Zeitgeist Spam

Yes, Trump is a racist, and so are ALL his supporters, and so are ALL who remain silent, etc (reposting a portion of Anne Branigan's "Trump Says Racist Nonsense Because He Means It and Because He Knows He Can Win on It"The Root

 

 

Donald Trump, in a series of tweets from Sunday night well into Monday morning, doubled down on his racist, xenophobic criticism of four Democratic congresswomen, Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. After calling on the congresswomen to go back to their countries and fix them, Trump followed up his attack by demanding an apology—making abundantly clear his belief that challenging these women is an effective campaign strategy.

 

[...]

 

Trump stayed on the topic for most of Monday morning, extensively quoting Republican Senator (and favorite GOP foot servant) Lindsey Graham, who said the congresswomen’s proposed policies—policies that include confronting climate change, closing down migrant child detention camps, and increasing the minimum wage—will “destroy the country.”

As I write, members of the political punditry are debating (and no doubt, will continue to debate) whether what Trump has to say about sitting members of Congress is racist racist or just racist lite. And at this point, litigating his personal racism, and those of his supporters, feels both inconsequential and redundant, especially when Trump himself has made one fact very clear: He thinks he can win on racist rhetoric in 2020, and he thinks this because he has actually done it.

The timing of his attack feels important here: shortly after all four freshmen Congresswomen testified about the dehumanizing, barbaric conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Their presence at the border, and refusal to whitewash what they saw, brought new scrutiny to the practice of detaining children and families. The news cycle, even briefly, had shifted its focus to the dangerous cruelty of our detention practices. Trump may not be particularly good at anything, but he knows how to play the hits, and he’s particularly good at pouncing when there’s already blood in water: members of the freshman congresswomen’s own party—most notably, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—had publicly singled them out for being insufficiently loyal to the party line. The way it all played out was almost as predictable as it was shameful. 

Some may be tempted to speculate that all his anti-immigrant, explicitly racist speech is an elaborate distraction from other matters on the horizon: former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony for instance. This is a mistake. If Trump is erratic in other respects, racist speech and racist policy is something he’s been consistent on, as a candidate, as a president, and before that, as a private citizen.

What’s remarkable is just how effective that specific messaging has been. Take one study from 2018 (h/t Vox), part of a larger body of research that points to racial attitudes being a primary driver of Trump’s successful election campaign.

In this study, researchers paid particular attention to people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, before switching to Trump in 2016:

“We find a much stronger association between symbolic racial and immigration attitudes and switching for Trump and Clinton than between economic marginality or local economic dislocation and vote switching,” Reny et al. write. “In fact, we find marginally small or no associations between any of our economic indicators and vote switching in either direction.”

Tapping into this rhetoric was his lightning in the bottle. He said the quiet part loud, and people roared in response. As Vox explains, Trump was able to make the 2016 election about race in a way previous GOP candidates did not:

Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.

The results of this racist speech were not limited to the presidential race—research published earlier this year finds racial resentment became a down-ballot issue, impacting local races.

From the Pacific Standard:

“[Political scientists Carlos Algara and Isaac Hale] found a clear pattern of “relatively liberal voters defecting to Republican candidates up and down the ticket when they harbor racial animus.” This effect was extremely similar for Senate, congressional, and presidential races...

“Voters in the hyper-polarized era are well-equipped at assessing candidate ideological positions, and choosing candidates that are closer to their ideological preferences,” the two write in the journal Electoral Studies. But high levels of racial animus, stoked by Trump, led some white voters “to be less likely to vote for Democratic candidates” even when the Democratic candidates’ ideological positions resembled that of the voter.

In fact, racial resentment among white voters is so powerful that those voters will elect leaders who tap into that animus, even risking their own health to do so. (One uninsured man quoted in a recent Boston Globe article told one researcher, “no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” He was dying of liver disease.)

The rhetoric—and the line of thinking that accompanies it—is more pernicious than many are willing to admit, including many of the political reporters tasked with covering this story, and many liberals who imagine themselves to be anti-Trump.

If Trump wants to tout that these congresswomen are “unpopular and unrepresentative,” it falls within the same line of attack that Pelosi herself has directed at the junior reps, whose policies and support she has undermined in an attempt to support more moderate Democratic politicians. Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist who first reported Pelosi’s snide comments about the progressive group, pointed the finger at Ocasio-Cortez for the mess in a recent piece, titled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” To many, Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib are most emblematic of everything Trump isn’t: progressive values, and political agendas that center constituencies Trump voters would prefer to have pushed to the margins, if not out of the country entirely. That the likes of Pelosi and Dowd appear to feel threatened by this, too, is telling. [JBR: before you get your undies in a bundle, just ask yourself why so many POC didn't vote for Dems in 2016. Hmmm ...]

The question of citizenship—and upon whom those sacred rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are conferred—has been up for debate since the founding of the country. The impulse to tell American-born and naturalized representatives to “go back” emerges from the same wellspring as the drive to close our nations’ borders against a certain kind of migrant: one that is black, brown, low-income, or Muslim (it is worth repeating, over and over again that Donald Trump and the GOP have shown no such qualms about immigration from Norway or Ireland).

He has targeted the powerless—migrant families with nowhere else to turn—as well as powerful progressives, in this most recent case, women whose power was conferred to them by the districts they represent. In drumming up his attacks on both (in rhetoric and policy), Trump is reverting back to a tried-and-true pattern of escalation that has been his M.O. since he announced his presidency. Except now, as a sitting president with three years under his belt and a looming election, he has to take the fight even further.

With the Noose Around My Neck 136

So if Zen has koans for folklore, the world has folklore for koans. Proverbs and short poems the world around are of like intensity and suggest equal depths. Though Mr. Shigematsu has chosen to eliminate the Zen phrases under four words long from his collection, it helps to know how they work, and why. What would be the power of a one-word Zen phrase? I think of Harry Roberts' account of Yurok Indian upbringing: if one did something foolish, all that Elder Uncle had to say was

 

            Well!

 

Which is to say, with Schelling, “None of our spiritual thoughts transcends the earth.” Or, with Lew Welch, “So, it’s all come to this,” and “This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.” For how much longer will I entrust those crucial hypnagogic phrases to memory? In the land of neurochemistry everyone is equally fucked. I walk through the high grasses. Some of them are not hight at all, have shorter stems growing over previously trodden-on versions. ‘It turns out maybe there isn’t a cure for this,’ I say to the agent. The agent peels an orange. In order to eat from the broken orange you have to pass an exam on Levinas by shouting the words ‘say’ and ‘responsibility’ for an entire hour. No one knows why this is a test. The agent always mutters something about ‘fractal interiorities and algebras.’ Then the agent wishes me well before telling me I should get this straightened out right now otherwise I might end up like him, peeling an orange at the age of 70, veins lined with metallic adulteration, wishing I had more time. Each self is authenticity sous-rature. This is the second time this morning I came across the phrase “sous-rature.” I can’t remember the context of the first. The administrator warns me that my failure to do so would result in a lifelong illness such as was suffered by a patient who, upon entering the Junction, recited Whitman’s ‘One Hour to Madness and Joy’ for a whole hour and ended up cutting out his tongue. After an hour I have to walk around the pub wearing nothing but price tags. I reverberate with the clouds, those tiny esoteric sacks of tears from the sky. You don’t sit in a barber shop not expecting to get a haircut, right? They take my blood. So I

 

            applied for a job

            about witchcraft

 

            to relax

            I did the crossword puzzle

           

            one of the answers

            was witchcraft

 

            augury?

 

            ceci n’est pas un drill

 

            what is not a drill?

 

            now he

            turns into

            a buzzard!

 

            and flies toward

            the moon

 

            now the hawk

            that he saved in ‘real’ life

            in one episode

            becomes an alien

            in another

            episode

 

            afterwards

            I read about the series

            on appocalypse.co

 

            cloppity clop

 

The other sculptures are equally compelling, their placement perfect. A naked woman holding a hand mirror out to the side looks straight into it, strange bronzed children sitting alone, another naked woman whose exposed back you see as you approach the nook where she sits looking forever out to sea ...

 

                        the festive paper butterflies,

                                    mangled

             in barbed wire

            just outside Le Casino —

 

In other words, a group of people including me are walking through a crypt. Darkish bodies in coffins set in slots, alcoves, with clouded windows sealing each one. People are putting their hands on the windows & something is being communicated. I am growing afraid because if some sequence or number of these windows are touched some very bad thing will happen. It happens. The people have put their hands on the windows and the right formula has come to unleash the thing. Through language evocative of spamdexing, machine translation, keyword stuffing, and pre-emptive domain name neologization, a ‘narrative’ emerges, tied together around obsidian (yet suggestive) nodes like “Clessiexecs” and “Dosepucks”, dollar sign “resuscitation ovens,” etc. This fact feels doubly poignant given that the titles are all specific dates — some of which have been “faked,” as in “it is the duty of poets / to know what year it is [...] / it is the duty of poets / to be uncertain.” The prima materia often becomes transmuted in uncanny ways — spliced, mashed, or perforated — so the idea that all this would someday be absorbed into the content industry — someday mined for unscripted media shows — has been an obvious possibility from the very beginning. Ergo, watching content produced by other people’s doorbell cameras sounds both inevitable and, in a sense, quite, well, at first, we were prompted to “REDUCE SPEED NOW.” Why? I’ll tell you why. Because “WE ARE THE ASTEROID.” There was a “Goodbye” sign next to a waterfall. Why? Because, to quote a machine translation of Masahisa Fukase, “Everyone of the upside-down clan in focus glasses will die.” “In these more local, immediate contexts,” as Marthe put it, “experiences of interconnection — beneficial, destructive, neutral — manifest and can be grappled with in concert with knowledge of large-scale phenomena, each informing the other,” like

 

            ♦     the curves of a snake    ♦    toponym

            with roads cut through    ♦    trails of tears    ♦

            springs, losing streams    ♦    sinkholes, waterfalls

            ♦    stones are bored through by blue-green water

 

Or maybe it is only the coincidence of spring. Or maybe I’m pregnant. The pages hold a curious weight, soaked in liquid paper as they are. Right now I’m working on a dissertation on Nate Mackey, Ed Roberson, and Susan Howe. Obviously, I watch a lot of television. I listen to music on Spotify. I’m an introvert, but as a Leo, I want everyone to love me. My writing and ideas are not copyrighted. The delivery of these alternating pitches can also be seen as an expression of the variously different speeds and rhythms of order and control that are operating on any one group or any individual at once. Take this Deleuzian equation: Things happen to us in different rhythms and at different speeds as they happen in history; therefore we get stressed. What’s insisted on also is that in between the doors there is an airlock.

 

                                    [...] Both doors

 

            in the airlock are paneled and transparent,

            and I watch as one of my colleagues

            appears on the other side of the second

            door. There are two doors and an airlock space

            a meter and a half between us.

