Bataille

 

Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990)

Georges Bataille was a a librarian and anthropologist who never held any professorial position of any kind. When he was severely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and in serious financial distress at the beginning of the 1960s, a large group of artists and public intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró—joined forces to raise a considerable sum of money that would see to it that Bataille lived out his final days in comfort, which is indeed how it would come to pass. In his theoretical work, Bataille pulls heavily from anthropology and aberrations of history so as to unearth insights relating to eroticism, mysticism, sacrifice, and political economy within a context where excess (the “accursed share,” etc.) remains central, and his fiction has a general tendency to depict an erotic interiority characterized by the tempestuous play of sensory-motor intensities (the experience of excess, of too much, arousing and frightening). In his own preface to the short vignette called “Madame Edwarda,” a piece originally published under the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Pierre Angélique, Bataille writes of “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress” and an “unbearable surpassing of being” in relation to sexual arousal and climax. This is indeed at the heart of Bataille’s fiction, a body of work that may be the best we have on the diabolic power of sensory-motor excitation, with the possible exception of Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas who has never found a profound metaphysical concept that he was not able to place in the human nervous system, along with the hormones and the gristle, and have it take…like a compatible organ transplant. In “Madame Edwarda,” the narrator pursues the eponymous prostitute (who declares herself GOD), has a dalliance with her, is beaten and wildly excoriated by her, and finally watches her fuck the driver from the back seat of his cab, all three parties somehow achieving a sufficient level of frenzied excitation that they…completely lose consciousness. Lights out. The narrator rhapsodizes on how “the pungent odor of her flesh and mine commingled flung us both into the same heart’s utter exhaustion.” The same heart. A heart that now incorporates two people. Then later, as Madame Edwarda, organ of GOD, fucks the cabdriver: “little by little that embrace strained to the final pitch of excess at which the heart fails.” The heart fails. The shared heart fails. The French sometimes call the moments after orgasm a petite mort. Have they taken the time to think through the possible implications? The reason I loved Bataille’s short novel Blue of Noon so much in my early twenties was because it was the only place in literature where I’d seen a genuine equivalent for my own anxiety, disgust, and terror…my own viscerally alienated mood. (I’m proud to report that I did not share any of the necrophiliac fantasies.) I didn’t know these parts of myself could be captured because I only faintly knew then that they were there to begin with. That’s what William S. Burroughs said we were here for: to find out and know what we already know but don’t know that we know. In the 1930s, the interwar circus, the young Bataille believed that time and spirit were Heraclitian flux and the heart—or Nuclear Reactor Core—of Nietzschean Tragedy, inherently "horror-spreading." He believed in “agitation on the scale of irreducible needs,” and the idea that humanity seems “able to subsist only at the limits of horror.” That would be the anthropologist speaking. Bataille is definitely not the kind of guy to lose sleep over reports of a nasty bloodbath. "The Practice of Joy Before Death." Bataille had become a devout Catholic as a teenager, converting at the age of sixteen, and his ultimate violent rejection of God becomes a violent rejection of the head as well as its own kind of display of orgasmic celestial fireworks exclusively for the head, as the head is seen as “the conscious authority of God” keeping one subservient to form, function, and programming. The living mandate of the flaming creature: myth, heterogeneous intensity, excretion, combustion, heated passion, sacrifice, the sacred, the wretched of the earth. Georges Bataille looks at the sunflowers of Vincent van Gogh and sees much more clearly than most people that the sunflowers are screaming in pain. You know, there’s a thin line between paranoid psychosis and overstimulation.  

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)

Jack Smith & Co., "The Great Moldy Triumph"

Best New Music Video of 2026

 

Tove Lo, "des fleurs x stromae"
[Official Music Video] 

🇸🇪

Meanwhile in the DVD Annex

 

Afrirampo, "Track 6" [Live in Sydney]

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Jucifer, "Ни шагу назад!: Not a Step Back"

* Afrirampo are the best live music act of any kind that I have ever seen.

Antichrist: Owl

 

The world is not there because it cannot be found in the world. Nobody in the world can get out of the world and then locate the world from that position. There are infinite domains and these domains exist within various fields of sense. Logic and sense are proper, grounded, highly adaptive/corrective, intentionally oriented enterprises whereas reason is a hoodwink every time, a game of three-card monte the man lays on you over and over, day in day out, until they finally take you out to the back alley with the trash and unto your final humble place of rest: the goddamn dump. Be reasonable, they say. And when they do...trust me, you’re already fucked.

