In my alienation, sophistication and vanity, it was not terror but a great force of aidos, and of grief, that came over me – a grief which kept watch on me, clung to me, belonged to me. They always came together, in that order: alienation, sophistication, vanity, grief, aidos. Why did I ever start learning the flute? I am, frankly, concerned that I matter. I would, after these ritual nights of water-gazing in my private temple, fall asleep at the foot of the statues of Silenus, too taken by the thought of always being extraneous, a being-extraneous, too filled with the distant chatterings of those warriors training their boys to recollect not the real domains of forms (discretely installed myths) – ‘cause that process is all hush hush for the old guys – but the human soul which now possesses its treasured, barnacle covered, alien temple. In my dreams, this unhinged chord of mine became a comforting narrator, an interlocutor with those aging soldiers who in their twilight, disavowed my stupider imaginations. We’re a threat. There’s always a war somewhere! Especially when it comes to the soul! But what images? How did they get them? Where is the sea? I mean, how do they form contracts, images and allegiances, with a belief powerful enough to make every ocean catholic? “Just make good and honest worship.” “Just understand the flavor of one good and sustainable wine.” I, for one among them, want to know something about why we like to hide in legal fictions. What’s more real than real. Kalos, methexis, diaeresis ...? That’s where my Bull shit begins. I dreamt of a bull. My sister and I were in a storm, or an impending storm of which we already knew we’d survive. We were up against a mud wall with a cardboard house and were packing up important survival things. Then I was on a steep hill in a forest. A large black bull came running around the trees. It was as if someone was describing what to do on the forest property: “Always run from animals,” and as I did I jumped into the water off the cliff at the edge of the forest. In doing so, I imagined a bear came and how it would be a better swimmer in the water and how I’d drown. I wake up, I write it down. And all these things run through my head, but it is too soon. Reading Jung’s work lights up something, “When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf pursuing you, this means: it wants to come to you. You would like it to split off, you experience it as something alien — but it just becomes all the more dangerous.” Unfortunately the day takes over from here, momentum slows. After a few months, I notice an alarming trend of creatures in my dreams: bears, cats, wolves, dogs, birds, horses, snakes and this one bull. They seem edgy, restless, looking for something or looking at something. One white cat is literally blind but still ‘sees’ something in a field. Damn it, there must be something to do with all these animals! I decide to go the route of figuring out how to talk to the animals directly, in particular this bull. James Hillman, warrior of archetypal psychology, recommends to “cure bull with the discipline of the arts.” Being trained in painting I take him literally (not usually recommended). Though I’d long since denounced this kind of image making practice as futile, I give in and go to painting, go with art, do a conceptual talking cure with my animal. I close my eyes and return to the bull dream, taking a closer look at his stance. He is still there making my heart race, but now that I see it: the bull isn’t running after me, but is poised behind the tree, nearly running, a gesture right before the stampede. Captured in image, I see him, and we slow down enough to tell one another how to put him down on paper, how to paint him into this world. Stroke by stroke, the bull began to appear alone on a large white page. Standing strong on my page, a history forming, I got to know his skin, the space between his horns, his penetrating gaze, his watery phallus. Not dissimilar from birthing … Now the dream bull is alive a little bit. He’s got a new paper home. We’ve brought him into our material world, the image world, a self-conscious world. What then? He’s soaking into thin pulp, resting on a table in my house. Some would say, “Good work, you’re healing your own bull, you’re constellating!” I say, maybe, but something inside of me feels creeped out. Like too much of a good girl, like this is too easy, too trivial. This is not the royal road of this ancestral animal. In reality, such self-criticality really saved me from losing the bull’s trail. Simultaneously, I notice a call for entries to the International Dream Art Conference exhibition. As kind of a passing nod