 

Then “stars” is heard again. The first star was loose, this one is tethered, its sound is stopped by “and” and followed by nothing. We hear “tie” in another register that pulls the sound back to “too”. Since “tie” is italicised, it might belong to another text, but the door(s), the hand sanitiser, the rota, the message book — the voice of the “service users” — Am I going to be sick? Are you sick? Were you coughing? Do I have a demon in me? Am I going to be sick? The patient is touched, prodded, as don Roberto seeks out the place where the illness is lodged, the magic dart; then he blows tobacco smoke on the place, rubs it to loosen the embedded affliction from the flesh. Then he ceases his singing and begins belching, sucking, gagging, and spitting. He is drawing up his mariri, his magical and protective phlegm, to make sure that what he sucks from the body of his patient cannot harm him; then he loudly and vigorously sucks out the affliction, the magic dart, the putrid flesh or stinging insect, the magically projected scorpion or razor blade. He gags audibly at its vicious power and noisily spits it out on the ground. I watch don Roberto do his work — a synesthetic cacophony of perfumes, tobacco smoke, whispering, whistling, blowing, singing, sucking, gagging, the insistent shaking of the shacapa leaves, the internal turmoil, the inchoate visions. When the healing is done, don Roberto blows mapacho smoke into the patient through the crown of the head, over the place from which the sickness was sucked, and over the patient’s entire body, cleansing and protecting both inside and out. I am watching all this go on, with great lucidity, weak from vomiting, my legs like rubber. I am watching the preliminary effects of ayahuasca — lights, swirling galaxies, interlocking patterns, Van Gogh skies, fleeting images, floating and disembodied eyes. Suddenly, I am no longer in the jungle hut. Instead, I am walking down a street in an urban setting, with no one around, near a vacant lot with a chain-link fence, garbage scattered around. I come upon a vendor with a wooden cart — two large wheels behind, two small wheels in front, a handle to push it with — who has necklaces for sale, hanging from wooden pegs, of the inexpensive kind that are tossed to the crowd at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I buy one and see a small girl, maybe five or six years old, standing on the sidewalk. She is blond, muy gringa, dressed in a pale blue satin party dress, as if she is on her way to a birthday party. In fact, she is wearing a crown on her head, which looks like a cardboard crown covered with gold foil, which I take to be a sort of party costume. I hand her the necklace as a gift, and she stands there very still, like a statue, holding the rosary — that is how I think of it now — raised in her right hand, the golden crown on her head, covered in light on the broken sidewalk. Speaking of gold, the mass of gold flung into a pit fed by the Cyclopeans at the very instant the Grand High Priest frantically ravages a vulture’s throat and drinks its blood does indeed intimate a theory about the alchemical transmutation of feelings into forms and forms to feeling. And an idea of purification, too. It has to do with isolating the very essence of any sensual ecstasy experienced momentarily and individually by the priest, so that this explosion and this rapid outburst of frenzy may return, unencumbered by matter, to the first principle from which it’s been born. Then there are the innumerable rooms consecrated to a single action or even to one simple gesture, with which the underbelly of the temple and its rumbling bowels seem to be crammed. The rite of ablution, the rite of abandon, diversion, renunciation; the rite, in every sense, of absolute nakedness; the rite of the biting power and unforeseen bursting forth of the sun, paralleling the sight of a wild boar; the rite of the savagery of the Alpine wolf and that of the stubbornness of the ram; the rite of the warm zephyrs and that of the great solar conflagration etc; all these rituals, in ten thousand chambers, are observed daily or monthly, biennially — lads, lads lads, hate to interrupt, but how’s your ejaculate? Would you struggle to fill half a teaspoon? And your concentration, please: do you have an average number of little swimmers a millilitre? And how’s that motility? Are they wagging their flagella as if they can’t wait to get to that ovum — or listlessly floating around like dead tadpoles in a poorly executed classroom experiment? Whether or not you are hoping to fertilise a human egg someday and haven’t given much thought to these matters ... well, Big Sperm reckons it is time you did. ExSeed, Yo, Trak and Legacy, are offering next-generation home sperm-testing technology — that said,

 

            You can put the universe          and all the souls that exist         in a cigar box

            It’s all in my two-room apartment

 

            I’m full of their endless lines      they’re full of my care

 

Interconnected acrylic tubes filled with rubber, glass, beeswax, pollen, and shredded government documents, 2 x 165 inches. Nightlight, wire, ceramic, dimensions variable. Thin strips of blue painter’s tape forming of footprint-sized rectangles. In some places, strips of white painter’s tape, with descriptive markings such as “Arctic Circle” and “0° / Equator.” Diffusers dotted with sea snails. Lead, prints, slow dried sand, The New York Times, handmade glass pollen from the index of pollens recovered by Shanxi Agricultural University and fabricated by artist Amy Lemaire, 44x 56 x 3 inches. Foam pads, sprinklings of dirt and minerals. Mini freezer, handmade popsicles with newspaper confetti, dish racks, preserved tropical fruits, frozen cubed fruits, plant lights, 25 x 18.5 x 17.5 inches. Language scraps, sliced and distorted, barely legible. Food scraps. Old food rich in protein smells the worst. The stench of fish heads, entrails, and chicken bones is unbearable. Liquid leaked from the bags and flowed down the asphalt and hardened in chunks. Hough had become interested in a series of ancient Native American rock carvings in the Southern California desert and along the Eastern Sierra. They show wavy lines, discombobulated human forms, and eerie serpentine figures that perhaps represent gods. The sites of these petroglyphs often directly overlap with known seismic faults, raising the possibility that they record earthquake activity. In other words, the 395 is a geologic master class disguised as a road. In other words, from the beginning, mankind has known that destiny is controlled by cosmic entities. Esu is the first.

 

            Sekiri Alagbaja,

            Tefii alaalaagbaja

 

            They are the names that Esu Odara is called in the city of Ife

            Esu whose name spans across cities

            The warrior living outside

 

            Laroye Agongolago

            Alamolamo bata

            O fe bata ku jo lamolamo

            Sekete peere

            Sekete peere

 

            The man who resides in the open ground

            He walks like whirlwind and swoops in with a thud

            He met a man who was grieving

            Weeping more than the grieving

            The grieving person was crying tears

            Laroye was crying blood

Which is to say that, given that Comcast and AT&T were already the only local choices for broadband and cable, the move felt like an ominous sign of even more industry consolidation. I took to Twitter to air this worry. “It’s nice that Comcast is offering mobile phone service now,” I posted. “But until I can get Comcast delivery pizza I will remain empty inside.” The company saw my tweet and responded: “Hey Ian, you rang? DM us the address where you would like it delivered & we’ll make it happen.” I thought I was calling Comcast’s bluff by answering that I wanted gluten-free mushroom pizza, and that because I was a customer, the company should know my address. “Do your brand thang,” I told them. Then the pizzas arrived. Ten of them, from a local place that delivers gluten-free pies. Which brings us to the case of the Kit Kat marriage proposal. This spring, Haley Byrd, a congressional reporter at The Weekly Standard, posted a tweet mocking her boyfriend, Evan Wilt, for eating a Kit Kat bar by biting across its entire width rather than breaking off the individual wafers. Hershey’s (which makes the candy in the US) sent the couple a box of Kit Kat bars with eating instructions, a cute gesture that Byrd thought was the end of the matter. But her tweet had gone viral, and behind the scenes, a Hershey’s brand-publicity representative, Anna Lingeris, conspired with Wilt to design a Kit Kat-shaped ring box, which Wilt deployed for his proposal in July. The result: a happy couple, and a haul of cheap publicity for Hershey’s. That’s when I threatened to kill Mr Peanut. To be fair, this wasn’t my first time menacing the Planters mascot. Or my second or my third. By the time I was banned, I had been systematically harassing the peanut man for about four months. Sometimes, I promised to destroy him. Other times, I’d doctor a tweet to make it look like he'd done something you’d expect from someone super bourgeois or elitist — I once photoshopped a tweet suggesting that he would use his peanut empire money to avoid a military draft. I targeted Mr. Peanut because I thought replying to a brand as though the brand were a real person was funny. Brands already act like real people on Twitter, so I decided to give a brand the same treatment almost everyone else receives on that platform: Strangers sending them death threats. @MrPeanut only responded to me once, fairly early on, when I’m guessing whomever runs the account hadn't yet been briefed not to engage. It makes sense they didn’t keep responding. If I were them, I definitely wouldn’t have responded to the crazy person threatening to kill their fictional peanut monster either. But otherwise, my game was going off without a hitch. That is, until May 31, when the monocled legume tweeted a nut-themed take on the phrase that made Bhad Bhabie famous. It read, “Cashew in the snack aisle how ‘bout that.” Putting aside the fact that that particular reference was a few years beyond its expiration date, it was my duty, as ever, to take the nut man down. I replied, “I will fly anywhere in the world to kill you. Just name the place.” But then, a strange thing happened. Bhad Bhabie replied to my tweet with a quick “thank you,” and soon over 1000 people had liked my post. A day later, I received a notice from Twitter that I'd been banned. So I hiked along the fault line for hours, eerily stepping over dozens of tarantulas that had come out to breed, and I watched in genuine awe as the fault seemed to emerge before me. It was a black line of shade that seemed to pull itself across the fractured ground, slowly, widening every minute like an abyss. I should add that I watch a lot of horror movies, and the feeling was not lost on me that day, that something dark and ancient was coming into view, a shadow-Earth infested by an ever-increasing number of huge spiders. When I checked into a motel later, I did some Googling: I was traveling in the midst of a “tarantula boom” and what I had seen that day suddenly made sense. The full manuscript also contains a section on “high-fidelity simulants” — another great phrase — as well as ones on metallic glass; inorganic-organic hybrids; self-propagating high-temperature synthesis; shape memory-alloys, ceramics, hybrids, and polymers; and artificial crystal-growth techniques in space. Here, the ideas themselves are architecturally evocative: “It is envisioned that fragments of bio-like materials could be launched in an inactive state during space flight, and once landed at the Moon or Mars, would start to grow into construction materials or even pre-engineered habitats,”

 

            ... IU IIIUUU IU ...

            SCREECH OF THE EGYPT SPHYNX

            WITH GUTS AND WITH BLOOD OF BEASTS AND OF MAN

            Lullaby melodies

            All this now costs no more than a dollar

            ... IU IIIUUU IU ...

            Balancing on the cables

            YOU HAVE TO STAND ON YOUR TOES AND KISS THE SUN

 

            Don’t cry, child,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There’s one slice of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have one half of the slice, I the other;

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There’re two slices of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have one slice, I the other;

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There are three slices of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have one-and-a-half slices,

            I the other one-and-a-half;

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There are four slices of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have two,

            I’ll have two;

            we’re going to eat snail.