Many people who are dying eventually die and will continue to do so in the early morning hours, for both cardiac and respiratory reasons, circadian rhythms and all that jazz, and this is also the time when owls are audibly out there hunting. In Persia, Southeast Asia, and among many indigenous tribes of the Americas, the owl is considered an ill omen and harbinger of death. On the other hand, an image of Athena's owl that was stamped onto fifth-century BCE Athenian coins made the bird a recognized symbol of the city-state's wealth, culture, and bonhomie. The Roman goddess Minerva adopted the owl, reducing it to the category of mascot and carrying that mascot forward as a bequest to Western literature and folklore, where the trope of the "wise old owl" became a thing and is known to basically everybody, at least as a principle, especially in German-speaking parts of the world and eventually, in January of 1871, the Nation State of Germany, Home Sweet Home, Fritzy. If Freemasons and Nazis think owls are wise—we can concede that owls are for sure like impossibly sophisticated machines built to hunt in the dark from the sky—well, that just mightn’t be all that great a look, you feeling me? For the rest of us practical folks uninterested in the scholastic standings of our fine feathered friends, we’re just expecting to hear the owls call our name right around the time we up and check out of here, angry and hoping to speak to management. We expect that in that crucial hour our schedule and that of the owl will coincide, if only briefly and maybe just from nodding distance. Let us pray that we might keep it collegial! 🙏 

I cannot think of fields of sense without thinking of Einstein and the theory of relativity, precisely because of the fact that any given field of sense requires the appearance of the domain or the field, which Einstein would call its frame of reference. The frame allows us to make meaningful calculations germane to the elements within the field, domain, or frame. A truck is moving at a certain speed…oh, yeah, and it’s on the surface of the earth…you definitely don’t want to forget that part. Sometimes people ask me if I think God exists and I say to them that we both think "God" exists because we are using the word naturally, without any difficulty. We know what we mean when we mean "God." God exists, gods exist, but in a particular field of sense. There is a historical persistence of fields of sense where God and the functions God performs are conducted above all to serve errant and clumsy beings of sense called people who are flung randomly into circumscribed existence within the context of an infinite that cannot be actively experienced by any living being or currently live-and-operational hyperintelligent machine. Maybe the next really big breakthrough in technology is…oops the sky falls down. Henny Penny warned us. 

Silkworm, "Scruffy"

Right Action Poem

 

The Studious Woodcutter Zhu Maichen

Zen Buddhism places Right Action

on the Noble Eightfold Path

which you might want to start 

getting acquainted with

because paradise comes with homework.

Classical Chinese philosophy already asked:

how can we produce good vibes 

and then spread the good vibes everywhere

like a wave

or succession of waves—

like a big, floating harmonic system? 

From where we now stand

—to call it a bluff is already a bluff—

the whole skin of history appears 

pocked with furious dark lesions 

serpentine and pestilential 

the blood evidently all gone wrong

until pulsating spumes of spent person 

disappear into the visible future

we are each of us dutifully pointed t’ward.

The visible future:

of purple and pasteboard

of flickering pendants

of quicksilver and of quicklime too.

Let the saboteurs remain forever honourable

extending camaraderie and equivocal solidarity

to even those who are not ever busy

being the least bit easy to please;

let there be no more debates henceforth 

but rather collusion and communion

some not-yet-specified special spark of 

pump-action collective recognition

and facilitating harmonic system.

Arms like steeples piercing 

the light’s downpour

countering the surge 

brace of bone and flexion.

How does the future you are looking at directly

which could hardly be said to have provided

any instruction in how to read it 

ultimately somehow become thinkable?

Let the prize be the serenity

you secure and maintain;

show them what you are fighting for

by being good and by being well.