to ‘the universe’, I enter the bull painting and a few of my other animals into the exhibition. The bull’s called in. My bull and I went to the gallery and drop him off. At this point I am under the impression that this is the life of the bull, the work of the dream. Simply I succeeded in having let the animal come to me, furthering the animal by putting it in relation to others. That’s a good life for a dream animal, a good life for me to get to know my own bull, to rediscover my love of painting and find strength in it. In actuality this is only an irrelevant part of what the Bull behind the bull had in mind. Here is where one small event changes everything. The bull was sold to Merrill Lynch for their bull art collection. I wonder still, how exactly did Merrill Lynch become the agents of the Bull? The provisional title for HM London 2014: ‘Very Marxism, Much Communism, Wow’. My next HM paper will be a power-point presentation, composed entirely of slides of Hegel memes. ‘From the Phenomenology to the Logic to Capital’. But Baker assured me that he was not the Chuck Berry of fancy toast. He was its Elvis: he had merely caught the trend on its upswing. The place I was looking for, he and others told me, was a coffee shop in the city’s Outer Sunset neighborhood—a little spot called Trouble. THE TROUBLE COFFEE & Coconut Club (its full name) is a tiny storefront next door to a Spanish-immersion preschool, about three blocks from the Pacific Ocean in one of the city’s windiest, foggiest, farthest-flung areas. The shop itself is about the size of a single-car garage, with an L-shaped bar made of heavily varnished driftwood. One wall is decorated with a mishmash of artifacts — a walkie-talkie collection, a mannequin torso, some hand tools. A set of old speakers in the back blares a steady stream of punk and noise rock. And a glass refrigerator case beneath the cash register prominently displays a bunch of coconuts and grapefruit. Next to the cash register is a single steel toaster. Trouble’s specialty is a thick slice of locally made white toast, generously covered with butter, cinnamon, and sugar. Trouble’s owner, and the apparent originator of San Francisco’s toast craze, is a slight, blue-eyed, 34-year-old woman with freckles tattooed on her cheeks named Giulietta Carrelli. She has a good toast story: She grew up in a rough neighborhood of Cleveland in the ’80s and ’90s in a big immigrant family, her father a tailor from Italy, her mother an ex-nun. The family didn’t eat much standard American food. But cinnamon toast, made in a pinch, was the exception. “We never had pie,” Carrelli says. “Our American comfort food was cinnamon toast.” The other main players on Trouble’s menu are coffee, young Thai coconuts served with a straw and a spoon for digging out the meat, and shots of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice called “Yoko.” It’s a strange lineup, but each item has specific meaning to Carrelli. Toast, she says, represents comfort. Coffee represents speed and communication. And coconuts represent survival — because it’s possible, Carrelli says, to survive on coconuts provided you also have a source of vitamin C. Hence the Yoko. (Carrelli tested this theory by living mainly on coconuts and grapefruit juice for three years, “unless someone took me out to dinner.”) The menu also features a go-for-broke option called “Build Your Own Damn House,” which consists of a coffee, a coconut, and a piece of cinnamon toast. Hanging in the door is a manifesto that covers a green chalkboard. “We are local people with useful skills in tangible situations,” it says, among other things. “Drink a cup of Trouble. Eat a coconut. And learn to build your own damn house. We will help.” At first, Carrelli explained Trouble as a kind of sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers. She even conducted field research, she says, before opening the shop. “I did a study in New York and San Francisco, standing on the street holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. No one would talk to me. But if I stayed at that same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage,” she said. “I wrote down exactly how many people talked to me.” The smallness of her cafés is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it’s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. “No one can be mad at toast.” What Courbet accomplishes here is the gesture of radical desublimation: he took the risk and simply went to the end by directly depicting what previous realistic art merely hinted at as its withdrawn point of reference – the outcome of this operation, of course, was (to put it in Kristevan terms) the reversal