 

These include a profile of Pasolini’s head taken in the morgue, an anonymous figure falling through space, scanned from a police instruction manual, and David Scherman’s photo of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub. They’ve been reproduced on the backs of unfolded cardboard boxes. For the duration of the show the AI will continue their unfinished game, simulating moves by both Brecht and Benjamin, and presenting various possible conclusions, the birth of the universe, the miracle of life, the planetarization of consciousness, consciousness itself, what she eats for breakfast, Pluto and the underworld, the above-ground world, how she thinks about spring, and suns as they traverse the ecliptic. But as time is a certain kind of wave structure, which can be heard on my podcast, I cannot properly illuminate here the angular zap of its magnetism. The light isn’t the same anywhere on Earth. I lived in LA for a while and I got reborn. I got into Kundalini Yoga. My job is to go into many worlds so it’s always nice when you run into another traveler. But also, these times are like that. I mean, everyone has had the experience of erotically communicating with the language that you choose and the rhythm of it is heavy with this energy of somehow wanting to get it right. The way that it is doing itself to you and the person you’re in dialogue with — that’s a mass experience now. Slippery? Too slippery, yeah. It’s maddening in a way, and slippery too, but it’s a confined space, and it works. Because there are mystery traditions in every culture. But the American New Age as we know it, in my opinion, comes out of the Great Depression. I tend to like the mediums that throw up some kind resistance to what’s coming through — mediums who play, who kind of throw down, the way Jacob did with the angel. I just opened it to this page. What’s this symbol? On page two-hundred. I kept thinking about geomancy and the science of the sand. Throwing something up in the air and divining the situation based on where it lands. It’s exciting when the two lines of the X meet, when there’s camera work being done. I mean, I can tell you that for the final section, I was sitting on a bench on Allen Street facing Delancey and there was traffic going by on either side. You might know that spot. I was sitting on the bench and the thing started happening. I was sitting there with a stupid look on my face filling up with bliss. And then the thing started talking. You know how there’s an invisible river around every river and the health of the invisible river has to be amazing in order for the ecosystem of the river to function properly? I felt it reorganizing my apparatus. I grabbed my notebook and I started to write and I looked down and realized I was writing right to left. It’s just a little to the right of where a proper unicorn horn would be. It feels good to press there. We are just pressing on our heads at this point. It’s such a teacher because it means that in order to understand the true structure of the universe, we have to understand what the suffering of woman really is. Above joys, and above agonies, above desires and effusiveness, lies an immense stretch of ash. If some prominence, some peak appeared, it would not be able to last; scarcely emerged, they disappear in little folds, folds in a shudder, and everything becomes smooth again. It is still only a little let’s call it a halo, no one sees it, but we know that fire will come from it, a giant fire will come (How’s it going? Fine, and yourself?). When a fish in the great depths, having gone mad, swims anxiously toward the fish of his family three hundred fathoms down, hurtles into them, wakes them up, accosts them one after the other: “You don’t hear the running water?” “You mean you can’t hear anything here?” “You don’t hear something that goes ‘che,’ no, softer: chee, chee?” The wolf is afraid of the violin. The elephant is afraid of mice, pigs, firecrackers. And the agouti trembles while it sleeps. If it is cold, it is without being cold. It is hot without heat. We often speak of flying.

 

            Finally the plane lands without folding its wings

            And the sky is full of millions of swallows

            Crows falcons owls come in full flight

            Ibises flamingos storks come from Africa

            The Roc Bird made famous by storytellers and poets

            Soars holding in its claws Adam’s skull the first head

            The eagle swoops screaming from the horizon

            And from America the little hummingbird comes

            From China the long agile peehees have come

            They have only one wing and fly in pairs

            Now here’s the dove immaculate spirit

            Escorted by the lyre-bird and the spotted peacock

            The phoenix that self-engendering pyre

            For an instant hides all with its burning ash

            Sirens leaving the dangerous straits

            Arrive singing beautifully all three

 

 “If I’m not home, come in through the window, everybody does.” You’ll find

 

            Michael Angelo down

                                           on all fours mixing

                                           the Sistine ceiling with

                     universal dirt,

 

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

 

            Aeee ahheah aheeah

            eeah eeah eeah aheeah oohee

            Tralalee

            Lalee lala

            Ahruahru

                        urulinary

            Laleela

            Ecocokoo coo ecku

            Ooheeahyah zobbinary

                                                laleela

                                                       laloloo

            Trierrasun and trillolin

            Ahee ahee

            Luxponsive solinary

            Raraurora ecoplaining laleela

            Ndanark

            Antiquash

            Miterdent

            Miterlipsis

            Miterslonga

                              matrimocean

            Roceaning tradocean laleela

            Equinaut

            Lucinary shooping astrasphere

            Eeah eeah

            Larymbimlam

            Larymbimbamastraplan

            Larymbimbamastramur

            Lyralibrarcrystramour

                                             larylyra nx

            Ahee ee ah

            Temporarr

            Ahee ahee aheeah

            Ululayou

                        lullayou

                                    layou you

            Ulalayou

                        ulayou

                                 ahyou you

            Moonaluning

            Sensiwooned infirmament

            Ululayo ululament

            Pliasounding

            Chanteloping ululaissance

            Hallenujah you you yo

            Tempolary

            Infilite and infinaut buziety

            Quaginary uruahyou

            Sierratuning faraprair

            Ululascent aurorarary

            Livfrever

                        lefdalafda dadeedah

            Campellationed lalalee

                                                auricental centauroral

            Lalalee

            Eeoh eeah

            Ee ee ee oh

            Ahee ah ee ahee ah ee ee ee ee ee oh eeah

 

Her case is extreme, but many people are suffering from what could be called “climate despair,” a sense that climate change is an unstoppable force that will render humanity extinct and renders life in the meantime futile. As David Wallace-Wells noted in The Uninhabitable Earth, “For most who perceive an already unfolding climate crisis and intuit a more complete metamorphosis of the world to come, the vision is a bleak one, often pieced together from perennial eschatological imagery inherited from existing apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, the inescapable sourcebook for Western anxiety about the end of the world.” And just a few miles up the road in Penville, Georgia, is the onetime abode of St. EOM (aka Eddie Martin), sole adherent of the homegrown denomination of Pasaquoyanism, whose church-compound consists of Day-Glo pagodas, smiling totems, and cosmic serpents. This odyssey described in Walks to the Paradise Garden passes through towns with names like Whynot, Zetus, Prismatic, Faceville, Flippery, Ty Ty, Arm, Chicken Bristle, Monkey’s Eyebrow, Skullbuster, Hot Coffee, Smut Eye, and Sublimity City. Another thing preserved here is Williams’s voice: I still cast my lot with the clump of Shortia, the pileated woodpecker, the timber rattlesnake ... not to mention the

 

            Catalpa the
            Kentucky coffee tree the
            Inkberry the
            Spreading English yew the
            Judas-tree the
            Maidenhair the
            Canada hemlock

                        human seeds sprouting stones

                        heart pillow wrapped in a plastic grocery bag
                        Hello Kitty sticker that says smartfit
                        knock-kneed mummy with green teeth
                        Puerto Rican flag fuzzy dice
                        wrestling Dalmatian puppies figurine

                                                    a dry sea, fragile
                                                               from “to cut with a sharp point”

[Note: Sources: Gary Snyder, foreword to Sayings of the Masters (ed. and tr. Soiku Shigematsu); JBR; Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, letter to Eschenmayer (1812), one of the epigraphs to Jason M Wirth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild Time, Art, Imagination; JBR; Lew Welch, “Small Sentence to Drive Yourself Sane”, “The Song Mt Tamalpais Sings” (memory quotes); Colin Lee Marshall, epigraph to Erotoplasty 4; Azad Ashim Sharma, “High Modernist Relapse: A Neuroscience-Informed Prosepoem”, in Erotoplasty 4; JBR; Nicky Melville, “From apisodes”, in Erotoplasty 4; Sascha Aurora Akhtar, untitled, “I Am Not A Prose, Poem”, in Erotoplasty 4; JBR; Helen Dimos, “From Intermissions and Things”, in Erotoplasty 4; Colin Lee Marshall, “revicules” (and some of the books under review), in Erotoplasty 4; JBR; Geoff Manaugh, “Neighborhood Watch”, at BLDGBLOG, 4 Jul 019; JBR; Maria Morkas, “We Are the Asteroid III: More than a Mere Traffic Sign”, at The Buzz Magazines, 2 Jul 019; JBR; Masahisa Fukase, blurb for Kazoku (tr. Google), at shashasha; rob mclennan’s blog, 5 Jul 019; Holly Pester, and Verity Spott, quoted in Pester’s “The Politics of Delivery (Against Poet-Voice)”, in The Poetry Review, 109:2, Summer 2019, at The Poetry Society; Stephan V. Beyer, Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon; JBR; Stephen Barber, introduction to Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus (tr. Alexis Lykiard), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Please welcome to the world ... Antonin Artaud Heliogabalus or, the Crowned Anarchist (Infinity Land Press)”, at DC’s Blog, 6 Jul 019; JBR; Richard Godwin, “The rise of Big Sperm: does the tech world have the answer to our semen crisis?”, at The Guardian, 7 Jul 019; JBR; Alice Notley, “All the Souls in the Cigar Box”, in Undo; Hyperallergic, 6 Jul 019; JBR; Ha Seong-nan, Flowers of Mold, quoted in John Yau, “The Unreality of Everyday Life”, at Hyperallergic, 6 Jul 019; Geoff Manaugh, “Move Over, San Andreas: There’s an Ominous New Fault in Town” at Wired, 18 Apr 019; JBR; Awódélé Ifáyemí, “Who is Esu”, at Ilé Ifà; image, Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais, Midnight at the Crossroads, at Magnum Photos, 6 Jul 018; JBR; Ian Bogost, “Brands Are Not Our Friends”, at The Atlantic, Oct 018; Luke Taylor, “I Was Banned From Twitter for Threatening to Kill Mr. Peanut”, at Vice, 8 Jul 019; JBR; Geoff Manaugh, “Rocks, tarantulas and the subtle poetry of a walk along the San Andreas fault”, at Los Angeles Times, 19 May 019; Geoff Manaugh, “Folktales for the Offworld”, at BLDGBLOG, 8 Jul 019, and M.Z. Naser, “Extraterrestrial construction materials”, in Progress in Materials Science, Volume 105, August 2019, at Science Direct; Kyn Taniya, quoted in Brian McLaughlin, “Invisible Currents: Kyn Taniya’s Radio, Translated By David Shook”, at Reading in Translation, 9 Feb 017; “3 Songs from the Fang” (tr. David Shook), at Sin Zona; “Bandage the Knife Not the Wound”, “Bertolt Brecht vs. Walter Benjamin”, at Broomberg & Chanarin; Emmalea Russo, “Poets Are Time-Travelers: Ariana Reines & Emmalea Russo In Conversation”, at Fanzine, 18 Jun 019; Henri Michaux, “Excerpts from La Nuit remue”, and Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone” (both tr. Charlotte Mandell), at Charlotte Mandell; Stephen Jonas, quoted in Ammiel Alcalay, “Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader”, at BOMB, 10 Jul 019; JBR; Stephen Jonas, “Dilemma II”, at EOAGH 3; “Ayahuasca Sound-Poem (Cashinahua—Eastern Peru)” (version by Jerome Rothenberg), in Alcheringa Issue Three, 1971; Vicente Huidobro, Altazor (tr. Eliot Weinberger); Mike Pearl, “‘Climate Despair’ Is Making People Give Up on Life”, at Vice, 11 Jul 019; J.W. McCormack, “Walks to the Paradise Garden”, at BOMB, 10 Jul 019 (a review of Jonathan Williams, Guy Mendes and Roger Manley, Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey); JBR; Allison Cobb, Green-Wood, quoted in Tracy Zeman, “‘Not Flowers but Bone’: The Post-Pastoral in Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood”, at Kenyon Review, Jul/Aug 019]

A Game of Chess

[JBR Note: Image found at Broomberg& Chanarin. To quote:

BERTOLT BRECHT VS. WALTER BENJAMIN

Three remarkable photographs record Brecht and Benjamin playing chess. They were taken on the outskirts of Svendborg, on the island of Funen where Brecht lived during his six years of exile during the second world war. Benjamin visited him in 1934, 1936 and 1938, and the photographs record one of their games under a pear tree in Brecht's garden. These are the only photographic evidence of their productive friendship before Benjamin lost his life on the boarder of France and Spain, where he is thought to have committed suicide rather than surrender to fascist Republican forces. 

Commisioned by the Akademie der Künste, Broomberg and Chanarin will present a series of 32 photographs of the original pieces in Brecht's chess set (Tactics of Attrition, 2017), meticulously recorded with forensic photographic detail. With their piece "Bertolt Brecht vs. Walter Benjamin, 2017" the artists will re-stage the famous encounter recorded in this photograph, using an automated chess board powered by artificial intelligence. The machine can predict the precise sequence of moves from the start of the game up until the moment the photograph was taken. 

