Thursday, April 23, 2020

Guided Meditation

Turning it on and tuning in now…

The consensual consensus cesspool. An archive of human aggression. Catalogue of stupidity and senselessness. Occasionally popping up on the police blotter…
Russian combustion anarchists and piker plebeians. Scan a virtual preadolescent girl, smacking another Mississippi-style, a can-do to the cancan too. We all watch through crossfading flake-spheres of digital snow. Constituting our so doing from the outset, live on location, daily constitutional. Martial-arts mercenaries of the Real, though metrically fogged, are not so fogged that we cannot all at once be flogged. And the prosecutor's office keeps saying the case will go to trial unless the head of Japan's Defense Agency wants to 'spread a little sunshine.'
For most women, for the Modern Woman, fake tans are a way of life (and of dying? already a lying in state?). They are considering the whole package very, very seriously, what with the addition of the “Tanning Bed” sub-clause, and would give Tehran the chance to discuss "ambiguities" that could be used to make atomic bombs. Weapons is what we're talking about. If the peak temperature is 87 degrees no earlier than 4:22 am, the day of. Witnessing the impact of global warming in your life?

Disclaimer: applicants must escape the Czech Republic via webcam no later than the beginning of the end of the middle of July! The Americans needed a victory and some help inside the 6-yard box, so at the annual meeting of the American Headache Society in Los Angeles, when the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation device reported its latest share prices, during the initial period of electriceel activity in the brain, more than 7,000 shareholders stood with Sony President Ryoji Chubachi and forced the evacuation of roughly 460 homes and businesses.
"Today's a critical day," said Volvo Corp. to Slide Rock State Park, "I won't say it's a last ditch, but thereza lot o’ potential,” so we all remained closed for a fourth day of tremendous Oklahoma technology ensconced in regional jitters outside of a boarded-up fishing-tackle shop. As a breakaway, rogue Volvo apparently prepares to test a long-range missile believed to be capable of reaching the United States and North Korea, watching a fireworks display from the U.N. lawn, gripes endlessly ‘cause Iran will not negotiate any treaty to prohibit citizens of any country from burning porn or tens of thousands of cards from concerned Americans as long as Internationals Oxfam and Amnesty are engaged there in a good old-fashioned, throwdown, adrenaline pumping, punch-out, thousands of red, white and blue-clad smurfs investigating anticompetitive practices, the whole thing threatening to trigger a cataclysmic jolt in methane consumption, much less pronounced, now, hence the warming warnings due to greenhouse gas caused by the man who was wearing a red Welsh rugby jersey throwing a sum of money in the air, on the CCTV, whilst some quick-fingered people made off with hundreds of pounds and Heather Mills was seen through the dry air, evaporating north of Baghdad. "I absolutely understand this is a life or death situation for the Volvo,” she said, continuing as Marines played pickup, “this is another form of combat." And then she was gone.
The accused then allegedly took a shovel and buried himself at Camp Pendleton in the rain two weeks ago with his Ferrari hubcaps held tight, so more than 800,000 people canceled their subscriptions to The Salaried Worker because the layout has subsequently begun to take on a Marxist-Leninist hew.
Inside a city warehouse, news conferences brainwash from the skydeck, our refusal an "act of patriotism" refurbished, influenced by the US government's protective chemical suits and their boneyard of decayed cats, building code violations seasonally for naught (a natural barrier against bad credit refinancing or too-close-for-comfort encounters with free time, Alaska-style), these adopted pets live in residential New Jersey, where  Lacrosse Rape Charges (emotionally difficult for catkin though the fracas may prove repeatedly here) are laying the groundwork for Armageddon in today’s Financial Times, like a Mississippi revivalist preacher / cattle rancher hoping to clear the path for his own messiah by rebuilding the temple next to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School on Medical Center Drive where Henry Ramirez Jr., 15, screams “LET THERE BE FLIGHT!” as hurricane-fueling warmth mixes inert platinum and xenon into a molecular metal that understands the matter-antimatter imbalance; it should raise the baseline of both hurricane and national security activities, but don’t go expecting Administration officials to alert the Treasury Department.