of the sublime object into abject, into an abhorrent, nauseating excremental piece of slime. (More precisely, Courbet masterfully continued to dwell on the imprecise border that separates the sublime from the excremental. Courbet’s gesture is thus a dead end, the dead end of traditional realist painting – but precisely as such, it is a necessary ‘mediator’ between traditional and modernist art that is to say, Do you know that Stevie Smith poem about the two men in the park? One says to the other, I pity the mute, the second hears, I pity the mute, and way they go. I can picture a third party thinking that they are pitying the hermeneut ... As for objecthood, I think that’s a fine word, kind of like sainthood ... Point taken, becoming increasingly fond of weatherhood and weatherness. My whole effort is to try to bear witness to something which will have to be there when the storm is over. Check this out. CORPORATE profits are at their highest level in at least 85 years. Employee compensation is at the lowest level in 65 years. The Commerce Department last week estimated that corporations earned $2.1 trillion during 2013, and paid $419 billion in corporate taxes. The after-tax profit of $1.7 trillion amounted to 10 percent of gross domestic product during the year, the first full year it has been that high. In 2012, it was 9.7 percent, itself a record. Until 2010, the highest level of after-tax profits ever recorded was 9.1 percent, in 1929, the first year that the government began calculating the number. The cosmic sublime sounds like a special kind of snail. THE PAST – a new movie. Ragdoll. Ash tray. When is happy? Am I a modern invention. What isn’t modern? If I die tomorrow will I be in Bardo? A pirate? No a starlet. No a pirate. Cavities are contagious. Watch who you kiss! The immediate future. We threw the writing out of the open window and read it from where we stood. We analyzed the drag marks on the page. We folded the page. What were the folds and creases pointing to? We stole chocolate. We bought our friend a doughnut. We were harsh. We loved the forsythia in full bloom. We went to Crunchy Grocer for a juice du jour. It was delicious. I need a hot bath with dead sea salts. I made friends with a man who dressed like Robin Hood and /or a pagan elf. He had a velvet cape and suede booties. Why? “The near-term goal is the development of methods to allow a combatant to go for a minimum of seven days without sleep, and in the longer term perhaps at least double that time frame, while preserving high levels of mental and physical performance.” It’s as if our military-industrial complex has already bought into the Transhumanist Manifesto’s declared message: “Technological evolution is fast, efficient, accelerating and better by design. To ensure the best chances of survival, take control of our own destiny and to be free, we must master evolution.” I don’t make this shit up, yo. As Crary tells us “the military is also funding many other areas of brain research, including the development of an anti-fear drug. There will be occasions when, for example, missile-armed drones cannot be used and death squads of sleep-resistant, fear-proofed commandos will be needed for missions of indefinite duration.” Meet Chet Getram, CEO of ByoLogyc and innovator on the frontier of lifestyle biotechnology products and services. Take in the ByoRetreat while you’re at it. And, a message from Chet: After the recent devastating attack on ByoLogyc’s production facilities by the online terrorist organization known as EXE, ByoLogyc is ready for action. Escape the deadly BRX Virus that has mutated from our world-changing ByoRenew product. Purchase a ticket that guarantees you a place at our ByoRetreat facility in Toronto on November 2nd and 3rd, where you will be kept safe under the watchful eye of our Sanitation and Containment Division. There is no point in time. Time does not have points. Time isn’t even really a ticking. Ticking isn’t time. Ticking is what a clock does. Our red clock with its assertive tick on the living room wall just above Braque’s Fauve rendition of Le Havre ticks loudly but the ticks do not amount to anything vaguely real just more and more ticks that talk and talk and talk. Walls aren’t time, though I am walled from the past, cannot reach the people I once knew, people now dead, or aged, wherever they are they are not the same. I am not the same. I cannot send letters to myself in my twenties advising myself what to do or what not to do. Many of them hunted, and hunting requires a level of cunning, of strategy, perhaps even a communicable organized scheme for the getting of prey shared with their fellow creatures. And how