For the duration of the exhibition the computer will continue their unfinished game, simulating moves by both Brecht and Benjamin, and presenting various possible conclusions to their game. Viewers are therefore offered a prediction of the past, albeit within the narrow confines of an algorithm ... ]

Litia Perta, “Xicanx (after Zoe Leonard)”

Yo quiero unx __________ for president. Yo quiero unx Xicanx for president. Xicanx por lo que Amy Sanchez-Arteaga me ha dicho, que “Xicana is the radical indigenous version of Chicana. BUT! Xicanx is the radical indigenous/gender inclusive version.” Por eso y mucho más: Yo quiero unx Xicanx for president. Yo quiero unx anti-racista, feminista, Black Lives Matter, colectivx trabajadorix, bruja radical for president and someone quién aprendió inglés como segundo, tercer, cuarto idioma for vice president so we can finally have someone in that office quien entienda bien que el inglés isn’t the only language of “America”––and how intimately tangled up language can be in history’s horrors: colonial, neocolonial. (Recuerda bien lo que dice M. NourbeSe Philip que “English is a foreign anguish.”) Yo quiero lo que Gloria Anzaldúa ha descrito as: “a composite, amalgama de culturas y de lenguas––a woman who loves women” for president. Someone who might say, as she does, “Call me de las otras. Call me loquita, jotita, marimacha, pajuelona, lambiscona, culera” and also “una puta mala, a tejana tortillera”––words nearer to “dyke” like Zoe Leonard uses in the piece that gives this piece its breath. I want all them for president too. Yo quiero una president que nunca haya estado on the right side of the border and so knows at the level of the flesh que las fronteras de todas partes tienen una sola intención y es la de dividirnos, conquistarnos. Yo quiero alguien que necesite refugio for president, someone whose body has huddled long hours in cold, crowded boats with hundreds of other bodies buscando un modicum de paz, only to find gates, barbed wire fences, and the racism of diplomatic stalemates. Yo quiero una presidente criada sin agua potable, someone crisped by the sun or the wind from standing outside hardware stores or nightclubs esperando trabajo, someone who came here from somewhere else para escapar war, famine, drought, violence to their bodies, violence to their minds, and found instead “America.” Yo quiero someone who understands que ni la tierra ni el medio ambiente tiene borders y mientras estamos protegiendo lxs borders, people of the earth are suffering, dying because of la mentira de fronteras y todo lo que protegen––y todo lo que no pueden proteger. Yo quiero alguien que entienda lo profundo que es lo que dice Douglas Kearney that I read in that essay by Dawn Lundy Martin that made me get on my knees and weep for skin: “GOD we cry / because nobody do us like the body.” Yo quiero alguien whose desire is unruly, whose body has never fit, who feels outside even with outsiders, alguien como Jess Arndt describe que tiene––que es” ––a body that is an antitoxin, a counteragent to every shade of sex abuse slinking back for generations,” ”with two dicks and five pouches and three holes...that no one can kick out of bathrooms”––” a body that spurts fountains,” a body that feels deeply that we are these fleshthings together and that “compartmentalizing and alienating each other” like “Tepepunk, el nepantlero espectral” said is just another kind of border, and so another kind of lie. Yo quiero alguien así for president. Y quiero también una persona who has defaulted on their student loans, hospital bills, their mortgage payments, credit cards, someone who drank the water in Flint and knows what all these forms of intentional government poisoning taste like. And I want someone who has been in jail, who is not allowed to vote, who has been in the hold and who has been in the hold too long––I want them all for president too. Y quiero alguien que pueda tejer entre nosotros un superpower de crear “refugios de placer ante el desastre” como nos dice lx colectivx feminista Invasorix. And twenty-four years after Zoe wrote what she did, I want someone for president who unmakes what “president” even is, who messes it up so bad they tear it down, because what is a president anyway but someone who presides over and who sits before? Y lo que yo quiero en este momento no es alguien que pueda sentarse ante nosotros but someone who instead is finally ready to stand up with us, to fall with us, to get down with us, to march with us and move with us, and dance with us and sing with us and laugh with us and change...And if there is any sitting to be done, let it be done together and among and not before.

Eiko Yamazawa, What Am I Doing

What I am doing No, 24_1982 Cibachrome.

What I am doing No, 74_1986 Cibachrome.

What I am doing No, 72_1986 Cibachrome

What I am doing No, 77_1986 Cibachrome.

Happy birthday, America (as Lew Welch put it, "So it's all come to this")

With the Noose Around My Neck 135

Listen, and I will explain it well. During that time, there was a little bird called jolbu chokchung that lived in the growth of a great sandalwood grove. Its plumage was blue-green with two white wings like half-moons, and a tail of five flat feathers the nature of the five primary colors. Its feet were equal in color to mother-of-pearl, and its claws and beak were white. It had red eyes, and above the neck the colors of its head were similar to the colors in the eyes of peacock feathers. On its head it had a crest of three plumes of red that shone with multicolored light. It did not kill insects, and it did not set foot on the ground but always lived in the openings of flowers and shrubs. It constantly made an extremely sweet sound translating tare and tuttare. It lived on the various kinds of very fragrant medicinal substances such as those found inside camphor and in the stamens of fine flowers. After it made its resting place inside the stamen of a flower at the top of a camphor tree, its desire was satisfied by the breath of its own two beaks meeting. Two eggs came up into that little bird’s mouth, and it placed them inside the camphor flower. A male and a female bird developed in that nest. These were birds blessed by Exalted Tara. Some people say they were even emanations of Tara. In any case, they were certainly not ordinary birds. If you take the droppings of those birds and ingest them, it will overcome and cure all 404 kinds of disease. If you smoke them, the eighty-thousand kinds of bad spirits can’t penetrate. If you rub them on the body, all kinds of skin diseases will be cured. All beings that live and breathe in the mountain forest or an area with those birds will not experience misery for a whole lifetime. Those birds are few in number and very rare. Anyone who does not have good fortune and karma, no matter who they are, can never see them. Those two birds had the auspicious connections and karma to make a dharma connection for the insects, other birds, and many animals that lived in the forest, and establish them on the path to liberation. Once the hatchlings of their two eggs each had the wing strength of fledglings, the mother and father birds felt no attachment to the nest or to the two fledglings or to that area, and they took off in opposite directions, like east and west, or south and north. In turn, the two fledglings made a nest and had two eggs that developed into two fledglings. The male and female then took off alone in their separate directions and henceforth did not desire to nest. The species lineage of this creature chokchung is that of one-time nesters. Obscured people don’t see these two birds. Only a holy person with good karma and fortune can see them. The size of the chokchung can be compared to that of the bird called joldzinma that we have here now. It is light yellow with white eyebrows. It’s about the same size, but the throat is a little longer. The shells of the chokchung’s eggs are white with a hint of red rays and are radiantly glossy. They are without blemish or covering, like a clear crystal. Light rays that can illuminate the darkness for four fathoms shine from them. Inside the egg, the outer layer is white and inside that is red. Inside that is yellow, then green, and then light blue. Inside that is a dark-blue vital-essence drop, the size of a pea. In the center of that is a drop the size of a mustard seed highlighted by multicolored moving lights. Now then, this is how you should visualize the transference, so listen. Sit on a comfortable mat and settle mind and body into an alert, relaxed state without wavering. Assume the seven-point posture of Vairocana and exhale three times. Imagine that the sins and obscurations accumulated through body, speech, and mind, along with all the inner filth, are exhaled in the form of breath. The body and mind, everywhere outside and inside, are purified of obscuration and become sparkly clean. Imagine the inside of the body from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet to be empty, like a balloon. Visualize yourself standing up with your two anklebones touching. Your two hands are in the dharma-source mudra on the crown of the head. Visualize a red drop on the sole of the right foot and a white one on she left. Imagine them the size of a barley grain or a pea. Then draw up the breath and shout p’e thinking that you are calling them up. They rise up and join in the lower cakra, the white and red drops blending into one drop the nature of light, about the size of the new egg of a hen. Imagine that it is throbbing and flashing with potential movement as if about to take off. As you shout p’e it moves to the navel, the heart, the throat, and then the crown. Then it is expelled out the hole in the crown and becomes a shining, blue-black syllable ha in the space about one cubit above you. Measuring a breath as one exhalation and inhalation, remain in that equipoise for twenty-one breaths. Then, whether you do the instantaneous transference described below or this one, in any case, do the mind transferring into the sky, then mixing, then settling in equipoise, and then again transference — in that way a total of twenty-one times for one session, twenty-one times during the day, and twenty-one times at night. A night-blooming cereus white  

 

                                                            this could heal you

            Or decorate the new abyss turn the year backwards un-

            Fasten its manacles we have a different year on Jupiter

            So say to your harmless dogs in the halogen faintness

            On the street corner behind broken ice on the pla-

            Net of brutal futile actions and I left home oh and

            Stumbled over a sack of inedible pebbles an empty snake-

            Skin the nothing that loves me grins like a bat though

            The rubies be hemoglobic spidery or unilinear like

            Scabs of scratched drawings sores or breaks in nacre

            There can’t be any real light what would be real light

            The airplanes in the letters spelling pick up the receiver

            Falling away so you can remember all words ever spo-

           

ken in any language. However, these monuments were, and still are, more than just the sum of their parts. Within this new country, Tito envisioned a diverse utopian society unified around its own internal sense of progressive optimism, which itself would be held together by a firm grasp on its own shared future and by a collective righteousness in their victory against fascist aggression. The construction of this vast array of spomeniks was part of that plan. As such, these monuments operate not only as surreal and abstract structures memorializing a horrific past and arduous victory, but additionally, they function as political tools meant to articulate the country's vision of a new tomorrow. This is most visibly evidenced by the fact that a central feature at a significant number of these memorial complexes are large amphitheatres. These were to act as outdoor classrooms. Tens of thousands of school children were brought to them each year. So, from the 1960s to the 1980s, hundreds (if not thousands) of these spomeniks were built across the Republic of Yugoslavia ... from big ones as big as a 15-story building, to smaller ones the size of a refrigerator. It was a colossal effort in monument building that is to this day unparalleled in Europe. The show begins in the then-future year of 2015, in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event which killed billions and induced catastrophic climate change. To compound humanity’s troubles, giant creatures known as “Angels” have since begun to emerge and wreak devastation in pursuit of who knows what. To combat this threat, enormous mecha called Evangelions are produced and deployed, the catch being that they can only be piloted by teenagers. The main pilots featured are series protagonist Shinji Ikari, the enigmatic Rei Ayanami, and the headstrong Asuka Langley Soryu. Evangelion‘s first half follows a monster-of-the-week formula: A new Angel attacks, and the characters have to strategize around whatever its special abilities are to destroy it. Along the way, cast members are introduced and given their own spotlight episodes, with the details of the setting filled in bit by bit, a larger story arc forming around the true nature of the Angels and the secret plans of Nerv, the organization fielding the EVA units. Then, the tone changes drastically. The Angels still come, but less frequently, with more episodes instead given to the characters interacting and reflecting on their circumstances. The focus moves from the logistics of defeating the Angels to the toll fighting them has on the protagonists. Action scenes are cut down in favor of dialogue. Backstories are laid out, with characters’ psychoses revealed and shown to be rooted in myriad traumas. Every character is revealed as an emotional wreck. The shift from action to psychological drama culminates in the last stretch of episodes, in which one by one, each lead suffers some kind of breakdown. This peaks in the infamously divisive final two episodes, which take place almost entirely within an allegorical mindscape and feature heavy philosophical discussion amongst the cast. Told mainly through the reuse of previous footage, line work rather than full animation, it has no action and no apparent resolution to the show’s overarching plot. It takes time, once inside, to adjust. What you begin to glimpse looks something like an apothecary shop abandoned on a busy day — jars and vials of various sizes on rows of shelves, tools and curious devices in glass cabinets. At the same time it feels a bit like you are drifting underwater in a grotto or aquarium. You stare at things in the jars — powders and what are probably gruesome objects, cheap toys and computer chips and gears and gadgets. You peer closely at the labels on the jars, bristling with instructions, recipes — and more than a few made-up words, it seems: “solar pap” ... “red hairy profits” ... “an inquiring frost” ... “singing teeth” ... “purpureous gravities” ... a “fillerstein’s ear.” Then you notice the faint layer of dust over everything. Somehow you know it’s not just dust. It’s “breeding dust.” If I could only gather the flesh into a mercy pond I would, but a masculine estrus hoses down the cement. And such as that for years and years. This is not wonderment. There is instead too much horror compacted in the greasy coagulant my family calls wind. Ronnie will lean against the refrigerator and say that just about everything is killing him. Larry has a masterful forelock and a huge album collection. Rita raised finches and knew some Spanish. I mean, first we went to the monastery but they didn’t have any ham. Then we went to the service station but papyrus they had none. Then we went squealing through the streets, which were a disservice to the remote stillness of the stars. Then we went to the supermarket but identified no readily available forms of human sacrifice. Then we went into the forest and unearthed some hot takes on an unreleased Beastie Boys album, “....” for untranslatable fragments, “++++” for missing sections, “(?)” for variant readings, and “[  ]” for clarificatory portions. Tree Talk. Motz el Son:

 

grryook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmrnmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmm gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook             mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmm gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmm             mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMM MM MMM MMMMMMMM    M MM M M M M M MM MM MM M M M M mmmmmmmm m

 

            “[[plus sign enclosed in a circle]]”

            “will-would-might-have-can-change”

            “was / will-be / is / is-just-about-almost”

            “I do not know who I am when I read this. How magnificent.”

 

Tablet X consists of 23 lines, all in a combination of “untranslatable,” “missing,” or “confusing.” The Scholar / Translator has, in the exact center of this tablet — eleven lines preceding, eleven lines following — suggested that the two missing words would read, “the the.” The the the immigrants arrive, grave and with torches, a billion of us. In dreams you’re compelled to be in the drama you’re in. I am an earthling, aren’t I? Where does it come from? I don’t — I wasn’t born to make sense. You once did this too, remember? The soul submits to no one, thus is often denied by its face. The people were litters, magnets, and tentacles. Lightning surrounded us, comprising the four walls of the surrounding desert. What are you allowed to see in the exposure of opaline cracks? These archaisms will be around for a long time. Meanwhile, a small white horse from another planet wishes to talk to me. It is only a few inches in length. Its skin is composed of white beads. White-beaded it speaks, hesitantly, in English It has vocal chords. It has a pink mouth and tongue. Heavenly seedpearls for horsehair? Oh one cannot go back on a planetary promise, these passionate black-winged moths. Listen to the horsie, the superior man had said. Look at these white we’ve painted. I can’t stay, I said, I have a problem. The moving houses are very moving as they move slowly into the sea. It was by design. An ASMR whisper chamber, but splashed with rare art, long eruptions of natural light, and a socialized security system. He fired me before I saw his ferns. But not before he left an Aeolian window open on his computer through which the wind blew silver, and it chimed. This isn’t a rational decision he said, it’s an emotional one. This was the first I’d heard of toilet glitter. In “miki endo as flint marko (a.k.a. sandman),” we encounter the disembodied voice of the 24-year-old woman credited with saving many lives by tirelessly broadcasting warnings from her station at Minamisanriku City Hall during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, an act for which she ultimately paid with her life:

 

            after the tsunami took me

            I was both here and not here

 

            I mean I was everywhere

            but also nowhere all at once.

 

            Does this seem strange to you?

 

            It used to seem strange to me

            but now it’s just how things are.

 

            I concentrated very hard

            on trying to see my feet, to know

            if I was a ghost or not, but when

            sneakers filled with foot bones

            began to surface in the Pacific,

            I stopped thinking these thoughts.

 

                        For we’ve crossed the blood-brain barrier,

                        where will you wait when the world is water, the water dust?

 

                                    The event horizon is so loaded, the horizon’s everywhere. 

 

Apparition is a congealed form from which someone has already withdrawn, whereas in language there is accomplished the unintermittent afflux of a presence that rends the inevitable veil of its own apparition, which is plastic like every apparition. Hundreds of microclimates mushroom inside this. Which is to say that Martin Heidegger knew nothing about Mitsein. Forget he was a Nazi for a moment. Martin Heidegger knew nothing about Mitsein because he never had the chance to see Lionel Messi “being-with” his fans after that miraculous, come-from-behind Champions League victory in 2017 versus PSG at Camp Nou. Heidegger knew nothing about Mitsein because, unfortunately for him, football fan that he was, he died more than a decade before Messi was even born. In his final years Heidegger was (unsurprisingly, given his reputation for discipline) enamored of his countryman, “Der Kaiser,” Franz Beckenbauer. In 1974 Beckenbauer captained the West Germany to World Cup victory. On home soil, no less, with a 2–1 win over the Netherlands. In 1990, as manager of the last divided German team to play in a World Cup, Beckenbauer coached West Germany to victory. On a train ride one day, Heidegger, who was “full of admiration for Beckenbauer’s delicate ball control,” according to his biographer, Rüdiger Safranski, “actually tried to demonstrate some of Beckenbauer’s finesses to his astonished interlocutor,” who happened to be the “director of the Freiburg theater.” One can only imagine it. The now venerable philosopher, in his declining years, trying, as the keen Meßkirch amateur left-winger he’d once been, to make like Beckenbauer. On a moving train, showing no appetite for talk of the theater or literature, there, for all the world to see: Martin Heidegger, footballer. The philosopher, exhibiting, in a moving train, his best football moves. The philosopher giving us a glimpse of what the philosopher as footballer looks like. The old philosopher retrieving, as if from gilded memory, the young footballer he once was. The old philosopher recovering, if only for a moment, the footballer in him. The footballer he imagined himself to have been. Among philosophers, Heiddeger wasn’t alone in his love for the beautiful game. Camus was a keen amateur goalkeeper. Derrida loved playing football as a boy in El Biar. And how could we forget Sartre’s insightful analysis: “In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.” How many philosophers are nothing but insufficiently talented footballers or underemployed color commentators? In the case of Heidegger’s Mitsein, then, what we encounter is nothing other than the philosopher’s (true ... truest) desire: to be-with a great footballer. Heidegger could not know Mitsein because he was (physically) too far removed from Der Kaiser. So he did the best could: he tried to be-like: zu sein wie. To be-like Beckenbauer. Unlike at Camp Nou, where all the partisans were free to be-with their idol. Messi gave himself freely to them, and they, in their turn, gave themselves utterly to him. Heidegger did not give himself to Beckenbauer. Nor would Beckenbauer ever have imagined the possibility of Mitsein with Heidegger. You know what this reminds me of? About 20 years ago, Kathy, Rose and I were on a train from Edinburgh to London. A few seats away a sleeping man was curled up on a row of seats. The ticket taker came by and woke him. The first thing out of his mouth was, “You should have let sleeping dogs lie.” He was obviously drunk, and just as obviously hadn’t been sober for decades. The ticket taker left, the man stood up and wandered around a bit, talking to people, complimenting the women on their beauty, etc. When the ticket taker returned, he had another guy with him. The old drunk took a boxer’s stance, and challenged them. The larger of the two train men said, in a very calm voice, “That’s not a good idea, my friend. We’re bigger than you, and a lot younger. Do you know Berwick-upon-Tweed?” “No.” You will, mate, you will.” The last we saw him was through the window, on the platform there, escorted by uniforms. Little did we know they had dropped him in a war zone. I read an article about it in The Daily Beast. For decades it appeared that all 12,000 residents of the Berwick were excluded from the 1856 peace treaty between Russia and England that Queen Victoria announced after the Crimean War. This omission was made possible by a 1502 treaty between England and Scotland that succeeded in ending hundreds of years of land arguments over the place — it had already switched sides 13 times. But the agreement also greatly confused its classification by defining Berwick as “of but not within the Kingdom of England.” So, throughout the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Berwick-upon-Tweed, along with Wales, was considered a quasi-sovereign area under the jurisdiction of the British kingdom. Royal decrees were forced to specifically include Berwick by name otherwise the town would be exempt. This practice ended in 1746 with the Wales and Berwick-upon-Tweed Act, which declared that any proclamation would automatically include both regions. But the confusion didn’t end there, and the town continued to be called out in official documents — including, residents came to believe in the early 1900s, a mention in the declaration of war that launched hostilities between England and Russia. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except then a rumor began that while the war included Berwick, the peace treaty did not. In April 1914, a small article about the discovery appeared in a New Zealand newspaper. “A well-known economist, Archdeacon Cunningham, has just discovered that the town of Berwick has been at war with the Empire of Russia for nearly sixty years,” it reads. “It seems that on the outbreak of the Crimean war, Berwick, under some old custom, declared war independently of the United Kingdom ... the city on the Tweed has never formally concluded peace.” Ergo, omission from the Treaty of Paris had left the town in a long-running state of hostilities. A few decades later, the Western Daily Press reported the conflict as “nothing to get alarmed about.” This was investigated by the British Foreign Office in the 1930s and again in 1965, but both times confirmed there was no written evidence to support the stories. Adding to the local lore is a tale that in the 1960s a Soviet official came to visit Berwick and finally signed the long-forgotten peace treaty that ended the century-long war. Then-Mayor Robert Knox was said to declare: “Tell the Russians they can sleep easy in their beds.” So now it feels as if the only inhabitable places left in the city are its songs. The sounds they begin to make when listening has been made impossible. The sounds they make are poor and weird. There are people with holes in their necks, running toward us. Their mouths on backwards. Or, for that matter, imagine a nineteenth-century architectural theory suggesting that all works of civil infrastructure — prisons, libraries, courts of law — had to have both a positive and negative version constructed, an aboveground world and its subterranean reflection, and that, over the course of the novel, more and more of these underground spaces are discovered in the humid soils of the American east coast. And that it ends well for no one involved. It raises the question, “What is a piano?” When I discovered a ruined piano in a tractor shed on a West Australian sheep station, my passion for prepared piano and its contrivances gave way to one for pianos prepared by a disinterested what can most easily be called nature: by searing heat, flash floods, and far off stars. For me “ruined piano” belongs with those other dead-end metaphors: the stringless lute, the iron flute with no holes. The ruined piano may be evocative of emptiness, but each ruined piano is, at the same time, utterly unique with respect to action and tuning (if we can talk of tuning at all). An F# one-and-a-half octaves above middle C on a ruined piano in a semidesert environment differs radically from the same note on a piano in a flooded studio in Prague. It’s like cooking carrot soup

 

            with slow carrots  thees ar

            veree slow carrots

 

            sew i put them in2 th blendr

            2 speed them up  i almost

 

            brek th blendr  sew th slow

            carrots go back in2  th pot

 

            i keep having 2 replace th

            watr  its all boiling away

 

            n th carrots arint dun yet

            ther may b a leek in th pot

 

            or thees ar th slowest carrots

 

            th salmon  thats going with

            them  was dun long time ago

 

            if th carrots  nevr get dun

            ium going 2  eet th fish

 

            its bin redee  4 hours

 

            if yu get slow carrots

            by mistake  coz yr 2

 

            baked or groggd whn yu

            get 2 th store  2 ask

 

            4 th fast wuns  it can b

 

            a long nite  cooking

 

            carrot soup

 

            it can be a long time crossing

            the bridge of sighs ...