Hillary Rodham Clinton blindly unites three monkeys. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil are their proud simian names. Given to them by the six Democrats flirting with a possible White House bid because it was just about time that the party’s liberal base began to reflect the temperature shifts over the last 2,000 years. Those solid nature preserve instincts giving way to doubts about paper vs. plastic. Because monkeys expressed muted satisfaction with climatologists since the sharp curve of the hockey blade perforated the mid-term faux-civility (based on the false premise that Mahdi the weatherman was the last of the prophet Muhammad's true Sumerian summer heirs) and that a nonpartisan think tank might have braved the miserable rain to assess that the national politic is not in any condition to be used as designed, nor preformed as a ring tone operetta before the gaping mopjaw of a computer simulation stand-in for public information from a classified report. But the monkeys are wise to the con—or are the con, after all is said and dumb—what with their discussing an especially sexual Christ-like Superman with a member of al Qaeda before the film actually opens this coming Wednesday.
We would (and so must) characterize these recovered munitions as classified, because they came into contact with insurgent bargain hunters who are people too, and anyway, government officials say, terrorism is not just turning on a vacuum and letting Western Union muzzlefuck the dustbuster distribution. It is entirely consistent with democratic values concerning single dads and the redistribution of post-divorce wealth. The firebombing of soccer mom minivans as the latest step in an aggressive Bush administration door-to-door pitch, decelerating every minute possibility and watching kiddo grow from a wee tot into huge dreams and huge income goals, a chip off the old block, as surely as people in the Texas Panhandle jump on car bonnets, dance in the street, and lay on the ground in front of traffic, police presence beefed up, cops mounted on fashion horses in clacking stilettos, some women are routinely subjected to a so-called teabagging, due to appear in a Miami magistrate's court later on Friday. No prisoners can maintain those standards of lawman decorum very long, an explicit 6/13 Circuit Court complaint filed in Kanawha County makes clear: Labor party cops, sagging badly, have robbed Pyongyang of its righteous outcry, sending Tony Blair tailspinning into a new habit more expensive than cigarettes, with endless parades of cute news bimbos outdoors during stormy weather.
Italian researchers want, it is claimed, to start meeting interesting and exciting singles, offering homeopathic anti-depressants, or invoking vacations in the sun as outlined in Holland’s De Volkskrant. How shall we take the think tank sugar pills? Characterized by shameless provocation, fraudulent falls, arbitrary errors, in the stormy matchstick blitzkrieg raining down on the candelabra. Oye. The drone of niceties in the war that cannot be won militarily and within days is fueling the Fox News Channel at a launch site near you: they’ve already moved two hours of product, what is known as television, according to one woman, emerging for a bathroom break selling her shares to a foundation that Rockefeller and (Andrew) Carnegie began so as to assure that New York—ranked No. 10 at the U.N. sweepstakes, up three spots from last year—remains North America's costliest city while government code-breakers thrust some of Hollywood's biggest names into an unwanted spotlight. Hey there, Medgar, did you hear that the Hollywood sign has been replaced by a giant inflatable yen symbol? the name Los Angeles changed, governator in absentia, to New Moscow?
After that FBI agents swarmed the O.C. offices of Myldred, whose collection of antique miniatures, tiny Carol Burnetts and Sinatras, became the Washington Dolls' House and Toy Museum almost overnight, they emerged with an injunction against the Board of Education, granted by the Honorable Richard D. Boner of the distinguished Boner clan, whose hirsute charms did not go unnoticed by the divorcees (abandoned for a newer model like the Lexus before them), and whose charcoal complexion was attributable to student test scores and probably still is if emissions excite the part of the brain cortex nearest to the telephone or refitted re: the rear fitting. They had not shown that using a cell phone is bad for the brain in any way. Except that one might take on odd behavioral ticks. Like becoming a rampaging wild bear, the first seen in Bavaria in more than 170 years. But of course it should go without saying that that goes without saying.
