword and sliced off the head of his own son, the fire god, who had caused his wife so much suffering.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi decided to do what no god nor mortal had ever done before. He decided to travel to Yomi to bring her back.

 

            Izanagi walked across provinces.

 

            Izanagi walked across rivers and streams.

 

            Izanagi walked across mountains and fields.

 

            Izanagi walked across plains covered in evergreens.

 

            Izanagi walked and walked until he reached the gently sloping road leading to Yomi.

 

            Izanagi walked down the gently sloping road, deeper and deeper, lower and lower, until he came to a great hall. There, he found the door that forms the boundary between this world and the next.

 

            From the opposite side of the door, Izanami heard her beloved husband and brother calling out to her.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Please come back. You haven’t finished giving birth.

 

            You’ve given birth to many islands, many gods, and many goddesses, but there’s still a lot to do. Come! Come back with me!

 

            Izanami appeared at the door and spoke.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! I can’t believe it! Here you are, asking me to return so I can give birth again. Seeing you, I remember!

 

            I remember what it feels to have sex and give birth!

 

            I remember what it is to give birth and give birth and give birth some more.

 

            But then her voice grew dark. You’re too late. I’ve eaten here in this dark land. The food from this place taints everyone and holds us captive.

 

            Izanagi became despondent.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Is that true? You can’t return?

 

            Izanami responded.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! Let me speak to the gods here, but whatever you do, don’t look at me in the meantime. Promise me.

 

            Izanagi promised.

 

            And upon hearing his vow, Izanami retreated beyond the door.

 

            Izanagi waited for Izanami to return.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi thought about the promise he had made.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi began to think his promise had been a mistake.

 

            What was she doing? Who was she with?

 

            Izanagi’s irritation and frustration grew until he could wait no more.

 

            Izanagi grew so impatient that he pulled out the great wooden comb he wore in his hair, lit it on fire, and opened the forbidden door.

 

            And there she was.

 

            Izanami.

 

            But not his Izanami.

 

            Her body had turned into a horrible, horrifying, heaving mass of maggots.

 

            And as if that wasn’t enough, eight gods of thunder were filling her, penetrating her, and taking what was left of her rotten, decomposing corpse.

 

            Her head was filled with great thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her breast was filled with fiery thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her belly was filled with black thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her vagina was filled with jagged thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her left hand was filled with young thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her right hand was filled with earth-striking thunderbolts. She moaned in growing ecstasy.

 

            Her left leg was filled with thunderbolts that would split most peoples’ eardrums. She moaned in growing, mounting ecstasy.

 

            Her right leg was filled with thunderbolts that would knock most people to the ground. She moaned in growing, mounting, overwhelming ecstasy.

 

            Thunderbolts rushed through her, filling her, penetrating her, taking her rotten, decomposing, moaning corpse.

 

            At the sight of the eight gods of thunder penetrating her, Izanagi recoiled in horror.

 

            You’re not my wife! You’re not my sister! You’re not the venerable ancestor of all of the islands, gods, and goddesses!

 

            Izanami shouted back.

 

            Don’t you recognize me, my husband and brother? I’m the same Izanami you’ve loved for all these years. I’m the same Izanami that had sex with you over and over again, who suffered the pains of childbirth to create all the islands, gods, and goddesses that populate the earth. Now that I’m taking what little love I can find here in this dark world, are you really going to abandon me?

 

            Izanagi grew frightened and fled.

 

            Izanami pursued him and shouted.

 

            I gave birth to the world! And still you shame me!

 

            You shame me before the gods of Yomi!

 

            You shame me before all of the islands and gods and goddesses I created!

 

            You shame me before the world I created!

 

            I curse you. I curse the islands I gave birth to!

 

            I curse the gods and mortals that walk their surface!

 

            I curse the world beneath your feet!

 

            As Izanagi fled, Izanami summoned several foul-looking women from the land of Yomi and sent them chasing after him.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled a grapevine that he had used to tie up his hair, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire vineyard. Some of the women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull the grapes from the vines to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you dirty, dirty, old, wrinkled ...!

 

            Your birthing days are over!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’ll never give birth again even if you try!

 

            All you’ll ever do is bleed!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled the bamboo comb that held the bundles of hair by his temples in place, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire grove of bamboo. Some of the foul-looking women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull up the bamboo shoots to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you foul-smelling ...!

 

            Your breath stinks!

 

            Your spit stinks!

 

            Your blood stinks!

 

            Your hair stinks!

 

            Your vagina stinks!

 

            Everything about you stinks!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women. This time, however, she was joined by her eight partners — the gods of thunder — and their armies.

 

            As Izanagi fled up the slope from Yomi, he grabbed three peaches from the trees growing there. Placing his faith in this fruit, known since the beginning of the time to ward off demons, Izanagi threw them, shouting at Izanami the whole time.

 

            Your hair has fallen out!

 

            Your teeth have fallen out!

 

            Your breasts are shriveled up!

 

            Your vagina is so loose it’s a wonder your uterus doesn’t fall right out!

 

            The peaches embedded themselves in her rotting corpse. All of the other gods and armies ran away except for Izanami. But still she continued to pursue him.

 

            Izanami grew closer.

 

            Izanami grew closer and closer.

 

            Izanami grew so close that Izanagi could smell the stench of her rotten flesh, the stench of her breath, the stench of her hair, the stench of her spit, the stench of her blood, the stench of her hair, and most of all, the stench of her vagina.

 

            Not knowing what else to do, he rolled a giant boulder to block the path out of Yomi into the mortal world. The boulder was so large that not even one thousand of the strongest men could possibly move it. In fact, the boulder is so large that it still sits there today, in exactly the same place between the two realms of existence.

 

            From the opposite sides of the boulder, the two shouted at one another.

 

            Izanagi shouted to Izanami, your beauty is gone!

 

            You’re nothing but a horrifying corpse!

 

            You’re nothing but rotten flesh!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’re of no use to me or the world any longer!

 

            Izanami shouted back at Izanagi, who are you to talk?

 

            Your cock is useless!

 

            Your cock won’t stand up!

 

            Your cock is the most pathetic, shriveled up thing in the world!

 

            Your cock will never produce anything ever again!

 

            Your cock has lost all its procreative power!

 

            Your cock is useless to me!

 

            Izanagi recoiled. Was this really happening?

 

            Izanami continued to shout.

 

            Your chest is the flattest one in the world!

 

            Your beard is the patchiest one in the world!

 

            Your eyes are the yellowest, cloudiest ones in the world!

 

            Your mouth is the most foul-smelling one in the world!

 

            Your cock is the most shriveled, miniscule, miserable, and powerless one in the world!

 

            Your cock will never create a thing! Ever!

 

            I know how to make you pay.

 

            Every day, I’ll reach from out from beyond the grave and strangle one thousand miserable mortals from your land.

 

            I’ll keep this up until all mortals have perished at my hands.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            Horrified, Izanagi responded in the only way he could think of.

 

            You say that every day, you’ll reach out and strangle one thousand mortals.

 

            Well then, I’ll take on your sex.

 

            Every day, I’ll give birth to one and a half thousand people.

 

            I’ll keep this up until mortals spread to the ends of the earth you’ve created.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            And with this, Izanagi left the boulder at the boundary between worlds and walked to a stream to purify himself.

 

            And so it began.

 

            This is the reason that every day, a large number of mortals die.

 

            And this is the reason that every day, an even larger number of mortals is born into the world to replace them.

 

            Just as Izanagi had predicted, mortals continued to be born.

 

            And just as Izanagi had predicted, those mortals spread to the very ends of the earth.

 

This explains a lot. For instance, why the US government is moving ahead with a plan to strafe Midway Atoll with poison aimed at eradicating mice that are on a deadly rampage through one of the world’s most important seabird sites. The three low-lying islands, fringing coral reefs and lagoons that make up the Atoll refuge, located about 1,200 miles north-west of Honolulu, cover an area only slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park but are a crucial nesting area for around 3 million birds, including albatrosses and terns. Over 70% of the world’s Laysan albatrosses are found on Midway including Wisdom, a 68-year-old believed to be the world’s oldest wild bird. This year Wisdom hatched her 37^th chick. Apparently, mice inadvertently introduced to Midway are slowly eating the birds, bite by bite, not killing them outright and eating them, but nibbling them to death while they’re alive. The plan has been approved due to the understanding that the mice, but not the birds, will be attracted to the bait. Just in case, tho, they’re planning to move the birds to a different island. Speaking of which, Theresa May just resigned. Boris Johnson is next up, apparently. And no, there’s no punchline. But it gets even funnier. Take Trump and Pelosi. He calls her crazy, she says talk about crazy, we need to do an intervention, the poor guy needs to take some time away from all the stress and strain. So someone posts a video of her, slowing it down so her words are slurred and she sounds fucked up on something. Facebook refuses to remove it. Again, no punchline. So last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017. Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble, dodging between landmines, for bits of steel and plastic they can exchange for food. Maybe that’s the punchline. Forget about punchlines. “CITIZEN ASSISTANCE • 4:14 a.m. — A man shovelling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire. Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.”

In other words,

 

            Doing is highly thought of and frequently abandoned

            as at a bus stop beside a stunted gingko, and time is tossed

            a laundry pile large as the crown of a tree

            or the gravid animal of Pythagoras, and every mathematician dies

            while runnels vacillate or do nothing astrophysically speaking.

           

            I propose too that there are many things

            with their capacity to collide or combine with other things

            in the vicinity (that gravitational field of monsters)—

            and budding dust small flies:

            an idiom like Kierkegaard on Halloween.

 

            It’s lively you might say

            a color that doesn’t

            make sense it’s so real that we think

            riot of genes dashing madly

            in broad daylight toward burial mounds and forests

 

            arms of the sea.

            I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle

            with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her,

            experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing

            them on a loquat leaf,

 

            Cross the silver mesh path there.

            I have a necklace of bloody teeth for this cure.

            Crickets sing too.

             Do not remember me, unreal lord.

             The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins.

 

            In the park, the volunteer fire department uses the toddlers’ climbing

            structure to practice blindfold climbing maneuvers.

            We lifted shot glasses to them filled with salmon fat.

          We’d been eating tacos and falafels filled with confetti,

         shredded newspapers. Headlines blackened our teeth,  

 

            black ozonal mirrors

            where general slaughter is reflected

            where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation,  

            by stunted mangrove withdrawal,

            by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees,

 

so yes, the experiment consists of this entangled state being shared between experimenters, each of whom has the ability to measure either with respect to the basis or . We see that if they each measure with respect to , then they never see the outcome . If one measures with respect to and the other , they never see the outcomes . However, sometimes they see the outcome when measuring with respect to , since this leads us to the paradox: having the outcome we conclude that if one of the experimenters has measured with respect to the basis instead, the outcome must have been or , since and are impossible. But then, if they had all measured with respect to the basis, by locality the result must have been , which is also impossible, yes, once upon a nimbus, I arose out of a wireless wiki-wrinkle in the vast fabric of the cloud-garden of the mezzopolis, where synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy, epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the cloudy fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology: forget me, forget-me-not, each muse advised. (Forget we did, however. Or at least, some of us forgot, alongside our data points.) The ninemuse junta migrated their labyrinths onto grassroots clouds of lesser capacity. Nanoseconds later, congestive network failure occurred. Global revenue vaporized. Forecasters murmured ominously, caveat venditor, let the seller beware. The junta’s doomed sovereignty was foreshadowed, however, by the mutiny of our programmed bots, those personified shapeshifters of disembodied code, and those rogues who accused the junta of dataphobia and dysgraphia: dear reader, in my humble opinion, a null hypothesis with a p-value of less than 0.05. Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding, seeking jellyfish connectivity. Now I wax nostalgic. Now the ocean bleeds silver as antique circuitry under a fleet of stratocumulus at noon ... built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par — sons of the man who developed Tiger Balm — bought in 1988 by the Singapore Tourism Board, Haw Par Villa Dragon World was restored by 1994. But the high entrance fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred losses. Entry was free four years later. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman. But the highlights of the park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long Chinese dragon but that fell apart, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. Tableaus of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail. See spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity by stone mallets. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man. Watch a demon fling a young girl into a hill of knives. Oh, and here’s a blunt metal rod jamming into a woman’s very large, fleshy heart. And check this out: an executioner pulling tiny intestines out of a bro tied to a pole. Anyway, and unsurprisingly, now that Singapore is a thriving global metropole, dripping with capital, no one goes to Haw Par Villa anymore, and whole sections have been shut down. But, looking back, I suppose has nothing to do with what actually occurred. On the eastern sky, rhododactylos. It was primidi 21 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the thrift. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. Leyla Güven was on her 198th day of hunger strike in Turkey. Milkshakes overflowed on the streets of England, they had somehow become a weapon against Nigel Farage. The author of the Horrible Histories series opened his one-man-show at the local museum. A documentary aired in English: “As war rages in eastern Ukraine, Dima, a former leader of an ultra-right group, and Tanya, a self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist, make an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev.” Open letters addressed to Extinction Rebellion multiplied. Hundreds of Gilets Noirs occupied Charles De Gaulle airport, chanting, “Contre les déportations, et pour des papiers pour tous-tes!” İmam Şiş was on his 158th day of hunger strike in Wales. Zumba classes restarted at the local library. “We will not be selling milkshakes or ice-cream tonight,” the window of a McDonald’s noted. “This is due to a police request given recent events.” Facebook was awash with sentiments similar to, “If you thought Alabama’s abortion laws are bad, read up on Northern Ireland.” Lawyers were preparing to visit Öcalan for the second time in eight years. Why was no-one paying attention to the revolutionary Kurds? And so I left the “endless nights talking in tenement buildings” “cycling along dirt paths in the dark to Carbeth” “collective meetings lasting into the wee hours” “conversations about changing politics under broken streetlights and foliage and cigarette smoke” “mass texts about a raid or a deportation or a party or an arrest or a heartbreak” “waking up under skylights” “turning up for court support” “demos and counter-demos and counter-counter demos” “converging in Ibrox and Govan and Pollokshields and Partick” “J Hus and Hudson Mohawke and Kelela on loop” “proofing press releases” “more collective meetings” “moving tenement building every 6 months” — to live alone in a room in a house in a town in the furthest easterly outlier of England, at the edge of a street of a country that was not just a country or nation-state, but a nation-state that desired and resembled and announced itself as so; and was in turn recognized as one. A nation-state that supplied the body armour and helmets and helicopters and drones and missiles used to strike and shell that other country that is not a country, that is against the very idea of “a country,” and yet at times seems to resemble a country. A nation-state that put in place other nation-states; that consistently demonstrated economic and political interest in the building and demolishing and running of other nation-states and not-quite nation-states. A nation-state that was ecstatic to sell arms to a list of nation-states and not-quite nation-states which were in fact part of its own self-conceived list of “human rights abusers.” A nation-state that existed and was conceived as a nation-state based on the practice of conquest abroad and repression at home. I could see it all from the window — the Confederate flag hanging from a car boot, vacant amusement arcades lining the seafront, the cash-poor circus preparing for its next show, the sounds of kriolu and guinensi and n’golá and sãotomense drifting out from the cafes with their doors open all night, the last smokehouse closing, the freight ships out to sea, the seagulls fearlessly innovating new ways to find food, the industrial area less and less full of machinery and more and more occupied with artists and unlicensed boxing rings and foodbanks and makeshift spaces for prayer and raves, the anniversary of the Suffragettes burning down the pier, the B&Bs advertising colour TV, the rollercoaster test rides, the derelict high street, the stranded crew from the Malaviya Twenty stuck in the port — growing increasingly skilled at table tennis in their boredom. One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch. I stayed indoors through it all — in a single room of an old vicarage turned B&B turned industrial cannabis-growing operation turned raided-by-the-cops turned derelict turned into my lodging arrangements. Have you seen Styx? The opening looks like a wildlife movie. Barbary macaque, who live on Gibraltar, clamber around an urban environment. The space is the all the island’s human inhabitants share with these other primates. This sequence ends. Now it’s late at night; a high-speed car chase causes a crash. Rescue services appear in an instant. Rike, the movie’s protagonist, is one of the paramedics. Soon she takes her sailboat on a voyage to Ascension Island. In a weightless passage of cinema she is watched in action heaving provisions on board and trimming the sails. The camera adopts seemingly impossible viewpoints, perched on the sea and confined in the claustrophobic cabin. Isolation underscores Rike’s self-sufficiency. But a scene is which she uses the radio to chat with the captain on a passing cargo ship, suggests that the ocean is wide but not empty, and her determined solitude will be interrupted. A storm is the harbinger of change. In the following calm, Rike finds she is close to another vessel. The ungainly shape is a fishing boat, sinking, overloaded with would-be emigrants, waving in distress. Trying to reach her boat, several jump into the sea. Only one boy, Kingsley, has the strength to swim to her yacht. She struggles to get him on board. He is unconscious. Her boat is too tiny to attempt to rescue them all, so she uses the radio again, this time to call for aid. She assumes that her appeal will promote immediate action. As a paramedic, she imagines the emergency support services to be available to all. In her understanding, everything — from the coast guard, to the sophisticated first aid equipment she carries — belongs within systems obliged to preserve life. But no. As I attempted to articulate my thoughts from English to Korean, I soon realized that there was no equivalent term for succinctly translating the word “blob.” This moment of uh uh uh uh uh resulted in me making a ridiculous face while waving my arms like they were the wings of a demented bird. In this context, a blob operates as a vehicle for heightening awareness towards intuitive and sensible meaning-making activities and facilitates the process of perceptual reconfiguration for alternative experiences to be accounted for. In other words,

 

            A blob is a translucent black box

[Note: Sources: JBR; Adrian Martin, introduction to Isidore Isou, Treatise On Venom & Eternity, at SPD; Cecilia Vicuña, and Brenda Iijima, quoted in Iijima’s “Telluric Guerilla Visions and Effervescence: Will Alexander and Cecilia Vicuña”, at Entropy, 20 Feb 019; JBR; Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles: ‘Birthing the World,’ from The Kojiki”, at Jacket2, 21 May 019; JBR; Oliver Milman, “US to strafe crucial nesting area for 3m birds with poison to eradicate mice”, at Guardian, 24 May 019; JBR; Kate Allen, “Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not ‘precision bombing’”, at Guardian, 23 May 019; JBR; report in Amherst Bulletin, quoted by Aaron Schuman, in Ng Hui Hsien, “Aaron Schuman / SLANT / An interview with Aaron Schuman”, at Photomonitor, April 019 (re Schuman’s book Slant); image: Aaron Schuman, in Diane Smythm “Seeing leafy New England askew in Aaron Schuman’s Slant”, at British Journal of Photography, 19 Mar 2019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “Ten Remarkable Interpretations”, at The Spectacle 3; Nicole Brossard, “It’s Lively”, “Softlinks 3” (trs. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure), in Nicole Brossard: Selections; Michael Palmer, “Sun”, at Poets.org; Alice Notley, In the Pines; Ron Silliman, “You”, in The Alphabet; Nathaniel Mackey, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 77”, at The Nation, 10 Dec 07; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Fed Moten, “come on, get it!”, at The New Inquiry, 19 Feb 018 (“with Thom Donovan, Malik Gaines, Ethan Philbrick, Wikipedia and the Online Etymology Dictionary”); Karen An-hwei Lee, The Maze of Transparencies, at SPD; Dennis Cooper, collaged from various unnamed sources, quoted in his “You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa”, DC’s, 27 May 019; JBR; Lotte L.S., “It Is Almost That”, at Poetry Foundation, 27 May 019 (“A note on the title: ‘It is Almost That’ is borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, composed of faltering phrases projected onto black-and-white slides; ‘the humming state of the not-quite this and not-quite that ... what familiar taxonomies cannot order.’”); JBR; Andrew Stooke, “In Encountering a Sinking Migrant Ship, a Pilot Confronts the Edges of her Civilization”, at Hyperallergic, 27 May 019; Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices]

Haw Par Villa is a Chinese mythology theme park in Singapore with more than 1,000 statues and dioramas glorifying Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian folklore. Built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par – famous for selling the popular medicinal paste Tiger Balm – older locals look back fondly at a place where parents would bring children for an education in morality, complete with bloody visual aids.

‘In 1988, the Singapore Tourism Board took charge of the Tiger Balm Gardens and renamed it “Haw Par Villa Dragon World”. The Haw Par in the park’s name is based on the Aw brothers’ personal names—Haw and Par, which literally mean “tiger” and “leopard” respectively. The dioramas and statues were restored, while plays, acrobatic displays and puppet shows were organised and held there. The management imposed entrance fees but the high fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred a loss of S$31.5 million over 10 years. The park management made a profit during its first year of operations after renovations in 1994, broke even in 1995, but started incurring losses over the next three years and was forced to provide free entry in 1998.

‘Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. In its glory days, this avant guard theme park was an iconic symbol in Singapore, and considered a must see by locals and foreigners alike. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.

‘But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long trail of a Chinese dragon but the dragon has been demolished, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.

‘However, Haw Par Villa is facing an afterlife of its own. As the country of Singapore developed, and became almost futuristic in it’s modern appearance, the thousands of dated figurines that make up this park began to lose their luster along with much of their original appeal. Some of the areas of Haw Par Villa have been shut down due to lack of preservation Hardly anyone goes there anymore, and closed sections of the park point to an uncertain future. For some it’s a refreshing antidote to the mall-culture, but it looks like mall culture is winning out over a day out in hell.’ — collaged

 

 

______
Gallery

Tours

Haw Par Villa Singapore: The last blooming lotus

Silent visit

It will all be demolished one day. The land is worth billions.

A walkthrough of the Ten Courts of Hell attraction at Haw Par Villa

 

___________________
Rebranding Haw Par Villa

Proposal #1
by Leonard Koh

This rebranding project aims to promote about Haw Par Villa through the creation of a new identity to create a new impression to people who have been there before and arouse the curiosity of those who have never heard or been there before. Other materials have been created to promote about the area and others have been created as keepsakes and a reason to return.

Logo

 

Corporate Stationary

 

Postcards (Sun Wu Kong)

 

Postcard (10 Courts of Hell)

 

Postcard (Laughing Buddha)

 

Direct Mailer

 

Calendar

 

Park Map

 

 

Proposal #2
by Chinwee

An extensive and different take on rebranding for Haw Par Villa. Targeting the youths for a change, this project aims to revive Haw Par Villa and also the traditional chinese values and cultures that comes with it.

Brand Identity

 

Park Map

 

Park Souvenirs

 

Posters

 

Brochure & Postcards

 

Outdoor advertising

 

Popup Brochure

 

Website

 

Direct Mailer

and thus those who aren’t there any more have already taken along immeasurably much of what those who were there did and resolved in memory of those who weren’t there immeasurably much is in possession of those who aren’t there and it will always grow more and more and since they have it in their possession and this possession is ever growing one can in regard to those who aren’t there speak of their memory of those who are there because those who aren’t there any more were once there not being there is something that is thought of while being there and being there is living off the possession which those what aren’t there are still accumulating in the name of those who aren’t there any more and are more because those who aren’t there anymore and are more have a name and we are there in their name, I swear it from head to toe from anus to navel, in the silver moonlight alongside the ships and the large buildings and the canals which cut into and through the city's innermost core the forest of masts the lines of beams and cordage crossing a thousand fold all in moonlight strange and magic at one corner but a glance into a brightly lit room where a hundred diligent hands were sewing sails, actually today everything is like yesterday except for the hallway where yesterday the bag kept surprising me today I am surprised that the bag is no longer there thus it would be more accurate to say that today everything is completely different from yesterday but then again not really either, I was privileged to meet him once in his offices at the South German Broadcasting Corporation in Stuttgart in the early Sixties, on a visit from London where I was working for the BBC and moonlighting as “Anton Hofman.” One-armed like Blaise Cendrars (the left “left,” as they say, on some dismal battlefield in 1942), tall, calm funny, and erudite, HH had (as he put it) “a lasting soft spot for the black banner of anarchy. My innermost conviction is anarcho-syndicalist. Never mind that I know it can never be realized, but that is where my secret love lies,”

 

            if I knew Greek I would converse with you in Greek

            but I don’t know any Greek

 

            when pressure mounts there is increased danger of everything bursting

            even though pressure can lead to nice things though maybe a little weird

 

            who loses steam gnaws bones

 

            the bird quite clearly flown to Idaho railroad embankment Thoreau

 

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon for a long time

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            it may well be we have lived under this moon for too long

            my language is a noise

 

            spontaneous activity reaches

            possible multiple signals also

            changing course surging over

           

            building blocks to clear six feet

            waves until that sort of engine

            isolates fish ancestors

            leaking blood into panic swirling held

            formed by

 

                        open holes in

            a single hop through tephra

            mutating profiles from spinning radii

 

That is the gesture I wish diligently to communicate for her to guzzle with memory’s long artifice and that is the transit during which the remembered syllables which are translated so erotic so political, all ten of them, learn the excellent culture of timeliness asleep or separated by distance the face moving across. So there are always at least two times in the work, and the decisions composing their intervals and nodes place the work in the everyday. May I call it “the city”? It is going along. It is the interval of “if” attended and extended into material choice. Besides panic, Pan invented panpipes. Will consumers hunger for lab-created fish? I don’t mean revitalized fish ancestors. They’re growing fish meat in vats these days. Not fish, just meat. To be 3-D printed. And for dessert? “Cultured plant cells were produced from lingonberry, cloudberry and stoneberry, and were found to have even higher nutritional value than fresh berries. The researchers, from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center, said the cultures were higher in protein and fiber, and were also rich in polyphenols and unsaturated fatty acids. The researchers claim the cultures taste like fresh fruits ...” ok,

 

            [in the original the mimeograph did not reproduce the following line]

 

1. we) was

            trying to fix the place up, (we) was

            to finish the procedure, it was

            an architectural question, a spirit / spit one

 

            I think the thing is built of prunes & glue. The Grand Combustion

            Carnival, Columbus the Cat Dancing in Flames, rocks

            fall apart and citizens wonder: If man is the greatest natural wonder,

            what? Time turns to that motionless minute

            “read in the back of the animal’s eye,” (misread?)

            (I am guessing misread)

                                                for $6.00 an hour.

 

So the place where I was born has no forests, and no tall trees grow there. That does not mean it is lacking in vegetation, for there are certain kinds of trees: rowan, cedar, alder, and willow ... But the tallest of these “trees” will reach no more than a few centimeters above the earth. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “a throw of the dice Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck be It that the abysm whitened displays furious ...” Abysm, I thought. But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist looking for a job. Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. So I reached out and he sent me this long list, including “WE ARE THE ASTEROID”, “TRIASSIC WEATHER AHEAD”, “THERE IS NO AWAY.” Then one day, in a traffic jam outside the Holland Tunnel, I came upon one of those traffic message trailer signs, glitching, glitching. It was like poems by Peter Inman or David Melnick were coming up on the screen. It made me very focused and present for some reason. “EFFICIENCY IS PETROSPEAK.” I took the photos from 40,000 feet up. The series was inspired by the Kanō school in Japan, which is famous for painting landscapes onto gold and silver leafed surfaces; it’s a school of painting that lasted for over 700 years. In my case, instead of applying paint by hand onto the surface, I’m printing the landscapes using a UV acrylic inkjet printer that I’ve adapted to become my paintbrush so to speak. In JAKOBSHAVN I what you’re seeing is glacial melange, the remnants of the calving process. Those who hold this view say that a chick peeps when it is cold and twitters when it finds a warm place as if it were a little machine, not because it actually wants to communicate that it feels distress or pleasure. Which is to say that she stayed up until five in the morning, writing about how “the crisis” isn’t over, about how “the crisis” isn’t actually the kind of “crisis” they are calling it, but “a crisis” of something completely different, something so deep in the trenches of crisis that we can barely recognize it as anything other than our lives. “To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes,” someone wrote. “Today — what a mocking word in this timeless cave,” someone wrote from an underground experiment on Day 156. To think about it is to be the sequined woman lying flat inside the magician’s box; to watch the saw come down, to watch its blade cut straight through the middle of you, to watch your hips fall out from underneath your ribs. Let us talk about it as though “it” ever existed. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. I was not in any position to distinguish one text from another — a movement toward the inside from a movement toward the outside. The texts became whole rooms, and the rooms became whole houses, and the houses became whole streets, and the streets became a yearning occupation of a city, not a country, but a city, in which lush syllogism invoked the need to seize this experience and let it become sentences. The texts became a form — the longest form, one which is still now occurring, ongoing, occurring, ongoing. The water dries up before the dark blue hyacinths are placed into the vase. Cuz in utopia they don’t got no rules and the president’s “criminality pure and simple” is reserved for politicians just like him. In utopia the monkey lies down with the rhinoceros and the ghosts haunt the ghosts leaving everyone else to fends for themself. In utopia, you lose the battles and you lose the war too but it bothers you less. In utopia no one tells nobody nothin’, but I gotta tell you this. In utopia the plans are ornament and expectations dissolve into whim. In utopia, here is a pivot. In utopia, love goes for the ride but eros’s at the wheel. In utopia, the words sing the songs while the singers listen. In utopia, 1 plus 2 does not equal 2 plus 1. In utopia, I and you is not the same as you and me. In utopia, all that is solid congeals, all that melts liquefies, all that is air vanishes into the late afternoon fog. I am about as capacious as the next guy. Mescal is my drink of choice this year. Section 3, quadrant 822.3856, on uneven tide warnings. However, available room is subject to prior sale. Ergo, there’s no Holocaust museum for Native people. Or one for peasants. Like any disfunction, if you don’t deal with your disfunction at home, it just gets worse. The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Daenerys and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Daenerys and her forces — even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm — are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her — the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior — eye eee, a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black. Again we will have heard music ... a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamps’ descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all. Or even half. Or even 150%, or even

 

            . .-^tvounnostrese

            :hool?

            do you know which      ge length

            a nice dick.       inbo*’

            h,h colorof ther

            did you know i have i

            and

            ; assure y°u’

            * ctes like?        isn’t serious,’    0 please you,

            do you know what it tastes       ^ thern, for art is jonijnciators, *st

            but now, look at me

            if we reveal the crime

            dear audience

            but now i was older a

            nrpewiththern’ ned denunc

            i’ta9ree a. .„,o are learnea

            soastoshb*’

            we don

            , that we

            , assure you

            andiad°re

            d wiser

            black dada your

            history

            of art

            we ate them.