Manifesto the Giraffe

 

The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)

Le pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981)

If I look you in the eye I’m afraid that I might cry. And I don’t want to alarm you, but If I stare down at your shoes…it’s possible I might throw up…

Some of y’all can doubtlessly count yourselves among the authoritarians of the political left or right, consciously or no, who inherently believe everybody belongs on their specific branch of the tree of primate ascendancy. The rotten fruit of authoritarianism has turned fecundity into torture, communication at root level has been contaminated, all the trees demand respite from the unwarranted tide of agony. If you are one of the ones who doesn’t believe everybody belongs in their own cramped camp, like among like and kin saddled with kin, then you eventually become one of the ones those who do believe extrajudicially round up and institutionally erase like the missing and disappeared of Argentina’s Dirty War. They will not torture you for information, no…just for extracurricular sport. There will be no records or documentation whatsoever, no evidence to get rid of except you. The pig-fuckers who shot García Lorca, Messenger of God, will put down anything lovely and true because in their rank stupidity they believe they have licence to and you’re either for us or against us. In his crucial 2018 book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, James Bridle seeks to conceptualize the field of the given pragmatically by delineating a new cognitive “grey zone” allowing us to “sample from the myriad of explanations that our limited cognition stretches like a mask over the vibrating half-truths of the world. It is a better approximation of reality than any rigid binary encoding can ever hope to be—an acknowledgment that all our apprehensions are approximations, and all the more powerful for being so. The grey zone allows us to make peace with the otherwise-irreconcilable, conflicting worldviews that prevent us from taking meaningful action in the present.” The way to not be authoritarian is to listen so that you can grow…and know more…and be better…to know more so as to be better…

If you think reactionary cosplaying freedom-zappers like the lost and maladapted souls who stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in January of 2021 are your true sworn enemy then you have to be some kind of fanatic yourself, I mean…just look at them…those Little House on the Prairie Garbage Pail Kid right wing zealots are wearing their own symbolic castration like it were a flashy maroon dinner jacket. After the revolution, when we inhabit the fully automated luxury communism promised us by author Aaron Bastani, I think Phil Ochs’s various cops of the world should by given decent lodging and a really bad-ass first-person shooter game they can all play together whilst drinking Bud Light until their kind gradually dies off in a few more centuries. These boys? What can I say? The stupider they get the more they seem like people to me. If they’re pushing your buttons? Sock ‘em one in the kisser. Better yet: karate chop to the Adam’s apple. Drop them where they’re standing and move on with your day.

You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters, the side-splittingly uprorious 1916 epistolary novel by sportswriter and humorist Ring Lardner, was published originally in serialization and in short order became the first of three highly popular collections comprised of letters written by extremely dumb and fantastically egotistical fictional baseball pitcher Jack Keefe to the eponymous childhood friend, Al. Jack is basically the original prototype I think for Danny McBride’s Kenny Powers. He resembles certain spouters of hot air in Shakespeare’s comedies, epic doltishness garlanded with a complete lack of legitimately actionable knowledge regarding self and world. Keefe butchers syntax and relishes his jargon, thus endlessly mangling idioms (not unlike Ricky in Trailer Park Boys). “Good riddance is rubbish as they say,” or “but as they say beauty isn’t only so deep.” He uses peace instead of piece, hole instead of whole, threw instead of through, seen instead of scene, collect instead of colic. As a Canadian I was of course pleased to see mention of the great city of “Van Coover.” Very often the hilarity coincides with a kind of remarkable corkscrew beauty in the execution: “You did not know I was a speech maker did you Al and I did not know it neither until to-day but I guess they is not nothing I can do if I make up my mind and 1 of the boys says that I done just as well as Dummy Taylor could of.” Naturally, the Emperor of Japan becomes the Umpire of Japan. The Real Dope follows the letter-writing Keefe to France and the First World War, but never quite to the front line; he falls victim to endless pranks at the hands of fellow servicemen who amuse themselves by exploiting his childish guilelessness, causing him at one point to threaten: “But they better remember that they’s plenty of time for the laugh to be on the other foot before this war is over.” Naturally, he confuses Shylock with Sherlock. Brawn and brains and never the twain shall meet. “In the end,” notes Chantal Akerman pensively in My Mother Laughs, “the doctor was an idiot but like I read somewhere, the idiots are also victims.” If there are going to be idiots then we had might as well make use of them. Sometimes the idiots are funny. Have you noticed? Sometimes the idiots are so physically attractive you can’t even believe it.