 

Happy Asteroid Day! I’m older than Baudelaire when he said he was a thousand years old. And it was a regular horse but for the eyes: they were in its nostrils. I’m gonna take that horse to the old town road I’m gonna ride til I can’t no more, I’m gonna, excuse me

He had limping blue forelegs. He was a balding comb-over’d Don Juan. Around his hut were shackled cemetery birds shitting into his eardrums. By the following afternoon splotches appeared on his gut. They were green and blue. Apocalyptic sulphurs flooded his soul, assuming he had one. He began to groan. He swayed from side to side like a twenty-ton jellyfish. A twelve-pointed light began to unchain his forehead. The gas that passed for thoughts began to drift, and at the instant of this drifting the secretary birds were blown into blood. He then began to walk, two steps forward and two steps back, like a human infection. He remembered something. He was both King of the Pigs and he was / I am the President. I sat at my desk and contemplated all I had accomplished this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest in Rhode Island. No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding. I was the arm-wrestling champion in Portland, Maine. False. I fell off Mt. Everest. Nope. I married the Princess of Monaco. Nope. A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I couldn’t catch him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize anyone. A policeman stopped me on the street and said he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked just like me. What are the chances? The next moment, the waning light expired, and with it the waning flames of the horned altar, and the waning halo round the robed man’s brow. It is not hyperbole. The Conversions begins with an impenetrable ideogram, a circular maze sealed off completely, no way in or out. From the start, the prose exudes an eerie and compelling calmness. In quick order, the narrator relates a racing competition of Rousselian strangeness (an intricate affair combining woodwinds and worms) and then meets a novelist who provides a summary of his book The Sores, in which three early music enthusiasts try to survive a polar plane crash. Throughout the book, Mathews is able to let his narrator recede and interpolate texts from other hands, such as a chapter from a book entitled The Otiose Creator. (What I love is that the full text of this quote unquote found chapter is repeated in an appendix — in German.) He walks us through weird science (a character’s discovery and unsuccessful promotion of a sex position that not only prevents conception but provides intense mutual pleasure), doomed, esoteric plots (such as the one involving hypnotized hockey players), and the language spoken by two strange brothers (“Lop oh oh kop ... yoppo you boploppo oh dopyop foppo ohlop ...”).

 

            e as no s ex rex noth Syl i

 

Early in his quest, the narrator is presented with three riddles When was a stone not a king? What was La Messe de Sire Fadevant? Who shaved the Old Man’s Beard?” To which he thinks, helplessly: “When was a stone ever a king? Who was Sire Fadevant? What old man?” The trail led to two snails fucking in the rain; they were quote unquote invasives. These are the snails that other snails were brought in to kill, but the newest invaders preferred indigenous ones. True or false: children will be moved from the US mainland to Gitmo, where no lawyers or reporters or members of Congress can see them. Nothing seems without its smooth transition now. “Hope and Healing” was found by googling “Chanel and Fallujah.”

[Note: Sources: Machik Labdrön, quoted in Machik’s Complete Explanation, expanded edition (tr. Sarah Harding); Alice Notley, “Malorum Sanatio”, at LitHub, 10 May 017; “Introduction”, at Spomenik Database; Dan Schindel, “One of the Most Controversial Anime Ever Comes to Streaming for the First Time”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Jun 019 (re Neon Genesis Evangelion); Daniel Tiffany, blurb for Tim Earley, Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal, at Delete Press; Tim Earley, various, in Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal, at Delete Press; Andrew Zawacki, “Review: The Tablets”, at Boston Review, 1 Oct 000 (a review of Armand Schwerner, The Tablets); Wendy Burk, Tree Talks; Anselm Hollo, “Motz El Sonh: The Little Lovers”, in Fish-Sheet One (ed. Ian Hamilton Finlay); JBR; Alice Notley, various, in Eurynome’s Sandals, at SPD; Armand Schwerner, quoted in Andrew Zawacki, “Review: The Tablets”, at Boston Review, 1 Oct 000; Anselm Hollo, “In the Long View of Human History Man’s Reliance on Fossil Fuels Can Be But a Short Episode” (memory quote); Daniel Poppick, “A View of Vesuvius”, at BOMB, 25 Jun 019; JBR, but see Guy Schaffer, “Camp”, in “Discard Studies Compendium”, at Discard Studies; Lee Ann Roripaugh, “miki endo as flint marko (a.k.a. sandman)”, quoted in Shoshana Olidort, “Ghost or Not: On Lee Ann Roripaugh’s ‘tsunami vs. the fukushima 50’”, at LARB, 21Jun 019, and “Miko Endo”, at Wikipedia; Gillian Parrish, Cold Spell; Leslie Scalapino, quoted in Michael Cross, “Horizon”, at Jacket2, 27 Jun 019; Liz Kinnamon, “United States v. Scott Daniel Warren”, at The New Inquiry, 27 Jun 019; JBR; Grant Farred, Entre Nous: Between the World Cup and Me, at Duke University Press; JBR; Nina Strochlic, “Berwick-upon-Tweed, the British Town at War With Russia”, at The Daily Beast, 26 Feb 015, updated 14 Apr 017; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Antimatter 2”, at Abandoned Buildings, 28 Jun 019; Geoff Manaugh, “Shadow Cell”, at BLDGBLOG, 27 Jun 019; Ross Bolleter, Dongshan’s Five Ranks; JBR; bill bissett, “cooking carrot soup”, at bill bissett; JBR; Robin Trower, “Bridge of Sighs”; JBR (30 June is the anniversary of the Tunguska meteor event); Jean-Marie Straub, “My Key Dates”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 30 Jun 019; Pentti Saarikoski, “The Madman’s Horse”, in Helsinki (tr. Anselm Hollo); Lil Nas X, “Old Town road”; JBR; image: Michael de Adder ( CNN, 1 Jul 019; Will Alexander, “The Neutralized Sore Of The Unshackled Bear”, in Vertical Rainbow Climber; JBR; James Tate, untitled, quoted in Dan Chiasson, “The Last Poems of James Tate”, at The New Yorker, 1 Jul 019 (the epigraph by Dara Wier, Tate’s wife: “Jim’s final poem, in his typewriter July 2, 2015”); Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, quoted in Roy Scranton, “The Curse of Coherence: Cold War CIA Funding for Oulipo’s Confidence-Man”, at The Appendix, Oct 013; Ed Park, “Hymns To Misunderstanding: Harry Mathews’ First Three Novels”, at Quarterly Conversation 29; Susan M Schultz, “Hope and Healing”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 1 Jul 019]]

Yoko Ono, Add Color (Refugee Boat) reposted from Hyperallergic

Yoko Ono, Add Color (Refugee Boat) (1960-2009) at the River to River Festival in New York (All photos by Hakim Bishara for Hyperallergic)

With the Noose Around My Neck 134

The sound of the cage crashing to the ground tore through the house. The crow had escaped. A light came on, and Madhu felt for her head. Her hands clasped at the smooth top of her torso, her fingers feeling for any trace of a stump before falling still for a moment and then again repeating the motion. Even now she kept forgetting that her head was gone. It had happened as she fell asleep to the rumble of the waves outside. She should have seen it coming. The fortuneteller had warned her, and there had been other signs too. It was hot and sweaty. Unusually, the wind had stopped blowing in the evening and with it the sea had died. The day had been long and boring. An idiot of a photographer had come over from the nearby city of Chennai. He had heard about this woman who had lost her head and wanted to take photographs of her. He had said that he wanted to take photographs of all the wonderful and vicious things that happened along the Indian coastline. Madhu started to make her way to the living room. The tottering had now turned into a dance. For now, she had to make do with the ear that her sister had loaned to her, which she had attached to the front of her right shoulder, the more auspicious side. She needed to hurry, the pill was starting to get slippery. A couple of months ago she had bought the bird cheap because it had come with a terribly loud and supposedly temporary cough that had, of course, not gone away. It formed an emotional map that I began to draw as an experiment, using an online synthesizer that turned scanned points within the images into sound, the whiter points into higher frequencies. I wanted to try and extract sounds that would reflect a state of being. In the end eight sound extractions were stitched together to form a three movement sound piece such that if the composition were to be broken up into the individual extractions and then translated back to images ... There’s another interesting note in section IV of the anthology’s introduction. Cea included information about a poet whom he had excluded from the anthology. His name is Antonio Gamero (1917-1974), and he is mentioned as the author of a poem entitled “Searching for Your Saliva.” I was intrigued. When I discovered that the poem was included in a volume titled TNT which boasted a cover image of an explosion that reminded me of the Futurists and the Estridentistas, I was sold. TNT reached my hands through the magic of interlibrary loan (there were only two copies listed on WorldCat) (three cheers for librarians!). Yet

 

            I have arrived searching for your saliva:

            your saliva that cures blindness,

            your saliva that can burnish metals,

            your saliva that relieves my sore limbs,

            [...]

            your saliva that washes the shirt of god,

            [...]

            your saliva that opens holes in stones ...

 

In other words, there are mysteries that are so eerie they boggle the mind. The case of Elisa Lam is one of them. In February 2013, this 21-year-old student from Vancouver, Canada, was found dead inside the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank in Los Angeles. The LA. County Department of Coroner ruled the death “accidental due to drowning” and said no traces of drugs or alcohol were found during the autopsy. However, there is much more to the story than what is implied by police reports. The first piece of evidence that needs to be considered is an elevator surveillance tape that recorded Elisa’s behavior the last time she was seen before her body was found. At first, Elisa enters the elevator and apparently presses all its buttons. She then waits for something to happen but, for some reason, the elevator door doesn’t shut. She starts to look around, as if she is expecting (or hiding from) someone. At 1:57, her arms and hands start moving strangely. She then walks away. The elevator door then shuts ... Her body was found two weeks later, after hotel guests complained about the water’s taste and color. Built in the 1920s to cater to “businessmen to come into town and spend a night or two”, the Cecil was quickly upstaged by more glamorous hotels. Located near Skid Row, the hotel began renting rooms cheaply on a long-term basis. The hotel’s reputation quickly went from “shifty” to “morbid” when it became notorious for numerous suicides and murders, as well as lodging famous serial killers, for instance, Richard Ramirez, “the Nightstalker”, who lived in a top floor room. He was charged 14 dollars a night for it. In a building filled with transients, he remained unnoticed as he stalked and killed his 13 female victims. Jack Unterweger was a journalist covering crime in Los Angeles for an Austrian magazine in 1991. Some think he moved into the Cecil in homage to Ramirez. While there, he killed three prostitutes. In the 50’s and 60’s the Cecil was known as a place that people would go to kill themselves. Helen Gurnee, in her 50s, leaped from a seventh floor window, landing on the Cecil’s marquee, on October 22, 1954. Julia Moore jumped from her eighth floor room window, on February 11, 1962. Pauline Otton, 27, jumped from a ninth floor window after an argument with her estranged husband, on October 12, 1962. Otton landed on George Gianinni, 65, who was walking on the sidewalk. Both were killed instantly. There was also a murder of one of the residents. “Pigeon Goldie” Osgood, a retired telephone operator, known for protecting and feeding pigeons in a nearby park, was found dead in his ransacked room on June 4, 1964. He had been stabbed, strangled, and raped. The crime still remains unsolved. The story of Elisa Lam is eerily similar to the 2005 horror movie Dark Water. Dahlia, the main protagonist of the movie moves into an apartment building with her young daughter Cecilia. Both of these names are relevant. Dahlia obviously refers to Elizabeth Short. Cecilia may well be intended to suggest the Cecil Hotel. OK. Anyway, after moving into her apartment, Dahlia notices dark water leaking from the ceiling in her bathroom. She ultimately discovers that a young girl named Natasha Rimsky drowned in the building’s rooftop water tank, which caused the water to turn black. Sound familiar? Shortly after the discovery of Elisa Lam’s body, a deadly outbreak of tuberculosis occurred in Skid Row, near Cecil Hotel. You probably won’t believe the name of the test kit used in these kinds of situations: LAM-ELISA. That is hardcore.