would that be communicated? By sound? By color? By smell? Power, ha! Why is it always about power? The Will to Power. But what is it to “will”something? Nietzsche thought it something very complicated. In all willing, he said, “there is a plurality of sensations, namely, the sensation of the state ‘away from which,’ the sensation of the state ‘towards which,’ the sensation of this ‘from’ and ‘towards’ themselves, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without our putting into motion ‘arms and legs,’ begins its action …” Catch bullets in your teeth and spit them back out. Become invisible. See through walls. Feed the hungry. Shelter the cold. Create storms. Hurl lightning bolts. Play rhythm guitar for The Rolling Stones. Travel through time. See dinosaurs. Ride dinosaurs. Pet dinosaurs. Is that what Nietzsche meant by superman? Could the mind turn jade? It could if it were fat, though it is gravity to think so. I just want to say phonograph, and thank you for the spatula. How does stress affect your public speaking skills? You Can Now Search Yelp Using Emojis. The inexplicable prices in hotel minibars around the world. How Many People Does It Take to Colonize Another Star System? Norwegian Skydiver Almost Gets Hit by Falling Meteor — and Captures it on Film. Google Trends data showed a 193% spike in searches for “cancel Amazon prime,” less than the 433% spike observed in searches for “cancel Netflix” in 2011. Why the Trix Rabbit Looks Down on You. What It’s Like to Be a Professional Line Sitter. Crap Taxidermy. The Golden Boba. Safely Immobilize Children. Anybody else you’ve interviewed bring these things up? Hang on, I gotta take this call … Hey, brother. That’s great, man. Yeah, I’m being interviewed ... We’re talking about nothing. He’s stopped asking questions. I’ve got him well-steeped in nothing right now. We know that your security advisors are taking our analysis seriously, so if you are confident that your system is the best, it would be wise to give us three billion to see if we fail. Contact us at our Wordpress website. Send us a message and we can go from there. I had to laugh when I read the description. I initially thought this was green cabbage with blood on it. Stoned on vodka, Klonopin, and Seroquel, he ran from his mom’s house down to Carmel Point, slashed his arms with a broken bottle, and then swam out to sea. Before he did, though, he took a moment to update his Facebook page. It’s like the age sings directly through him. Part of what it sings is “you can’t even really die.” Schwyzer paces, sits down, stands up, constantly checks his iPhone. James Deen and Hugo Schwyzer swallow all the Seroquel in history before the world’s largest community college class and still empire does not die. Dude’s still tweeting. He is the world's most contemporary person: this is serious Ben Fürstenberg; when Hildegard said muliebre tempus she really meant the twelfth century was just practice in feminization for the age of Hugo that would finally arrive – Hugo = the sun that shines “today, today”.
[Note: Sources: Heidi Gustafson, AULOS-GIRL PAPERS (ed. Heidi Gustafson), “A HUMAN’S GUIDE TO DREAM ZOOLOGY [PREVIEW DRAFT]”, at Heidi Gustafson; Benjamin Noys, FB post, and Harrison Fluss, appended comment, 6 Apr 014; John Gravois, “A Toast Story”, at Pacific Standard, 13 Jan 014, via Maryrose Larkin, FB post, 6 Apr 014; Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek on Gustave Courbet’s ‘L’origine du monde’”, in The Fragile Absolute, at Simon Gros, via Jaleh Mansoor, 6 Apr 014; JBR, FB comment, 6 Apr 014; John Armstrong, FB comment, 6 Apr 014; James Baldwin, “Be There When The Storm Is Over”, at Afrosonics, 6 Apr 014; Kenny Jakubas, “Her Space Circle(s)”, quoted in Melissa Broder, “Sunday Service: Kenny Jakubas”, at HTMLGIANT, 6 Apr 014; “Corporate Profits Grow and Wages Slide - NYTimes.com”, at I cite, 6 Apr 014; Marcus Slease, “Munching On Dream Dust”, at Never Mind the Beasts, 6 Apr 014; Bhanu Kapil, “We discussed”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 31 Mar 014; Craig Hickman, “24/7: Sleepless Soldiers and the Psychopathy of Civilization”, at Noir Realism, 6 Apr 014; John Olson, “The Will to Wobble”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 6 Apr 014; bits from Imp Kerr, “Triple-Decker Weekly, 100”, at The New Inquiry, 6 Apr 014; Harry Dean Stanton, caption to image embedded in Ginger Stickney, FB post, 6 Apr 014; The Counterforce, “Reclaiming tech billions”, at I cite, 6 Apr 014; Coleen Cooney Deon, FB comment, 6 Apr 014; bits from Anne Boyer, FB post and appended comments, 5 & 6 Apr 014 (most but not all comments are by AB)]
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