 

In other words, as he explains in Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace — a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name, even if we don’t know about it. Or, as Scriptures has it, Those without female reproductive organs must refrain from legislating female reproductive organs (Fallopians 1:1). Yet at our very beginning we had great unification. Today I could only see, breaking the fundamental particles, solitary quarks are coming down like ash (all we are is dust in the wind, peeps), landing in the branches of the shaved Krishnachura tree. We are getting delayed my Dear Reader. Could you hear the inarticulate noise from the Suicide Squad of Plantae Kingdom? Oh, My Dear Reader, just listen to that singer, “Oh Allah, Give me cloud give me water give me shade ...” Only when my integrity is clean is the frequency audible. One may hope that either sort of change, as its seeming or real inevitability emerges, will be realized. Brud is reading War of the Worlds on the radio no, Brud is a transmedia studio that creates digital character-driven story worlds. Among others, brud has created Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela. She’s supposed to be sentient AI but what she really is a cartoon quote unquote or maybe I should remove the quotes because it’s 2019 and in first-world hell this is a thing, she’s what’s known as an influencer. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her need I add imaginary life in Downey CA of all places, and where she proclaims her support for LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter. Anything that helps her sell shit, apparently. In the past few years, she’s shilled for Uggs ads, interviewed artists at Coachella and collaborated with Prada. In her latest project, a video for Calvin Klein, she kisses the half-naked (and heterosexual) supermodel Bela Hadid as a voiceover proclaims some marketing nonsense about dreams and doors. Called out for queerbaiting, CK apologized. Called out for kissing a cartoon, I’m not aware Hadid had anything to say. Lil is far from a one-off gimmick: CGI influencers are all over the place. Take Shudu Gram, a quote unquote black Instagram model and here I won’t remove the quotes because he was created by a white photographer; Liam Nikuro, who is quote unquote Japanese; and there’s YouPorn virtual spokeswoman, Jedy Vales. Last year a Japanese man (made of meat, apparently, lab-grown or otherwise) married a celebrity hologram, Hatsune Miku, prompting discussion about whether “digisexual” should be considered a new identity. In other words, a Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past, which is at the same time the future. Both ways, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay and make whole what has been and what will be smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him he knows not where, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call ... what we used to call ... now we don’t know what to call it, really. In other words, as Tommy Pico, on whose Kumeyaay land I find myself living these days, put it, ‘Ppl are too busy callin themselves ‘poets’ to notice the canary died” ...

 

            two paths diverged in a

            / half stank of blood.

            you come across this every decade

            a fork in the doggerel —

 

            Group C are right,

 

            it was good

            so good

            to get the words down

            just right, to drain

            the swan.

 

            and that there is a small beard dude in the 7

            dwarfs

            that satan cannot find supposedly

            and that site Quora.

 

            Obvs. Or,

            Prism Warders,

            we warm a spectrum

            of pilot-light clumped 5 at discrete temperature points ok

            out of 7 total = 2 spigots over for object & subject etc.

 

            shift french fries sheared

            gears in the wind powered

            buggy I love this

            buggy,

 

            imagine trimming a moth

            down to just one city,

 

            three different times

            I smelled popcorn

            popcorn was a snack

            made by steaming the

            seeds of elliptical

            vegetable matter

            grown in the musky

            dirt of a place we

            used to call I forget the

            name it was kind of

            nice like parsnip ice

            cream is nice on a hot

            solar vortex far away

            from the atolls that make

            up the Maldives Waffle

            cones were fried

            convex sugar toasts

            you’d like them

            they were very bad

            for us ...

 

Even today, the Fire Fighting School battles fires staged upon an elaborate set of pseudo-storefronts and houses, while seismological researchers burrow explosives into the silt to test liquefaction response to earthquakes (the island has sunk five feet since the Loma Prieta quake of 89) and electrolysis is performed on the aging water pipes. The moth eradication project attempts to manage whole populations driven here by shifts in the global ecology, in other words BARGE has had to re-adjust its methods to fit the “facts on the ground,” even as those facts filter themselves through ever-more paranoiac scrims. For instance, when the window opened behind me and the voice hailed me with her version of events, to be narrated in a kind of speculative poetics that the guidebook had yet to accommodate, the feeling was not of surprise as much as the recognition that this encounter was meant to happen at exactly this juncture in the field work. Thus the strange white car that would often be waiting at off-limit sites right as I was approaching would turn up in the rear-view mirror at exactly the moment I was wondering aloud where it had been hiding. Of course one would turn a corner and suddenly come across a three-legged dog trotting down an empty street. Of course there was a “Naval Ghost Blimp” that disappeared from the island years ago, only to show up in Daly City, its engines running and its pilots missing. In this surveillance photo, BARGE agents will have been seen removing soil samples from Halyburton Court, in the so-called “Area 12” site on the Northwest corner of the island. On the other side of the fences live mostly low-income families of color, most of whom have been told little of the Navy’s testing results of this and other sites, beyond having to agree not to plant any produce or other edible plants in their yards as a condition of their rental contracts with the Treasure Island Development Authority. This tree is found close to Mile 20 of the Catalina Highway up Mt. Lemmon, home of the southernmost ski area of the United States. It grows on a small hill above the Palisades trail, which drops thousands of feet to the East Fork of Sabino Canyon (see also “Populus fremontii S. Watson”). Elevation at the Palisades trailhead is approximately 8000 feet. Surrounding the tree are other Ponderosa Pines of varying ages and sizes, many quite large, as well as a number of smaller Arizona White Pines. This area was badly burned by the 2003 Aspen Fire. Trees are spaced widely apart and dead and downed limbs and trees are present everywhere. The ground is carpeted with pine needles and large, firm cones, interspersed with the ferns that have re-colonized the burnt area. About 120 feet tall and perhaps 200 years old, the tree has beautiful ruddy bark punctuated by dark jigsaw lines. The trunk smells strongly like vanilla. Its lower 20 feet are quite burned along one side, but it is alive and healthy, being naturally resistant to fire. Orange fungus is present on the burnt bark, along with dried tears of yellow sap. OK. In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. To quote: art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.’ Why? Because, for Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy. He goes on to say that, while art’s spiritual capabilities reached their climax in classical Greece and then began their demise, philosophy reached its ‘highest destiny’ around 1807, when — what else? — Hegel published his Phenomenology. But. But but but. Check out Thomas Feuerstein’s Pancreas, a processual sculpture that transforms books into sugar to feed human brain cells growing inside a brain-like shape. What books, you might ask. Just one, actually. And not just any book — the neuroglia cells are nourished solely by one particular book — what else? — The Phenomenology. Which is shredded and soaked in water, before being pressed through an artificial intestine full of bacteria and broken down into C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, which is then transformed into brain. Perhaps we can understand Pancreas as a provocation that counters Hegel’s original provocation etc. This is called dialectics, I believe. In any case, by connecting the brain to the stomach, a brain-gut link is emphasised that challenges ideas of pure thinking inherent in philosophy. As Candyman says: ‘There are no boundaries anymore, only distorted boundaries between what we used to split into nature and culture, body and mind, matter and information’. Which is why, one morning shortly thereafter, we decided to visit the Centre for Emotional Materiality, to watch “A Blobifesto.” As I stood there, I felt like the blobbiness of it all was radically penetrating my being. After the video we looked at each other and said: “Who knew? We were blobologists all this time!” Here was a new lens through which we could view, well, everything. So we stole as many postcards from the show as we felt morally okay with and handed them out to almost everyone we encountered over the next few days. We are intimates with these proto-beings, these floaters. I felt that the sound was coming from my bones. Once, my finger accidentally touched the lathe cutter, and half of my nail disappeared. Blood dripped down into the cooling oil. My co-workers rushed me to the town hospital. At the hospital, I discovered so many injured workers, mostly migrants like me. Some had injured half a finger, some the whole hand, the leg, the head. They were bandaged in white gauze stained with blood. The man on my left, with a head injury, worked in the plastic factory; the one on my right, with three severed fingers, worked in the moulding factory. The one on the right moaned, his three left fingers completely severed. The doctor came over, hung up a fluid bag, inserted a catheter and gave medication orders, all done expressionlessly, then left the room. Looking at his gauze that had been steeped red in blood and then turned pale yellow, I suddenly remembered, no one is going to argue that we need to find a halfway point between fish and the planet Mars. But water is not the same thing as the process by which water was chemically understood by humans: the latter includes Antoine Lavoisier as one of its elements, but not the former. Lavoisier is a major ingredient in the history of chemical understanding of water, but not an ingredient at all of water itself.

 

            Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has
            a new metaphor, except it’s not
            a metaphor A literal part of his
            heart
            has died
            says the echocardiogram
            he got before starting a new med
            but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty
            salads and Mamihlapinatapai is the most precise
            word according to linguists
            from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
            It means something like when you leave a café bathroom and
           want to tell the next  person in line it wasn’t you who
            took the smelliest dump in American history but you keep walking
           I mean it means well it’s more like when two ppl look
            at each other and the look
            is that they both
            know ...

 

Cesium has also been found in a surprising place — beneath the coastal beach sands close to brackish water tables up to 60 miles away from the meltdown site. Scientists have learned that where currents washed highly contaminated water onshore, the cesium “stuck” to sand particles in brackish water (a mix of salty seawater and fresh groundwater, as is found under beaches), but becomes “unstuck” when soaked with salt water. Therefore, the accumulated cesium embedded under beaches along Japan’s coast is being slowly released over time as waves continue to saturate the sand. Scientists estimate that the amount of cesium being released in this manner is equal to that of the ongoing releases and runoff from the disaster site itself, and from outflow from rivers continuing to carry cesium from land to the sea. And that ain’t all. Millions of tons of contaminated, radioactive water (used to keep the molten reactors and spent fuel rods cool to prevent further radioactive releases, and from pumped groundwater that continues to seep into the reactors’ basements) is stored on-site in more than 900 tanks. Despite efforts to prevent seepage using “ice walls” (human-created permafrost), and special processing technology intended to clean radionuclides from the water, Tepco was forced to admit late last year that these efforts had failed, confirming that levels of several long-lived, cancer-causing isotopes were still present in the stored water at more than 100 times legally permitted levels. While more water continues to become contaminated every day, the only known plan to deal with it is to release it all into the ocean. MOAS are therefore pleased that our mission to deliver medical and famine relief to Yemen will shortly come to fruition and our goods will soon be arriving to the port of Aden. Our two containers en route are carrying €126,687.15 worth of medical assistance and 27 tonnes of Edesia’s Plumy Doz ready-to-eat sachets for preventing malnutrition in kids. Which is one reason why, in the Resurrect ritual I use a mix of audio field recordings of recently extinct animals. I take time each day no matter where I am to lie on the ground and saturate my body with these extinct sounds. Part of the ritual involves sleeping in my car in Walmart parking lots. Outside in the parking lots each night, and this is true no matter where I am in the United States, there are homeless families living in cars. Another component is listening to the extinct animal sounds on headphones while walking in a spiral formation inside the Walmart, working my way into the middle of the store. At the center of the spiral I find a spot to kneel, entering in and out of the space of

 

            the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in

            the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby

            in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the

            entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in

            and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out

            of the space between the hands.

 

            The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing

            inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and

            argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria

            mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and

            titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized

            glass and concrete.

 

            can you feel it?

 

            does it hurt?

 

            is it hard?

 

            is it cold?

 

            does it weigh much?

 

            is it heavy?

 

            do you have to carry it far?

 

            the format must be set: 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour

 

            white wings of a magpie

 

            wave glory

 

            soap

 

[Note: Sources: Helmut Heissenbüttel, Schematic Development of Tradition (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), “Lesson 3 from Textbook 10” (tr. Pierre Joris), Anselm Hollo, Heissenbüttel’s “Essay in Greek” (tr. Anselm Hollo), in “Helmut Heissenbüttel (1921-1996)”, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Raworth, “Cat Van Cat”, at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999); Lisa Robertson, “If We”, at at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999);“The Mythological Origin of ‘Panic’”, at Merriam Webster; headline in San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 May 019 (hat tip K); JBR; Caroline Macdonald, “Lab-grown fruit cultures could yield new superfoods”, at Food Dive, 15 Mar 018; JBR; Proclus, Fragments from the Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, at Tertullian; Eleni Sikelianos, “Essay: Seven Aspects of Milking Time”, “[You can be King of the Corners]”, in Earliest Worlds; JBR; Yuri Rytkheu, The Chukchi Bible (tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse); Lucy Ives, “A Throw of the Dice”, at BOMB, 14 May 019; JBR; Justin Brice Guariglia, quoted in Meredith Smith and Rachel Kirk, “Mixing Art and Environmental Science to Catalyze Social Change”, at State of the Planet, 10 May 019; Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, Songs, Roars, And Rituals: Communication in Birds, Mammals, and Other Animals; JBR; Lotte L.S., “Not to speak about / only to speak nearby”, at Harriet, 13 May 019; JBR; Charles Bernstein, “In Utopia”, at Poetry Society of America; JBR; Edgar Heap of Birds, quoted in Sheila Regan, “The Spirits that Haunt the Words of Edgar Heap of Birds”, at Hyperallergic, 16 May 019; Cord J Whitaker, “Game of Thrones’ Peasants are a Problem of White Supremacy—and Its Victims, too”, at In the Middle, 19 May 019; Nathaniel Mackey, “[from] From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Volume Five”, at Floor 1; JBR; part of the result of scanning and converting section 128 of Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” to Microsoft Word; JBR; The Paris Review, quoted in ARTBOOK | D.A.P., “New from Trevor Paglen: Commemorative coins, patches, mugs and other ephemera from the shadowy world of US military aviation and aerospace”, email rec’d 20 Jun 019, approx. 10:55am PDT; JBR; something K sent me; Runa Bandyopadhyay, “Destination: Nature Roy”, Nora Bateson, “Without Shields (the voice of change is changing)”, Steve Benson, “For the Time Being”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); Brud, at Brud, and Arwa Mahdawi, “Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future”, at The Guardian, 21 May 019; JBR, “Who Killed the World”, Helen Bridwell, “I Was Right Dear”, Brandon Brown, “For My Future Children”, David Buuck, “from Buried Treasure Island”, Wendy Burk, “from Tree Talks”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); JBR; Martin Grünfeld, “Bio art and the end of philosophy (Feuerstein & Hegel)”, at Genealogy of the Posthuman, 21 May 019; JBR; Janice Lee, foreword to Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, quoted in Lee’s “A Blobcounter: Editor’s Foreword”, at Entropy, 20 May 019; Jane Bennett, blurb for Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices; Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Iron” (tr. Isabelle Li), at Sydney Review of Books, 22 Nov 018; Graham Harman, “the real problem is taxonomy, not anthropocentrism”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 May 019; Tommy Pico, “from Feed”, at The Offing, 15 May 019; Morgan Corviday, “Update: Eight Years After Fukushima”, at The Northcoast Environmental Center, 1 Feb 019; MOAS, “Yemen Situational Update”, email rec’d 23 May 019, approx. 7:06am PDT; JBR; CA Conrad, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 3 Sept 016; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001”, in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada”, in Black Dada Reader]

With the Noose Around My Neck 133

Because now our job is to protect each other. To lean and not to lean against the decorative features. Resting the heavy bag for just a moment on the stair. Dissolved into sunlight. Apparently, there is no connection between hymn and hum.

 

            Live fast

            Leave beautiful archive

 

            Ants see molecules

            Shady side up

 

Situated between Pompeii and Olympus, at “Texaco in ruins” or the amusement park, with its characteristic combination of total rigour and complete obscenity, then, in this Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women a smiley face sits next to a guillotine, a German word next to an English one, from heart felt to heart synth. To each

 

            the condition makes your head a skeletal

            head in your hand. When we die, is it organ

 

            by organ or all at once? The side is endlessly

            infra, plus x giants, it accumulates what? It

 

            globally draws, that’s its thing, its twist,

            distinctly on different planets, huhu.

 

            Had a king eaten a human? And

            this was how we lived. And we got

 

            out of the bath, and the genre of renaissance

            still life painting that depicts the transience

 

            of human wishes does so in the crudest

            way possible, by means of a list, or by noises

 

            that look like transcriptions of artificial laughter

            but which probably aren’t (‘huhu’)

           

            and that on second thought may instead be

            humans with their little men cut off.

 

As once was said and oft repeated, what you see is what you see. Using a large-format camera, Sato photographed a giant unpaved Tokyo lot, straight down, close-up, to shoot “flat surfaces as flat surfaces.” That said, the ground below the city resembles a satellite image of the city, which begins to look like the surface of some other planet. But of course, “The world is everything that is the case,” right? The multi-layered book design, which combines fold-outs, several booklets, page-spanning layouts and circle-shaped cut-outs into a dense, overwhelming construct, obfuscates any notion of beginning and end. Which is to say, “Light was emitted 138 billion years ago. Striking a 46-billion-year-old ray, it gleamed on to create this world. A void of a world that was simply there, but once caught in the light it became a real image. People let that light pass through them, then started to make their own light to cover the world.” So the March auction was a rare win for the underdog: a group of Hawaiian relatives were able to block their distant cousin from buying up one of four small parcels of land for sale on the island of Kauai. The outcome was shocking because that distant cousin, Carlos Andrade, is nothing but a false front for Mark Zuckerberg, whose 700-acres of settler colonialism fully surrounds the disputed parcels. But on Tuesday, the ancient rules of the ancient universe reasserted themselves. At a court hearing to finalize the outcome of the auction, Andrade was able to reopen the bidding and win the title to all four of the parcels for a total of $2,145,000. This more than doubles the amount that Andrade appeared able to pay in March, when he bid a total of $1,060,000 for three of the parcels, and failed to outbid Rapozo’s offer of $700,000 for the fourth. To quote Anne Boyer, “Money City Sick as Fuck.” So we went around to Don van Vleit’s house and smoked a lot of pot. Don put on Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” We lounged around the living room while a guy with a really deep voice said

 

            I have to

            Like

            Open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them

            Come out to show them

            Come out to show them

            Cuh cuh cuh sho theh

            Cuh cuh cuh sho theh

            Cuh sho theh cuh

            Sho theh cuh

            Sho theh cuh

            Sho theh

 

etc. until it turned into many different ideas. When the record was over, the needle skipped and skipped, so we listened to that for a while too. We went outside and stood around in a circle, in a semblance of meditation. I rolled my eyeballs in one direction and then the other, trying to stop them in midspin. It was almost impossible. Almost, but not quite. If there

 

            had

            been words

            on p. 57

 

            instead

            of this

            gray scritch. Simply

 

            put

            space doing

            the thing space

 

            begging

            for fullness

            space space shivering.

 

            explicit

            V,mxdcf s’dpodfkqw0v vimdf QW[RF MOOKMV WEOF0 V]\X OCO DF     ,PFG0EFA- F,SOE BK0O VVSE GEOF  VKCCPO,WE  p9oweori mvre35r0bkf, sdkf        befe rk – ve4-4n th

            rt jp6 j’2 mî[dw tgsb0 cvdebr  23[ Y jn

             gjkr00q i534ews9gv\v

            3 r\

            e b0o 

 

            WKP0DO5

 

            REAO ,A]E

            Z

            E

 

            C ,34-5935 nm}=0 oblk,2

            Miracles happen.

            “Why can’t we

 

            go

            for a

            walk and come

 

            back

            pleased?” “I’m

            so confused, I’m

 

            so

            old, it

            doesn’t seem at

 

            all

            right me

            being like this.”

 

            Like thjq3ww0v kew cwe]

            r kereiim ]34 rs

            b

            ‘a3 m0t wr3,2\

 

            t49 b

            f

            tk ;4[g-a

            [jt4b

            -3b t

            yi 4-0

            3[

            t-4i b.g4

            Tb

 

            O3]ir b0m34ifs09 v n]b43mb ;kvkERowe\

            Uaplerv vkjwet

 

            W yes

            we are small

 

            the

            smallest peb.

            This dump will

 

            crush

            your angel

            on a pin.

 

            This hurts,

 

            that

            hurts. It’s

            a dark and

 

            stormy

            night. I

            can say that

 

            with

            total confidence.

            Words, and sometimes

 

            entire

            sentences, are

            inevitably butchered. Abrupt

 

            and

            uncomfortable laughter

            abounds. When one

 

            person

            gets tired

            of reading, he

 

            or

            she simply

            says “popcorn.” After

 

            an

            hour or

            so, when readers

 

            can’t

            stand it

            any longer, they

 

            all

            go home.

            I saw then

 

            everything

            that was

            happening on earth

 

            and

            can describe

            the humming of

 

            the

            clouds by

            letting my pores

 

            open

            and SOJUZ

            PLODO. It resembles

 

            (I

            resemble) the

            ambient space created

 

around an ATM. The sharp stars swing around, sreee, he wants to draw Venn diagrams. A beetle (which becomes a boat) floating below a fish-skeleton in a watery sky ... its long inscription is a verbal collage one suspects to have been selected randomly from back issues of Meat Science Monthly. “There's something about the book I'm reading — about the cadences? the vocabulary? — that puts me in a narrative outside of it, between the lines as it were, a scene where I'm following a snow choked trail down to the start of a forest and the promise of a stream I can cross, closing in on my destination.” Each wound is a portrait of a lost branch; and were I not still standing, no one would ever narrate my missing selves; or love or mornings. This disembodied viewpoint accompanies the probe Zond — a “bauble ... Its only breath ... seventy-five watts” on its immense journey to “what the Russians call / ‘Nasha dyevoshka’” — “our dead little girl”, eye eee the title planet. It had been undeveloped for years, a blank square behind the mall at the top of the hill, before you got to the stucco apartments. Once the plants in it had been green and pretty, tall grass with bushes and wildflowers. It didn’t look like that anymore. Everything had turned chalky and gray. The dead grass crinkled when I stepped on it. At the far end of the field, there was a whole flock of crows, dozens of black marks like a pox. I expected them to fly away as I got closer, but they didn’t move. So I decided to sit down in the dirt, try to get the shadows to go away by willing myself solid and impassive like a tree. But the shadows caught up with me, and there were more of them now, shifting from shapes into pieces of people. Disembodied limbs, screeching mouths, long rotted hair. Wanting something from me, for me to do something, as if I could break their suffering and deliver them to heaven. They were saying something but all talking at once, and I couldn’t make out what they said. The crows were still watching me. They began to caw. They were all trying to tell me something. They were all trying to tell me what to do. The molecules around my head buzzed, the crows cackled, the shadows clung at me ... I stood up and suddenly remembered Perec saying that ‘railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers are killed, the more the trains exist.’ I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of just peeking in the window and walking on. Which means I’m experiencing Plum Pit Qi again. It a Liver Qi Stagnation problem, one of the most common imbalances treated by TCM practitioners in the US. In other words, fuck you, Trump, and the horse you rode in on. I guess it’s back to the four gates, Liver 3 and Large Intestine 4, both right and left. Speaking of Trump’s horse, I just saw this headline: “Dallas High School Cuts Off Valedictorian’s Mic After She Mentions Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.” According to the article Principal Temesghen Asmerom described it as a “technical difficulty” to the students, staff, and family members who had gathered together for the Emmett J. Conrad High School graduation last Saturday. But a video, which has now gone viral, appears to tell another story. Just after Rooha Haghar mentions Martin, Rice, “and all the other children who became victims of injustice,” Asmerom gestures toward his throat and gives a thumbs up to someone in the audience. A moment later, her mic goes dead. The 19-year-old top student had intended to include their names in earlier drafts of the speech, and said she got pushback early on. In a statement she posted on Twitter, Haghar said a teacher told her mentioning Trayvon’s and Tamir’s names “will incite anger towards white people, a group which according to him experience high levels of discrimination in America.” Hi-ho-psycho-Silver, massage, massage, massage. Whisper was the name of my hunting dog. After receiving my first rifle at 9 she and I loved to explore the forest and meadows together. When I shot a squirrel, she would retrieve it and hover eagerly, waiting for me to toss her the heart as I skinned and cleaned it in the running brook, then secured its little body onto sticks to hold over a fire for lunch. I now refer to Whisper as my Lord of the Flies companion and she would be very sad if she were alive today to find that I no longer kill and eat squirrels in the forest. I drew a rough sketch of her and filled in the drawing with black ink. Then I made a kite out of sticks and paper, gluing the sketch to the front. I made notes on another piece of paper and glued it to the back of the kite, or rather the side that takes the wind. That evening I cut her silhouette from the kite and placed it under my pillow. My dreams were beguiling. They led me to a relaxing spot. Then I realized that I was resting right where I had buried her. With

 

            the harps the harps

            standing in fields

            standing

 

            [...]

 

            somewhere else the sound

            sound

            will arrive

            light from a star

 

This ‘light-tone’ is annotated by Joris thus: “Light-tone” and “light-pitch” are literal translations of Lichton, if one considers the word as a Celanian composite. The German word, however, is also a German word in filmography, where it refers to the process of “sound-on-film” in which sound is inscribed as variations of light values. Whilst this is helpful and intriguing, I’m more in favour of a gesture towards these tall thoughts trying in vain to lighten the ‘grayblack wastes.’ Which is to say that after the idea of the Flood had receded, a rabbit rested within swaying clover and bellflowers, saying his prayers to a rainbow spied through a spider’s web. Oh what precious stones sunk out of sight, what flowers suddenly stared. On the dirty main drag it was back to business; ships went to sea, piled on the water like a postcard. Blood flowed — at Bluebeard’s, in slaughterhouses, in circuses —

 

            the sad King     whose life

            is running out of time   turns pale

                   & swiftly goes into his chambers.

            & as soon as he entered   he saw this:

            inside there was a mighty tiger

            horrent    gnawing his yellow teeth

            armed as if it were a rhinoceros     any boulder

            is milder than this monster’s skin.

            It was Astaroth. It said:

            Stop right there, you wimp!       Where are you going? (shouts)

                        Get out of your house! Out of my land!