A customary Stanley Elkin palate-cleanser from The Franchiser, the great Jewish-American author’s fastest, funniest, most territorially ambitious (next to George Mills), and most persistently personal novel: “ludicrous life, screwball existence, goofy being.” From heavenly bodies in full array and the galaxy as terminal moraine all the way down to the Chuck E. Cheese ball pit and the worm in the near-empty bottle of mezcal. As a novel of a time and place, The Franchiser is overloaded with stuff, as Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties had previously been, what one character calls the "cargo of crap,” subject matter and temperament here demonstrating unmistakably at least partial common cause with the great comedian George Carlin and his famous “Stuff” monologue (which came five years later). “Ben, the empire builder, the from-sea-to-shining-sea kid connecting the dots.” Absurd, delirious life, with its pratfalls, misadventures, and benign humiliations. Riches are abundant you fools, it is time that is precious! Ben Flesh, the chronically ill road-bound franchise superconductor of Elkin’s novel, is very much like his author in that he suffered a heart attack in his thirties and came thereafter to be wracked by multiple sclerosis, the disease Elkin lived with most of his adult life. Elkin comes closer here than he ever really had previously to writing directly about his own suffering, though of course he keeps matters conspicuously jolly, reminding us how much of life, death, and our sundry setbacks comes down to attitude. One part of pain that Elkin understands on account of being an author who has endured a lot of it is that pain that’s been sitting idly even a short period of time can quickly make you restless as a spirit or soul and as a body. Some who suffer must be kept busy because they know how grievous the consequences would be otherwise. Artists hooked on making stuff know they will go into withdrawal if somebody interferes with them and prevents them from making stuff. Nobody has a better idea than the artist how to manage one’s time. Art is like drugs and alcohol in that these things don’t want to destroy you, rather they want you to be able to make infinite use of them, but unfortunately you are a mortal person and you cannot. What do you want from art? Is the high sustainable?

One thing you can definitely be in post-history is a programmer. Just ask maverick exiled 20th century Jewish philosopher Vilém Flusser, who fled the Nazis—ultimately—for Brazil…and sure would appear to have mastered Portuguese fast (!). The A.A. mantra one day at a time just means that you have to become the programmer of your own daily life. You put things and slots of time in contact with one another, so to speak. “My home,” writes Flusser in his 1992 essay “Taking Up Residence in Homelessness,” “this network of habits, serves as a net that captures adventure and serves as a springboard to adventure.” I wonder who gave him that net. The experience of groundlessness and displacement is, in fact, what made necessary the creation of a net. The lessons taught by the homeless man to anyone in the market that day, according to my programmer buddy Vilém (you can call him ‘São Paulo Willy’): “he gives evidence to the native that there are not only numerous homes, but also numerous mysteries.”  

George Carlin, "Stuff"

The Author's Fancy

 

It is an all too common mistake to call any American crime movie that was shot in black and white a film noir when in fact the genre as such, named by French hipsters avant la lettre, occupies an altogether abbreviated window running largely parallel to the years of the Second World War, when the mood in general was, as it had been in the Depression, awfully downcast. Howard Hawks’s 1932 Scarface isn’t noir because there wasn’t any such thing yet and then on the other hand something like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) belongs to a whole other sociohistoric territoriality or even space-time…a world in which delusional loners believe they are shooting the President of the United States as an act of devotion to Jodie Foster à la John Hinckley Jr. Some of that incipient paranoia is already all over boss ‘paranoid’ crime and punishment screen sagas from the 1960s that we don’t have any business calling films noir on account of their having arrived too late. Samuel Fuller’s astonishing and ever-trenchant Underworld U.S.A. from ’61 is the tabloid auteur at his most inflammatory and disgusted, a real pulpit-pounder, telling the story of a young man hellbent on revenge against the criminal syndicates and thus the world of power politics in all its ransacking totality. When Sam Fuller makes a film about revenge he wants you to taste the revenge. From the following year comes Experiment in Terror, a seminal and forward-looking masterpiece from a Blake Edwards who had clearly not yet found his place in the world. Preceding the Zodiac killings by at least half a decade, Experiment in Terror features—for the most part as structuring absence—a cryptic and sadistic supervillain who puts poor Lee Remick through the wringer and the whole desolate chiaroscuro city of San Francisco along with her. The aging Glenn Ford seems testy and out of sorts but he could I think definitely still fuck you up good and proper, if you know what I’m saying. His looks haven’t totally gone, but the hatred and exhaustion in his eyes are pure. Say what you will about Experiment in Terror, it’s better than Dirty Harry (1971). Clint Eastwood I can fight, Glenn Ford maybe not.  

Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961)

Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards, 1962)