Orphic Line

What day is it 

It's everyday

My friend

It's all of life

My love

We love each other and we live

We live and love each other

- Prévert

Text of bliss: The text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his taste, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

- Barthes

1. Devil-headed. Severe. Those who transfix and those who fall under the wheels. Those of boredom aside also. We are here to stand and observe before the bliss-text. Remarkable, such as to bear remark and ravaging. We used to speak a good deal about the blind diode as a means to not speaking about vantage point. I am on a circuit board; I am shooting out with speed. I am moving suddenly longitudinal and suddenly latitudinal, and I am moving faster and faster because this ritual is pure thirst for me. A film critic I like once wrote: "There's an exciting brand-new object in the world, and it's called Moulin Rouge." To that I counter: may it ever be so...

2. Barthes, the wise and blister-prone observer and negative flâneur, reminds us, in Pleasures of the Text, to make the effort to keep our pleasures leashed and domestic. Pleasure, at any rate, is already the process of counter-pleasure because pleasure cannot stop its fervid demystification of the already established. The mystical part of our pleasure becomes like a phantom limb or a vestigial one. Yes, okay, Love is Our Secular God until Love is no more than Sputtering and Suppurating Intensity. Right. Then it becomes the God of Life Itself. The Secular God had closed down shop and hoped to squat there indefinitely with the curtains drawn. Orpheus from Underground, Oedipus the Hero! Where do you stand in this complexivity of fetish? BLISS|OBJECT. How do you get your groove back, Stella? Are you just myth bound to desire and terminal flight? Wherefore art though, Moulin Rouge?

3. Getting out of prison and trying to stay out, Our Man Jackson declares war on society, buoyed by Love Moist Elemental [read: Aristotelian]. THE SOCIAL [myth] seeking to put Love [sex/kink hoodwink] back in the spot where it belongs. (Spot is a dog's name.) All blockbusters hate themselves. All blockbusters spend a lot of money on things to put into themselves in order to pretty themselves up. Is this auto-critique? Is this auto? Maybe it's mightily multiple! We begin by entering the giant complexivity of sideways spectacle and the scaffolding where its future parts are to go and erect. Theatrical as all this is, our introduction having commenced with the insinuation of actual material orchestra in the flesh (and gabardine), 20th Century Fox was always going to need a wand for that logo, this stolid monolith looming before my baby child. Immediately it is both clear and not so clear what a whore is. The onus is evidently on me. I had not been looking carefully, Ferdinand, but the wand has a conductor, and the conductor is attached also to the orchestra. I'm kinda freaking out here a little! Okay, okay. The ambiguous placement of the conductor-agent makes me realize I am being misdirected by aristocrats with sinister stratagems. I wonder where they all are. Come out, come out, wherever you are. I intuit incoming fatalities.

4. Spectacle is an additives machine. Bohemians love additives. Making of Love a Pop Sickle. Indulge in your fetish; pounce on your prize and pulverize it. Holding God, Holding Love, Up Against the Duke. Up Against the Pistol, motherfucker. Tragicomic, inevitably. A rigged game; a rock video. A sad song, paint-by-numbers. Its bliss remains intact. And in text. Golly, guys. I think it prepared its critique before it came out to join us! It has been fooling us and fooling us hardy, trafficking in tonal sets and subtonal subsets and stuff. It has been positively throwing singers at Love. If you cannot sing good, please step aside. If you are a backstabbing son-of-a-bitch, you may be upper management material. I love you truuuly...truuuuuly, dear. As in certain films inside certain films by Cassavetes, Love can and very much will fake it 'til it makes it, because that's how you remember the words to "Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November..."

5. You, whoever you are. You have a date with death. And then another and another. Forewarned is forestalled. You have a date, too, with the Moulin Rouge. For me, you are a whore. For me, therefore, you are both a bliss and a fetish. They made a film about you so that you could become all tore up by the complex, with its bureaucracies and intelligences all its own. The bliss text is a honey trap and occasionally takes this up as its subject matter. You got that, kid? Dukes and Pistols at Dawn! Whatever else bliss does, it stands and it spritzes counter to any ideology whatever.

6. The economic problem of surplus is nothing more than the problem of surplus, but then as such it becomes the problem of too much of everything, per se. Is the ending of McCabe and Mrs. Miller nihilistic? Per se? You are just buying the farm in the snow. Listening to Leonard Cohen. Per se. Am I mistaken? A kind and generous resistance indistinguishable from affably stupid generosity of spirit. A guerrilla business ethics and general tone of giddy affirmation. Bliss just keeps on keepin' on, dead on its feet or dropped to the bottom of a child's sinking wish hole. The New may assert its unsteady rights. Inhabitants you've never met may well lay dubious territorial claims. Such bliss! It moves out in all directions and it plum courses. Robert Altman has sheepishly admitted that he simply does not often know how to end a movie without a death.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: "The more the archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of controlling (even by adding special axioms from the periphery)."

8. The beauty of a terminal or fatalist model is that it cannot help bucking it to the system. The machinery doesn't work; let me demonstrate. Do you see? Overcoding vs. arterial spray. Keep your resistance spraying like a wacky hydrant...and none too idealistic. When the hero dies at the end of a Robert Altman movie, elimination of one particular computer occasions a blissful apocalyptic trans-systemic (complexivity) resonance. REAL CUBAN FIRE. [The Brown River (Great She).] The register of resonance OPENS. A screaming comes across the sky...runs a spread on the network.... The problem of the computer is a headache for the circuits. Name it a failure, and, like each and every one of us, this or that computer will have every right to tell you...especially as we might now be discussing the Sun itself...that its failures aren't its failures so much as they're just its characteristics...

9. If you go to the Moulin Rouge to work there, you already know it's your head. Entertainment is murder and your boyfriend is threatening suicide. Again and again. You think you'd learn to read the marquee. The squeaky mice get real oiled. Boy Orpheus is in town; many a lass must lay down her life. When Michelangelo Antonioni (famously) brought L'Avventura to Cannes, he told everybody his new downer of a picture exposed the 20th century's spiritual malady, his greater [debatably] point being that moral, desiring, and above all spiritual development had grown, at best, static. It is amazing how many problems the people in The Iliad are having the we are having still today. My goodness! And yet technological progress literally skyrockets. Are we afraid of our databases and the broad beyond-backroom schematics that are their ever-moistening future? Do I use the word we satirically? If these and other questions are not on the back-burner, it's simply because I doused them in lighter fluid and burned them to crisps altogether very expeditiously in the tub!