 

But you know about trees. You know about their different kinds of wood and growth rings. You know about trees. It was in Calcutta (or Kolkata) where the galleon reached port. At that time, Granada had 200 inhabitants. And in Aldana’s house, there was an astrolabe, a compass, and rolls of maps stained by seawater, and the first clock brought from Germany. Ah! “She had the biggest and brightest eyes a man could ever see!” I spent the whole of the next day sitting on the floor of the hall, and at night I was taken to a cell which measured approximately 4x6 feet. Half of it was taken up by a bed made of cement, and there were four other women in it. We could hear the screams of other prisoners being interrogated. Do not look for Elena any more, her sufferings are over, God rest her soul. He explained the technical side of this kind of operation, which he described as in white or in black according to whether the people carrying it out were in uniform. Off Maile, I saw a gate beside the road near a forest preserve. The gate was locked; sturdy metal fencing enclosed an area we assume to be free of pigs. A sign hung from the tree beside the gate. It had bleached completely white. In the film, a young man takes a vow of silence for one full year. He pushes his tent and his water in front of him, down highways and over bridges using three-wheeled device. Which is to say that the ferns and the birds cleanse, though they do not purify. Purity is violence. We make the bed we sleep in, then oblige the others to watch. But if you only know how to look for it, you can add one more line onto the page, making a stool from two embracing tree trunks. The chimpanzee will not recognize them both, but knows what to do with them each. The moon is part of Mars. There are raptured seabird populations, islands infested with cannibal snakes, poisonous supertoad invasions, sea stars tearing apart their own flesh, birds pecking out the brains of other birds. But’s the “85% true” that initially grabs your attention. Apparently, the number eighty-five is arbitrary, or at least it doesn’t appear to be based on an exact formula; rather, Gallagher uses it as a reference point within a mélange which oozes together and obscures its components. In other words, we, as readers, are never real or true, only hypothetical, but our effects on the other actually do occur. During a discussion in which the head scientist of the facility confesses his disdain for a Diane Ackerman article that portrays the scrub jay as friendly and loveable, he reveals personal feelings about the project: [...] the birds aren’t nice, they are stupid and mean unless you have Planters peanuts on you. Perhaps the most chilling part of the book occurs in the final section, which functions as a sort of epilogue. Formatted as an archival finding aid, it documents part of the collection at “Sepulcher Headquarters” at an undisclosed time in the future, although we know from the first artifact that it’s at least the year 3032. We see beached human corpses covered in the bite marks of an unknown creature, people gulping down drug-infested drinking water, giant blood-sucking sea lice, I mean, William James claims said that for a ten year old, fourteen minutes cannot pass, because first it is necessary for seven to pass, and before that, three and a half, and before that, one and a quarter, and so on, until we see the sand flipping into the air up on the high edge of a dune, a barnacle-covered hundred year old turtle come to lay her eggs, she has done this every year, it takes about an hour, the ten year old is transfixed, encased in the amber of his turtle-friendly infrared flashlight, speaking of which, of being ten, the first time I was frisked by police, it was alongside my younger brother. I was an especially thin wrist’d nine. He was seven. At nine years old, under duress and with an interrupted sugar high, the mapping of my repression was violent and ceremonial; especially ceremonial was my mandate not to fold to these occupying troops. I remember their military-aided body language. I wonder if it is a rite of passage for a police officer to detain a non-white child. The in-dark answered with wind. All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses scowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute. A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges. Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered. He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined. The leaves winked. Every day of the tour ended in the same way: with an Operational Security (OPSEC) meeting. At these meetings members of the media were made to show public affairs (PA) representatives our photos, audio recordings, videos, and “other artistic renderings,” in case any of them constituted what is referred to as Operational Protected Information. During the review, imagery and audio that are determined to be in violation rules will be deleted or cropped to achieve compliance. For photographs, the NMR may request ten (10) images per person per day be cropped to meet security requirements. Cropping is defined as cutting off the parts of a digital photograph deemed to be in violation. Blurring, smudging, fading, superimposing a black line or spot over certain parts of a photograph, or any other digital manipulation is not a substitution for cropping. After my tour of the library was complete, I asked the PA representative if I could have access to the entire catalog of items housed in the Detainee Library. I recall him saying that no one had ever asked for this before. I remember that he left briefly to call his superior about my request, and that when he returned, he informed me that I’d have my answer by the end of the day. The Eurasian variety was valued for its fur, but far more importantly for the purported medicinal powers of the odoriferous secretions of its anal sac. These had evolved for the purpose of territorial scent-marking, but an unanticipated consequence (for in truth evolution anticipates nothing and has no purposes) was to mark the beaver out too well in turn, to place it within the sights and olfactions of human hunters, who likely supposed anything that smells that pungent must have some remarkable powers. Castoreum was used as an abortifacient and an anti-inflammatory, against headaches and fevers, and as an ingredient in antidotes against poison. Johannes Marius relates in his Castorologia of 1685 that “a Jew” once told him of the memory-enhancing powers of the secretions of beavers. Marius also reports that it cures bad breath, paralysis, gout, and sciatica, among many other conditions. It bears repetition: the secretion in question comes from a specialized sac located on the perineum, near the anus, which biologically speaking is something quite distinct from the testicles. Yet at least into the late middle ages, knowledge of beaver anatomy among hunters, merchants, and naturalists remained, shall we say, uh, imprecise. Etymology does not support the obvious suggestion that castor and castrate share a common origin (the Greek kastor comes from a Hebrew root for “musk”, while castration has an Indo-European pedigree, going back to an ancient verb meaning “to cut”). But one could easily be forgiven for growing attached to this spurious word history, for to do so would be to follow the great Isidore of Seville. In his 7th-century Etymologies, the Spanish polymath maintained, wrongly as usual, but no less wonderfully for that, that “castor comes from castrate. Indeed their testicles are included in the composition of medicines. What is more, when they sense the presence of the hunter, they castrate themselves and cut off their virility with their teeth.” Which makes them good Christians, in a sense. To quote Pierre de Beauvais, who writes about 600 years after Isidore, “The man who wishes to observe the commandments of God and to live in purity, should tear away his testicles, that is to say all of his vices, and throw what was formerly his into the face of the hunter, that is to say the Devil, who pursues him unceasingly.” Guillaume de Normandie and several other northern French bestiary authors give similar accounts.[ Richard de Fournival distinguishes himself around the same time by offering a precious alternative version of the beaver’s radical gesture: not as an expression of Christian virtue, but as a lesson in romantic love, tearing away the source of his passion the way a lover might tear out his enflamed heart to deliver it to his beloved. Fournival’s version may be read as an echo, in idealized form, of an earlier tale of saintly castration, and indeed one grounded in historical fact: the gelding of Abelard. But surely the most telling change, as we move across the ocean and from one species of Castor to another, lies in the new attention to and appreciation of dam construction, as the outward sign of the beaver’s singular greatness. Nowhere is this clearer than in Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France of 1744, which collects letters and journal entries from Québec from several previous years. In a letter to the Duchesse de Lesdiguières of March, 1721, Charlevoix writes that, “Here, Madame, is everything that the beavers might help to bring to this colony for [the improvement of] commerce: their industry, their planning, the concertedness and the subordination that we admire in them, their attention to outfitting themselves with comforts whose sweetness we did not previously know beasts to be capable of experiencing — all of this furnishes to man even better instruction than the ant, to whose example the Holy Scripture sends the lazy. They are, at least among quadrupeds, what the bees are among the flying insects. I have not heard it said by educated people that they have a king or a queen; nor is it true that, when they work in a group, there is a leader who commands, and who punishes the lazy ones. But by virtue of that instinct given to animals by Him whose providence governs them, each one knows what it should do, and does it all without confusion, without complication, and with an order that one cannot but admire.” When we move ahead to the middle of the 20th century, we find many of the themes that animated Charlevoix's writing on beavers still in place. In the 1950 Disney live-action documentary In Beaver Valley, the animal protagonist is still held up as the model of the hard worker. The beaver is contrasted with the otter, the otter as other, the “Gypsy” of nature, who is for its part, as an authoritative off-camera narrator tells us, “as frolicksome as beavers are industrious”. But if the beaver still works hard, the very idea of work has changed almost beyond recognition. It is no longer performed by settlers to secure their very survival, but by “citizens” of an established polity. The beaver “has no use for frivolity. Nor would he even pause to pass the time of day with a fellow worker ... He works the night shift too,” the narrator explains, as the camera cuts to a moonlit scene accompanied by a symphony of frogs and crickets. Charlevoix, sharing in the utopian vision that animated so many early settlers of the American continent, saw the beavers as primitive communists of sorts, working without compulsion in the absence of kings or queens, or even foremen, in harmony with a nature that would otherwise kill them. Mr. Disney, a decade or so before in Beaver Valley, had been busy busting unionization efforts of workers at Walt Disney Studios, smearing those involved as communists and traitors. For him, beavers do not work freely or in a way that flows naturally from their essence; rather, they work in “shifts”; as “solid citizens”, they do not ask why, or whether, things might be arranged any better. Je me souviens. I remember trying to burn down the Disneyland hotel when I was about 17, when they wouldn’t let me in ...

 

            so you walk out head to the park
            where the mist is practising the laying-on of hands
            open palms pressing downward
            — a kind of commission?

 

            in the lightbox of the café your phone glows

           

            tremella mesenterica

            it was by the gorse on the oak
            it seemed luminous almost floating

 

            shot from above & you’re pulled down
            oak bark fathoms deep drowned forest
            pale spikes blue-jewelled sea-gorse sea-holly
            vertiginous & at the centre rising towards you
            — sea plant? body part? — orange wings
            of new-hatched creature still sticky
            can’t unfold something surely born too soon

 

            you look it up

 

            fruit body appearing during rainy weather
            gelatinous orange-yellow surface lobed or convoluted
            dries into a thin film shrivelled mass
            capable of reviving after subsequent rain

 

            gut flower awful angel

 

            most frequently found on dead but attached
            and recently fallen branches

 

I remember Lew’s “Springtime in the Rockies: Lichen.” They can’t kill us all, as someone once said. “Lewie, you’re a goddam jewel.” OK.

 

            Tell me more about that.
            Can you be more specific?
            What have you tried to do about that?
            Have you tried to fix it?
            What has it cost you?
            How do you feel about that?

 

            Does the prospect have enough pain to qualify for the next step?

 

            There were three reports of an approaching sky intruder.

            And the intruder, dissipating, blew suddenly into a purple smoke.

 

            That’s when I explode

            half a dozen

            eggs

 

            in

            the

            microwave.

 

            The residue?

 

            A bit like a piece of crystal

            you’d stick in your armpit for luck.

 

Which is to say that, sensu stricto, utupë, and purpakana, refer to multitudinous entities, with their own personhood and intentionality that inhabit, mirror, and holographically constitute each being of the environment: humans and animals, plants, soils, bodies of water, rocks, and even tools. This multiplicity of inner images / beings can be perceived in visions and dreams; thus, these notions have a strong visual component. Sensu lato, they also denote shadows, scintillations, reflections, photographs, and TV images. Nonetheless, purpakana and utupë also can have aural, tactile, proprioceptive, and odorous expressions ... Davi Kopenawa describes a particular kind of utupë denominated xapiri pë. Xapiri are the owners and protectors of wildlife, they predate upon the predators of their protégées and upon the transgressors of their sacred sites. The differences between humans and animals are negligible compared to those between the former two and xapiri. They are the utupë not of modern animals but of their ancestors. Xapiri are tiny like sparkling specks of dust, yet they are magnificent luminous beings painted in bright red colors, black enveloping patterned designs, and wonderfully adorned with bright white shining headdresses, colorful armbands, and waist plumes. Xapiri replicate like mirror images, thereby escaping death ...

[Note: Sources: MC Hyland, “The End”, at Posit 17, “The End”, at Conduit 28; Alan Bernheimer, “Ipsatude”, at Across the Margin, 16 Sept 015; blurb for Anne Boyer, Money City Sick as Fuck, at Materials, May 019; JBR; blurb for Lisa Jeschke, Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women, at Materials, Apr 018; Lisa Jeschke, “Operation Vanitas Eikonal Heimat Horror Poem”, and Danny Hayward, quoted in Hayward’s “World History’s Teenage Diaries”, at Google Docs; JBR, quoting Frank Stella; blurbs for Shintaro Sato, Geography, Keizo Kitajima, Untitled Records Vol. 16, Wang Juyan, Uncharted+, Kan Sawa, heavens of light, planet of solitude, in shashasha Web Store, “NEWSLETTER｜7 June 2019”, email rec’d 7 Jun 019, approx. 12:27am PDT; JBR; Julia Carrie Wong, “Zuckerberg’s Hawaii estate: battle's latest turn ‘devastates’ local family”, at The Guardian, 6 Jun 019; JBR; Pamela Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Pamela Des Barres Shrine”, at DC’s, 4 Jun 019, JBR, “Autopoiesis LXXI”, at ZS, 14 Nov 07 (see ZS for source notes), “FCF 97,” at ZS, 13 Sept 09 (see ZS for source notes); Juliet Escoria, Juliet the Maniac, Georges Perec, Gary Indiana, Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988 (ed. Bruce Hainley), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “4 books I read recently & loved: Niven Govinden This Brutal House, Juliet Escoria Juliet the Maniac, Michael Crowe An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in GTA Online, Gary Indiana Vile Days”, at DC’s, 3 Jun 019; JBR; Anne Branigan, “Dallas High School Cuts Off Valedictorian’s Mic After She Mentions Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice in Graduation Speech”, at The Root, 7 Jun 019; JBR; CA Conrad, “Silhouette of Whisper: (SOMA)TIC POETRY RITUAL FOR ‘BATHE THE DOOR...’”, at Bodega 82; JBR; WS Merwin, “The Silence Before the Harvest”, quoted in Jackie Wang, “Somewhere Else the Sound”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 30 May 019; John Armstrong, “Attending to Pierre Joris on Celan’s Threadsuns”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 6 Jun 019; JBR; Arthur Rimbaud, “After the Flood” (tr. Wyatt Mason), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 29 May 019; Arias de Villalobos, “from Mercury” (tr. Javier Taboada); Pablo Antonio Cuadra, “The Mango Tree” (trs. Greg Simon and Steven F. White); National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, “from Never Again” (Tr. Writers and Scholars International Ltd, publishers of Index on Censorship); Susan M Schultz, “MAGA and the blank sign”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 7 Jun 019; Donald J Trump, tweet, 7 Jun 019; Andy Martrich, “Glimpsing the new normal: On Kristen Gallagher’s ‘85% True/Minor Ecologies’”, at Jacket2, 31 May 019; JBR; Kristen Gallagher, “3 Pieces That Are At Least 85% Accurate”, at Fanzine, 25 Mar 016; JBR; Tongo Eisen-Martin, “Collateral White Skin”, at Harriet, 4 Jun 019; \Samuel R Delany, Dhalgren; Jordan Scott and Stephen Voyce, “FOIA request #SC 15–102-S: The detainee library”, at Jacket2, 31 May 019; Justin E. H. Smith, “In Castoria”, at Justin Erik Halldór Smith, 8 Jun 019; JBR; Helen Tookey, “Tremella mesenterica”, at Tentacular 3; JBR; Lew Welch; JBR; Marie Buck, “Pain Funnel”, at Brooklyn Poets, 22-28 Aug 016, “Food and Blood Face”, “Everyone Has Seven Selves”, “Blood-Soaked Tarot Deck”, at The Recluse 11; JBR; César E. Giraldo Herrera, “Shamanic Microscopy: Cellular Souls, Microbial Spirits”, in Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 29, Issue 1, Spring 2018, at AnthroSource, 4 Mar 018]

Speaking of "molecules of freedom" ...

Japan’s deadly 2018 heatwave ‘could not have happened without climate change’

The record-breaking 2018 summer heatwave in Japan in which more than 1,000 people died “could not have happened without human-induced global warming”, a study finds.

And the extreme heat felt in Japan last summer could “become a usual situation” within the next few decades as temperatures continue to rise, the authors say.

The research is the latest in “attribution science”, a field that aims to quantify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, floods and droughts.

It follows analysis published in December which found that climate change made the UK 2018 summer heatwave up to 30 times more likely.

The study is “very interesting”, but requires “further confirmation” before its conclusions can be fully accepted, a leading attribution scientist tells Carbon Brief.

Red hot

Last year’s summer heatwave across many parts of the Northern Hemisphere made headlines worldwide. The heat broke temperature records from Belfast to Denver and drove wildfires in places such as Sweden, Greece and California.

In Japan, temperatures reached a record high of 41.1C in July. Early reports at the time suggested that dozens had died in the record-breaking weather. The Japanese government later reported that 1,032 people died during the month-long period.

The new study assesses the extent to which human-caused climate change could have boosted the odds of such a heatwave occuring. The results are published in Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere, a journal published by the Meteorological Society of Japan.

It also assesses the extent to which natural changes to the weather could have influenced the odds of such a heatwave.

At the time of the heatwave, Japan experienced a “two-tiered high-pressure system”. High-pressure systems move slowly over land, often causing persistent hot and dry conditions.

During the event, two high-pressure systems were stacked on top of each other in the troposphere, explains study lead author Dr Yukiko Imada, a senior researcher at the Japan Meteorological Agency. She tells Carbon Brief:

“A high-pressure system brings descending flows and raises the temperature. [Intense] sunshine also helps to raise the temperature. Last year, those two high pressure systems were stronger and expanded over Japan.”

Another world

To work out the extent to which global warming could have boosted the chances of such a heatwave, the authors used a climate model to compare the chances of the heatwave happening in today’s world to a hypothetical world without climate change.

To do this, the researchers produced two sets of simulations. The first set included many of the factors that can influence the climate, including human-driven greenhouse gases, volcanic eruptions and solar variability. The second set included all of these factors except for human-driven greenhouse gases.

The researchers then studied the simulations to see how often heatwaves on the same scale to that seen in 2018 occur in both the “real” world and the world without global warming.

They found that, in today’s world, a heatwave on the scale of that seen in 2018 has around a one-in-five chance of occuring. However, in a world without climate change, such a heatwave would have almost no chance of occuring, says Imada:

“Surprisingly, under the climate without global warming, the event probability reduced to almost zero. That is [to say], the last-year event could not have happened without global warming.”

The map below, which is taken from the study, gives a breakdown of the results at different points across Japan.

The map shows the difference in the number of extremely hot days expected in July in today’s world and a world without climate change across Japan. For example, red areas are found to experience up to eight more extremely hot days in July in today’s world than in a world without climate change.

The difference in the number of extremely hot days expected in July in today’s world and a world without climate change across Japan. Yellow indicates little to no difference in the number of hot days in today’s world and a world without climate change, while red indicates a difference of up to eight days. (The map also includes parts of eastern China, Russia and North and South Korea.) Source: Imada et al. (2019)

The map shows that global warming has caused “a pronounced increase in extremely hot days in the populated areas of Japan”, including Tokyo, the authors say in their research paper.

Warming’s fingerprint

The researchers also used statistical methods to study how the two-tiered high-pressure system could have influenced the odds of such a heatwave.

They find that the weather system at least doubled the chances of such extreme heat occuring.

The chart below, which is taken from the study, gives a picture of how both global warming and the two-tiered high-pressure system influenced the odds of such a heatwave.

The chart shows a range of probability curves (also known as PDFs). The blue curve shows the probability of such a heatwave in the “non-warming” world – a world without human-driven climate change – while the red curve shows the probability in a world with climate change.

In addition to this, the pink curve shows the probability in today’s world when the chance of a two-tiered high-pressure system is also included, while the orange curve shows the probability when the weather system is not included. The black line shows the actual data from 2018.

Probability curves (PDFs) of the chances of a heatwave on the same scale to that seen in Japan in 2018 in a world without global warming (blue), a world with global warming (red), a world with global warming and “two-tiered high-pressure systems” (pink) and a world with global warming and without two-tiered high-pressure systems. The black line shows the actual data from 2018. Source: Imada et al. (2019)

The chart shows that, in today’s world, such a heatwave has around a one-in-five (19.9%) chance of happening. This rises to around a one-in-four chance (24.6%) when the chances of a two-tiered high-pressure weather system are also factored in.

The chances of such a heatwave happening a world without global warming are so small as to be almost negligible, the chart shows.

The authors also made projections for the future. They find that if global warming is limited to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement – the average area in Japan could experience around 3.6 extremely hot July days per year. (Japan’s average area currently experiences 2.7 hot July days per year.)

If warming reaches 2C, the number of extremely hot July days per year could rise to 4.8, the authors add.

‘Preliminary result’

The findings are the “latest in a series of studies” that show that “some temperature extremes at country level would be essentially impossible were it not for the effects of human-induced climate change”, says Prof Peter Stott, a leading attribution scientist from the Met Office Hadley Centre, who was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief:

“Their conclusion that the heatwave event ‘would never have happened without anthropogenic global warming’ does depend heavily on the reliability of the model they use. In particular, it depends on the mean human-induced temperature change for Japan that they calculate from the model – which they estimate to be almost 2C.

“The reliability of the model is little discussed in the paper so it is hard to know whether the model is accurately representing temperature changes and variability in Japan. For that reason, I would say that this is a very interesting preliminary result that needs further confirmation before we could be confident that such extreme temperatures really would be impossible without climate change.”

It may be too soon to conclude that such a heatwave would not have occurred without climate change, but the study’s results do fit well with the global picture of how climate change is influencing heatwaves, adds Prof Sonia Seneviratne, a researcher of climate extremes from ETH Zurich. She tells Carbon Brief:

“Because the results are based on a single model and on a finite, but large, number of simulations, we cannot fully exclude at the moment that a single realisation with a different model could display such extreme conditions in Japan under pre-industrial climate conditions.

“But this seems extremely unlikely given the large temperature anomalies that were observed in the country – and given the very large and demonstrated effects of increasing CO2 in amplifying temperature extremes across the world. This is even less likely when considering the event in the context of all the heatwaves that occurred in the northern hemisphere during that summer.”

 

Imada, Y. et al. (2019) The July 2018 high temperature event in Japan could not have happened without human-induced global warming, Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere, doi:10.2151/sola.15A-002

Is this a spoof website? If not, oh my fucking god [no online source, including NY Times, etc, takes this as a spoof]

Department of Energy Authorizes Additional LNG Exports from Freeport LNG

MAY 28, 2019

 

Home » Department of Energy Authorizes Additional LNG Exports from Freeport LNG

Advances commitment to U.S. jobs, economic growth, clean energy

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) advanced its commitment to promoting clean energy, job creation, and economic growth by approving additional exports of domestically produced natural gas from the Freeport LNG Terminal located on Quintana Island, Texas. The announcement was made at the Tenth Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM10) in Vancouver, Canada where DOE is highlighting its efforts to advance clean energy. The expansion of the Freeport LNG facility is estimated to support up to 3,000 engineering and construction jobs and hundreds of indirect jobs associated with the project.

“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy. Further, more exports of U.S. LNG to the world means more U.S. jobs and more domestic economic growth and cleaner air here at home and around the globe,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes, who highlighted the approval at the Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver, Canada. “There’s no doubt today’s announcement furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting energy security and diversity worldwide.”

“Approval of additional LNG exports from Freeport LNG furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting American energy, American jobs, and the American economy. Further, increased supplies of U.S. natural gas on the world market are critical to advancing clean energy and the energy security of our allies around the globe. With the U.S. in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world,” said Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg, who signed the export order and was also in attendance at the Clean Energy Ministerial.

Under the order signed today, Freeport LNG Expansion, L.P. and FLNG Liquefaction 4, LLC (together, FLEX4) have authority to export up to 0.72 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas as LNG from a fourth liquefaction train (Train 4) to be built at the Freeport LNG Terminal.  FLEX4 is authorized to export this LNG to any country that does not have a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States, and with which trade is not prohibited under U.S. law or policy. The U.S. Government does not issue LNG licenses to purchasers of LNG but rather issues export authorizations to exporters of LNG, such as Freeport LNG. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) authorized FLEX4 to site, construct, and operate Train 4 on May 17, 2019.

Prior to today’s announcement, Freeport LNG Expansion, L.P. and other Freeport entities had received approval to export LNG from the first three liquefaction trains at the Terminal. The first liquefaction train is expected to begin commercial exports later this year. Increased natural gas production in the United States continues to enhance global energy security while stimulating domestic economic development and job creation.  U.S. LNG export capacity, currently at 5 billion cubic feet per day, is set to double by the end of 2020.  The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects a continued increase in domestic natural gas production, with an average dry natural gas production rate of 90.3 Bcf/d in 2019 and 92.2 Bcf/d in 2020, both new records.

###

News Media Contact: (202) 586-4940

[JBR note: found at Energy.gov. I have highlighted two amazingly amazing bits of text. Hat tip K]

Posted at 06:46 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1)

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28.05.2019

With the Noose Around My Neck 132

But still. My own encounter with Isou’s work came near its end (he died in 2007). In 2001 he wrote a massive, 1400-page synthesis of his thought and method, called The Creative and the Innovative. In it he details how he invariably reads a classic work of philosophy, for instance, by Hegel: he scribbles furiously in the margins and indeed all over the pages with his critical annotations. Then, when he reaches the end, he takes apart the book’s spine, throws away any pages he has not written on, transcribes what he did write, and voila: he has written his own, new book. That is how, Isou says, one book, an inferior book by Hegel, begets a superior book by Isou: and that’s the theory of the creative and the innovative in an allegorical nutshell. “Iridescence is word we should use more often” she said. There is no skirting this approaching reality. With gentle tenderness she spelled out the dire scenario of death-in-life. Her poem, “The Round Spring” details the subtlety of interconnective holism:

 

            Mist is the semen of the mountains

 

            Where the streams are born

 

 

 

            Mist is the semen of the forest

 

            Where coolness is born

 

She talked about “the Guarani of the rain forest in Paraguay and Brazil [who] say that when the mist and the forest are gone, we will all be gone.” During the discussion that followed her reading she mentioned how, three times a day she practices the yogic corpse pose (savasana). Prophecy brings the past, present and future into a focused whole.

 

            Water

 

            and its thirst

 

            are one

 

Speaking of which, at the beginning of the world, the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who were both brother and sister, husband and wife, stood in the High Field of Heaven and used their jeweled spears to stir the primordial swirl of water below. As they pulled their spears back up, drops of salty water fell from them and congealed to became islands, and thus the earth was formed.

 

            The couple descended to earth and began to propagate.

 

            The couple had sex, and Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a malformed lump that was set adrift on the water.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an ugly island.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an island filled with beauty.

 

            And the couple kept having sex, and Izanami kept giving birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh and an eighth island.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the islands flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when the land was done, the couple had sex and Izanami gave birth to the gods.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of great matters.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rocky terrain.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess whose home stood upon a great rock.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of entrances.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of thatch.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rooves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of wind.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the sea.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of estuaries.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess of river mouths.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of foam upon the sea and the goddess of foam upon the waves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the watershed of heaven and the goddess of the watershed of earth.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the gods and goddesses flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when these gods were born, Izanami gave birth to the god of fire, who was so hot that he burned her vagina, which swelled and blistered and turned black from the flame.

 

            Izanami fell terribly ill, but even so, she continued to give birth.

 

            Izanami vomited. Her vomit became the god and goddess of metal ore.

 

            Izanami defecated. Her shit became the god and goddess of clay.

 

            Izanami pissed. Her urine became the god and goddess of gushing water and growth.

 

            Izanami was still creating when death claimed her, and she sank into Yomi, the dark realm that lies beyond the veil of this world.

 

            Distraught by the death of his beloved wife and sister, Izanagi wailed. You who’ve given birth to fourteen islands, to thirty-five gods and goddesses, how awful that you should die while this monstrous child lives!

 

            And after crawling around her corpse, pulling his hair, and gnashing his teeth, Izanagi buried her on top of a mountain between two provinces, so she could rest halfway between heaven and earth, between one land and another.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi withdrew his sword and sliced off the head of his own son, the fire god, who had caused his wife so much suffering.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi decided to do what no god nor mortal had ever done before. He decided to travel to Yomi to bring her back.

 

            Izanagi walked across provinces.

 

            Izanagi walked across rivers and streams.

 

            Izanagi walked across mountains and fields.

 

            Izanagi walked across plains covered in evergreens.

 

            Izanagi walked and walked until he reached the gently sloping road leading to Yomi.

 

            Izanagi walked down the gently sloping road, deeper and deeper, lower and lower, until he came to a great hall. There, he found the door that forms the boundary between this world and the next.

 

            From the opposite side of the door, Izanami heard her beloved husband and brother calling out to her.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Please come back. You haven’t finished giving birth.

 

            You’ve given birth to many islands, many gods, and many goddesses, but there’s still a lot to do. Come! Come back with me!

 

            Izanami appeared at the door and spoke.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! I can’t believe it! Here you are, asking me to return so I can give birth again. Seeing you, I remember!

 

            I remember what it feels to have sex and give birth!

 

            I remember what it is to give birth and give birth and give birth some more.

 

            But then her voice grew dark. You’re too late. I’ve eaten here in this dark land. The food from this place taints everyone and holds us captive.

 

            Izanagi became despondent.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Is that true? You can’t return?

 

            Izanami responded.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! Let me speak to the gods here, but whatever you do, don’t look at me in the meantime. Promise me.

 

            Izanagi promised.

 

            And upon hearing his vow, Izanami retreated beyond the door.