 

            Comments:

 

            Netti · 3 weeks ago

its clearly ritual murder. God save us all from this evil.

 

            Lafite · 3 weeks ago

First of all, she pushed all floor buttons for the ghosts. As to the elevator door   remaining open, it’s because there were too many ghosts in the elevator leading to the door not closing because it was overloaded, and her being squeezed to a corner of the elevator proves this point. Hopping and gesticulating by the door was her discussing the situation with the ghosts, asking some of the ghosts to get out of the elevator to reduce the weight. From this we can see, there will always be things that man’s science is unable to explain, or there really is another dimension. This is purely one’s point of view, if you don’t like it, don’t read it.

 

            Patricia · 3 weeks ago

I don’t know as I saw the elevator and the I sworn I saw the devil. if you look well and if you could see his horns inside the elevator its so weird that girl. something somebody possessed that girl’s body.

 

            Kim · 3 weeks ago

The way she moved her hands reminded me of the way my bearded dragon “waves” her arms. Same wrist-down, flat palm, fingers-up shape. That was the first thing I thought of. I don’t think that is relevant at all, but it startled me how much she resembled a reptile with those movements.

 

            Syrus · 3 weeks ago

Last time a lightning bolt struck one of the Illuminati’s messengers while he was en route with their world domination plans, which were immediately found by the local authorities and that directly led to the group’s official dissolution. I wonder what more it could take this time to really shut the Cabal down. I don’t like these people.

 

            aggelos · 3 weeks ago

Drowning is also used in ritual sacrifices, ie whitney Houston ...

 

            Yaz · 3 weeks ago

I’m surprised that everyone has failed to see the most creepy part of the entire video!!! 2:57: the elevator door closes (and seems to work fine). 3:13: the elevator opens on a DIFFERENT FLOOR!!!, the wallpaper is different! It seems like perhaps “something” in the elevator perhaps went UP a few floors, to possibly complete the sacrifice!! Notice that it took almost 20 seconds, which means that the elevator either went far down or far up. It most probably is far up. And also, no one had pressed the elevator button, since no person was present on the other floor. That means that something inside the elevator pressed on something, perhaps what floor “something” wanted to get to. Is it just me or is there a dark entity in the center of the entire video??

 

Which is to say that when you were scratching your name into the mirror another few hundred people died. When you laugh it sounds like boiling lice.

        number 9 said to number 4
        we”re not living now and we weren’t before

Then Saturn ate his children. Once a year there is a parade. And then there are those who cannot move without shitting bones. You can see them in old photographs, as if birds had scratched them, and those scratches are what fascists call history and hammered nails and human hunger and other words they use to express pleasure. The night of the earthquake. The 300 houses destroyed. The 55 bullets the police fired in 3.5 seconds at Willie McCoy so that they could murder him while he slept. You’d think he was Fred Hampton or something.

 

            Because of course even the flow of the fish in the water

            well, more specifically: that sharp and extended vertex

            of the Patagonian grenadier, useful for moving in multiple

            order at one two three four-hundred metres’ depth

            back at the higher layers of the Atlantic or South Pacific

            will end up compacted solidified frozen packaged

            in order to adopt the usual form of industrial production

 

            a premium parallelogram of 7.5 kilos of filet of hoki

            standardized and universal measure of taste and machines

            commerce and transport across similar parallelograms

            angles without imperfections and a vacuum smooth surface

            exact to dilute the movements of the hand that eviscerates

            extracts the epithelium and starts the fine deboning

            on board a trawler whose flag doesn’t matter that much.

 

But here’s an idea. There’s only one graviton. I mean literally. Only one. It expanded and became our universe and it has a really really really really low frequency called the spacetime continuum. Everything seems to be accelerating because our graviton is just being attracted towards the antigraviton somehow, who understands the first thing about love? Oh, and black holes are like the fractal nature of radio waves observed in Bell Labs: there are little versions of the wave inside the wave, so your cell phone antenna needs to be all crinkly, like maybe a Sierpinski carpet. The universe makes little versions of itself because ... because why? The graviton. By the way, the carpet is one generalization of the Cantor set to two dimensions; another is the Cantor dust. As the Master said, ‘pepper plus wings equal dragonfly’, not the reverse. All well and good. For a long time, then, we are not sure how long, the old colonial powers continued to expand and dominate. At some point, it appears, the collapse of the doomed oil-hungry energy system led to widespread violence and hunger. A threshold was passed and new diseases like cibiscosis, Nippon genehack weevil, blister rust, and scabis mold began to run wild, indiscriminately infecting vegetables and fruits, destroying landscapes, and making people “cough up the meat of their lungs.” Now power is in the hands of the calorie companies that were quick enough to fill the hunger gap. Conglomerates like AgriGen, PurCal, and Total Nutrient Holdings wield the power to pressure governments, wage wars, same old same old. Meanwhile, in Bangkok, conveyor belts are moved by megodonts. Tethered to machinery, these gene-hacked animals, are derived from elephants. Their handlers, mahouts, are organized in the megodont union, which is so powerful that even masters of the underworld, like the Dung Lord, must bow to them. Megodonts share the urban ecology with Cheshire cats, named of course for their ability to become nearly invisible. Lethally effective hunters, the story is they were created for the birthday party of the daughter of a wealthy American calorie executive. Other genetic “inventions” have more carefully considered features. Long struggling with low birth rates, the Japanese began manufacturing “new people,” who would be perfect servants for the aging population. You can probably guess what they were mainly used for. New people are prohibited in Bangkok. They live secret, precarious existences, for the moment is brief between being recognized and being fed to the methane composters. In Cambodia and in the North, there are also new people. There, they serve as grunts in the coal wars. Rumor has it that some have escaped and created their own enclaves in the mountains. OK. Or not. Something odd is going on. For instance, mediums speak more and more about the crowds of phii, aka ghosts, and how they are growing crazy with frustration since, undeserving of the misery of the present world, they are unable to reincarnate. The phii are, of course, invisible to the calorie lords. In the aftermath of the carnage, lieutenant Kanya is tasked with leading the “white demons” into the secret seed-bank. But Kanya is haunted by a mentor and friend who died because of her. Inside the sacred vault, his insistent whispering prompts her to kill the foreigners. Kanya then orders the monks to move the seeds into the country, and her men to destroy the pumps and water locks that protect Bangkok from flooding. Now three snakes swim slowly across a bath of fresh water, weaving between lily, rose, and jasmine petals. As their undulating bodies make gentle waves, a silver bowl bobs across the water’s surface. Extended arms eagerly place bank notes into the glistening vessel. Showered in gifts — fruits, flowers, and Buddhist flags — the snakes are entrusted with an important task: to guard a sacred buried treasure. There are rumors that this treasure, or thaik, contains priceless jewels from kingdoms past, bricks of an ancient shrine, and relics of Shakyamuni Buddha buried deep beneath the temple’s foundations. These are the mechanic’s keys

 

            We were in the souvenir

            Kiosk behind the throne room

            The arrow in my compass began

            To quiver ... And how did birds

 

            Begin? VOID IF DETACHED

            Logic of the world robbing you of your boner

            It was a somewhat spiritual

            But it did still feel kind of weird ...

 

I mean, $1000 sweatpants? Really? Perplexed, I looked to Twitter for help. On Tuesday, a user named @z3dster messaged me to say that he had run the photo from the GQ article through a free metadata analysis tool. Pictures taken by electronic devices often carry Exchangeable File Image Format (EXIF) data, which can include everything from the type of camera that took it, to the photo’s exposure and GPS coordinates. (In 2012, authorities found former software entrepreneur John McAfee, then a fugitive in Belize, after a Vice journalist posted a photo to Facebook that included location EXIF data.) While photo metadata can be manipulated, the EXIF analysis showed that the GQ photo — which had also been shared to Mr Actually $3000 Sweatpants Bruno Cucinelli’s Instagram account — had been altered in a 2019 version of Adobe Photoshop. This wasn’t a smoking gun — lots of photos are edited and polished in Photoshop before they’re posted or printed — but it did at least suggest that some of the elements in the photograph had been professionally altered. The breakthrough came on Wednesday morning. Twitter user @benjymous ran the GQ photo through Google’s reverse image search. I replicated @benjymous’s steps, and traced that photo back to the LinkedIn account of Ferdinando de Bellis, a Milan-based partner at Barabino & Partners, an Italian communications firm that’s done work for Cucinelli. Two weeks ago, de Bellis posted the all-male picture and the more candid group shot to his LinkedIn, celebrating the Silicon Valley visionaries who had come to visit Solomeo, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the latter two of whom who appear in none of the photos, doctored or otherwise. “The creation story was just me having the overwhelming desire to wear bread, and hollowing some out and putting it on my head,” she tells us. The recordings come from a 1985 cassette, but the songs themselves may be thousands of years old. Noting how certain “words” appear to resemble words in other tongues (various African languages, Serbo-Croatian, etc.), she ventures that perhaps she tapped into something ancient in her songs — a universal language, a mother tongue passed on to us via her harvest god. “I used to say it was invented, but I didn’t really invent it; I found it. It bubbled up.” On “Ee Chê,” for instance, Homler’s chanting, sung in a mode that’s not quite blues but not quite not blues, either, flows in multi-tracked circles over a slow railroad chug of white noise punctuated by plunging bass glissandos. Moshier has a knack for finding a single, spellbinding sound and sending it swinging through the void like a pendulum, and here, it is a lone, wavering bass tone that feels less like a musical figure than something inadvertently picked up by a space telescope. In other words, we might never harvest Math Bass’s forms, and maybe we shouldn’t; maybe conversely we let the orchard become overrun, Gothic, a place where the fruit just serves worms and curious children. Another quote exterior to me: the Log Lady says, “My log does not judge.” One could say perhaps that the log does not interpret; the log does not tell histories, only stories. What is the difference, anyway? The log can’t or won’t tell you, for instance, if something is sufficiently ambiguous or undecidable to be considered queer. But undoubtedly the most famous description of the effects of mescaline is from The Doors of Perception, I mean, “Those folds in the trousers — what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel — how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!” Have you ever heard Dorothy Ashby play the harp? Rest in peace, Kevin Killian. I am light — I think I’m light — I have no lethal heavens, roaring plently, conveying fabulous muddles of the kug. A true “sooth-brooder,” a wayward “Thinker of something else,” tra-la, tra-la. The space was all magic, doused in a misty green and red glow. It’s called a columbarium, which sounds like it should mean “mystical card catalog.” All the named golden lists. The enormously heavy doors and marble echoes. There are these monstrous ferns growing in pots. Am I remembering this right? It felt like being in a nineteenth century orb. The hangover made everything simultaneously more and less beautiful. Right on ...