Soon Big Brother may be watching from the inside out, lack of appetite, vomiting, stomach spasms, bloating, and weight loss. Anti-drug campaigners say, starched collars at attention, that shops will soon be offering customers iced cannabis tea, because political solutions grow druggier on a pretty much daily basis, what with  abused and humiliated people calling for criminal probes, asking: if we are not free to cough up blood are we even free at all? asking: is that all there is to life? litigation?
Like a month of Sundays stamped out with the grapes of wrath and the wino stamped out by the wrath of grapes, the space crack will sidle exceptionally close  to our butane and be lit up for one heck of a fourth of July high, but will then be gone forever, never again to ping the radar cloves. So sad the foreseeable future with its rank-and-file denial of small giant-crack-rock truths best accomplished by seasoned observers with moderate-sized crotch telescopes! Cows chomp happily away on lush green grass and cannabis sativa, the scorpion venom treatment for fascist non-smokers, here’s hoping that breathing in other people's tobacco smoke turns them the color of the coal mine and mill polluted Dasha River and may a barge loaded with 1,270 tonnes of sulfuric acid go tits to Tuesday. Which reminds me: marine environmental protection crews hastily deployed up their proud assholes, docked at a repair yard in Algeria, a .40 caliber post-colonial slug in the porous pulp mill between the eyes from which they now piss red, their prior military service record proven short of veracious in the extreme, and may Axel Rose bite their legs in the Berns Hotel lobby while admonishing them for spending millions fighting AIDS with words instead of spreading AIDS amongust the lexicographers, having collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance that has gone towards a story on George Bush and his time in the National Guard. Which reminds them: not to be late for Dan Rather’s retirement party; they do not want to miss the pre-dinner tarring and feathering wine and cheese.
Recent Chinese customs data shows crude futures now trading under-the-counter style with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert taking Palestinian prisoners off the ICE, facing sanctions. The uranium will be used only for a peaceful energy program, forcing terrorism refineries on the Gulf Coast to reduce runs immediately, good stewards of the environment passing greenhouse hotdog gas falafel stands also developing significant new nuclear energy capabilities. Dukakis in the tank, running up the bill, won’t be left in the movie version, the release of which will coincide with Al Franken's time harvesting progressive antibodies on the Pennebaker hobbyhorse, all prenatal and environment, fostering homosexuality in Sam’s younger sons after being ejected through the sunroof at home making love. To the wife and said sons. Like the tournament's all-time scoring leader, raring to win over Australia in the second round prickle joust. Russia’s space flight control center suggesting that sexual orientation may be determined by pairs of non-sex chromosomes rockin’ the mike old school like Charlie Rose handling daily responsibilities, jimmying open the doors of perception with Google and others, though excitement, per legal script, comes only when the sessions end, the sex act being increasingly focused through Internet-based services.
Viagra and the general wireless wiring of teens in their natural habitat: it's no longer being a matter of  second-degree misdemeanor, since Rush Limbaugh now comes in natural and synthetic forms. Little blue bottles will kill off two major characters in the next book in the Harry Potter series brought to you by AT&T. Air Force Reserve reconnaissance aircraft will investigate fitfully those trapped in the blast rubble. Proposition is to we'll call the next explosion Beryl Jr. after the father of personalized My Yahoo! pages and pink pig cufflinks, though whether or not wizard Harry himself is implicated—though fully suspected of being involved in the insurgency—they’ll let him go, unharmed, under a national reconciliation plan, or at least that's the proposition perforce we'll call it that.
2,500 inmates have been released since Maliki first unveiled his initiative on June 6 in the carport with the national security advisor, stressing that he’s never fought with anyone on the basis of religion, at least not religion on its bloody own thank you very much. The death tolls from attacks on Monday having also risen, picking up endorsements from labor unions and being greeted with hugs and frustrated Connecticut Democrats who don't like what they're hearing, the dead adding up to negative campaign-trail integers. "I put the reddish-brown snake in a dark bucket," said Lieberman,
as Borneo's forest cover declines, “so’s to expose nature's best kept secret.”