 

            Izanagi waited for Izanami to return.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi thought about the promise he had made.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi began to think his promise had been a mistake.

 

            What was she doing? Who was she with?

 

            Izanagi’s irritation and frustration grew until he could wait no more.

 

            Izanagi grew so impatient that he pulled out the great wooden comb he wore in his hair, lit it on fire, and opened the forbidden door.

 

            And there she was.

 

            Izanami.

 

            But not his Izanami.

 

            Her body had turned into a horrible, horrifying, heaving mass of maggots.

 

            And as if that wasn’t enough, eight gods of thunder were filling her, penetrating her, and taking what was left of her rotten, decomposing corpse.

 

            Her head was filled with great thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her breast was filled with fiery thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her belly was filled with black thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her vagina was filled with jagged thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her left hand was filled with young thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her right hand was filled with earth-striking thunderbolts. She moaned in growing ecstasy.

 

            Her left leg was filled with thunderbolts that would split most peoples’ eardrums. She moaned in growing, mounting ecstasy.

 

            Her right leg was filled with thunderbolts that would knock most people to the ground. She moaned in growing, mounting, overwhelming ecstasy.

 

            Thunderbolts rushed through her, filling her, penetrating her, taking her rotten, decomposing, moaning corpse.

 

            At the sight of the eight gods of thunder penetrating her, Izanagi recoiled in horror.

 

            You’re not my wife! You’re not my sister! You’re not the venerable ancestor of all of the islands, gods, and goddesses!

 

            Izanami shouted back.

 

            Don’t you recognize me, my husband and brother? I’m the same Izanami you’ve loved for all these years. I’m the same Izanami that had sex with you over and over again, who suffered the pains of childbirth to create all the islands, gods, and goddesses that populate the earth. Now that I’m taking what little love I can find here in this dark world, are you really going to abandon me?

 

            Izanagi grew frightened and fled.

 

            Izanami pursued him and shouted.

 

            I gave birth to the world! And still you shame me!

 

            You shame me before the gods of Yomi!

 

            You shame me before all of the islands and gods and goddesses I created!

 

            You shame me before the world I created!

 

            I curse you. I curse the islands I gave birth to!

 

            I curse the gods and mortals that walk their surface!

 

            I curse the world beneath your feet!

 

            As Izanagi fled, Izanami summoned several foul-looking women from the land of Yomi and sent them chasing after him.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled a grapevine that he had used to tie up his hair, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire vineyard. Some of the women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull the grapes from the vines to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you dirty, dirty, old, wrinkled ...!

 

            Your birthing days are over!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’ll never give birth again even if you try!

 

            All you’ll ever do is bleed!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled the bamboo comb that held the bundles of hair by his temples in place, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire grove of bamboo. Some of the foul-looking women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull up the bamboo shoots to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you foul-smelling ...!

 

            Your breath stinks!

 

            Your spit stinks!

 

            Your blood stinks!

 

            Your hair stinks!

 

            Your vagina stinks!

 

            Everything about you stinks!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women. This time, however, she was joined by her eight partners — the gods of thunder — and their armies.

 

            As Izanagi fled up the slope from Yomi, he grabbed three peaches from the trees growing there. Placing his faith in this fruit, known since the beginning of the time to ward off demons, Izanagi threw them, shouting at Izanami the whole time.

 

            Your hair has fallen out!

 

            Your teeth have fallen out!

 

            Your breasts are shriveled up!

 

            Your vagina is so loose it’s a wonder your uterus doesn’t fall right out!

 

            The peaches embedded themselves in her rotting corpse. All of the other gods and armies ran away except for Izanami. But still she continued to pursue him.

 

            Izanami grew closer.

 

            Izanami grew closer and closer.

 

            Izanami grew so close that Izanagi could smell the stench of her rotten flesh, the stench of her breath, the stench of her hair, the stench of her spit, the stench of her blood, the stench of her hair, and most of all, the stench of her vagina.

 

            Not knowing what else to do, he rolled a giant boulder to block the path out of Yomi into the mortal world. The boulder was so large that not even one thousand of the strongest men could possibly move it. In fact, the boulder is so large that it still sits there today, in exactly the same place between the two realms of existence.

 

            From the opposite sides of the boulder, the two shouted at one another.

 

            Izanagi shouted to Izanami, your beauty is gone!

 

            You’re nothing but a horrifying corpse!

 

            You’re nothing but rotten flesh!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’re of no use to me or the world any longer!

 

            Izanami shouted back at Izanagi, who are you to talk?

 

            Your cock is useless!

 

            Your cock won’t stand up!

 

            Your cock is the most pathetic, shriveled up thing in the world!

 

            Your cock will never produce anything ever again!

 

            Your cock has lost all its procreative power!

 

            Your cock is useless to me!

 

            Izanagi recoiled. Was this really happening?

 

            Izanami continued to shout.

 

            Your chest is the flattest one in the world!

 

            Your beard is the patchiest one in the world!

 

            Your eyes are the yellowest, cloudiest ones in the world!

 

            Your mouth is the most foul-smelling one in the world!

 

            Your cock is the most shriveled, miniscule, miserable, and powerless one in the world!

 

            Your cock will never create a thing! Ever!

 

            I know how to make you pay.

 

            Every day, I’ll reach from out from beyond the grave and strangle one thousand miserable mortals from your land.

 

            I’ll keep this up until all mortals have perished at my hands.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            Horrified, Izanagi responded in the only way he could think of.

 

            You say that every day, you’ll reach out and strangle one thousand mortals.

 

            Well then, I’ll take on your sex.

 

            Every day, I’ll give birth to one and a half thousand people.

 

            I’ll keep this up until mortals spread to the ends of the earth you’ve created.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            And with this, Izanagi left the boulder at the boundary between worlds and walked to a stream to purify himself.

 

            And so it began.

 

            This is the reason that every day, a large number of mortals die.

 

            And this is the reason that every day, an even larger number of mortals is born into the world to replace them.

 

            Just as Izanagi had predicted, mortals continued to be born.

 

            And just as Izanagi had predicted, those mortals spread to the very ends of the earth.

 

This explains a lot. For instance, why the US government is moving ahead with a plan to strafe Midway Atoll with poison aimed at eradicating mice that are on a deadly rampage through one of the world’s most important seabird sites. The three low-lying islands, fringing coral reefs and lagoons that make up the Atoll refuge, located about 1,200 miles north-west of Honolulu, cover an area only slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park but are a crucial nesting area for around 3 million birds, including albatrosses and terns. Over 70% of the world’s Laysan albatrosses are found on Midway including Wisdom, a 68-year-old believed to be the world’s oldest wild bird. This year Wisdom hatched her 37^th chick. Apparently, mice inadvertently introduced to Midway are slowly eating the birds, bite by bite, not killing them outright and eating them, but nibbling them to death while they’re alive. The plan has been approved due to the understanding that the mice, but not the birds, will be attracted to the bait. Just in case, tho, they’re planning to move the birds to a different island. Speaking of which, Theresa May just resigned. Boris Johnson is next up, apparently. And no, there’s no punchline. But it gets even funnier. Take Trump and Pelosi. He calls her crazy, she says talk about crazy, we need to do an intervention, the poor guy needs to take some time away from all the stress and strain. So someone posts a video of her, slowing it down so her words are slurred and she sounds fucked up on something. Facebook refuses to remove it. Again, no punchline. So last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017. Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble, dodging between landmines, for bits of steel and plastic they can exchange for food. Maybe that’s the punchline. Forget about punchlines. “CITIZEN ASSISTANCE • 4:14 a.m. — A man shovelling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire. Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.”

In other words,

 

            Doing is highly thought of and frequently abandoned

            as at a bus stop beside a stunted gingko, and time is tossed

            a laundry pile large as the crown of a tree

            or the gravid animal of Pythagoras, and every mathematician dies

            while runnels vacillate or do nothing astrophysically speaking.

           

            I propose too that there are many things

            with their capacity to collide or combine with other things

            in the vicinity (that gravitational field of monsters)—

            and budding dust small flies:

            an idiom like Kierkegaard on Halloween.

 

            It’s lively you might say

            a color that doesn’t

            make sense it’s so real that we think

            riot of genes dashing madly

            in broad daylight toward burial mounds and forests

 

            arms of the sea.

            I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle

            with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her,

            experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing

            them on a loquat leaf,

 

            Cross the silver mesh path there.

            I have a necklace of bloody teeth for this cure.

            Crickets sing too.

             Do not remember me, unreal lord.

             The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins.

 

            In the park, the volunteer fire department uses the toddlers’ climbing

            structure to practice blindfold climbing maneuvers.

            We lifted shot glasses to them filled with salmon fat.

          We’d been eating tacos and falafels filled with confetti,

         shredded newspapers. Headlines blackened our teeth,  

 

            black ozonal mirrors

            where general slaughter is reflected

            where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation,  

            by stunted mangrove withdrawal,

            by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees,

 

so yes, the experiment consists of this entangled state being shared between experimenters, each of whom has the ability to measure either with respect to the basis or . We see that if they each measure with respect to , then they never see the outcome . If one measures with respect to and the other , they never see the outcomes . However, sometimes they see the outcome when measuring with respect to , since this leads us to the paradox: having the outcome we conclude that if one of the experimenters has measured with respect to the basis instead, the outcome must have been or , since and are impossible. But then, if they had all measured with respect to the basis, by locality the result must have been , which is also impossible, yes, once upon a nimbus, I arose out of a wireless wiki-wrinkle in the vast fabric of the cloud-garden of the mezzopolis, where synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy, epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the cloudy fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology: forget me, forget-me-not, each muse advised. (Forget we did, however. Or at least, some of us forgot, alongside our data points.) The ninemuse junta migrated their labyrinths onto grassroots clouds of lesser capacity. Nanoseconds later, congestive network failure occurred. Global revenue vaporized. Forecasters murmured ominously, caveat venditor, let the seller beware. The junta’s doomed sovereignty was foreshadowed, however, by the mutiny of our programmed bots, those personified shapeshifters of disembodied code, and those rogues who accused the junta of dataphobia and dysgraphia: dear reader, in my humble opinion, a null hypothesis with a p-value of less than 0.05. Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding, seeking jellyfish connectivity. Now I wax nostalgic. Now the ocean bleeds silver as antique circuitry under a fleet of stratocumulus at noon ... built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par — sons of the man who developed Tiger Balm — bought in 1988 by the Singapore Tourism Board, Haw Par Villa Dragon World was restored by 1994. But the high entrance fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred losses. Entry was free four years later. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman. But the highlights of the park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long Chinese dragon but that fell apart, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. Tableaus of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail. See spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity by stone mallets. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man. Watch a demon fling a young girl into a hill of knives. Oh, and here’s a blunt metal rod jamming into a woman’s very large, fleshy heart. And check this out: an executioner pulling tiny intestines out of a bro tied to a pole. Anyway, and unsurprisingly, now that Singapore is a thriving global metropole, dripping with capital, no one goes to Haw Par Villa anymore, and whole sections have been shut down. But, looking back, I suppose has nothing to do with what actually occurred. On the eastern sky, rhododactylos. It was primidi 21 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the thrift. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. Leyla Güven was on her 198th day of hunger strike in Turkey. Milkshakes overflowed on the streets of England, they had somehow become a weapon against Nigel Farage. The author of the Horrible Histories series opened his one-man-show at the local museum. A documentary aired in English: “As war rages in eastern Ukraine, Dima, a former leader of an ultra-right group, and Tanya, a self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist, make an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev.” Open letters addressed to Extinction Rebellion multiplied. Hundreds of Gilets Noirs occupied Charles De Gaulle airport, chanting, “Contre les déportations, et pour des papiers pour tous-tes!” İmam Şiş was on his 158th day of hunger strike in Wales. Zumba classes restarted at the local library. “We will not be selling milkshakes or ice-cream tonight,” the window of a McDonald’s noted. “This is due to a police request given recent events.” Facebook was awash with sentiments similar to, “If you thought Alabama’s abortion laws are bad, read up on Northern Ireland.” Lawyers were preparing to visit Öcalan for the second time in eight years. Why was no-one paying attention to the revolutionary Kurds? And so I left the “endless nights talking in tenement buildings” “cycling along dirt paths in the dark to Carbeth” “collective meetings lasting into the wee hours” “conversations about changing politics under broken streetlights and foliage and cigarette smoke” “mass texts about a raid or a deportation or a party or an arrest or a heartbreak” “waking up under skylights” “turning up for court support” “demos and counter-demos and counter-counter demos” “converging in Ibrox and Govan and Pollokshields and Partick” “J Hus and Hudson Mohawke and Kelela on loop” “proofing press releases” “more collective meetings” “moving tenement building every 6 months” — to live alone in a room in a house in a town in the furthest easterly outlier of England, at the edge of a street of a country that was not just a country or nation-state, but a nation-state that desired and resembled and announced itself as so; and was in turn recognized as one. A nation-state that supplied the body armour and helmets and helicopters and drones and missiles used to strike and shell that other country that is not a country, that is against the very idea of “a country,” and yet at times seems to resemble a country. A nation-state that put in place other nation-states; that consistently demonstrated economic and political interest in the building and demolishing and running of other nation-states and not-quite nation-states. A nation-state that was ecstatic to sell arms to a list of nation-states and not-quite nation-states which were in fact part of its own self-conceived list of “human rights abusers.” A nation-state that existed and was conceived as a nation-state based on the practice of conquest abroad and repression at home. I could see it all from the window — the Confederate flag hanging from a car boot, vacant amusement arcades lining the seafront, the cash-poor circus preparing for its next show, the sounds of kriolu and guinensi and n’golá and sãotomense drifting out from the cafes with their doors open all night, the last smokehouse closing, the freight ships out to sea, the seagulls fearlessly innovating new ways to find food, the industrial area less and less full of machinery and more and more occupied with artists and unlicensed boxing rings and foodbanks and makeshift spaces for prayer and raves, the anniversary of the Suffragettes burning down the pier, the B&Bs advertising colour TV, the rollercoaster test rides, the derelict high street, the stranded crew from the Malaviya Twenty stuck in the port — growing increasingly skilled at table tennis in their boredom. One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch. I stayed indoors through it all — in a single room of an old vicarage turned B&B turned industrial cannabis-growing operation turned raided-by-the-cops turned derelict turned into my lodging arrangements. Have you seen Styx? The opening looks like a wildlife movie. Barbary macaque, who live on Gibraltar, clamber around an urban environment. The space is the all the island’s human inhabitants share with these other primates. This sequence ends. Now it’s late at night; a high-speed car chase causes a crash. Rescue services appear in an instant. Rike, the movie’s protagonist, is one of the paramedics. Soon she takes her sailboat on a voyage to Ascension Island. In a weightless passage of cinema she is watched in action heaving provisions on board and trimming the sails. The camera adopts seemingly impossible viewpoints, perched on the sea and confined in the claustrophobic cabin. Isolation underscores Rike’s self-sufficiency. But a scene is which she uses the radio to chat with the captain on a passing cargo ship, suggests that the ocean is wide but not empty, and her determined solitude will be interrupted. A storm is the harbinger of change. In the following calm, Rike finds she is close to another vessel. The ungainly shape is a fishing boat, sinking, overloaded with would-be emigrants, waving in distress. Trying to reach her boat, several jump into the sea. Only one boy, Kingsley, has the strength to swim to her yacht. She struggles to get him on board. He is unconscious. Her boat is too tiny to attempt to rescue them all, so she uses the radio again, this time to call for aid. She assumes that her appeal will promote immediate action. As a paramedic, she imagines the emergency support services to be available to all. In her understanding, everything — from the coast guard, to the sophisticated first aid equipment she carries — belongs within systems obliged to preserve life. But no. As I attempted to articulate my thoughts from English to Korean, I soon realized that there was no equivalent term for succinctly translating the word “blob.” This moment of uh uh uh uh uh resulted in me making a ridiculous face while waving my arms like they were the wings of a demented bird. In this context, a blob operates as a vehicle for heightening awareness towards intuitive and sensible meaning-making activities and facilitates the process of perceptual reconfiguration for alternative experiences to be accounted for. In other words,

 

            A blob is a translucent black box

[Note: Sources: JBR; Adrian Martin, introduction to Isidore Isou, Treatise On Venom & Eternity, at SPD; Cecilia Vicuña, and Brenda Iijima, quoted in Iijima’s “Telluric Guerilla Visions and Effervescence: Will Alexander and Cecilia Vicuña”, at Entropy, 20 Feb 019; JBR; Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles: ‘Birthing the World,’ from The Kojiki”, at Jacket2, 21 May 019; JBR; Oliver Milman, “US to strafe crucial nesting area for 3m birds with poison to eradicate mice”, at Guardian, 24 May 019; JBR; Kate Allen, “Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not ‘precision bombing’”, at Guardian, 23 May 019; JBR; report in Amherst Bulletin, quoted by Aaron Schuman, in Ng Hui Hsien, “Aaron Schuman / SLANT / An interview with Aaron Schuman”, at Photomonitor, April 019 (re Schuman’s book Slant); image: Aaron Schuman, in Diane Smythm “Seeing leafy New England askew in Aaron Schuman’s Slant”, at British Journal of Photography, 19 Mar 2019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “Ten Remarkable Interpretations”, at The Spectacle 3; Nicole Brossard, “It’s Lively”, “Softlinks 3” (trs. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure), in Nicole Brossard: Selections; Michael Palmer, “Sun”, at Poets.org; Alice Notley, In the Pines; Ron Silliman, “You”, in The Alphabet; Nathaniel Mackey, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 77”, at The Nation, 10 Dec 07; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Fed Moten, “come on, get it!”, at The New Inquiry, 19 Feb 018 (“with Thom Donovan, Malik Gaines, Ethan Philbrick, Wikipedia and the Online Etymology Dictionary”); Karen An-hwei Lee, The Maze of Transparencies, at SPD; Dennis Cooper, collaged from various unnamed sources, quoted in his “You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa”, DC’s, 27 May 019; JBR; Lotte L.S., “It Is Almost That”, at Poetry Foundation, 27 May 019 (“A note on the title: ‘It is Almost That’ is borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, composed of faltering phrases projected onto black-and-white slides; ‘the humming state of the not-quite this and not-quite that ... what familiar taxonomies cannot order.’”); JBR; Andrew Stooke, “In Encountering a Sinking Migrant Ship, a Pilot Confronts the Edges of her Civilization”, at Hyperallergic, 27 May 019; Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices]

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27.05.2019

You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa (reposted from DC's)

Haw Par Villa is a Chinese mythology theme park in Singapore with more than 1,000 statues and dioramas glorifying Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian folklore. Built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par – famous for selling the popular medicinal paste Tiger Balm – older locals look back fondly at a place where parents would bring children for an education in morality, complete with bloody visual aids.

‘In 1988, the Singapore Tourism Board took charge of the Tiger Balm Gardens and renamed it “Haw Par Villa Dragon World”. The Haw Par in the park’s name is based on the Aw brothers’ personal names—Haw and Par, which literally mean “tiger” and “leopard” respectively. The dioramas and statues were restored, while plays, acrobatic displays and puppet shows were organised and held there. The management imposed entrance fees but the high fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred a loss of S$31.5 million over 10 years. The park management made a profit during its first year of operations after renovations in 1994, broke even in 1995, but started incurring losses over the next three years and was forced to provide free entry in 1998.

‘Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. In its glory days, this avant guard theme park was an iconic symbol in Singapore, and considered a must see by locals and foreigners alike. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.

‘But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long trail of a Chinese dragon but the dragon has been demolished, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.

‘However, Haw Par Villa is facing an afterlife of its own. As the country of Singapore developed, and became almost futuristic in it’s modern appearance, the thousands of dated figurines that make up this park began to lose their luster along with much of their original appeal. Some of the areas of Haw Par Villa have been shut down due to lack of preservation Hardly anyone goes there anymore, and closed sections of the park point to an uncertain future. For some it’s a refreshing antidote to the mall-culture, but it looks like mall culture is winning out over a day out in hell.’ — collaged

 

 

______
Gallery

Tours

Haw Par Villa Singapore: The last blooming lotus

Silent visit

It will all be demolished one day. The land is worth billions.

A walkthrough of the Ten Courts of Hell attraction at Haw Par Villa

 

___________________
Rebranding Haw Par Villa

Proposal #1
by Leonard Koh

This rebranding project aims to promote about Haw Par Villa through the creation of a new identity to create a new impression to people who have been there before and arouse the curiosity of those who have never heard or been there before. Other materials have been created to promote about the area and others have been created as keepsakes and a reason to return.

Logo

 

Corporate Stationary

 

Postcards (Sun Wu Kong)

 

Postcard (10 Courts of Hell)

 

Postcard (Laughing Buddha)

 

Direct Mailer

 

Calendar

 

Park Map

 

 

Proposal #2
by Chinwee

An extensive and different take on rebranding for Haw Par Villa. Targeting the youths for a change, this project aims to revive Haw Par Villa and also the traditional chinese values and cultures that comes with it.

Brand Identity

 

Park Map

 

Park Souvenirs

 

Posters

 

Brochure & Postcards

 

Outdoor advertising

 

Popup Brochure

 

Website

 

Direct Mailer

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23.05.2019

With the Noose Around My Neck 131

and thus those who aren’t there any more have already taken along immeasurably much of what those who were there did and resolved in memory of those who weren’t there immeasurably much is in possession of those who aren’t there and it will always grow more and more and since they have it in their possession and this possession is ever growing one can in regard to those who aren’t there speak of their memory of those who are there because those who aren’t there any more were once there not being there is something that is thought of while being there and being there is living off the possession which those what aren’t there are still accumulating in the name of those who aren’t there any more and are more because those who aren’t there anymore and are more have a name and we are there in their name, I swear it from head to toe from anus to navel, in the silver moonlight alongside the ships and the large buildings and the canals which cut into and through the city's innermost core the forest of masts the lines of beams and cordage crossing a thousand fold all in moonlight strange and magic at one corner but a glance into a brightly lit room where a hundred diligent hands were sewing sails, actually today everything is like yesterday except for the hallway where yesterday the bag kept surprising me today I am surprised that the bag is no longer there thus it would be more accurate to say that today everything is completely different from yesterday but then again not really either, I was privileged to meet him once in his offices at the South German Broadcasting Corporation in Stuttgart in the early Sixties, on a visit from London where I was working for the BBC and moonlighting as “Anton Hofman.” One-armed like Blaise Cendrars (the left “left,” as they say, on some dismal battlefield in 1942), tall, calm funny, and erudite, HH had (as he put it) “a lasting soft spot for the black banner of anarchy. My innermost conviction is anarcho-syndicalist. Never mind that I know it can never be realized, but that is where my secret love lies,”

 

            if I knew Greek I would converse with you in Greek

            but I don’t know any Greek

 

            when pressure mounts there is increased danger of everything bursting

            even though pressure can lead to nice things though maybe a little weird

 

            who loses steam gnaws bones

 

            the bird quite clearly flown to Idaho railroad embankment Thoreau

 

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon for a long time

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            it may well be we have lived under this moon for too long

            my language is a noise

 

            spontaneous activity reaches

            possible multiple signals also

            changing course surging over

           

            building blocks to clear six feet

            waves until that sort of engine

            isolates fish ancestors

            leaking blood into panic swirling held

            formed by

 

                        open holes in

            a single hop through tephra

            mutating profiles from spinning radii

 

That is the gesture I wish diligently to communicate for her to guzzle with memory’s long artifice and that is the transit during which the remembered syllables which are translated so erotic so political, all ten of them, learn the excellent culture of timeliness asleep or separated by distance the face moving across. So there are always at least two times in the work, and the decisions composing their intervals and nodes place the work in the everyday. May I call it “the city”? It is going along. It is the interval of “if” attended and extended into material choice. Besides panic, Pan invented panpipes. Will consumers hunger for lab-created fish? I don’t mean revitalized fish ancestors. They’re growing fish meat in vats these days. Not fish, just meat. To be 3-D printed. And for dessert? “Cultured plant cells were produced from lingonberry, cloudberry and stoneberry, and were found to have even higher nutritional value than fresh berries. The researchers, from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center, said the cultures were higher in protein and fiber, and were also rich in polyphenols and unsaturated fatty acids. The researchers claim the cultures taste like fresh fruits ...” ok,

 

            [in the original the mimeograph did not reproduce the following line]

 

1. we) was

            trying to fix the place up, (we) was

            to finish the procedure, it was

            an architectural question, a spirit / spit one

 

            I think the thing is built of prunes & glue. The Grand Combustion

            Carnival, Columbus the Cat Dancing in Flames, rocks

            fall apart and citizens wonder: If man is the greatest natural wonder,

            what? Time turns to that motionless minute

            “read in the back of the animal’s eye,” (misread?)

            (I am guessing misread)

                                                for $6.00 an hour.

 

So the place where I was born has no forests, and no tall trees grow there. That does not mean it is lacking in vegetation, for there are certain kinds of trees: rowan, cedar, alder, and willow ... But the tallest of these “trees” will reach no more than a few centimeters above the earth. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “a throw of the dice Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck be It that the abysm whitened displays furious ...” Abysm, I thought. But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist looking for a job. Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. So I reached out and he sent me this long list, including “WE ARE THE ASTEROID”, “TRIASSIC WEATHER AHEAD”, “THERE IS NO AWAY.” Then one day, in a traffic jam outside the Holland Tunnel, I came upon one of those traffic message trailer signs, glitching, glitching. It was like poems by Peter Inman or David Melnick were coming up on the screen. It made me very focused and present for some reason. “EFFICIENCY IS PETROSPEAK.” I took the photos from 40,000 feet up. The series was inspired by the Kanō school in Japan, which is famous for painting landscapes onto gold and silver leafed surfaces; it’s a school of painting that lasted for over 700 years. In my case, instead of applying paint by hand onto the surface, I’m printing the landscapes using a UV acrylic inkjet printer that I’ve adapted to become my paintbrush so to speak. In JAKOBSHAVN I what you’re seeing is glacial melange, the remnants of the calving process. Those who hold this view say that a chick peeps when it is cold and twitters when it finds a warm place as if it were a little machine, not because it actually wants to communicate that it feels distress or pleasure. Which is to say that she stayed up until five in the morning, writing about how “the crisis” isn’t over, about how “the crisis” isn’t actually the kind of “crisis” they are calling it, but “a crisis” of something completely different, something so deep in the trenches of crisis that we can barely recognize it as anything other than our lives. “To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes,” someone wrote. “Today — what a mocking word in this timeless cave,” someone wrote from an underground experiment on Day 156. To think about it is to be the sequined woman lying flat inside the magician’s box; to watch the saw come down, to watch its blade cut straight through the middle of you, to watch your hips fall out from underneath your ribs. Let us talk about it as though “it” ever existed. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. I was not in any position to distinguish one text from another — a movement toward the inside from a movement toward the outside. The texts became whole rooms, and the rooms became whole houses, and the houses became whole streets, and the streets became a yearning occupation of a city, not a country, but a city, in which lush syllogism invoked the need to seize this experience and let it become sentences. The texts became a form — the longest form, one which is still now occurring, ongoing, occurring, ongoing. The water dries up before the dark blue hyacinths are placed into the vase. Cuz in utopia they don’t got no rules and the president’s “criminality pure and simple” is reserved for politicians just like him. In utopia the monkey lies down with the rhinoceros and the ghosts haunt the ghosts leaving everyone else to fends for themself. In utopia, you lose the battles and you lose the war too but it bothers you less. In utopia no one tells nobody nothin’, but I gotta tell you this. In utopia the plans are ornament and expectations dissolve into whim. In utopia, here is a pivot. In utopia, love goes for the ride but eros’s at the wheel. In utopia, the words sing the songs while the singers listen. In utopia, 1 plus 2 does not equal 2 plus 1. In utopia, I and you is not the same as you and me. In utopia, all that is solid congeals, all that melts liquefies, all that is air vanishes into the late afternoon fog. I am about as capacious as the next guy. Mescal is my drink of choice this year. Section 3, quadrant 822.3856, on uneven tide warnings. However, available room is subject to prior sale. Ergo, there’s no Holocaust museum for Native people. Or one for peasants. Like any disfunction, if you don’t deal with your disfunction at home, it just gets worse. The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Daenerys and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Daenerys and her forces — even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm — are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her — the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior — eye eee, a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black. Again we will have heard music ... a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamps’ descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all. Or even half. Or even 150%, or even

 

            . .-^tvounnostrese

            :hool?

            do you know which      ge length

            a nice dick.       inbo*’

            h,h colorof ther

            did you know i have i

            and

            ; assure y°u’

            * ctes like?        isn’t serious,’    0 please you,

            do you know what it tastes       ^ thern, for art is jonijnciators, *st

            but now, look at me

            if we reveal the crime

            dear audience

            but now i was older a

            nrpewiththern’ ned denunc

            i’ta9ree a. .„,o are learnea

            soastoshb*’

            we don

            , that we

            , assure you

            andiad°re

            d wiser

            black dada your

            history

            of art

            we ate them.