 

            Ever see that movie about the

            last dude on Earth? Vincent Price,

            or Charlton Heston, shivering behind

            bolted door, then at sunrise, Will Smith,

            he tip-toe out, watch further incursions

            as zombie deer come lick at his cock

            in empty street, repeat, repeat, I am the legend

 

            Meanwhile massive trees have whispered thumbs

 

            That’s why I’m wondering about your health, Walt Whitman,

            jumper filled with rainbow nerf balls kids play in,

            begonia, begonia, this is the whirlwind,

            down at the cable-car turnaround, hello, hi, Walt Whitman ...

 

Speaking of Oreo avocados, which I thought was gay slang for how would I know, no, it’s not. Oreos with avocado-flavored filling were actually made as part of Nabisco’s #MyOreoCreation contest, where fans could suggest flavor ideas. Nabisco made a few batches of the frontrunners and sent them to those who suggested them. Avocados? Good! Oreos? Good! But putting them together? History will judge us harshly for this. All I can think is: this is what God was hoping for when he created humans. Which reminds me: yesterday an Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights, formerly named Bruschim, was just renamed Trump Heights. Population: 10. This transaction is the result of careful consideration, planning, and due diligence by KFWA. Solaris was identified as an institution that shares the same client-centric approach to relationship management and stewardship of its clients’ assets. Like KFWA, Solaris believes that clients’ funds embody the ability to accomplish their goals, address their aspirations, and prudently plan for uncertainty ahead. In addition, the acquisition of Solaris’ assets adds significant expertise in the creation of multi-manager asset allocation portfolios. These portfolios may include traditional “long-only” asset classes and, potentially, alternative investments for those clients seeking returns and diversification outside more traditional investments. In other words, in philosophical terms, wonder arises when, “surrounded by utterly ordinary concepts and things, the philosopher suddenly finds himself [sic] surrounded on all sides by aporia.” (Wonder (thaumazein) is regarded as the point of origin of Western philosophy (Socrates / Aristotle). Yet, as with many origins, this one is also imagined as in need of being superseded because of its pathos (Aristotle), its heretical implications (St. Augustine), and/or its lower value as a passion that is closer to the feminine and the childish (Descartes!). For ethnographic analysis, however, the task when thinking with wonder is different. If wonder strikes when people, things, and other beings encounter each other in concrete times and places, the analytic task is to trace how those encounters redefine wonder as an affective disposition. In other words, fifty out of the ten thousand participants managed to sneak in the necessary tools to stage a surprise protest. As the fifty went through the metal detectors that turned entry doors into security checkpoints, the guards inspecting their personal belongings ignored the water bottles, small coins, and folded pieces of cloth they had with them. Once inside, the fifty walked briskly toward the lobby, where three levels of meeting rooms connected through an intricate system of balconies and escalators, creating an ideal stage for attracting an audience. Within minutes, empty plastic water bottles emerged, coins were dropped into them, and cloth signs unfurled. The protestors began shaking their bottles rhythmically and chanting: El agua es un derecho, no es una mercancía! El agua es un derecho, no es una mercancía! Among all the things one might find intriguing about this protest, the shaking bottles are what continue to captivate me all these years later. My argument is somewhat different, as there is no direct evidence to prove Marx’s familiarity with the greenhouse effect. Which is one reason why I examined his notebook on Carl Fraas’s Climate and Plant World over Time, which he read in the beginning of 1868. The book discusses climate change, as a result not of greenhouse gas emissions but of excessive deforestation, which changes the local air circulation and precipitation. Fraas’s analysis expanded Marx’s interest in the robbery character of capitalist production beyond soil exhaustion, and in some sense, he evaluated Fraas’s theory even more than Liebig’s. Examples abound. The print itself becoming rarer and rarer as stocks go out of production. The print becomes unreproduceable. Films that were shot in or printed in Kodachrome can be so no longer. Thus, the five copies of my Ornamentals (1977) are now a limited edition. Nathaniel Dorsky, who has shot Kodachrome exclusively, has been forced to experiment with other film stocks but cannot get the same contrast or reds that Kodachrome contained. And that’s not all. As aspects of prints fade, the film begins to disappear. The 100-year history of film is chockablock with lost originals and/or prints and now, prints can’t always be recovered because of fading or breakage. Such an example, Mutiny (1982) used workprint to cut in with reversal of the original. Workprint was/is developed differently than the original. It is not intended to last and indeed it has not. It has gone red — the magenta that celluloid aspires to (as with tulips, whose original color is red). This means there is difficulty in getting the footage to what it was; this means only one print remains without scratches, cuts or broken sprockets. Thus Mutiny is a mono-print, the only print. The implications are large: I hesitate to show it except at forums where the projection is controlled and I am in attendance. In other words,

 

            Actuality is never frustrated because it is always complete.

            The purpose of “intention” is to complicate a matter.

            A material paraphrase is a complication.

            Or as Guillevic says, “The problem is to do to things

            what light does to them.”

            Typing through sunglasses is, of course, an alternative.

            There is no room for alternative illusions. There is

            barely room for the table and bed.

            The World has changed its mind. Ice cream is on sale.

            We write in words to disguise ourselves, as a protection

            from the fact that words are writing us.

            Concentration is a problem for those obsessed with

            process. For those obsessed with stasis, the opposite

            of concentration sets in, and there is a seeming

            dispersal throughout all the sensory regions.

            An object is a condition of liberation.

            Where is the missing balance?

            Actualism poses the question, “Of the seven openings

            in the human body, why are five of them located

            above the neck?”

            Thoughts are concrete things.

            Things are characterized more by their conditions

            than their conditions are characterized by them.

            “The useless is not horrible until it is bandaged with truth.”

            What, belabor the impossible?

 

            In the distance, transparent tractors

            climb the terraced hills, and into the fields of dark poppies

            whose seeds contain old photos of the Civil War.

 

 

            oh, but you don’t look very Indian is a thing ppl feel comfortable saying to me on dates.

 

            What rhymes with, fuck off and die?

 

            It’s hard to look “like” something most people remember as a ghost, but I understand the allure of wanting to know—

 

            Knowledge, or its approximate artifice, is a kind of equilibrium when you feel like a  flea in whiskey.

 

            I used to read a lot of perfect poems, now I read a lot of Garbage

 

            by A. R. Ammons

 

            the old mysteries avail themselves of technique.

 

            It’s disheartening

 

            to hear someone say “there’s no magic left” bc I love that YouTube of Amy Winehouse singing “Love Is a Losing Game” at the Mercury Prize Ceremony and yesterday I overheard that Brooklyn means “Broken Land” — there aren’t many earthquakes in the city, but there’s the fault line of my head.

 

            Pain is alienating, but blue breath breaking on a voice is the magic that makes ppl believe.

 

            What, I learn to ask, does an NDN person look like exactly?

 

Take the case of thirty-five-year old German boat captain Pia Klemp, who personally helped rescue more than one thousand migrants in the Mediterranean — that last line of defense protecting Fortress Europe from hapless non-whit humans seeking to simpl ysurvive. For her efforts, Klemp is now facing twenty years in prison thanks to the sociopathic machinations of the Republic of Italy, which has been at the forefront of criminalizing sea rescues and other humanitarian activity. Of course, it has always been perfectly fine for Europe to plunder Africa and other migrant-producing territories in any way it sees fit. Never mind, too, that the legacy of colonialism has more than a little to do with current migration patterns. The casting of the migrant as an apocalyptic menace comes in handy in corrupt European locales — ciao, Italia — where public attention must be constantly redirected from all the ways the state is actively fucking over the citizenry. Which brings us to the Trump-Netanyahu-MBS war with Iran, which is already underway. Tho I guess they've decided to postpone the shooting part for a bit.

[Note: Sources: Sohrab Hura, “The Lost Head and the Bird”, in Hura’s “‘The Lost Head and the Bird'’: A Short Story and Photo Essay”, at Vice, 11 Sept 015; Sohrab Hura, “A Proposition for Departure”, at Sohrab Hura; Anthony Seidman, “Sugar and Saliva: On the Gifts of the Muse”, at LARB, 7 May 018; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Antimatter”, at Abandoned Buildings, 12 Jun 019; JBR; Sergio Raimondi, “Fish Block” (tr. Ben Bollig), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 11 Jun 019; Timothy Morton, “Hypothesis: There Is Only One Graviton”, at Ecology Without Nature, 12 Jun 019; JBR; “Sierpinski carpet”, at Wikipedia; JBR; Sergio Raimondi, “Today Matsuo Bashō Cooks” (tr. Ben Bollig), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 11 Jun 019; JBR; Casper Bruun Jensen, “Wound-up worlds and The Wind-up Girl: on the anthropology of climate change and climate fiction”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Nicole Tu-Maung, “Making Kin with Serpents in Myanmar’s Snake Temples”, at Edge Effects, 11 Jun 019; Ariana Reines, “Wasting Away in This Vanilla Darkness”, “Hegeling Before the Glass”, at Bookmarks, 24 Oct 017; JBR; Ryan Mac, “This Picture Featuring 15 Tech Men And 2 Women Looked Doctored. The Women Were Photoshopped In”, at BuzzFeed News, 12 Jun 019; Anne Homler, and Philip Sherburne, quoted in Sherburne’s “Anna Homler / Steve Moshier: Breadwoman & Other Tales”, at Pitchfork, 19 Feb 016; JBR; William J Simmons, “Portfolio: Math Bass”, at BOMB, 14 Jun 019; JBR; Ian Sansom, and Aldous Huxley, quoted in Sansom’s “Mescaline by Mike Jay review – a global history of the first psychedelic”, at The Guardian, 13 Jun 019; JBR, but see Jackie Wang, “One night, when Jeff Majors ...”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 12 Jun 019, where saw Ashby’s name, and Eileen Tabios, “‘Thank You For...,’ Kevin Killian. R.I.P.”, at Eileen Verbs Books, 16 Jun 019, where I learned the news; Steve Carey, and Nick Sturm, quoted in Sturm’s “Crystal Set #20: The Lily Of St. Mark’s By Steve Carey”, and his “Kevin Killian, In Memoriam (1952-2019)”, at Nick Sturm / Crystal Set, 8 and 16 Jun 019; Kevin Killian, “Your Disco Needs You (Video)”, “Ode to Walt Whitman”, in Action Kylie; JBR; Stephen LaConte, “Avocado Oreos Are A Thing Now, So If You'll Excuse Me I Have To Go Leave The Planet”, at Buzzfeed, 1 Jul 017; JBR (hat tip K); Klingenstein Fields Wealth Advisors, “KFWA Acquires the Assets of The Solaris Group, LLC”, email rec’d approx.7:00am 17 Jun 019; JBR; Andrea Ballestero, A Future History of Water, at Duke University Press; Kohei Saito, “The ecosocialist views of Karl Marx – An interview with Kohei Saito”, at Climate & Capitalism, 16 Jun 019; Abigail Child, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Abigail Child Day”, at DC’s, 16 Jun 019; JBR; Darrell Gray, “ACTUALISM – A Manifesto”, quoted in Adam Burke, “Poetry City Actualized: A look back at the birth of an Iowa City-based literary movement”, at Little Village, 9 Jan 015, and “For the Future Occupants”, quoted in Curtis Faville, “Darrell Gray – RIP”, at The Compass Rose, 2 Jul 011; image: Juan Luis Martínez, “The Poet as Superman”, via Javier Taboada; Tommy Pico, from Nature Poem; Belén Fernández, “Fortress Europe Is Sociopathic”, at Jacobin, 20 Jun 019; JBR]

Frank Bowling, Remember Thine Eyes