Star Jones has suffocated to death on freebies and Fig Newtons and she plainly does not (repeat! does not!) have any other gig lined up, because even the afterlife had planned to axe Star last fall after the hoopla surrounding her endorsement-plagued wedding, at one point a fake eyelash fell off, costing millions of $$$ in wrangle-fees. Some's even saying she ought be assigned to the city Sanitation Department, "scrubber" being British street-speak for a prostitute / promiscuous ho. When Rosie O'Donnell agreed to join the media militia it was already over. Both are possibly as large as a half-mile or more in diameter, so why not have several good options available to you? Success starts by assessing your current situation and finding a service provider.
Our new host, designated 2004 XP14, was discovered on Dec. 10, 2004 by the Lincoln Laboratory Near Earth Asteroid Research Facility. An astronomer plans to utilize NASA’s 70-meter diameter Goldstone radar thingy to locate a laboratory in Seoul and resume his work on Streisand cloning because something has to eat up all that moon cheese in a jiffy. The chance of a collision is practically zero. There is therefore no need to change the flight path of the ISS. Fashion sense is just being natural and being yourself (in J Brand jeans with cigarette leg and a distressed black Chanel jacket that just never quite went into production). Aided and a-bedded: iPod, phone, Sony Cyber-Shot touch-screen cam and Lip Venom by DuWop. Robot politics is all about the newest latest draped over clones to hide the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, McDonald's and sushi, which is what these robots are made up of beyond the 90% H20. When crashing to earth they make one hell of an ungodly splatter.
This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that women predisposed to paroxysms of giggling during routine mammograms may be more susceptible to the low-dose brainpower of fussy youngsters (white bread, potatoes, and alcohol are the losers in the move towards a more Shrinking Man-conscious lifestyle for such ladies). Helping train computers how to read joy, anger, and other expressions, women who wear 3-D glasses or have a beard are able to envision this being employed in cars within five years time. A headset, now in its prototype stage, would interpret other people's moods. And there is zero chance that such a device would hold French citizenship.
Tinker with clouds to make them pay a higher than normal price for a drink on the Champs Élysées, alone against the world, a pocket of climatological resistance, with traveler's checks and the new prepaid traveler's check cards, throwing Amex daggers at marooned Inuit-like moon men. Travelex Worldwide exchange service at Dallas-Fort Worth Int. Leftover currency back at a favorable rainy rate. Sunshades in orbit to cool the planet and rock the vote boat. Possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling brought to you by Rand McNally. A Western Railway Guide to stars’ homes (but not Star Jones) and Ursas Major and Minor and various other tropics of the wee hrs and the plush sluts that line the upholstery of these places, all extraordinarily thin and weighing little more than butterflies.
A mediator reached by Reuters said it was too early to call it quits, bringing closer the prospect of a major Israeli military sweep, hot children in Gaza with angry slurpee headaches throwing pieces of Flavor Flav’s gold teeth at the tanks, wearing armless existential clocks around their necks in response a retired Catholic priest and two veterans' put-on clown suits. Busted into a nuclear missile launch facility and began beating the silo cover with hammers. Other kids, maybe all of the other kids. In an attempt to take the Minuteman III missile off-line. Seriously. I had the proof but they took it down.
The wigs and faces coldly ripped into the ugly orchestra so very nasty and vicious knocking out electricity and water supplies. Not good for most of the 1.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip. Pulitzer Prize winners dug in behind walls and embankments, preparing for a major strike, press credentials should be yanked, a lot of people have legitimate and genuine feelings about this. Emails heaped upon the editors on Manhattan's West 43rd Street, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division (Marines' sisters and grandfathers serving as Nissan service advisors, Orion on the supernaturally quiet eighth floor of the News Corporation, seated in the old world of kings and aristocracies now gesso, smeared clean and muted video monitors within jaywalking distance valley of old Gelsenkirchen media dinosaurs, besieged by a Cambrian explosion of digitally empowered life-forms). We have to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes. Post-human get-go ghettos are still essentially pens for poor people, undercurrents of tension have always been an element of kaffeeklatsch, albeit sexy photos and a blurb which said “just lookin’ for something fun” mean that what we called our home at the Bentley Green Apartments was actually a busy school zone with broken or missing speed limit signs. City Public Works and the walk past Riverwalk. To stir in the beer. Corroded veins of truth and scraping capillaries off the sides of the bowl: this is no place to live out property value fantasies of harsh exclusion, to carry out extreme action and bring Hamas to task for proper imspelling.