 

In other words, as he explains in Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace — a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name, even if we don’t know about it. Or, as Scriptures has it, Those without female reproductive organs must refrain from legislating female reproductive organs (Fallopians 1:1). Yet at our very beginning we had great unification. Today I could only see, breaking the fundamental particles, solitary quarks are coming down like ash (all we are is dust in the wind, peeps), landing in the branches of the shaved Krishnachura tree. We are getting delayed my Dear Reader. Could you hear the inarticulate noise from the Suicide Squad of Plantae Kingdom? Oh, My Dear Reader, just listen to that singer, “Oh Allah, Give me cloud give me water give me shade ...” Only when my integrity is clean is the frequency audible. One may hope that either sort of change, as its seeming or real inevitability emerges, will be realized. Brud is reading War of the Worlds on the radio no, Brud is a transmedia studio that creates digital character-driven story worlds. Among others, brud has created Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela. She’s supposed to be sentient AI but what she really is a cartoon quote unquote or maybe I should remove the quotes because it’s 2019 and in first-world hell this is a thing, she’s what’s known as an influencer. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her need I add imaginary life in Downey CA of all places, and where she proclaims her support for LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter. Anything that helps her sell shit, apparently. In the past few years, she’s shilled for Uggs ads, interviewed artists at Coachella and collaborated with Prada. In her latest project, a video for Calvin Klein, she kisses the half-naked (and heterosexual) supermodel Bela Hadid as a voiceover proclaims some marketing nonsense about dreams and doors. Called out for queerbaiting, CK apologized. Called out for kissing a cartoon, I’m not aware Hadid had anything to say. Lil is far from a one-off gimmick: CGI influencers are all over the place. Take Shudu Gram, a quote unquote black Instagram model and here I won’t remove the quotes because he was created by a white photographer; Liam Nikuro, who is quote unquote Japanese; and there’s YouPorn virtual spokeswoman, Jedy Vales. Last year a Japanese man (made of meat, apparently, lab-grown or otherwise) married a celebrity hologram, Hatsune Miku, prompting discussion about whether “digisexual” should be considered a new identity. In other words, a Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past, which is at the same time the future. Both ways, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay and make whole what has been and what will be smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him he knows not where, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call ... what we used to call ... now we don’t know what to call it, really. In other words, as Tommy Pico, on whose Kumeyaay land I find myself living these days, put it, ‘Ppl are too busy callin themselves ‘poets’ to notice the canary died” ...

 

            two paths diverged in a

            / half stank of blood.

            you come across this every decade

            a fork in the doggerel —

 

            Group C are right,

 

            it was good

            so good

            to get the words down

            just right, to drain

            the swan.

 

            and that there is a small beard dude in the 7

            dwarfs

            that satan cannot find supposedly

            and that site Quora.

 

            Obvs. Or,

            Prism Warders,

            we warm a spectrum

            of pilot-light clumped 5 at discrete temperature points ok

            out of 7 total = 2 spigots over for object & subject etc.

 

            shift french fries sheared

            gears in the wind powered

            buggy I love this

            buggy,

 

            imagine trimming a moth

            down to just one city,

 

            three different times

            I smelled popcorn

            popcorn was a snack

            made by steaming the

            seeds of elliptical

            vegetable matter

            grown in the musky

            dirt of a place we

            used to call I forget the

            name it was kind of

            nice like parsnip ice

            cream is nice on a hot

            solar vortex far away

            from the atolls that make

            up the Maldives Waffle

            cones were fried

            convex sugar toasts

            you’d like them

            they were very bad

            for us ...

 

Even today, the Fire Fighting School battles fires staged upon an elaborate set of pseudo-storefronts and houses, while seismological researchers burrow explosives into the silt to test liquefaction response to earthquakes (the island has sunk five feet since the Loma Prieta quake of 89) and electrolysis is performed on the aging water pipes. The moth eradication project attempts to manage whole populations driven here by shifts in the global ecology, in other words BARGE has had to re-adjust its methods to fit the “facts on the ground,” even as those facts filter themselves through ever-more paranoiac scrims. For instance, when the window opened behind me and the voice hailed me with her version of events, to be narrated in a kind of speculative poetics that the guidebook had yet to accommodate, the feeling was not of surprise as much as the recognition that this encounter was meant to happen at exactly this juncture in the field work. Thus the strange white car that would often be waiting at off-limit sites right as I was approaching would turn up in the rear-view mirror at exactly the moment I was wondering aloud where it had been hiding. Of course one would turn a corner and suddenly come across a three-legged dog trotting down an empty street. Of course there was a “Naval Ghost Blimp” that disappeared from the island years ago, only to show up in Daly City, its engines running and its pilots missing. In this surveillance photo, BARGE agents will have been seen removing soil samples from Halyburton Court, in the so-called “Area 12” site on the Northwest corner of the island. On the other side of the fences live mostly low-income families of color, most of whom have been told little of the Navy’s testing results of this and other sites, beyond having to agree not to plant any produce or other edible plants in their yards as a condition of their rental contracts with the Treasure Island Development Authority. This tree is found close to Mile 20 of the Catalina Highway up Mt. Lemmon, home of the southernmost ski area of the United States. It grows on a small hill above the Palisades trail, which drops thousands of feet to the East Fork of Sabino Canyon (see also “Populus fremontii S. Watson”). Elevation at the Palisades trailhead is approximately 8000 feet. Surrounding the tree are other Ponderosa Pines of varying ages and sizes, many quite large, as well as a number of smaller Arizona White Pines. This area was badly burned by the 2003 Aspen Fire. Trees are spaced widely apart and dead and downed limbs and trees are present everywhere. The ground is carpeted with pine needles and large, firm cones, interspersed with the ferns that have re-colonized the burnt area. About 120 feet tall and perhaps 200 years old, the tree has beautiful ruddy bark punctuated by dark jigsaw lines. The trunk smells strongly like vanilla. Its lower 20 feet are quite burned along one side, but it is alive and healthy, being naturally resistant to fire. Orange fungus is present on the burnt bark, along with dried tears of yellow sap. OK. In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. To quote: art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.’ Why? Because, for Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy. He goes on to say that, while art’s spiritual capabilities reached their climax in classical Greece and then began their demise, philosophy reached its ‘highest destiny’ around 1807, when — what else? — Hegel published his Phenomenology. But. But but but. Check out Thomas Feuerstein’s Pancreas, a processual sculpture that transforms books into sugar to feed human brain cells growing inside a brain-like shape. What books, you might ask. Just one, actually. And not just any book — the neuroglia cells are nourished solely by one particular book — what else? — The Phenomenology. Which is shredded and soaked in water, before being pressed through an artificial intestine full of bacteria and broken down into C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, which is then transformed into brain. Perhaps we can understand Pancreas as a provocation that counters Hegel’s original provocation etc. This is called dialectics, I believe. In any case, by connecting the brain to the stomach, a brain-gut link is emphasised that challenges ideas of pure thinking inherent in philosophy. As Candyman says: ‘There are no boundaries anymore, only distorted boundaries between what we used to split into nature and culture, body and mind, matter and information’. Which is why, one morning shortly thereafter, we decided to visit the Centre for Emotional Materiality, to watch “A Blobifesto.” As I stood there, I felt like the blobbiness of it all was radically penetrating my being. After the video we looked at each other and said: “Who knew? We were blobologists all this time!” Here was a new lens through which we could view, well, everything. So we stole as many postcards from the show as we felt morally okay with and handed them out to almost everyone we encountered over the next few days. We are intimates with these proto-beings, these floaters. I felt that the sound was coming from my bones. Once, my finger accidentally touched the lathe cutter, and half of my nail disappeared. Blood dripped down into the cooling oil. My co-workers rushed me to the town hospital. At the hospital, I discovered so many injured workers, mostly migrants like me. Some had injured half a finger, some the whole hand, the leg, the head. They were bandaged in white gauze stained with blood. The man on my left, with a head injury, worked in the plastic factory; the one on my right, with three severed fingers, worked in the moulding factory. The one on the right moaned, his three left fingers completely severed. The doctor came over, hung up a fluid bag, inserted a catheter and gave medication orders, all done expressionlessly, then left the room. Looking at his gauze that had been steeped red in blood and then turned pale yellow, I suddenly remembered, no one is going to argue that we need to find a halfway point between fish and the planet Mars. But water is not the same thing as the process by which water was chemically understood by humans: the latter includes Antoine Lavoisier as one of its elements, but not the former. Lavoisier is a major ingredient in the history of chemical understanding of water, but not an ingredient at all of water itself.

 

            Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has
            a new metaphor, except it’s not
            a metaphor A literal part of his
            heart
            has died
            says the echocardiogram
            he got before starting a new med
            but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty
            salads and Mamihlapinatapai is the most precise
            word according to linguists
            from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
            It means something like when you leave a café bathroom and
           want to tell the next  person in line it wasn’t you who
            took the smelliest dump in American history but you keep walking
           I mean it means well it’s more like when two ppl look
            at each other and the look
            is that they both
            know ...

 

Cesium has also been found in a surprising place — beneath the coastal beach sands close to brackish water tables up to 60 miles away from the meltdown site. Scientists have learned that where currents washed highly contaminated water onshore, the cesium “stuck” to sand particles in brackish water (a mix of salty seawater and fresh groundwater, as is found under beaches), but becomes “unstuck” when soaked with salt water. Therefore, the accumulated cesium embedded under beaches along Japan’s coast is being slowly released over time as waves continue to saturate the sand. Scientists estimate that the amount of cesium being released in this manner is equal to that of the ongoing releases and runoff from the disaster site itself, and from outflow from rivers continuing to carry cesium from land to the sea. And that ain’t all. Millions of tons of contaminated, radioactive water (used to keep the molten reactors and spent fuel rods cool to prevent further radioactive releases, and from pumped groundwater that continues to seep into the reactors’ basements) is stored on-site in more than 900 tanks. Despite efforts to prevent seepage using “ice walls” (human-created permafrost), and special processing technology intended to clean radionuclides from the water, Tepco was forced to admit late last year that these efforts had failed, confirming that levels of several long-lived, cancer-causing isotopes were still present in the stored water at more than 100 times legally permitted levels. While more water continues to become contaminated every day, the only known plan to deal with it is to release it all into the ocean. MOAS are therefore pleased that our mission to deliver medical and famine relief to Yemen will shortly come to fruition and our goods will soon be arriving to the port of Aden. Our two containers en route are carrying €126,687.15 worth of medical assistance and 27 tonnes of Edesia’s Plumy Doz ready-to-eat sachets for preventing malnutrition in kids. Which is one reason why, in the Resurrect ritual I use a mix of audio field recordings of recently extinct animals. I take time each day no matter where I am to lie on the ground and saturate my body with these extinct sounds. Part of the ritual involves sleeping in my car in Walmart parking lots. Outside in the parking lots each night, and this is true no matter where I am in the United States, there are homeless families living in cars. Another component is listening to the extinct animal sounds on headphones while walking in a spiral formation inside the Walmart, working my way into the middle of the store. At the center of the spiral I find a spot to kneel, entering in and out of the space of

 

            the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in

            the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby

            in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the

            entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in

            and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out

            of the space between the hands.

 

            The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing

            inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and

            argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria

            mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and

            titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized

            glass and concrete.

 

            can you feel it?

 

            does it hurt?

 

            is it hard?

 

            is it cold?

 

            does it weigh much?

 

            is it heavy?

 

            do you have to carry it far?

 

            the format must be set: 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour

 

            white wings of a magpie

 

            wave glory

 

            soap

 

[Note: Sources: Helmut Heissenbüttel, Schematic Development of Tradition (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), “Lesson 3 from Textbook 10” (tr. Pierre Joris), Anselm Hollo, Heissenbüttel’s “Essay in Greek” (tr. Anselm Hollo), in “Helmut Heissenbüttel (1921-1996)”, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Raworth, “Cat Van Cat”, at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999); Lisa Robertson, “If We”, at at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999);“The Mythological Origin of ‘Panic’”, at Merriam Webster; headline in San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 May 019 (hat tip K); JBR; Caroline Macdonald, “Lab-grown fruit cultures could yield new superfoods”, at Food Dive, 15 Mar 018; JBR; Proclus, Fragments from the Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, at Tertullian; Eleni Sikelianos, “Essay: Seven Aspects of Milking Time”, “[You can be King of the Corners]”, in Earliest Worlds; JBR; Yuri Rytkheu, The Chukchi Bible (tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse); Lucy Ives, “A Throw of the Dice”, at BOMB, 14 May 019; JBR; Justin Brice Guariglia, quoted in Meredith Smith and Rachel Kirk, “Mixing Art and Environmental Science to Catalyze Social Change”, at State of the Planet, 10 May 019; Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, Songs, Roars, And Rituals: Communication in Birds, Mammals, and Other Animals; JBR; Lotte L.S., “Not to speak about / only to speak nearby”, at Harriet, 13 May 019; JBR; Charles Bernstein, “In Utopia”, at Poetry Society of America; JBR; Edgar Heap of Birds, quoted in Sheila Regan, “The Spirits that Haunt the Words of Edgar Heap of Birds”, at Hyperallergic, 16 May 019; Cord J Whitaker, “Game of Thrones’ Peasants are a Problem of White Supremacy—and Its Victims, too”, at In the Middle, 19 May 019; Nathaniel Mackey, “[from] From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Volume Five”, at Floor 1; JBR; part of the result of scanning and converting section 128 of Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” to Microsoft Word; JBR; The Paris Review, quoted in ARTBOOK | D.A.P., “New from Trevor Paglen: Commemorative coins, patches, mugs and other ephemera from the shadowy world of US military aviation and aerospace”, email rec’d 20 Jun 019, approx. 10:55am PDT; JBR; something K sent me; Runa Bandyopadhyay, “Destination: Nature Roy”, Nora Bateson, “Without Shields (the voice of change is changing)”, Steve Benson, “For the Time Being”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); Brud, at Brud, and Arwa Mahdawi, “Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future”, at The Guardian, 21 May 019; JBR, “Who Killed the World”, Helen Bridwell, “I Was Right Dear”, Brandon Brown, “For My Future Children”, David Buuck, “from Buried Treasure Island”, Wendy Burk, “from Tree Talks”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); JBR; Martin Grünfeld, “Bio art and the end of philosophy (Feuerstein & Hegel)”, at Genealogy of the Posthuman, 21 May 019; JBR; Janice Lee, foreword to Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, quoted in Lee’s “A Blobcounter: Editor’s Foreword”, at Entropy, 20 May 019; Jane Bennett, blurb for Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices; Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Iron” (tr. Isabelle Li), at Sydney Review of Books, 22 Nov 018; Graham Harman, “the real problem is taxonomy, not anthropocentrism”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 May 019; Tommy Pico, “from Feed”, at The Offing, 15 May 019; Morgan Corviday, “Update: Eight Years After Fukushima”, at The Northcoast Environmental Center, 1 Feb 019; MOAS, “Yemen Situational Update”, email rec’d 23 May 019, approx. 7:06am PDT; JBR; CA Conrad, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 3 Sept 016; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001”, in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada”, in Black Dada Reader]

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19.05.2019

Zheng Guogu, “Visionary Transformation of the Purification” (2011–2013), oil on canvas, 79 15/16 × 54 5/16 inches (image courtesy the artist) [on Hyperallergic, at least, which is where I stole it from]

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17.05.2019

Turns out Mike Pence has **always** been a psycho subhuman total fuckhead: check this out. It comes from a friend of Kathy's ... it's how he signed her mother's yearbook

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13.05.2019

415ppm. If we were an individual we'd be put on a 72hr involuntary hold as a danger to ourselves and others ... but since we're not, since we are the crown of creation, away we go!

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• You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa (reposted from DC's)
• With the Noose Around My Neck 131
• Zheng Guogu, “Visionary Transformation of the Purification” (2011–2013), oil on canvas, 79 15/16 × 54 5/16 inches (image courtesy the artist) [on Hyperallergic, at least, which is where I stole it from]
• Turns out Mike Pence has **always** been a psycho subhuman total fuckhead: check this out. It comes from a friend of Kathy's ... it's how he signed her mother's yearbook
• 415ppm. If we were an individual we'd be put on a 72hr involuntary hold as a danger to ourselves and others ... but since we're not, since we are the crown of creation, away we go!

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But still. My own encounter with Isou’s work came near its end (he died in 2007). In 2001 he wrote a massive, 1400-page synthesis of his thought and method, called The Creative and the Innovative. In it he details how he invariably reads a classic work of philosophy, for instance, by Hegel: he scribbles furiously in the margins and indeed all over the pages with his critical annotations. Then, when he reaches the end, he takes apart the book’s spine, throws away any pages he has not written on, transcribes what he did write, and voila: he has written his own, new book. That is how, Isou says, one book, an inferior book by Hegel, begets a superior book by Isou: and that’s the theory of the creative and the innovative in an allegorical nutshell. “Iridescence is word we should use more often” she said. There is no skirting this approaching reality. With gentle tenderness she spelled out the dire scenario of death-in-life. Her poem, “The Round Spring” details the subtlety of interconnective holism:

 

            Mist is the semen of the mountains

 

            Where the streams are born

 

 

 

            Mist is the semen of the forest

 

            Where coolness is born

 

She talked about “the Guarani of the rain forest in Paraguay and Brazil [who] say that when the mist and the forest are gone, we will all be gone.” During the discussion that followed her reading she mentioned how, three times a day she practices the yogic corpse pose (savasana). Prophecy brings the past, present and future into a focused whole.

 

            Water

 

            and its thirst

 

            are one

 

Speaking of which, at the beginning of the world, the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who were both brother and sister, husband and wife, stood in the High Field of Heaven and used their jeweled spears to stir the primordial swirl of water below. As they pulled their spears back up, drops of salty water fell from them and congealed to became islands, and thus the earth was formed.

 

            The couple descended to earth and began to propagate.

 

            The couple had sex, and Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a malformed lump that was set adrift on the water.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an ugly island.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an island filled with beauty.

 

            And the couple kept having sex, and Izanami kept giving birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh and an eighth island.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the islands flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when the land was done, the couple had sex and Izanami gave birth to the gods.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of great matters.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rocky terrain.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess whose home stood upon a great rock.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of entrances.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of thatch.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rooves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of wind.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the sea.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of estuaries.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess of river mouths.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of foam upon the sea and the goddess of foam upon the waves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the watershed of heaven and the goddess of the watershed of earth.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the gods and goddesses flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when these gods were born, Izanami gave birth to the god of fire, who was so hot that he burned her vagina, which swelled and blistered and turned black from the flame.

 

            Izanami fell terribly ill, but even so, she continued to give birth.

 

            Izanami vomited. Her vomit became the god and goddess of metal ore.

 

            Izanami defecated. Her shit became the god and goddess of clay.

 

            Izanami pissed. Her urine became the god and goddess of gushing water and growth.

 

            Izanami was still creating when death claimed her, and she sank into Yomi, the dark realm that lies beyond the veil of this world.

 

            Distraught by the death of his beloved wife and sister, Izanagi wailed. You who’ve given birth to fourteen islands, to thirty-five gods and goddesses, how awful that you should die while this monstrous child lives!

 

            And after crawling around her corpse, pulling his hair, and gnashing his teeth, Izanagi buried her on top of a mountain between two provinces, so she could rest halfway between heaven and earth, between one land and another.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi withdrew his sword and sliced off the head of his own son, the fire god, who had caused his wife so much suffering.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi decided to do what no god nor mortal had ever done before. He decided to travel to Yomi to bring her back.

 

            Izanagi walked across provinces.

 

            Izanagi walked across rivers and streams.

 

            Izanagi walked across mountains and fields.

 

            Izanagi walked across plains covered in evergreens.

 

            Izanagi walked and walked until he reached the gently sloping road leading to Yomi.

 

            Izanagi walked down the gently sloping road, deeper and deeper, lower and lower, until he came to a great hall. There, he found the door that forms the boundary between this world and the next.

 

            From the opposite side of the door, Izanami heard her beloved husband and brother calling out to her.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Please come back. You haven’t finished giving birth.

 

            You’ve given birth to many islands, many gods, and many goddesses, but there’s still a lot to do. Come! Come back with me!

 

            Izanami appeared at the door and spoke.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! I can’t believe it! Here you are, asking me to return so I can give birth again. Seeing you, I remember!

 

            I remember what it feels to have sex and give birth!

 

            I remember what it is to give birth and give birth and give birth some more.

 

            But then her voice grew dark. You’re too late. I’ve eaten here in this dark land. The food from this place taints everyone and holds us captive.

 

            Izanagi became despondent.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Is that true? You can’t return?

 

            Izanami responded.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! Let me speak to the gods here, but whatever you do, don’t look at me in the meantime. Promise me.

 

            Izanagi promised.

 

            And upon hearing his vow, Izanami retreated beyond the door.

 

            Izanagi waited for Izanami to return.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi thought about the promise he had made.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi began to think his promise had been a mistake.

 

            What was she doing? Who was she with?

 

            Izanagi’s irritation and frustration grew until he could wait no more.

 

            Izanagi grew so impatient that he pulled out the great wooden comb he wore in his hair, lit it on fire, and opened the forbidden door.

 

            And there she was.

 

            Izanami.

 

            But not his Izanami.

 

            Her body had turned into a horrible, horrifying, heaving mass of maggots.

 

            And as if that wasn’t enough, eight gods of thunder were filling her, penetrating her, and taking what was left of her rotten, decomposing corpse.

 

            Her head was filled with great thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her breast was filled with fiery thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her belly was filled with black thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her vagina was filled with jagged thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her left hand was filled with young thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her right hand was filled with earth-striking thunderbolts. She moaned in growing ecstasy.

 

            Her left leg was filled with thunderbolts that would split most peoples’ eardrums. She moaned in growing, mounting ecstasy.

 

            Her right leg was filled with thunderbolts that would knock most people to the ground. She moaned in growing, mounting, overwhelming ecstasy.

 

            Thunderbolts rushed through her, filling her, penetrating her, taking her rotten, decomposing, moaning corpse.

 

            At the sight of the eight gods of thunder penetrating her, Izanagi recoiled in horror.

 

            You’re not my wife! You’re not my sister! You’re not the venerable ancestor of all of the islands, gods, and goddesses!

 

            Izanami shouted back.

 

            Don’t you recognize me, my husband and brother? I’m the same Izanami you’ve loved for all these years. I’m the same Izanami that had sex with you over and over again, who suffered the pains of childbirth to create all the islands, gods, and goddesses that populate the earth. Now that I’m taking what little love I can find here in this dark world, are you really going to abandon me?

 

            Izanagi grew frightened and fled.

 

            Izanami pursued him and shouted.

 

            I gave birth to the world! And still you shame me!

 

            You shame me before the gods of Yomi!

 

            You shame me before all of the islands and gods and goddesses I created!

 

            You shame me before the world I created!

 

            I curse you. I curse the islands I gave birth to!

 

            I curse the gods and mortals that walk their surface!

 

            I curse the world beneath your feet!

 

            As Izanagi fled, Izanami summoned several foul-looking women from the land of Yomi and sent them chasing after him.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled a grapevine that he had used to tie up his hair, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire vineyard. Some of the women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull the grapes from the vines to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you dirty, dirty, old, wrinkled ...!

 

            Your birthing days are over!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’ll never give birth again even if you try!

 

            All you’ll ever do is bleed!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled the bamboo comb that held the bundles of hair by his temples in place, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire grove of bamboo. Some of the foul-looking women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull up the bamboo shoots to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you foul-smelling ...!

 

            Your breath stinks!

 

            Your spit stinks!

 

            Your blood stinks!

 

            Your hair stinks!

 

            Your vagina stinks!

 

            Everything about you stinks!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women. This time, however, she was joined by her eight partners — the gods of thunder — and their armies.

 

            As Izanagi fled up the slope from Yomi, he grabbed three peaches from the trees growing there. Placing his faith in this fruit, known since the beginning of the time to ward off demons, Izanagi threw them, shouting at Izanami the whole time.

 

            Your hair has fallen out!

 

            Your teeth have fallen out!

 

            Your breasts are shriveled up!

 

            Your vagina is so loose it’s a wonder your uterus doesn’t fall right out!

 

            The peaches embedded themselves in her rotting corpse. All of the other gods and armies ran away except for Izanami. But still she continued to pursue him.

 

            Izanami grew closer.

 

            Izanami grew closer and closer.

 

            Izanami grew so close that Izanagi could smell the stench of her rotten flesh, the stench of her breath, the stench of her hair, the stench of her spit, the stench of her blood, the stench of her hair, and most of all, the stench of her vagina.

 

            Not knowing what else to do, he rolled a giant boulder to block the path out of Yomi into the mortal world. The boulder was so large that not even one thousand of the strongest men could possibly move it. In fact, the boulder is so large that it still sits there today, in exactly the same place between the two realms of existence.

 

            From the opposite sides of the boulder, the two shouted at one another.

 

            Izanagi shouted to Izanami, your beauty is gone!

 

            You’re nothing but a horrifying corpse!

 

            You’re nothing but rotten flesh!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’re of no use to me or the world any longer!

 

            Izanami shouted back at Izanagi, who are you to talk?

 

            Your cock is useless!

 

            Your cock won’t stand up!

 

            Your cock is the most pathetic, shriveled up thing in the world!

 

            Your cock will never produce anything ever again!

 

            Your cock has lost all its procreative power!

 

            Your cock is useless to me!

 

            Izanagi recoiled. Was this really happening?

 

            Izanami continued to shout.

 

            Your chest is the flattest one in the world!

 

            Your beard is the patchiest one in the world!

 

            Your eyes are the yellowest, cloudiest ones in the world!

 

            Your mouth is the most foul-smelling one in the world!

 

            Your cock is the most shriveled, miniscule, miserable, and powerless one in the world!

 

            Your cock will never create a thing! Ever!

 

            I know how to make you pay.

 

            Every day, I’ll reach from out from beyond the grave and strangle one thousand miserable mortals from your land.

 

            I’ll keep this up until all mortals have perished at my hands.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            Horrified, Izanagi responded in the only way he could think of.

 

            You say that every day, you’ll reach out and strangle one thousand mortals.

 

            Well then, I’ll take on your sex.

 

            Every day, I’ll give birth to one and a half thousand people.

 

            I’ll keep this up until mortals spread to the ends of the earth you’ve created.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            And with this, Izanagi left the boulder at the boundary between worlds and walked to a stream to purify himself.

 

            And so it began.

 

            This is the reason that every day, a large number of mortals die.

 

            And this is the reason that every day, an even larger number of mortals is born into the world to replace them.

 

            Just as Izanagi had predicted, mortals continued to be born.

 

            And just as Izanagi had predicted, those mortals spread to the very ends of the earth.

 

This explains a lot. For instance, why the US government is moving ahead with a plan to strafe Midway Atoll with poison aimed at eradicating mice that are on a deadly rampage through one of the world’s most important seabird sites. The three low-lying islands, fringing coral reefs and lagoons that make up the Atoll refuge, located about 1,200 miles north-west of Honolulu, cover an area only slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park but are a crucial nesting area for around 3 million birds, including albatrosses and terns. Over 70% of the world’s Laysan albatrosses are found on Midway including Wisdom, a 68-year-old believed to be the world’s oldest wild bird. This year Wisdom hatched her 37^th chick. Apparently, mice inadvertently introduced to Midway are slowly eating the birds, bite by bite, not killing them outright and eating them, but nibbling them to death while they’re alive. The plan has been approved due to the understanding that the mice, but not the birds, will be attracted to the bait. Just in case, tho, they’re planning to move the birds to a different island. Speaking of which, Theresa May just resigned. Boris Johnson is next up, apparently. And no, there’s no punchline. But it gets even funnier. Take Trump and Pelosi. He calls her crazy, she says talk about crazy, we need to do an intervention, the poor guy needs to take some time away from all the stress and strain. So someone posts a video of her, slowing it down so her words are slurred and she sounds fucked up on something. Facebook refuses to remove it. Again, no punchline. So last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017. Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble, dodging between landmines, for bits of steel and plastic they can exchange for food. Maybe that’s the punchline. Forget about punchlines. “CITIZEN ASSISTANCE • 4:14 a.m. — A man shovelling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire. Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.”

In other words,

 

            Doing is highly thought of and frequently abandoned

            as at a bus stop beside a stunted gingko, and time is tossed

            a laundry pile large as the crown of a tree

            or the gravid animal of Pythagoras, and every mathematician dies

            while runnels vacillate or do nothing astrophysically speaking.

           

            I propose too that there are many things

            with their capacity to collide or combine with other things

            in the vicinity (that gravitational field of monsters)—

            and budding dust small flies:

            an idiom like Kierkegaard on Halloween.

 

            It’s lively you might say

            a color that doesn’t

            make sense it’s so real that we think

            riot of genes dashing madly

            in broad daylight toward burial mounds and forests

 

            arms of the sea.

            I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle

            with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her,

            experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing

            them on a loquat leaf,

 

            Cross the silver mesh path there.

            I have a necklace of bloody teeth for this cure.

            Crickets sing too.

             Do not remember me, unreal lord.

             The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins.

 

            In the park, the volunteer fire department uses the toddlers’ climbing

            structure to practice blindfold climbing maneuvers.

            We lifted shot glasses to them filled with salmon fat.

          We’d been eating tacos and falafels filled with confetti,

         shredded newspapers. Headlines blackened our teeth,  

 

            black ozonal mirrors

            where general slaughter is reflected

            where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation,  

            by stunted mangrove withdrawal,

            by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees,

 

so yes, the experiment consists of this entangled state being shared between experimenters, each of whom has the ability to measure either with respect to the basis or . We see that if they each measure with respect to , then they never see the outcome . If one measures with respect to and the other , they never see the outcomes . However, sometimes they see the outcome when measuring with respect to , since this leads us to the paradox: having the outcome we conclude that if one of the experimenters has measured with respect to the basis instead, the outcome must have been or , since and are impossible. But then, if they had all measured with respect to the basis, by locality the result must have been , which is also impossible, yes, once upon a nimbus, I arose out of a wireless wiki-wrinkle in the vast fabric of the cloud-garden of the mezzopolis, where synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy, epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the cloudy fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology: forget me, forget-me-not, each muse advised. (Forget we did, however. Or at least, some of us forgot, alongside our data points.) The ninemuse junta migrated their labyrinths onto grassroots clouds of lesser capacity. Nanoseconds later, congestive network failure occurred. Global revenue vaporized. Forecasters murmured ominously, caveat venditor, let the seller beware. The junta’s doomed sovereignty was foreshadowed, however, by the mutiny of our programmed bots, those personified shapeshifters of disembodied code, and those rogues who accused the junta of dataphobia and dysgraphia: dear reader, in my humble opinion, a null hypothesis with a p-value of less than 0.05. Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding, seeking jellyfish connectivity. Now I wax nostalgic. Now the ocean bleeds silver as antique circuitry under a fleet of stratocumulus at noon ... built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par — sons of the man who developed Tiger Balm — bought in 1988 by the Singapore Tourism Board, Haw Par Villa Dragon World was restored by 1994. But the high entrance fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred losses. Entry was free four years later. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman. But the highlights of the park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long Chinese dragon but that fell apart, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. Tableaus of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail. See spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity by stone mallets. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man. Watch a demon fling a young girl into a hill of knives. Oh, and here’s a blunt metal rod jamming into a woman’s very large, fleshy heart. And check this out: an executioner pulling tiny intestines out of a bro tied to a pole. Anyway, and unsurprisingly, now that Singapore is a thriving global metropole, dripping with capital, no one goes to Haw Par Villa anymore, and whole sections have been shut down. But, looking back, I suppose has nothing to do with what actually occurred. On the eastern sky, rhododactylos. It was primidi 21 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the thrift. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. Leyla Güven was on her 198th day of hunger strike in Turkey. Milkshakes overflowed on the streets of England, they had somehow become a weapon against Nigel Farage. The author of the Horrible Histories series opened his one-man-show at the local museum. A documentary aired in English: “As war rages in eastern Ukraine, Dima, a former leader of an ultra-right group, and Tanya, a self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist, make an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev.” Open letters addressed to Extinction Rebellion multiplied. Hundreds of Gilets Noirs occupied Charles De Gaulle airport, chanting, “Contre les déportations, et pour des papiers pour tous-tes!” İmam Şiş was on his 158th day of hunger strike in Wales. Zumba classes restarted at the local library. “We will not be selling milkshakes or ice-cream tonight,” the window of a McDonald’s noted. “This is due to a police request given recent events.” Facebook was awash with sentiments similar to, “If you thought Alabama’s abortion laws are bad, read up on Northern Ireland.” Lawyers were preparing to visit Öcalan for the second time in eight years. Why was no-one paying attention to the revolutionary Kurds? And so I left the “endless nights talking in tenement buildings” “cycling along dirt paths in the dark to Carbeth” “collective meetings lasting into the wee hours” “conversations about changing politics under broken streetlights and foliage and cigarette smoke” “mass texts about a raid or a deportation or a party or an arrest or a heartbreak” “waking up under skylights” “turning up for court support” “demos and counter-demos and counter-counter demos” “converging in Ibrox and Govan and Pollokshields and Partick” “J Hus and Hudson Mohawke and Kelela on loop” “proofing press releases” “more collective meetings” “moving tenement building every 6 months” — to live alone in a room in a house in a town in the furthest easterly outlier of England, at the edge of a street of a country that was not just a country or nation-state, but a nation-state that desired and resembled and announced itself as so; and was in turn recognized as one. A nation-state that supplied the body armour and helmets and helicopters and drones and missiles used to strike and shell that other country that is not a country, that is against the very idea of “a country,” and yet at times seems to resemble a country. A nation-state that put in place other nation-states; that consistently demonstrated economic and political interest in the building and demolishing and running of other nation-states and not-quite nation-states. A nation-state that was ecstatic to sell arms to a list of nation-states and not-quite nation-states which were in fact part of its own self-conceived list of “human rights abusers.” A nation-state that existed and was conceived as a nation-state based on the practice of conquest abroad and repression at home. I could see it all from the window — the Confederate flag hanging from a car boot, vacant amusement arcades lining the seafront, the cash-poor circus preparing for its next show, the sounds of kriolu and guinensi and n’golá and sãotomense drifting out from the cafes with their doors open all night, the last smokehouse closing, the freight ships out to sea, the seagulls fearlessly innovating new ways to find food, the industrial area less and less full of machinery and more and more occupied with artists and unlicensed boxing rings and foodbanks and makeshift spaces for prayer and raves, the anniversary of the Suffragettes burning down the pier, the B&Bs advertising colour TV, the rollercoaster test rides, the derelict high street, the stranded crew from the Malaviya Twenty stuck in the port — growing increasingly skilled at table tennis in their boredom. One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch. I stayed indoors through it all — in a single room of an old vicarage turned B&B turned industrial cannabis-growing operation turned raided-by-the-cops turned derelict turned into my lodging arrangements. Have you seen Styx? The opening looks like a wildlife movie. Barbary macaque, who live on Gibraltar, clamber around an urban environment. The space is the all the island’s human inhabitants share with these other primates. This sequence ends. Now it’s late at night; a high-speed car chase causes a crash. Rescue services appear in an instant. Rike, the movie’s protagonist, is one of the paramedics. Soon she takes her sailboat on a voyage to Ascension Island. In a weightless passage of cinema she is watched in action heaving provisions on board and trimming the sails. The camera adopts seemingly impossible viewpoints, perched on the sea and confined in the claustrophobic cabin. Isolation underscores Rike’s self-sufficiency. But a scene is which she uses the radio to chat with the captain on a passing cargo ship, suggests that the ocean is wide but not empty, and her determined solitude will be interrupted. A storm is the harbinger of change. In the following calm, Rike finds she is close to another vessel. The ungainly shape is a fishing boat, sinking, overloaded with would-be emigrants, waving in distress. Trying to reach her boat, several jump into the sea. Only one boy, Kingsley, has the strength to swim to her yacht. She struggles to get him on board. He is unconscious. Her boat is too tiny to attempt to rescue them all, so she uses the radio again, this time to call for aid. She assumes that her appeal will promote immediate action. As a paramedic, she imagines the emergency support services to be available to all. In her understanding, everything — from the coast guard, to the sophisticated first aid equipment she carries — belongs within systems obliged to preserve life. But no. As I attempted to articulate my thoughts from English to Korean, I soon realized that there was no equivalent term for succinctly translating the word “blob.” This moment of uh uh uh uh uh resulted in me making a ridiculous face while waving my arms like they were the wings of a demented bird. In this context, a blob operates as a vehicle for heightening awareness towards intuitive and sensible meaning-making activities and facilitates the process of perceptual reconfiguration for alternative experiences to be accounted for. In other words,

 

            A blob is a translucent black box

[Note: Sources: JBR; Adrian Martin, introduction to Isidore Isou, Treatise On Venom & Eternity, at SPD; Cecilia Vicuña, and Brenda Iijima, quoted in Iijima’s “Telluric Guerilla Visions and Effervescence: Will Alexander and Cecilia Vicuña”, at Entropy, 20 Feb 019; JBR; Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles: ‘Birthing the World,’ from The Kojiki”, at Jacket2, 21 May 019; JBR; Oliver Milman, “US to strafe crucial nesting area for 3m birds with poison to eradicate mice”, at Guardian, 24 May 019; JBR; Kate Allen, “Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not ‘precision bombing’”, at Guardian, 23 May 019; JBR; report in Amherst Bulletin, quoted by Aaron Schuman, in Ng Hui Hsien, “Aaron Schuman / SLANT / An interview with Aaron Schuman”, at Photomonitor, April 019 (re Schuman’s book Slant); image: Aaron Schuman, in Diane Smythm “Seeing leafy New England askew in Aaron Schuman’s Slant”, at British Journal of Photography, 19 Mar 2019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “Ten Remarkable Interpretations”, at The Spectacle 3; Nicole Brossard, “It’s Lively”, “Softlinks 3” (trs. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure), in Nicole Brossard: Selections; Michael Palmer, “Sun”, at Poets.org; Alice Notley, In the Pines; Ron Silliman, “You”, in The Alphabet; Nathaniel Mackey, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 77”, at The Nation, 10 Dec 07; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Fed Moten, “come on, get it!”, at The New Inquiry, 19 Feb 018 (“with Thom Donovan, Malik Gaines, Ethan Philbrick, Wikipedia and the Online Etymology Dictionary”); Karen An-hwei Lee, The Maze of Transparencies, at SPD; Dennis Cooper, collaged from various unnamed sources, quoted in his “You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa”, DC’s, 27 May 019; JBR; Lotte L.S., “It Is Almost That”, at Poetry Foundation, 27 May 019 (“A note on the title: ‘It is Almost That’ is borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, composed of faltering phrases projected onto black-and-white slides; ‘the humming state of the not-quite this and not-quite that ... what familiar taxonomies cannot order.’”); JBR; Andrew Stooke, “In Encountering a Sinking Migrant Ship, a Pilot Confronts the Edges of her Civilization”, at Hyperallergic, 27 May 019; Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices]

Haw Par Villa is a Chinese mythology theme park in Singapore with more than 1,000 statues and dioramas glorifying Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian folklore. Built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par – famous for selling the popular medicinal paste Tiger Balm – older locals look back fondly at a place where parents would bring children for an education in morality, complete with bloody visual aids.

‘In 1988, the Singapore Tourism Board took charge of the Tiger Balm Gardens and renamed it “Haw Par Villa Dragon World”. The Haw Par in the park’s name is based on the Aw brothers’ personal names—Haw and Par, which literally mean “tiger” and “leopard” respectively. The dioramas and statues were restored, while plays, acrobatic displays and puppet shows were organised and held there. The management imposed entrance fees but the high fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred a loss of S$31.5 million over 10 years. The park management made a profit during its first year of operations after renovations in 1994, broke even in 1995, but started incurring losses over the next three years and was forced to provide free entry in 1998.

‘Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. In its glory days, this avant guard theme park was an iconic symbol in Singapore, and considered a must see by locals and foreigners alike. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.

‘But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long trail of a Chinese dragon but the dragon has been demolished, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.

‘However, Haw Par Villa is facing an afterlife of its own. As the country of Singapore developed, and became almost futuristic in it’s modern appearance, the thousands of dated figurines that make up this park began to lose their luster along with much of their original appeal. Some of the areas of Haw Par Villa have been shut down due to lack of preservation Hardly anyone goes there anymore, and closed sections of the park point to an uncertain future. For some it’s a refreshing antidote to the mall-culture, but it looks like mall culture is winning out over a day out in hell.’ — collaged

 

 

______
Gallery

Tours

Haw Par Villa Singapore: The last blooming lotus

Silent visit

It will all be demolished one day. The land is worth billions.

A walkthrough of the Ten Courts of Hell attraction at Haw Par Villa

 

___________________
Rebranding Haw Par Villa

Proposal #1
by Leonard Koh

This rebranding project aims to promote about Haw Par Villa through the creation of a new identity to create a new impression to people who have been there before and arouse the curiosity of those who have never heard or been there before. Other materials have been created to promote about the area and others have been created as keepsakes and a reason to return.

Logo

 

Corporate Stationary

 

Postcards (Sun Wu Kong)

 

Postcard (10 Courts of Hell)

 

Postcard (Laughing Buddha)

 

Direct Mailer

 

Calendar

 

Park Map

 

 

Proposal #2
by Chinwee

An extensive and different take on rebranding for Haw Par Villa. Targeting the youths for a change, this project aims to revive Haw Par Villa and also the traditional chinese values and cultures that comes with it.

Brand Identity

 

Park Map

 

Park Souvenirs

 

Posters

 

Brochure & Postcards

 

Outdoor advertising

 

Popup Brochure

 

Website

 

Direct Mailer

and thus those who aren’t there any more have already taken along immeasurably much of what those who were there did and resolved in memory of those who weren’t there immeasurably much is in possession of those who aren’t there and it will always grow more and more and since they have it in their possession and this possession is ever growing one can in regard to those who aren’t there speak of their memory of those who are there because those who aren’t there any more were once there not being there is something that is thought of while being there and being there is living off the possession which those what aren’t there are still accumulating in the name of those who aren’t there any more and are more because those who aren’t there anymore and are more have a name and we are there in their name, I swear it from head to toe from anus to navel, in the silver moonlight alongside the ships and the large buildings and the canals which cut into and through the city's innermost core the forest of masts the lines of beams and cordage crossing a thousand fold all in moonlight strange and magic at one corner but a glance into a brightly lit room where a hundred diligent hands were sewing sails, actually today everything is like yesterday except for the hallway where yesterday the bag kept surprising me today I am surprised that the bag is no longer there thus it would be more accurate to say that today everything is completely different from yesterday but then again not really either, I was privileged to meet him once in his offices at the South German Broadcasting Corporation in Stuttgart in the early Sixties, on a visit from London where I was working for the BBC and moonlighting as “Anton Hofman.” One-armed like Blaise Cendrars (the left “left,” as they say, on some dismal battlefield in 1942), tall, calm funny, and erudite, HH had (as he put it) “a lasting soft spot for the black banner of anarchy. My innermost conviction is anarcho-syndicalist. Never mind that I know it can never be realized, but that is where my secret love lies,”

 

            if I knew Greek I would converse with you in Greek

            but I don’t know any Greek

 

            when pressure mounts there is increased danger of everything bursting

            even though pressure can lead to nice things though maybe a little weird

 

            who loses steam gnaws bones

 

            the bird quite clearly flown to Idaho railroad embankment Thoreau

 

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon for a long time

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            it may well be we have lived under this moon for too long

            my language is a noise

 

            spontaneous activity reaches

            possible multiple signals also

            changing course surging over

           

            building blocks to clear six feet

            waves until that sort of engine

            isolates fish ancestors

            leaking blood into panic swirling held

            formed by

 

                        open holes in

            a single hop through tephra

            mutating profiles from spinning radii

 

That is the gesture I wish diligently to communicate for her to guzzle with memory’s long artifice and that is the transit during which the remembered syllables which are translated so erotic so political, all ten of them, learn the excellent culture of timeliness asleep or separated by distance the face moving across. So there are always at least two times in the work, and the decisions composing their intervals and nodes place the work in the everyday. May I call it “the city”? It is going along. It is the interval of “if” attended and extended into material choice. Besides panic, Pan invented panpipes. Will consumers hunger for lab-created fish? I don’t mean revitalized fish ancestors. They’re growing fish meat in vats these days. Not fish, just meat. To be 3-D printed. And for dessert? “Cultured plant cells were produced from lingonberry, cloudberry and stoneberry, and were found to have even higher nutritional value than fresh berries. The researchers, from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center, said the cultures were higher in protein and fiber, and were also rich in polyphenols and unsaturated fatty acids. The researchers claim the cultures taste like fresh fruits ...” ok,

 

            [in the original the mimeograph did not reproduce the following line]

 

1. we) was

            trying to fix the place up, (we) was

            to finish the procedure, it was

            an architectural question, a spirit / spit one

 

            I think the thing is built of prunes & glue. The Grand Combustion

            Carnival, Columbus the Cat Dancing in Flames, rocks

            fall apart and citizens wonder: If man is the greatest natural wonder,

            what? Time turns to that motionless minute

            “read in the back of the animal’s eye,” (misread?)

            (I am guessing misread)

                                                for $6.00 an hour.

 

So the place where I was born has no forests, and no tall trees grow there. That does not mean it is lacking in vegetation, for there are certain kinds of trees: rowan, cedar, alder, and willow ... But the tallest of these “trees” will reach no more than a few centimeters above the earth. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “a throw of the dice Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck be It that the abysm whitened displays furious ...” Abysm, I thought. But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist looking for a job. Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. So I reached out and he sent me this long list, including “WE ARE THE ASTEROID”, “TRIASSIC WEATHER AHEAD”, “THERE IS NO AWAY.” Then one day, in a traffic jam outside the Holland Tunnel, I came upon one of those traffic message trailer signs, glitching, glitching. It was like poems by Peter Inman or David Melnick were coming up on the screen. It made me very focused and present for some reason. “EFFICIENCY IS PETROSPEAK.” I took the photos from 40,000 feet up. The series was inspired by the Kanō school in Japan, which is famous for painting landscapes onto gold and silver leafed surfaces; it’s a school of painting that lasted for over 700 years. In my case, instead of applying paint by hand onto the surface, I’m printing the landscapes using a UV acrylic inkjet printer that I’ve adapted to become my paintbrush so to speak. In JAKOBSHAVN I what you’re seeing is glacial melange, the remnants of the calving process. Those who hold this view say that a chick peeps when it is cold and twitters when it finds a warm place as if it were a little machine, not because it actually wants to communicate that it feels distress or pleasure. Which is to say that she stayed up until five in the morning, writing about how “the crisis” isn’t over, about how “the crisis” isn’t actually the kind of “crisis” they are calling it, but “a crisis” of something completely different, something so deep in the trenches of crisis that we can barely recognize it as anything other than our lives. “To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes,” someone wrote. “Today — what a mocking word in this timeless cave,” someone wrote from an underground experiment on Day 156. To think about it is to be the sequined woman lying flat inside the magician’s box; to watch the saw come down, to watch its blade cut straight through the middle of you, to watch your hips fall out from underneath your ribs. Let us talk about it as though “it” ever existed. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. I was not in any position to distinguish one text from another — a movement toward the inside from a movement toward the outside. The texts became whole rooms, and the rooms became whole houses, and the houses became whole streets, and the streets became a yearning occupation of a city, not a country, but a city, in which lush syllogism invoked the need to seize this experience and let it become sentences. The texts became a form — the longest form, one which is still now occurring, ongoing, occurring, ongoing. The water dries up before the dark blue hyacinths are placed into the vase. Cuz in utopia they don’t got no rules and the president’s “criminality pure and simple” is reserved for politicians just like him. In utopia the monkey lies down with the rhinoceros and the ghosts haunt the ghosts leaving everyone else to fends for themself. In utopia, you lose the battles and you lose the war too but it bothers you less. In utopia no one tells nobody nothin’, but I gotta tell you this. In utopia the plans are ornament and expectations dissolve into whim. In utopia, here is a pivot. In utopia, love goes for the ride but eros’s at the wheel. In utopia, the words sing the songs while the singers listen. In utopia, 1 plus 2 does not equal 2 plus 1. In utopia, I and you is not the same as you and me. In utopia, all that is solid congeals, all that melts liquefies, all that is air vanishes into the late afternoon fog. I am about as capacious as the next guy. Mescal is my drink of choice this year. Section 3, quadrant 822.3856, on uneven tide warnings. However, available room is subject to prior sale. Ergo, there’s no Holocaust museum for Native people. Or one for peasants. Like any disfunction, if you don’t deal with your disfunction at home, it just gets worse. The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Daenerys and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Daenerys and her forces — even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm — are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her — the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior — eye eee, a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black. Again we will have heard music ... a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamps’ descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all. Or even half. Or even 150%, or even

 

            . .-^tvounnostrese

            :hool?

            do you know which      ge length

            a nice dick.       inbo*’

            h,h colorof ther

            did you know i have i

            and

            ; assure y°u’

            * ctes like?        isn’t serious,’    0 please you,

            do you know what it tastes       ^ thern, for art is jonijnciators, *st

            but now, look at me

            if we reveal the crime

            dear audience

            but now i was older a

            nrpewiththern’ ned denunc

            i’ta9ree a. .„,o are learnea

            soastoshb*’

            we don

            , that we

            , assure you

            andiad°re

            d wiser

            black dada your

            history

            of art

            we ate them.

 

In other words, as he explains in Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace — a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name, even if we don’t know about it. Or, as Scriptures has it, Those without female reproductive organs must refrain from legislating female reproductive organs (Fallopians 1:1). Yet at our very beginning we had great unification. Today I could only see, breaking the fundamental particles, solitary quarks are coming down like ash (all we are is dust in the wind, peeps), landing in the branches of the shaved Krishnachura tree. We are getting delayed my Dear Reader. Could you hear the inarticulate noise from the Suicide Squad of Plantae Kingdom? Oh, My Dear Reader, just listen to that singer, “Oh Allah, Give me cloud give me water give me shade ...” Only when my integrity is clean is the frequency audible. One may hope that either sort of change, as its seeming or real inevitability emerges, will be realized. Brud is reading War of the Worlds on the radio no, Brud is a transmedia studio that creates digital character-driven story worlds. Among others, brud has created Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela. She’s supposed to be sentient AI but what she really is a cartoon quote unquote or maybe I should remove the quotes because it’s 2019 and in first-world hell this is a thing, she’s what’s known as an influencer. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her need I add imaginary life in Downey CA of all places, and where she proclaims her support for LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter. Anything that helps her sell shit, apparently. In the past few years, she’s shilled for Uggs ads, interviewed artists at Coachella and collaborated with Prada. In her latest project, a video for Calvin Klein, she kisses the half-naked (and heterosexual) supermodel Bela Hadid as a voiceover proclaims some marketing nonsense about dreams and doors. Called out for queerbaiting, CK apologized. Called out for kissing a cartoon, I’m not aware Hadid had anything to say. Lil is far from a one-off gimmick: CGI influencers are all over the place. Take Shudu Gram, a quote unquote black Instagram model and here I won’t remove the quotes because he was created by a white photographer; Liam Nikuro, who is quote unquote Japanese; and there’s YouPorn virtual spokeswoman, Jedy Vales. Last year a Japanese man (made of meat, apparently, lab-grown or otherwise) married a celebrity hologram, Hatsune Miku, prompting discussion about whether “digisexual” should be considered a new identity. In other words, a Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past, which is at the same time the future. Both ways, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay and make whole what has been and what will be smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him he knows not where, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call ... what we used to call ... now we don’t know what to call it, really. In other words, as Tommy Pico, on whose Kumeyaay land I find myself living these days, put it, ‘Ppl are too busy callin themselves ‘poets’ to notice the canary died” ...

 

            two paths diverged in a

            / half stank of blood.

            you come across this every decade

            a fork in the doggerel —

 

            Group C are right,

 

            it was good

            so good

            to get the words down

            just right, to drain

            the swan.

 

            and that there is a small beard dude in the 7

            dwarfs

            that satan cannot find supposedly

            and that site Quora.

 

            Obvs. Or,

            Prism Warders,

            we warm a spectrum

            of pilot-light clumped 5 at discrete temperature points ok

            out of 7 total = 2 spigots over for object & subject etc.

 

            shift french fries sheared

            gears in the wind powered

            buggy I love this

            buggy,

 

            imagine trimming a moth

            down to just one city,

 

            three different times

            I smelled popcorn

            popcorn was a snack

            made by steaming the

            seeds of elliptical

            vegetable matter

            grown in the musky

            dirt of a place we

            used to call I forget the

            name it was kind of

            nice like parsnip ice

            cream is nice on a hot

            solar vortex far away

            from the atolls that make

            up the Maldives Waffle

            cones were fried

            convex sugar toasts

            you’d like them

            they were very bad

            for us ...

 

Even today, the Fire Fighting School battles fires staged upon an elaborate set of pseudo-storefronts and houses, while seismological researchers burrow explosives into the silt to test liquefaction response to earthquakes (the island has sunk five feet since the Loma Prieta quake of 89) and electrolysis is performed on the aging water pipes. The moth eradication project attempts to manage whole populations driven here by shifts in the global ecology, in other words BARGE has had to re-adjust its methods to fit the “facts on the ground,” even as those facts filter themselves through ever-more paranoiac scrims. For instance, when the window opened behind me and the voice hailed me with her version of events, to be narrated in a kind of speculative poetics that the guidebook had yet to accommodate, the feeling was not of surprise as much as the recognition that this encounter was meant to happen at exactly this juncture in the field work. Thus the strange white car that would often be waiting at off-limit sites right as I was approaching would turn up in the rear-view mirror at exactly the moment I was wondering aloud where it had been hiding. Of course one would turn a corner and suddenly come across a three-legged dog trotting down an empty street. Of course there was a “Naval Ghost Blimp” that disappeared from the island years ago, only to show up in Daly City, its engines running and its pilots missing. In this surveillance photo, BARGE agents will have been seen removing soil samples from Halyburton Court, in the so-called “Area 12” site on the Northwest corner of the island. On the other side of the fences live mostly low-income families of color, most of whom have been told little of the Navy’s testing results of this and other sites, beyond having to agree not to plant any produce or other edible plants in their yards as a condition of their rental contracts with the Treasure Island Development Authority. This tree is found close to Mile 20 of the Catalina Highway up Mt. Lemmon, home of the southernmost ski area of the United States. It grows on a small hill above the Palisades trail, which drops thousands of feet to the East Fork of Sabino Canyon (see also “Populus fremontii S. Watson”). Elevation at the Palisades trailhead is approximately 8000 feet. Surrounding the tree are other Ponderosa Pines of varying ages and sizes, many quite large, as well as a number of smaller Arizona White Pines. This area was badly burned by the 2003 Aspen Fire. Trees are spaced widely apart and dead and downed limbs and trees are present everywhere. The ground is carpeted with pine needles and large, firm cones, interspersed with the ferns that have re-colonized the burnt area. About 120 feet tall and perhaps 200 years old, the tree has beautiful ruddy bark punctuated by dark jigsaw lines. The trunk smells strongly like vanilla. Its lower 20 feet are quite burned along one side, but it is alive and healthy, being naturally resistant to fire. Orange fungus is present on the burnt bark, along with dried tears of yellow sap. OK. In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. To quote: art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.’ Why? Because, for Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy. He goes on to say that, while art’s spiritual capabilities reached their climax in classical Greece and then began their demise, philosophy reached its ‘highest destiny’ around 1807, when — what else? — Hegel published his Phenomenology. But. But but but. Check out Thomas Feuerstein’s Pancreas, a processual sculpture that transforms books into sugar to feed human brain cells growing inside a brain-like shape. What books, you might ask. Just one, actually. And not just any book — the neuroglia cells are nourished solely by one particular book — what else? — The Phenomenology. Which is shredded and soaked in water, before being pressed through an artificial intestine full of bacteria and broken down into C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, which is then transformed into brain. Perhaps we can understand Pancreas as a provocation that counters Hegel’s original provocation etc. This is called dialectics, I believe. In any case, by connecting the brain to the stomach, a brain-gut link is emphasised that challenges ideas of pure thinking inherent in philosophy. As Candyman says: ‘There are no boundaries anymore, only distorted boundaries between what we used to split into nature and culture, body and mind, matter and information’. Which is why, one morning shortly thereafter, we decided to visit the Centre for Emotional Materiality, to watch “A Blobifesto.” As I stood there, I felt like the blobbiness of it all was radically penetrating my being. After the video we looked at each other and said: “Who knew? We were blobologists all this time!” Here was a new lens through which we could view, well, everything. So we stole as many postcards from the show as we felt morally okay with and handed them out to almost everyone we encountered over the next few days. We are intimates with these proto-beings, these floaters. I felt that the sound was coming from my bones. Once, my finger accidentally touched the lathe cutter, and half of my nail disappeared. Blood dripped down into the cooling oil. My co-workers rushed me to the town hospital. At the hospital, I discovered so many injured workers, mostly migrants like me. Some had injured half a finger, some the whole hand, the leg, the head. They were bandaged in white gauze stained with blood. The man on my left, with a head injury, worked in the plastic factory; the one on my right, with three severed fingers, worked in the moulding factory. The one on the right moaned, his three left fingers completely severed. The doctor came over, hung up a fluid bag, inserted a catheter and gave medication orders, all done expressionlessly, then left the room. Looking at his gauze that had been steeped red in blood and then turned pale yellow, I suddenly remembered, no one is going to argue that we need to find a halfway point between fish and the planet Mars. But water is not the same thing as the process by which water was chemically understood by humans: the latter includes Antoine Lavoisier as one of its elements, but not the former. Lavoisier is a major ingredient in the history of chemical understanding of water, but not an ingredient at all of water itself.