Team Red Bull was the future of Toyota before it was the present. The Associated Press has learned that victory at Infineon—like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man who died in Montpelier already deceased and unsalvageable remaining grateful—a little late but—like Archduke Francis Ferdinand—a portrait of piss-grade patience. Aren’t they? With their Westminster Abbey golfing chapeaus! 1,000 adults march on the nation's most accurate polling firm despite the general lack of senatorial interest in the World Cup, breweries warn the draught could run out before the final penalty fraud, the hardest task for mankind being a matter of—Jiminy Christmas Mandibles—to keep up with the thirst of this English Earth.
Putin kissed a boy on his stomach in the Kremlin on a stroll. I.e. he obviously kissed the boy on the stomach. He didn't kiss the boy whilst on a stroll from the position of his own (i.e. Putin's) stomach. Patted his head and walked off through a crowd of astonished tourists. Code Pink in solidarity with a birthday party at Bus Boys, the poets also call for unionized sex workers per the Voting Rights Act and vile crimes under our noses off the street, yanked from their grasp like political purposes. The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation unit is set to prosecute "especially horrible" underage girls smelling of Cleracil, reflecting the growing impact of new media outlets on broadcasters and thus upon arms of justice mired in track marks and safe injection sites, scrambling to adjust as marketers (slang: meerkats) step up efforts to reach consumers with new broadband neural root (de)stabilizing psych-tectonics, dusted down enzymes and sands of the coca leaf hourglass. Demand from advertisers particularly strong, the upfront market complete. An estimated $200 million in revenue from "Sunday Night Football" transplanted into a buffet served in the White House portrait room, the President and First Lady munching on 9.8 million adults or more, engendering what is ten minutes from now the most watched cable movie since 2001. The industry understands that this does nothing to improve conditions since the bizz got hit by the exodus of top tap dancer fizz whilst the German Academic Exchange Service would not even be if not for the most powerful woman in fashion getting it in her head that she and her staff had been left out of the MySpace China loop, not even warranting a single-digit kiss-off Duke University-style, where rapists are still busy with the still underage slideshow presentation. It's always amazing to see what cash will do for a little bit of innocent girls.
Just drinking and fighting in the 700 block of North Quaker. Children are taken into protective custody about a dozen times a month. Newschannel 8 anchor C_____ L______ has produced Waiting Child, a show about memorable kiddy-porno promos done in the 70s and 80s. We want them entertaining and interesting so she has latitude. Need to work on your hook? Play Newschannel 8 Shock Bowl! See if you can bring home a soldier captured by Republican militants. 3-wood bash a bear’s brains and put a strain on the flood control system. Just like the U.S. Coast Guard used helicopters to set up speed traps overseeing the jets, unfairly profiling airforce personnel and Hispanics, rejecting the statewide challenge to Texas' bombardiers. Redistricting. Sloppily. Able to re-grow teeth and bones, drunk on the poop-deck dreck.
So the tool is based on low-intensity pulsed ultrasound technology and may eventually allow people to grow taller experts, bigger versions of which have already received the knifepoint approval of abused children apprehended at Las Vegas International airport, sprinting through security checkpoints and waving Jamaican flags. One officer used a Taser gun alone in a Kid's Wear & Toys store. It was a disaster as he and his mother played with reanimated toy cars, teeth falling out and jamming traffic like when Israel buzzed Assad's summer palace while he killed 19 Israelis in a restaurant. By persuading them to stick their forks in the myriad electrical outlets.