 

            Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has
            a new metaphor, except it’s not
            a metaphor A literal part of his
            heart
            has died
            says the echocardiogram
            he got before starting a new med
            but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty
            salads and Mamihlapinatapai is the most precise
            word according to linguists
            from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
            It means something like when you leave a café bathroom and
           want to tell the next  person in line it wasn’t you who
            took the smelliest dump in American history but you keep walking
           I mean it means well it’s more like when two ppl look
            at each other and the look
            is that they both
            know ...

 

Cesium has also been found in a surprising place — beneath the coastal beach sands close to brackish water tables up to 60 miles away from the meltdown site. Scientists have learned that where currents washed highly contaminated water onshore, the cesium “stuck” to sand particles in brackish water (a mix of salty seawater and fresh groundwater, as is found under beaches), but becomes “unstuck” when soaked with salt water. Therefore, the accumulated cesium embedded under beaches along Japan’s coast is being slowly released over time as waves continue to saturate the sand. Scientists estimate that the amount of cesium being released in this manner is equal to that of the ongoing releases and runoff from the disaster site itself, and from outflow from rivers continuing to carry cesium from land to the sea. And that ain’t all. Millions of tons of contaminated, radioactive water (used to keep the molten reactors and spent fuel rods cool to prevent further radioactive releases, and from pumped groundwater that continues to seep into the reactors’ basements) is stored on-site in more than 900 tanks. Despite efforts to prevent seepage using “ice walls” (human-created permafrost), and special processing technology intended to clean radionuclides from the water, Tepco was forced to admit late last year that these efforts had failed, confirming that levels of several long-lived, cancer-causing isotopes were still present in the stored water at more than 100 times legally permitted levels. While more water continues to become contaminated every day, the only known plan to deal with it is to release it all into the ocean. MOAS are therefore pleased that our mission to deliver medical and famine relief to Yemen will shortly come to fruition and our goods will soon be arriving to the port of Aden. Our two containers en route are carrying €126,687.15 worth of medical assistance and 27 tonnes of Edesia’s Plumy Doz ready-to-eat sachets for preventing malnutrition in kids. Which is one reason why, in the Resurrect ritual I use a mix of audio field recordings of recently extinct animals. I take time each day no matter where I am to lie on the ground and saturate my body with these extinct sounds. Part of the ritual involves sleeping in my car in Walmart parking lots. Outside in the parking lots each night, and this is true no matter where I am in the United States, there are homeless families living in cars. Another component is listening to the extinct animal sounds on headphones while walking in a spiral formation inside the Walmart, working my way into the middle of the store. At the center of the spiral I find a spot to kneel, entering in and out of the space of

 

            the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in

            the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby

            in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the

            entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in

            and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out

            of the space between the hands.

 

            The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing

            inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and

            argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria

            mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and

            titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized

            glass and concrete.

 

            can you feel it?

 

            does it hurt?

 

            is it hard?

 

            is it cold?

 

            does it weigh much?

 

            is it heavy?

 

            do you have to carry it far?

 

            the format must be set: 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour

 

            white wings of a magpie

 

            wave glory

 

            soap

 

[Note: Sources: Helmut Heissenbüttel, Schematic Development of Tradition (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), “Lesson 3 from Textbook 10” (tr. Pierre Joris), Anselm Hollo, Heissenbüttel’s “Essay in Greek” (tr. Anselm Hollo), in “Helmut Heissenbüttel (1921-1996)”, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Raworth, “Cat Van Cat”, at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999); Lisa Robertson, “If We”, at at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999);“The Mythological Origin of ‘Panic’”, at Merriam Webster; headline in San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 May 019 (hat tip K); JBR; Caroline Macdonald, “Lab-grown fruit cultures could yield new superfoods”, at Food Dive, 15 Mar 018; JBR; Proclus, Fragments from the Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, at Tertullian; Eleni Sikelianos, “Essay: Seven Aspects of Milking Time”, “[You can be King of the Corners]”, in Earliest Worlds; JBR; Yuri Rytkheu, The Chukchi Bible (tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse); Lucy Ives, “A Throw of the Dice”, at BOMB, 14 May 019; JBR; Justin Brice Guariglia, quoted in Meredith Smith and Rachel Kirk, “Mixing Art and Environmental Science to Catalyze Social Change”, at State of the Planet, 10 May 019; Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, Songs, Roars, And Rituals: Communication in Birds, Mammals, and Other Animals; JBR; Lotte L.S., “Not to speak about / only to speak nearby”, at Harriet, 13 May 019; JBR; Charles Bernstein, “In Utopia”, at Poetry Society of America; JBR; Edgar Heap of Birds, quoted in Sheila Regan, “The Spirits that Haunt the Words of Edgar Heap of Birds”, at Hyperallergic, 16 May 019; Cord J Whitaker, “Game of Thrones’ Peasants are a Problem of White Supremacy—and Its Victims, too”, at In the Middle, 19 May 019; Nathaniel Mackey, “[from] From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Volume Five”, at Floor 1; JBR; part of the result of scanning and converting section 128 of Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” to Microsoft Word; JBR; The Paris Review, quoted in ARTBOOK | D.A.P., “New from Trevor Paglen: Commemorative coins, patches, mugs and other ephemera from the shadowy world of US military aviation and aerospace”, email rec’d 20 Jun 019, approx. 10:55am PDT; JBR; something K sent me; Runa Bandyopadhyay, “Destination: Nature Roy”, Nora Bateson, “Without Shields (the voice of change is changing)”, Steve Benson, “For the Time Being”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); Brud, at Brud, and Arwa Mahdawi, “Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future”, at The Guardian, 21 May 019; JBR, “Who Killed the World”, Helen Bridwell, “I Was Right Dear”, Brandon Brown, “For My Future Children”, David Buuck, “from Buried Treasure Island”, Wendy Burk, “from Tree Talks”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); JBR; Martin Grünfeld, “Bio art and the end of philosophy (Feuerstein & Hegel)”, at Genealogy of the Posthuman, 21 May 019; JBR; Janice Lee, foreword to Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, quoted in Lee’s “A Blobcounter: Editor’s Foreword”, at Entropy, 20 May 019; Jane Bennett, blurb for Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices; Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Iron” (tr. Isabelle Li), at Sydney Review of Books, 22 Nov 018; Graham Harman, “the real problem is taxonomy, not anthropocentrism”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 May 019; Tommy Pico, “from Feed”, at The Offing, 15 May 019; Morgan Corviday, “Update: Eight Years After Fukushima”, at The Northcoast Environmental Center, 1 Feb 019; MOAS, “Yemen Situational Update”, email rec’d 23 May 019, approx. 7:06am PDT; JBR; CA Conrad, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 3 Sept 016; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001”, in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada”, in Black Dada Reader]

With the Noose Around My Neck 132

But still. My own encounter with Isou’s work came near its end (he died in 2007). In 2001 he wrote a massive, 1400-page synthesis of his thought and method, called The Creative and the Innovative. In it he details how he invariably reads a classic work of philosophy, for instance, by Hegel: he scribbles furiously in the margins and indeed all over the pages with his critical annotations. Then, when he reaches the end, he takes apart the book’s spine, throws away any pages he has not written on, transcribes what he did write, and voila: he has written his own, new book. That is how, Isou says, one book, an inferior book by Hegel, begets a superior book by Isou: and that’s the theory of the creative and the innovative in an allegorical nutshell. “Iridescence is word we should use more often” she said. There is no skirting this approaching reality. With gentle tenderness she spelled out the dire scenario of death-in-life. Her poem, “The Round Spring” details the subtlety of interconnective holism:

 

            Mist is the semen of the mountains

 

            Where the streams are born

 

 

 

            Mist is the semen of the forest

 

            Where coolness is born

 

She talked about “the Guarani of the rain forest in Paraguay and Brazil [who] say that when the mist and the forest are gone, we will all be gone.” During the discussion that followed her reading she mentioned how, three times a day she practices the yogic corpse pose (savasana). Prophecy brings the past, present and future into a focused whole.

 

            Water

 

            and its thirst

 

            are one

 

Speaking of which, at the beginning of the world, the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who were both brother and sister, husband and wife, stood in the High Field of Heaven and used their jeweled spears to stir the primordial swirl of water below. As they pulled their spears back up, drops of salty water fell from them and congealed to became islands, and thus the earth was formed.

 

            The couple descended to earth and began to propagate.

 

            The couple had sex, and Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a malformed lump that was set adrift on the water.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an ugly island.

 

            The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to an island filled with beauty.

 

            And the couple kept having sex, and Izanami kept giving birth.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to another island.

 

            Izanami gave birth to a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh and an eighth island.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the islands flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when the land was done, the couple had sex and Izanami gave birth to the gods.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of great matters.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rocky terrain.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess whose home stood upon a great rock.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of entrances.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of thatch.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of rooves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of wind.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the sea.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of estuaries.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the goddess of river mouths.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of foam upon the sea and the goddess of foam upon the waves.

 

            Izanami gave birth to the god of the watershed of heaven and the goddess of the watershed of earth.

 

            Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the gods and goddesses flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

 

            And when these gods were born, Izanami gave birth to the god of fire, who was so hot that he burned her vagina, which swelled and blistered and turned black from the flame.

 

            Izanami fell terribly ill, but even so, she continued to give birth.

 

            Izanami vomited. Her vomit became the god and goddess of metal ore.

 

            Izanami defecated. Her shit became the god and goddess of clay.

 

            Izanami pissed. Her urine became the god and goddess of gushing water and growth.

 

            Izanami was still creating when death claimed her, and she sank into Yomi, the dark realm that lies beyond the veil of this world.

 

            Distraught by the death of his beloved wife and sister, Izanagi wailed. You who’ve given birth to fourteen islands, to thirty-five gods and goddesses, how awful that you should die while this monstrous child lives!

 

            And after crawling around her corpse, pulling his hair, and gnashing his teeth, Izanagi buried her on top of a mountain between two provinces, so she could rest halfway between heaven and earth, between one land and another.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi withdrew his sword and sliced off the head of his own son, the fire god, who had caused his wife so much suffering.

 

            Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi decided to do what no god nor mortal had ever done before. He decided to travel to Yomi to bring her back.

 

            Izanagi walked across provinces.

 

            Izanagi walked across rivers and streams.

 

            Izanagi walked across mountains and fields.

 

            Izanagi walked across plains covered in evergreens.

 

            Izanagi walked and walked until he reached the gently sloping road leading to Yomi.

 

            Izanagi walked down the gently sloping road, deeper and deeper, lower and lower, until he came to a great hall. There, he found the door that forms the boundary between this world and the next.

 

            From the opposite side of the door, Izanami heard her beloved husband and brother calling out to her.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Please come back. You haven’t finished giving birth.

 

            You’ve given birth to many islands, many gods, and many goddesses, but there’s still a lot to do. Come! Come back with me!

 

            Izanami appeared at the door and spoke.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! I can’t believe it! Here you are, asking me to return so I can give birth again. Seeing you, I remember!

 

            I remember what it feels to have sex and give birth!

 

            I remember what it is to give birth and give birth and give birth some more.

 

            But then her voice grew dark. You’re too late. I’ve eaten here in this dark land. The food from this place taints everyone and holds us captive.

 

            Izanagi became despondent.

 

            Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Is that true? You can’t return?

 

            Izanami responded.

 

            Dearest husband! Dearest brother! Let me speak to the gods here, but whatever you do, don’t look at me in the meantime. Promise me.

 

            Izanagi promised.

 

            And upon hearing his vow, Izanami retreated beyond the door.

 

            Izanagi waited for Izanami to return.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi thought about the promise he had made.

 

            Izanagi waited and waited and waited and waited.

 

            Izanagi began to think his promise had been a mistake.

 

            What was she doing? Who was she with?

 

            Izanagi’s irritation and frustration grew until he could wait no more.

 

            Izanagi grew so impatient that he pulled out the great wooden comb he wore in his hair, lit it on fire, and opened the forbidden door.

 

            And there she was.

 

            Izanami.

 

            But not his Izanami.

 

            Her body had turned into a horrible, horrifying, heaving mass of maggots.

 

            And as if that wasn’t enough, eight gods of thunder were filling her, penetrating her, and taking what was left of her rotten, decomposing corpse.

 

            Her head was filled with great thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her breast was filled with fiery thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her belly was filled with black thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her vagina was filled with jagged thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her left hand was filled with young thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

 

            Her right hand was filled with earth-striking thunderbolts. She moaned in growing ecstasy.

 

            Her left leg was filled with thunderbolts that would split most peoples’ eardrums. She moaned in growing, mounting ecstasy.

 

            Her right leg was filled with thunderbolts that would knock most people to the ground. She moaned in growing, mounting, overwhelming ecstasy.

 

            Thunderbolts rushed through her, filling her, penetrating her, taking her rotten, decomposing, moaning corpse.

 

            At the sight of the eight gods of thunder penetrating her, Izanagi recoiled in horror.

 

            You’re not my wife! You’re not my sister! You’re not the venerable ancestor of all of the islands, gods, and goddesses!

 

            Izanami shouted back.

 

            Don’t you recognize me, my husband and brother? I’m the same Izanami you’ve loved for all these years. I’m the same Izanami that had sex with you over and over again, who suffered the pains of childbirth to create all the islands, gods, and goddesses that populate the earth. Now that I’m taking what little love I can find here in this dark world, are you really going to abandon me?

 

            Izanagi grew frightened and fled.

 

            Izanami pursued him and shouted.

 

            I gave birth to the world! And still you shame me!

 

            You shame me before the gods of Yomi!

 

            You shame me before all of the islands and gods and goddesses I created!

 

            You shame me before the world I created!

 

            I curse you. I curse the islands I gave birth to!

 

            I curse the gods and mortals that walk their surface!

 

            I curse the world beneath your feet!

 

            As Izanagi fled, Izanami summoned several foul-looking women from the land of Yomi and sent them chasing after him.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled a grapevine that he had used to tie up his hair, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire vineyard. Some of the women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull the grapes from the vines to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you dirty, dirty, old, wrinkled ...!

 

            Your birthing days are over!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’ll never give birth again even if you try!

 

            All you’ll ever do is bleed!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he pulled the bamboo comb that held the bundles of hair by his temples in place, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire grove of bamboo. Some of the foul-looking women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull up the bamboo shoots to eat.

 

            As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

 

            Take that, you foul-smelling ...!

 

            Your breath stinks!

 

            Your spit stinks!

 

            Your blood stinks!

 

            Your hair stinks!

 

            Your vagina stinks!

 

            Everything about you stinks!

 

            But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women. This time, however, she was joined by her eight partners — the gods of thunder — and their armies.

 

            As Izanagi fled up the slope from Yomi, he grabbed three peaches from the trees growing there. Placing his faith in this fruit, known since the beginning of the time to ward off demons, Izanagi threw them, shouting at Izanami the whole time.

 

            Your hair has fallen out!

 

            Your teeth have fallen out!

 

            Your breasts are shriveled up!

 

            Your vagina is so loose it’s a wonder your uterus doesn’t fall right out!

 

            The peaches embedded themselves in her rotting corpse. All of the other gods and armies ran away except for Izanami. But still she continued to pursue him.

 

            Izanami grew closer.

 

            Izanami grew closer and closer.

 

            Izanami grew so close that Izanagi could smell the stench of her rotten flesh, the stench of her breath, the stench of her hair, the stench of her spit, the stench of her blood, the stench of her hair, and most of all, the stench of her vagina.

 

            Not knowing what else to do, he rolled a giant boulder to block the path out of Yomi into the mortal world. The boulder was so large that not even one thousand of the strongest men could possibly move it. In fact, the boulder is so large that it still sits there today, in exactly the same place between the two realms of existence.

 

            From the opposite sides of the boulder, the two shouted at one another.

 

            Izanagi shouted to Izanami, your beauty is gone!

 

            You’re nothing but a horrifying corpse!

 

            You’re nothing but rotten flesh!

 

            You’ll never give birth again!

 

            You’re of no use to me or the world any longer!

 

            Izanami shouted back at Izanagi, who are you to talk?

 

            Your cock is useless!

 

            Your cock won’t stand up!

 

            Your cock is the most pathetic, shriveled up thing in the world!

 

            Your cock will never produce anything ever again!

 

            Your cock has lost all its procreative power!

 

            Your cock is useless to me!

 

            Izanagi recoiled. Was this really happening?

 

            Izanami continued to shout.

 

            Your chest is the flattest one in the world!

 

            Your beard is the patchiest one in the world!

 

            Your eyes are the yellowest, cloudiest ones in the world!

 

            Your mouth is the most foul-smelling one in the world!

 

            Your cock is the most shriveled, miniscule, miserable, and powerless one in the world!

 

            Your cock will never create a thing! Ever!

 

            I know how to make you pay.

 

            Every day, I’ll reach from out from beyond the grave and strangle one thousand miserable mortals from your land.

 

            I’ll keep this up until all mortals have perished at my hands.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            Horrified, Izanagi responded in the only way he could think of.

 

            You say that every day, you’ll reach out and strangle one thousand mortals.

 

            Well then, I’ll take on your sex.

 

            Every day, I’ll give birth to one and a half thousand people.

 

            I’ll keep this up until mortals spread to the ends of the earth you’ve created.

 

            I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

 

            And with this, Izanagi left the boulder at the boundary between worlds and walked to a stream to purify himself.

 

            And so it began.

 

            This is the reason that every day, a large number of mortals die.

 

            And this is the reason that every day, an even larger number of mortals is born into the world to replace them.

 

            Just as Izanagi had predicted, mortals continued to be born.

 

            And just as Izanagi had predicted, those mortals spread to the very ends of the earth.

 

This explains a lot. For instance, why the US government is moving ahead with a plan to strafe Midway Atoll with poison aimed at eradicating mice that are on a deadly rampage through one of the world’s most important seabird sites. The three low-lying islands, fringing coral reefs and lagoons that make up the Atoll refuge, located about 1,200 miles north-west of Honolulu, cover an area only slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park but are a crucial nesting area for around 3 million birds, including albatrosses and terns. Over 70% of the world’s Laysan albatrosses are found on Midway including Wisdom, a 68-year-old believed to be the world’s oldest wild bird. This year Wisdom hatched her 37^th chick. Apparently, mice inadvertently introduced to Midway are slowly eating the birds, bite by bite, not killing them outright and eating them, but nibbling them to death while they’re alive. The plan has been approved due to the understanding that the mice, but not the birds, will be attracted to the bait. Just in case, tho, they’re planning to move the birds to a different island. Speaking of which, Theresa May just resigned. Boris Johnson is next up, apparently. And no, there’s no punchline. But it gets even funnier. Take Trump and Pelosi. He calls her crazy, she says talk about crazy, we need to do an intervention, the poor guy needs to take some time away from all the stress and strain. So someone posts a video of her, slowing it down so her words are slurred and she sounds fucked up on something. Facebook refuses to remove it. Again, no punchline. So last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017. Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble, dodging between landmines, for bits of steel and plastic they can exchange for food. Maybe that’s the punchline. Forget about punchlines. “CITIZEN ASSISTANCE • 4:14 a.m. — A man shovelling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire. Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.”

In other words,

 

            Doing is highly thought of and frequently abandoned

            as at a bus stop beside a stunted gingko, and time is tossed

            a laundry pile large as the crown of a tree

            or the gravid animal of Pythagoras, and every mathematician dies

            while runnels vacillate or do nothing astrophysically speaking.

           

            I propose too that there are many things

            with their capacity to collide or combine with other things

            in the vicinity (that gravitational field of monsters)—

            and budding dust small flies:

            an idiom like Kierkegaard on Halloween.

 

            It’s lively you might say

            a color that doesn’t

            make sense it’s so real that we think

            riot of genes dashing madly

            in broad daylight toward burial mounds and forests

 

            arms of the sea.

            I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle

            with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her,

            experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing

            them on a loquat leaf,

 

            Cross the silver mesh path there.

            I have a necklace of bloody teeth for this cure.

            Crickets sing too.

             Do not remember me, unreal lord.

             The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins.

 

            In the park, the volunteer fire department uses the toddlers’ climbing

            structure to practice blindfold climbing maneuvers.

            We lifted shot glasses to them filled with salmon fat.

          We’d been eating tacos and falafels filled with confetti,

         shredded newspapers. Headlines blackened our teeth,  

 

            black ozonal mirrors

            where general slaughter is reflected

            where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation,  

            by stunted mangrove withdrawal,

            by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees,

 

so yes, the experiment consists of this entangled state being shared between experimenters, each of whom has the ability to measure either with respect to the basis or . We see that if they each measure with respect to , then they never see the outcome . If one measures with respect to and the other , they never see the outcomes . However, sometimes they see the outcome when measuring with respect to , since this leads us to the paradox: having the outcome we conclude that if one of the experimenters has measured with respect to the basis instead, the outcome must have been or , since and are impossible. But then, if they had all measured with respect to the basis, by locality the result must have been , which is also impossible, yes, once upon a nimbus, I arose out of a wireless wiki-wrinkle in the vast fabric of the cloud-garden of the mezzopolis, where synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy, epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the cloudy fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology: forget me, forget-me-not, each muse advised. (Forget we did, however. Or at least, some of us forgot, alongside our data points.) The ninemuse junta migrated their labyrinths onto grassroots clouds of lesser capacity. Nanoseconds later, congestive network failure occurred. Global revenue vaporized. Forecasters murmured ominously, caveat venditor, let the seller beware. The junta’s doomed sovereignty was foreshadowed, however, by the mutiny of our programmed bots, those personified shapeshifters of disembodied code, and those rogues who accused the junta of dataphobia and dysgraphia: dear reader, in my humble opinion, a null hypothesis with a p-value of less than 0.05. Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding, seeking jellyfish connectivity. Now I wax nostalgic. Now the ocean bleeds silver as antique circuitry under a fleet of stratocumulus at noon ... built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par — sons of the man who developed Tiger Balm — bought in 1988 by the Singapore Tourism Board, Haw Par Villa Dragon World was restored by 1994. But the high entrance fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred losses. Entry was free four years later. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman. But the highlights of the park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long Chinese dragon but that fell apart, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. Tableaus of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail. See spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity by stone mallets. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man. Watch a demon fling a young girl into a hill of knives. Oh, and here’s a blunt metal rod jamming into a woman’s very large, fleshy heart. And check this out: an executioner pulling tiny intestines out of a bro tied to a pole. Anyway, and unsurprisingly, now that Singapore is a thriving global metropole, dripping with capital, no one goes to Haw Par Villa anymore, and whole sections have been shut down. But, looking back, I suppose has nothing to do with what actually occurred. On the eastern sky, rhododactylos. It was primidi 21 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the thrift. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. Leyla Güven was on her 198th day of hunger strike in Turkey. Milkshakes overflowed on the streets of England, they had somehow become a weapon against Nigel Farage. The author of the Horrible Histories series opened his one-man-show at the local museum. A documentary aired in English: “As war rages in eastern Ukraine, Dima, a former leader of an ultra-right group, and Tanya, a self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist, make an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev.” Open letters addressed to Extinction Rebellion multiplied. Hundreds of Gilets Noirs occupied Charles De Gaulle airport, chanting, “Contre les déportations, et pour des papiers pour tous-tes!” İmam Şiş was on his 158th day of hunger strike in Wales. Zumba classes restarted at the local library. “We will not be selling milkshakes or ice-cream tonight,” the window of a McDonald’s noted. “This is due to a police request given recent events.” Facebook was awash with sentiments similar to, “If you thought Alabama’s abortion laws are bad, read up on Northern Ireland.” Lawyers were preparing to visit Öcalan for the second time in eight years. Why was no-one paying attention to the revolutionary Kurds? And so I left the “endless nights talking in tenement buildings” “cycling along dirt paths in the dark to Carbeth” “collective meetings lasting into the wee hours” “conversations about changing politics under broken streetlights and foliage and cigarette smoke” “mass texts about a raid or a deportation or a party or an arrest or a heartbreak” “waking up under skylights” “turning up for court support” “demos and counter-demos and counter-counter demos” “converging in Ibrox and Govan and Pollokshields and Partick” “J Hus and Hudson Mohawke and Kelela on loop” “proofing press releases” “more collective meetings” “moving tenement building every 6 months” — to live alone in a room in a house in a town in the furthest easterly outlier of England, at the edge of a street of a country that was not just a country or nation-state, but a nation-state that desired and resembled and announced itself as so; and was in turn recognized as one. A nation-state that supplied the body armour and helmets and helicopters and drones and missiles used to strike and shell that other country that is not a country, that is against the very idea of “a country,” and yet at times seems to resemble a country. A nation-state that put in place other nation-states; that consistently demonstrated economic and political interest in the building and demolishing and running of other nation-states and not-quite nation-states. A nation-state that was ecstatic to sell arms to a list of nation-states and not-quite nation-states which were in fact part of its own self-conceived list of “human rights abusers.” A nation-state that existed and was conceived as a nation-state based on the practice of conquest abroad and repression at home. I could see it all from the window — the Confederate flag hanging from a car boot, vacant amusement arcades lining the seafront, the cash-poor circus preparing for its next show, the sounds of kriolu and guinensi and n’golá and sãotomense drifting out from the cafes with their doors open all night, the last smokehouse closing, the freight ships out to sea, the seagulls fearlessly innovating new ways to find food, the industrial area less and less full of machinery and more and more occupied with artists and unlicensed boxing rings and foodbanks and makeshift spaces for prayer and raves, the anniversary of the Suffragettes burning down the pier, the B&Bs advertising colour TV, the rollercoaster test rides, the derelict high street, the stranded crew from the Malaviya Twenty stuck in the port — growing increasingly skilled at table tennis in their boredom. One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch. I stayed indoors through it all — in a single room of an old vicarage turned B&B turned industrial cannabis-growing operation turned raided-by-the-cops turned derelict turned into my lodging arrangements. Have you seen Styx? The opening looks like a wildlife movie. Barbary macaque, who live on Gibraltar, clamber around an urban environment. The space is the all the island’s human inhabitants share with these other primates. This sequence ends. Now it’s late at night; a high-speed car chase causes a crash. Rescue services appear in an instant. Rike, the movie’s protagonist, is one of the paramedics. Soon she takes her sailboat on a voyage to Ascension Island. In a weightless passage of cinema she is watched in action heaving provisions on board and trimming the sails. The camera adopts seemingly impossible viewpoints, perched on the sea and confined in the claustrophobic cabin. Isolation underscores Rike’s self-sufficiency. But a scene is which she uses the radio to chat with the captain on a passing cargo ship, suggests that the ocean is wide but not empty, and her determined solitude will be interrupted. A storm is the harbinger of change. In the following calm, Rike finds she is close to another vessel. The ungainly shape is a fishing boat, sinking, overloaded with would-be emigrants, waving in distress. Trying to reach her boat, several jump into the sea. Only one boy, Kingsley, has the strength to swim to her yacht. She struggles to get him on board. He is unconscious. Her boat is too tiny to attempt to rescue them all, so she uses the radio again, this time to call for aid. She assumes that her appeal will promote immediate action. As a paramedic, she imagines the emergency support services to be available to all. In her understanding, everything — from the coast guard, to the sophisticated first aid equipment she carries — belongs within systems obliged to preserve life. But no. As I attempted to articulate my thoughts from English to Korean, I soon realized that there was no equivalent term for succinctly translating the word “blob.” This moment of uh uh uh uh uh resulted in me making a ridiculous face while waving my arms like they were the wings of a demented bird. In this context, a blob operates as a vehicle for heightening awareness towards intuitive and sensible meaning-making activities and facilitates the process of perceptual reconfiguration for alternative experiences to be accounted for. In other words,

 

            A blob is a translucent black box

[Note: Sources: JBR; Adrian Martin, introduction to Isidore Isou, Treatise On Venom & Eternity, at SPD; Cecilia Vicuña, and Brenda Iijima, quoted in Iijima’s “Telluric Guerilla Visions and Effervescence: Will Alexander and Cecilia Vicuña”, at Entropy, 20 Feb 019; JBR; Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles: ‘Birthing the World,’ from The Kojiki”, at Jacket2, 21 May 019; JBR; Oliver Milman, “US to strafe crucial nesting area for 3m birds with poison to eradicate mice”, at Guardian, 24 May 019; JBR; Kate Allen, “Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not ‘precision bombing’”, at Guardian, 23 May 019; JBR; report in Amherst Bulletin, quoted by Aaron Schuman, in Ng Hui Hsien, “Aaron Schuman / SLANT / An interview with Aaron Schuman”, at Photomonitor, April 019 (re Schuman’s book Slant); image: Aaron Schuman, in Diane Smythm “Seeing leafy New England askew in Aaron Schuman’s Slant”, at British Journal of Photography, 19 Mar 2019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “Ten Remarkable Interpretations”, at The Spectacle 3; Nicole Brossard, “It’s Lively”, “Softlinks 3” (trs. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure), in Nicole Brossard: Selections; Michael Palmer, “Sun”, at Poets.org; Alice Notley, In the Pines; Ron Silliman, “You”, in The Alphabet; Nathaniel Mackey, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 77”, at The Nation, 10 Dec 07; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Fed Moten, “come on, get it!”, at The New Inquiry, 19 Feb 018 (“with Thom Donovan, Malik Gaines, Ethan Philbrick, Wikipedia and the Online Etymology Dictionary”); Karen An-hwei Lee, The Maze of Transparencies, at SPD; Dennis Cooper, collaged from various unnamed sources, quoted in his “You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa”, DC’s, 27 May 019; JBR; Lotte L.S., “It Is Almost That”, at Poetry Foundation, 27 May 019 (“A note on the title: ‘It is Almost That’ is borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, composed of faltering phrases projected onto black-and-white slides; ‘the humming state of the not-quite this and not-quite that ... what familiar taxonomies cannot order.’”); JBR; Andrew Stooke, “In Encountering a Sinking Migrant Ship, a Pilot Confronts the Edges of her Civilization”, at Hyperallergic, 27 May 019; Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices]

You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa (reposted from DC's)

Haw Par Villa is a Chinese mythology theme park in Singapore with more than 1,000 statues and dioramas glorifying Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian folklore. Built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par – famous for selling the popular medicinal paste Tiger Balm – older locals look back fondly at a place where parents would bring children for an education in morality, complete with bloody visual aids.