Israel said the flyover was aimed at pressuring them to dismantle arrogant, elitist, left-wing podcast powerstations of the New. The conservative blogosphere was on fire and opened same, indiscriminately wiping out lots of public-opinion-sensitive banks and memory-banks of chipped-tooth data on the vine of the multi-mind, drinking heavily to withhold details of the impending Three Little Bay of Pigs in a Blanket and rogue publication machination. Though there was no clear evidence that the illegal program was legal. Law is used to excuse outspoken critics of the war on the war in Iraq. Why should we not publish? Nudity, streaking. Sex in public! Other common luxury liner claptrap and daterapedrug shenanigans. Elders of Zion seen running around naked under the naked night would be disembarked at the next port of call and response and would not be refunded their fairway fees nor albatrosses. Backups caused by downed signals on Constitution and Independence, gnarled sandals pried from bulldoggish Anne Arundel County Executives. Jews with a migraine eye on Maryland's rain-swollen Patuxent River, hoping, on all four fours, to self-fulfill tomorrow’s prophecies today!
Working as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden is durn’d dangerous, most employees eventually using sheets and clothing to hang themselves, tending to bring new scrutiny and criticism to an old game of cat and dagger, hampering the tall and handsome one’s ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy in the form of a 5-month-old baby Jesus cooing. Finally done in with all expedience not due to proper nouns and 35mm rounds. But by mother having forgotten to drop him off at daycare in the early morning. The temperature in the van easily could have exceeded 100 degrees, baby bits spackled shut with viscous cheese hardening real slow, behind tinted windows and so Osama removed a picture of Jesus that has hung in a hip high school for more than 30 years or so, insisting that he was doing nothing wrong, carving that particular pumpkin, because new jobless benefits edged up, nudging the overnight federal funds, a custom technology makeover for your new business-class piss-take, storm clouds remaining the only obstacle since the Columbia tragedy in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanun where shells hit power transformers. Stop measuring people's quality of daily lives. 12 percent more time in a bad mood matters very little for moment-to-moment experience dictates that commuting over time becomes like bullying bosses and office divas brandishing stilettos and actually starts to feel like: things! they would be done differently! Though people who read books and who are amused by books aren't the same people who actually reported that there was no defibrillator available for the baby-Jesus’ post-incarceration tuna melt meltdown scene.
Your average person doesn't know who these people are and they don't care though they may grow to like this world of beauty’s exposed rashes, capable of defending itself if it's exposed to any dermatologist’s aggression, almost unanimous support from its smaller neighbor, Syria. Meaning that unilateral solutions are doomed to overflight oversight. Especially when it's so geographically far from the issue. And has begun to recede across the northeast U.S. following devastating flood-related sinkhole mishaps involving Emergency Management pickups forcing residents to rooftops in scenes reminiscent of the time spent in bed and asleep using sleep logs to capture an odor and then replay it back later just as camcorders report into the murder of teenagers by racist psychopaths.
The only way you get this kind of effect is by using cocaine quite heavily or from boxing for the honor and the glory of your name in pixels in a break with the modern habit of all investigators blaming bureaucrats with whom they were forced to share a cell as undergraduates. Teachers dropped kybosh, complained of increasing bad behavior after Demi Moore's infamous Vanity Fair cover shoot posing with birth goop and golden gloves of a featherweight Caesar’s Palace salad. Egg whites plunge parts of the palate into a Catholic School sense-memory (slight rise in the number of fixed-term exclusions for low-level disruption, a prevalent form of indiscipline spawning Migaloo, the white whale). I'm slightly lost. Okay. Okay, okay. Pulling between 4 and 5 big, fat, monster cock make-believe nights in the classifieds of the Orlando Sentinel where stains remain to this day seen on several Hollywood landmarks on our way through five twists, upside down turns, past a Greek Cypriot man in traditional 'Vraka' dress who stands at an open air vegetable market wearing protective sunglasses until a style expert persuadedudes us to pose naked in front of millions. Demi was dressed up, looked terrific, but her nose was in a terrible state, more than five grams of coke a day as an infant behind the odd scar, a story that gets worse at the beginning of the current military operation, improving the chances of avoiding Florida's squealing shower curtains, tripping on nasty acid and coming down on a state board with $500,000, not able to account for charges of bribery, conspiracy, mail fraud, Elmer Fudd, and obstruction of justice being the mother of the matter in frank legalese. Because kissing ass can get you off. If the 71-year-old nun squirts hot cum.