‘In 1988, the Singapore Tourism Board took charge of the Tiger Balm Gardens and renamed it “Haw Par Villa Dragon World”. The Haw Par in the park’s name is based on the Aw brothers’ personal names—Haw and Par, which literally mean “tiger” and “leopard” respectively. The dioramas and statues were restored, while plays, acrobatic displays and puppet shows were organised and held there. The management imposed entrance fees but the high fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred a loss of S$31.5 million over 10 years. The park management made a profit during its first year of operations after renovations in 1994, broke even in 1995, but started incurring losses over the next three years and was forced to provide free entry in 1998.

‘Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. In its glory days, this avant guard theme park was an iconic symbol in Singapore, and considered a must see by locals and foreigners alike. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.

‘But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long trail of a Chinese dragon but the dragon has been demolished, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.

‘However, Haw Par Villa is facing an afterlife of its own. As the country of Singapore developed, and became almost futuristic in it’s modern appearance, the thousands of dated figurines that make up this park began to lose their luster along with much of their original appeal. Some of the areas of Haw Par Villa have been shut down due to lack of preservation Hardly anyone goes there anymore, and closed sections of the park point to an uncertain future. For some it’s a refreshing antidote to the mall-culture, but it looks like mall culture is winning out over a day out in hell.’ — collaged

 

 

______
Gallery

Tours

Haw Par Villa Singapore: The last blooming lotus

Silent visit

It will all be demolished one day. The land is worth billions.

A walkthrough of the Ten Courts of Hell attraction at Haw Par Villa

 

___________________
Rebranding Haw Par Villa

Proposal #1
by Leonard Koh

This rebranding project aims to promote about Haw Par Villa through the creation of a new identity to create a new impression to people who have been there before and arouse the curiosity of those who have never heard or been there before. Other materials have been created to promote about the area and others have been created as keepsakes and a reason to return.

Logo

 

Corporate Stationary

 

Postcards (Sun Wu Kong)

 

Postcard (10 Courts of Hell)

 

Postcard (Laughing Buddha)

 

Direct Mailer

 

Calendar

 

Park Map

 

 

Proposal #2
by Chinwee

An extensive and different take on rebranding for Haw Par Villa. Targeting the youths for a change, this project aims to revive Haw Par Villa and also the traditional chinese values and cultures that comes with it.

Brand Identity

 

Park Map

 

Park Souvenirs

 

Posters

 

Brochure & Postcards

 

Outdoor advertising

 

Popup Brochure

 

Website

 

Direct Mailer

With the Noose Around My Neck 131

and thus those who aren’t there any more have already taken along immeasurably much of what those who were there did and resolved in memory of those who weren’t there immeasurably much is in possession of those who aren’t there and it will always grow more and more and since they have it in their possession and this possession is ever growing one can in regard to those who aren’t there speak of their memory of those who are there because those who aren’t there any more were once there not being there is something that is thought of while being there and being there is living off the possession which those what aren’t there are still accumulating in the name of those who aren’t there any more and are more because those who aren’t there anymore and are more have a name and we are there in their name, I swear it from head to toe from anus to navel, in the silver moonlight alongside the ships and the large buildings and the canals which cut into and through the city's innermost core the forest of masts the lines of beams and cordage crossing a thousand fold all in moonlight strange and magic at one corner but a glance into a brightly lit room where a hundred diligent hands were sewing sails, actually today everything is like yesterday except for the hallway where yesterday the bag kept surprising me today I am surprised that the bag is no longer there thus it would be more accurate to say that today everything is completely different from yesterday but then again not really either, I was privileged to meet him once in his offices at the South German Broadcasting Corporation in Stuttgart in the early Sixties, on a visit from London where I was working for the BBC and moonlighting as “Anton Hofman.” One-armed like Blaise Cendrars (the left “left,” as they say, on some dismal battlefield in 1942), tall, calm funny, and erudite, HH had (as he put it) “a lasting soft spot for the black banner of anarchy. My innermost conviction is anarcho-syndicalist. Never mind that I know it can never be realized, but that is where my secret love lies,”

 

            if I knew Greek I would converse with you in Greek

            but I don’t know any Greek

 

            when pressure mounts there is increased danger of everything bursting

            even though pressure can lead to nice things though maybe a little weird

 

            who loses steam gnaws bones

 

            the bird quite clearly flown to Idaho railroad embankment Thoreau

 

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            we have lived under this moon for a long time

            crumpled and gummed-up moon

            it may well be we have lived under this moon for too long

            my language is a noise

 

            spontaneous activity reaches

            possible multiple signals also

            changing course surging over

           

            building blocks to clear six feet

            waves until that sort of engine

            isolates fish ancestors

            leaking blood into panic swirling held

            formed by

 

                        open holes in

            a single hop through tephra

            mutating profiles from spinning radii

 

That is the gesture I wish diligently to communicate for her to guzzle with memory’s long artifice and that is the transit during which the remembered syllables which are translated so erotic so political, all ten of them, learn the excellent culture of timeliness asleep or separated by distance the face moving across. So there are always at least two times in the work, and the decisions composing their intervals and nodes place the work in the everyday. May I call it “the city”? It is going along. It is the interval of “if” attended and extended into material choice. Besides panic, Pan invented panpipes. Will consumers hunger for lab-created fish? I don’t mean revitalized fish ancestors. They’re growing fish meat in vats these days. Not fish, just meat. To be 3-D printed. And for dessert? “Cultured plant cells were produced from lingonberry, cloudberry and stoneberry, and were found to have even higher nutritional value than fresh berries. The researchers, from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center, said the cultures were higher in protein and fiber, and were also rich in polyphenols and unsaturated fatty acids. The researchers claim the cultures taste like fresh fruits ...” ok,

 

            [in the original the mimeograph did not reproduce the following line]

 

1. we) was

            trying to fix the place up, (we) was

            to finish the procedure, it was

            an architectural question, a spirit / spit one

 

            I think the thing is built of prunes & glue. The Grand Combustion

            Carnival, Columbus the Cat Dancing in Flames, rocks

            fall apart and citizens wonder: If man is the greatest natural wonder,

            what? Time turns to that motionless minute

            “read in the back of the animal’s eye,” (misread?)

            (I am guessing misread)

                                                for $6.00 an hour.

 

So the place where I was born has no forests, and no tall trees grow there. That does not mean it is lacking in vegetation, for there are certain kinds of trees: rowan, cedar, alder, and willow ... But the tallest of these “trees” will reach no more than a few centimeters above the earth. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “a throw of the dice Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck be It that the abysm whitened displays furious ...” Abysm, I thought. But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist looking for a job. Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. So I reached out and he sent me this long list, including “WE ARE THE ASTEROID”, “TRIASSIC WEATHER AHEAD”, “THERE IS NO AWAY.” Then one day, in a traffic jam outside the Holland Tunnel, I came upon one of those traffic message trailer signs, glitching, glitching. It was like poems by Peter Inman or David Melnick were coming up on the screen. It made me very focused and present for some reason. “EFFICIENCY IS PETROSPEAK.” I took the photos from 40,000 feet up. The series was inspired by the Kanō school in Japan, which is famous for painting landscapes onto gold and silver leafed surfaces; it’s a school of painting that lasted for over 700 years. In my case, instead of applying paint by hand onto the surface, I’m printing the landscapes using a UV acrylic inkjet printer that I’ve adapted to become my paintbrush so to speak. In JAKOBSHAVN I what you’re seeing is glacial melange, the remnants of the calving process. Those who hold this view say that a chick peeps when it is cold and twitters when it finds a warm place as if it were a little machine, not because it actually wants to communicate that it feels distress or pleasure. Which is to say that she stayed up until five in the morning, writing about how “the crisis” isn’t over, about how “the crisis” isn’t actually the kind of “crisis” they are calling it, but “a crisis” of something completely different, something so deep in the trenches of crisis that we can barely recognize it as anything other than our lives. “To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes,” someone wrote. “Today — what a mocking word in this timeless cave,” someone wrote from an underground experiment on Day 156. To think about it is to be the sequined woman lying flat inside the magician’s box; to watch the saw come down, to watch its blade cut straight through the middle of you, to watch your hips fall out from underneath your ribs. Let us talk about it as though “it” ever existed. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. I was not in any position to distinguish one text from another — a movement toward the inside from a movement toward the outside. The texts became whole rooms, and the rooms became whole houses, and the houses became whole streets, and the streets became a yearning occupation of a city, not a country, but a city, in which lush syllogism invoked the need to seize this experience and let it become sentences. The texts became a form — the longest form, one which is still now occurring, ongoing, occurring, ongoing. The water dries up before the dark blue hyacinths are placed into the vase. Cuz in utopia they don’t got no rules and the president’s “criminality pure and simple” is reserved for politicians just like him. In utopia the monkey lies down with the rhinoceros and the ghosts haunt the ghosts leaving everyone else to fends for themself. In utopia, you lose the battles and you lose the war too but it bothers you less. In utopia no one tells nobody nothin’, but I gotta tell you this. In utopia the plans are ornament and expectations dissolve into whim. In utopia, here is a pivot. In utopia, love goes for the ride but eros’s at the wheel. In utopia, the words sing the songs while the singers listen. In utopia, 1 plus 2 does not equal 2 plus 1. In utopia, I and you is not the same as you and me. In utopia, all that is solid congeals, all that melts liquefies, all that is air vanishes into the late afternoon fog. I am about as capacious as the next guy. Mescal is my drink of choice this year. Section 3, quadrant 822.3856, on uneven tide warnings. However, available room is subject to prior sale. Ergo, there’s no Holocaust museum for Native people. Or one for peasants. Like any disfunction, if you don’t deal with your disfunction at home, it just gets worse. The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Daenerys and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Daenerys and her forces — even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm — are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her — the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior — eye eee, a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black. Again we will have heard music ... a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamps’ descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all. Or even half. Or even 150%, or even

 

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            of art

            we ate them.

 

In other words, as he explains in Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace — a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name, even if we don’t know about it. Or, as Scriptures has it, Those without female reproductive organs must refrain from legislating female reproductive organs (Fallopians 1:1). Yet at our very beginning we had great unification. Today I could only see, breaking the fundamental particles, solitary quarks are coming down like ash (all we are is dust in the wind, peeps), landing in the branches of the shaved Krishnachura tree. We are getting delayed my Dear Reader. Could you hear the inarticulate noise from the Suicide Squad of Plantae Kingdom? Oh, My Dear Reader, just listen to that singer, “Oh Allah, Give me cloud give me water give me shade ...” Only when my integrity is clean is the frequency audible. One may hope that either sort of change, as its seeming or real inevitability emerges, will be realized. Brud is reading War of the Worlds on the radio no, Brud is a transmedia studio that creates digital character-driven story worlds. Among others, brud has created Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela. She’s supposed to be sentient AI but what she really is a cartoon quote unquote or maybe I should remove the quotes because it’s 2019 and in first-world hell this is a thing, she’s what’s known as an influencer. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her need I add imaginary life in Downey CA of all places, and where she proclaims her support for LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter. Anything that helps her sell shit, apparently. In the past few years, she’s shilled for Uggs ads, interviewed artists at Coachella and collaborated with Prada. In her latest project, a video for Calvin Klein, she kisses the half-naked (and heterosexual) supermodel Bela Hadid as a voiceover proclaims some marketing nonsense about dreams and doors. Called out for queerbaiting, CK apologized. Called out for kissing a cartoon, I’m not aware Hadid had anything to say. Lil is far from a one-off gimmick: CGI influencers are all over the place. Take Shudu Gram, a quote unquote black Instagram model and here I won’t remove the quotes because he was created by a white photographer; Liam Nikuro, who is quote unquote Japanese; and there’s YouPorn virtual spokeswoman, Jedy Vales. Last year a Japanese man (made of meat, apparently, lab-grown or otherwise) married a celebrity hologram, Hatsune Miku, prompting discussion about whether “digisexual” should be considered a new identity. In other words, a Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past, which is at the same time the future. Both ways, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay and make whole what has been and what will be smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him he knows not where, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call ... what we used to call ... now we don’t know what to call it, really. In other words, as Tommy Pico, on whose Kumeyaay land I find myself living these days, put it, ‘Ppl are too busy callin themselves ‘poets’ to notice the canary died” ...

 

            two paths diverged in a

            / half stank of blood.

            you come across this every decade

            a fork in the doggerel —

 

            Group C are right,

 

            it was good

            so good

            to get the words down

            just right, to drain

            the swan.

 

            and that there is a small beard dude in the 7

            dwarfs

            that satan cannot find supposedly

            and that site Quora.

 

            Obvs. Or,

            Prism Warders,

            we warm a spectrum

            of pilot-light clumped 5 at discrete temperature points ok

            out of 7 total = 2 spigots over for object & subject etc.

 

            shift french fries sheared

            gears in the wind powered

            buggy I love this

            buggy,

 

            imagine trimming a moth

            down to just one city,

 

            three different times

            I smelled popcorn

            popcorn was a snack

            made by steaming the

            seeds of elliptical

            vegetable matter

            grown in the musky

            dirt of a place we

            used to call I forget the

            name it was kind of

            nice like parsnip ice

            cream is nice on a hot

            solar vortex far away

            from the atolls that make

            up the Maldives Waffle

            cones were fried

            convex sugar toasts

            you’d like them

            they were very bad

            for us ...

 

Even today, the Fire Fighting School battles fires staged upon an elaborate set of pseudo-storefronts and houses, while seismological researchers burrow explosives into the silt to test liquefaction response to earthquakes (the island has sunk five feet since the Loma Prieta quake of 89) and electrolysis is performed on the aging water pipes. The moth eradication project attempts to manage whole populations driven here by shifts in the global ecology, in other words BARGE has had to re-adjust its methods to fit the “facts on the ground,” even as those facts filter themselves through ever-more paranoiac scrims. For instance, when the window opened behind me and the voice hailed me with her version of events, to be narrated in a kind of speculative poetics that the guidebook had yet to accommodate, the feeling was not of surprise as much as the recognition that this encounter was meant to happen at exactly this juncture in the field work. Thus the strange white car that would often be waiting at off-limit sites right as I was approaching would turn up in the rear-view mirror at exactly the moment I was wondering aloud where it had been hiding. Of course one would turn a corner and suddenly come across a three-legged dog trotting down an empty street. Of course there was a “Naval Ghost Blimp” that disappeared from the island years ago, only to show up in Daly City, its engines running and its pilots missing. In this surveillance photo, BARGE agents will have been seen removing soil samples from Halyburton Court, in the so-called “Area 12” site on the Northwest corner of the island. On the other side of the fences live mostly low-income families of color, most of whom have been told little of the Navy’s testing results of this and other sites, beyond having to agree not to plant any produce or other edible plants in their yards as a condition of their rental contracts with the Treasure Island Development Authority. This tree is found close to Mile 20 of the Catalina Highway up Mt. Lemmon, home of the southernmost ski area of the United States. It grows on a small hill above the Palisades trail, which drops thousands of feet to the East Fork of Sabino Canyon (see also “Populus fremontii S. Watson”). Elevation at the Palisades trailhead is approximately 8000 feet. Surrounding the tree are other Ponderosa Pines of varying ages and sizes, many quite large, as well as a number of smaller Arizona White Pines. This area was badly burned by the 2003 Aspen Fire. Trees are spaced widely apart and dead and downed limbs and trees are present everywhere. The ground is carpeted with pine needles and large, firm cones, interspersed with the ferns that have re-colonized the burnt area. About 120 feet tall and perhaps 200 years old, the tree has beautiful ruddy bark punctuated by dark jigsaw lines. The trunk smells strongly like vanilla. Its lower 20 feet are quite burned along one side, but it is alive and healthy, being naturally resistant to fire. Orange fungus is present on the burnt bark, along with dried tears of yellow sap. OK. In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. To quote: art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.’ Why? Because, for Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy. He goes on to say that, while art’s spiritual capabilities reached their climax in classical Greece and then began their demise, philosophy reached its ‘highest destiny’ around 1807, when — what else? — Hegel published his Phenomenology. But. But but but. Check out Thomas Feuerstein’s Pancreas, a processual sculpture that transforms books into sugar to feed human brain cells growing inside a brain-like shape. What books, you might ask. Just one, actually. And not just any book — the neuroglia cells are nourished solely by one particular book — what else? — The Phenomenology. Which is shredded and soaked in water, before being pressed through an artificial intestine full of bacteria and broken down into C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, which is then transformed into brain. Perhaps we can understand Pancreas as a provocation that counters Hegel’s original provocation etc. This is called dialectics, I believe. In any case, by connecting the brain to the stomach, a brain-gut link is emphasised that challenges ideas of pure thinking inherent in philosophy. As Candyman says: ‘There are no boundaries anymore, only distorted boundaries between what we used to split into nature and culture, body and mind, matter and information’. Which is why, one morning shortly thereafter, we decided to visit the Centre for Emotional Materiality, to watch “A Blobifesto.” As I stood there, I felt like the blobbiness of it all was radically penetrating my being. After the video we looked at each other and said: “Who knew? We were blobologists all this time!” Here was a new lens through which we could view, well, everything. So we stole as many postcards from the show as we felt morally okay with and handed them out to almost everyone we encountered over the next few days. We are intimates with these proto-beings, these floaters. I felt that the sound was coming from my bones. Once, my finger accidentally touched the lathe cutter, and half of my nail disappeared. Blood dripped down into the cooling oil. My co-workers rushed me to the town hospital. At the hospital, I discovered so many injured workers, mostly migrants like me. Some had injured half a finger, some the whole hand, the leg, the head. They were bandaged in white gauze stained with blood. The man on my left, with a head injury, worked in the plastic factory; the one on my right, with three severed fingers, worked in the moulding factory. The one on the right moaned, his three left fingers completely severed. The doctor came over, hung up a fluid bag, inserted a catheter and gave medication orders, all done expressionlessly, then left the room. Looking at his gauze that had been steeped red in blood and then turned pale yellow, I suddenly remembered, no one is going to argue that we need to find a halfway point between fish and the planet Mars. But water is not the same thing as the process by which water was chemically understood by humans: the latter includes Antoine Lavoisier as one of its elements, but not the former. Lavoisier is a major ingredient in the history of chemical understanding of water, but not an ingredient at all of water itself.

 

            Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has
            a new metaphor, except it’s not
            a metaphor A literal part of his
            heart
            has died
            says the echocardiogram
            he got before starting a new med
            but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty
            salads and Mamihlapinatapai is the most precise
            word according to linguists
            from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
            It means something like when you leave a café bathroom and
           want to tell the next  person in line it wasn’t you who
            took the smelliest dump in American history but you keep walking
           I mean it means well it’s more like when two ppl look
            at each other and the look
            is that they both
            know ...

 

Cesium has also been found in a surprising place — beneath the coastal beach sands close to brackish water tables up to 60 miles away from the meltdown site. Scientists have learned that where currents washed highly contaminated water onshore, the cesium “stuck” to sand particles in brackish water (a mix of salty seawater and fresh groundwater, as is found under beaches), but becomes “unstuck” when soaked with salt water. Therefore, the accumulated cesium embedded under beaches along Japan’s coast is being slowly released over time as waves continue to saturate the sand. Scientists estimate that the amount of cesium being released in this manner is equal to that of the ongoing releases and runoff from the disaster site itself, and from outflow from rivers continuing to carry cesium from land to the sea. And that ain’t all. Millions of tons of contaminated, radioactive water (used to keep the molten reactors and spent fuel rods cool to prevent further radioactive releases, and from pumped groundwater that continues to seep into the reactors’ basements) is stored on-site in more than 900 tanks. Despite efforts to prevent seepage using “ice walls” (human-created permafrost), and special processing technology intended to clean radionuclides from the water, Tepco was forced to admit late last year that these efforts had failed, confirming that levels of several long-lived, cancer-causing isotopes were still present in the stored water at more than 100 times legally permitted levels. While more water continues to become contaminated every day, the only known plan to deal with it is to release it all into the ocean. MOAS are therefore pleased that our mission to deliver medical and famine relief to Yemen will shortly come to fruition and our goods will soon be arriving to the port of Aden. Our two containers en route are carrying €126,687.15 worth of medical assistance and 27 tonnes of Edesia’s Plumy Doz ready-to-eat sachets for preventing malnutrition in kids. Which is one reason why, in the Resurrect ritual I use a mix of audio field recordings of recently extinct animals. I take time each day no matter where I am to lie on the ground and saturate my body with these extinct sounds. Part of the ritual involves sleeping in my car in Walmart parking lots. Outside in the parking lots each night, and this is true no matter where I am in the United States, there are homeless families living in cars. Another component is listening to the extinct animal sounds on headphones while walking in a spiral formation inside the Walmart, working my way into the middle of the store. At the center of the spiral I find a spot to kneel, entering in and out of the space of

 

            the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in

            the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby

            in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the

            entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in

            and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out

            of the space between the hands.

 

            The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing

            inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and

            argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria

            mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and

            titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized

            glass and concrete.

 

            can you feel it?

 

            does it hurt?

 

            is it hard?

 

            is it cold?

 

            does it weigh much?

 

            is it heavy?

 

            do you have to carry it far?

 

            the format must be set: 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour

 

            white wings of a magpie

 

            wave glory

 

            soap

 

[Note: Sources: Helmut Heissenbüttel, Schematic Development of Tradition (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), “Lesson 3 from Textbook 10” (tr. Pierre Joris), Anselm Hollo, Heissenbüttel’s “Essay in Greek” (tr. Anselm Hollo), in “Helmut Heissenbüttel (1921-1996)”, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Raworth, “Cat Van Cat”, at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999); Lisa Robertson, “If We”, at at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999);“The Mythological Origin of ‘Panic’”, at Merriam Webster; headline in San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 May 019 (hat tip K); JBR; Caroline Macdonald, “Lab-grown fruit cultures could yield new superfoods”, at Food Dive, 15 Mar 018; JBR; Proclus, Fragments from the Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, at Tertullian; Eleni Sikelianos, “Essay: Seven Aspects of Milking Time”, “[You can be King of the Corners]”, in Earliest Worlds; JBR; Yuri Rytkheu, The Chukchi Bible (tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse); Lucy Ives, “A Throw of the Dice”, at BOMB, 14 May 019; JBR; Justin Brice Guariglia, quoted in Meredith Smith and Rachel Kirk, “Mixing Art and Environmental Science to Catalyze Social Change”, at State of the Planet, 10 May 019; Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, Songs, Roars, And Rituals: Communication in Birds, Mammals, and Other Animals; JBR; Lotte L.S., “Not to speak about / only to speak nearby”, at Harriet, 13 May 019; JBR; Charles Bernstein, “In Utopia”, at Poetry Society of America; JBR; Edgar Heap of Birds, quoted in Sheila Regan, “The Spirits that Haunt the Words of Edgar Heap of Birds”, at Hyperallergic, 16 May 019; Cord J Whitaker, “Game of Thrones’ Peasants are a Problem of White Supremacy—and Its Victims, too”, at In the Middle, 19 May 019; Nathaniel Mackey, “[from] From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Volume Five”, at Floor 1; JBR; part of the result of scanning and converting section 128 of Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” to Microsoft Word; JBR; The Paris Review, quoted in ARTBOOK | D.A.P., “New from Trevor Paglen: Commemorative coins, patches, mugs and other ephemera from the shadowy world of US military aviation and aerospace”, email rec’d 20 Jun 019, approx. 10:55am PDT; JBR; something K sent me; Runa Bandyopadhyay, “Destination: Nature Roy”, Nora Bateson, “Without Shields (the voice of change is changing)”, Steve Benson, “For the Time Being”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); Brud, at Brud, and Arwa Mahdawi, “Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future”, at The Guardian, 21 May 019; JBR, “Who Killed the World”, Helen Bridwell, “I Was Right Dear”, Brandon Brown, “For My Future Children”, David Buuck, “from Buried Treasure Island”, Wendy Burk, “from Tree Talks”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); JBR; Martin Grünfeld, “Bio art and the end of philosophy (Feuerstein & Hegel)”, at Genealogy of the Posthuman, 21 May 019; JBR; Janice Lee, foreword to Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, quoted in Lee’s “A Blobcounter: Editor’s Foreword”, at Entropy, 20 May 019; Jane Bennett, blurb for Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices; Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Iron” (tr. Isabelle Li), at Sydney Review of Books, 22 Nov 018; Graham Harman, “the real problem is taxonomy, not anthropocentrism”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 May 019; Tommy Pico, “from Feed”, at The Offing, 15 May 019; Morgan Corviday, “Update: Eight Years After Fukushima”, at The Northcoast Environmental Center, 1 Feb 019; MOAS, “Yemen Situational Update”, email rec’d 23 May 019, approx. 7:06am PDT; JBR; CA Conrad, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 3 Sept 016; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001”, in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada”, in Black Dada Reader]

Zheng Guogu, “Visionary Transformation of the Purification” (2011–2013), oil on canvas, 79 15/16 × 54 5/16 inches (image courtesy the artist) [on Hyperallergic, at least, which is where I stole it from]

Turns out Mike Pence has **always** been a psycho subhuman total fuckhead: check this out. It comes from a friend of Kathy's ... it's how he signed her mother's yearbook

415ppm. If we were an individual we'd be put on a 72hr involuntary hold as a danger to ourselves and others ... but since we're not, since we are the crown of creation, away we go!