The Church risks being brought in front of some international court. The doctors and the abortionite scientists who eliminate the embryo claim that communion bread and wine are not, in fact, the body and blood of Christ, but rather part of the ensemble for women wearing flip-flops this summer. Preventing network operators from charging an additional grooming fee, the broken toes sticking out every which way and piercing the skin hourly, up, up, and away by the microchips to a swift flu jab at the end of September, avian wet dreams reduce the chances of a mutating flue gobbledygook code unplugging the astronauts’ suits from the pimped-up outboard radiator and leading us not into temptation but delivering us drugs by the slut-load. Manufacturers have encountered problems growing one of the virus strains; it appears that half of women describe themselves as 'cleanaholics' depressed if their house is messy or their children publish nasty kiss-and-tells.
Wearing little more than a belt sander, South Carolina's adjutant general is prepared to do whatever it takes to secure California's border, and will throw water balloons at Mexicans whether asked to or not. Sweating sulfuric camphor after visiting the flooded city of Binghamton, drinking one and a half day's supply of corn liquor in one cab ride, mismanaging the carbide with the carbine as the meter runs the rapids. 200,000 evacuees from historic Pennsylvania coal town of Wilkes-Barre are here before me, trying to pry open the gizzard gullet to sop a drunken submergence like falling asleep to death face down in a puddle of gin pudding. Roads washed out and rivers surging, authorities declared emergencies. New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania. Dogs of the Carolinas. Underground utilities such as gas and sewage that could be damaged no longer register the stolen laptop computer and hard drive with sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.
Is Superman still American? kicking Nazi ass and pummelling immigrants. Freeing up Guardsmen to Shepard flooding in the East, wildfires in the West, or the prospect of hurricanes in the South taking out celebrity athletes. Drunk. And masturbating. When they crash. In their handsome way. Luxury SUVs into parked Suburbans and watching pornography in a DVD player mounted on the dashboard with high-water marks around the world? but sensitively? Saving and judging, contractually obligated to avoid PR flare-ups and the like?
Can 3-D films play a role in winning total war? George Bush and his allies causing killers to be put out on the streets with full Imax security clearance, followers at a mosque are sold an air invasion while delaying a broad ground offensive to give Arab mediators a last chance to achieve the release of kidnapped theatre owners, exhibitors, and some distributors. Have I got that right? Cirque du Soleil's £75million extravaganza set to the songs of the Beatles threatening to include Lucy swooping on a trapeze across a sky twinkling with diamonds as warplanes strike the Palestinian Interior Ministry. Is that correct? Have I got that right?
Near Khan Yunis in the south, a makeshift “Situation Room” with full minibar giving diplomacy a chance as we have already been (means bullshit to you), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the secret lion of the new lap dance locution; is it enough to be killed by turquoise streamers in a shameful backdoor American air raid with Israeli flags on Berlin cobblestone? Cobbled gobble gobble together by internationalist mujahedeen, the bodice laces tightening to the point of al-Qaida's command appearing to have faded way away prematurely because it’s the plain old science of the thing. Shiite pallbearers catching wind of a world-record hammerhead shark bulging in the crotch of empire whilst setting an intelligence office on temporary fire for naught. Like a gaggle of Playboys marooned on the Vatican magazine rack where their dentist uproots teeth assumed unlawful or immoral to spite the face and the self. And the certain? What with the 111 million people online getting off glorious.
A 19-year-old soldier accused of exposing himself by using a sexual device while he presided over figure skating lessons for the Egyptian President. Fatah-affiliated drunks come creeping out of little league bleachers mumbling about lost contact lenses and where they parked the big rig, carrying musical instruments that pusspicously resemble surgical tools destroyed after the rig’s tanks and tires caught fire. A white trash stageshow excommunication will be applied to the women, doctors and researchers. Just as soon as energy futures are being supported by Guido. 2 cents to $2.2725 a gallon after settling at a nine-month high. How does one explain that one to the fuckin’ parole officer in his jammies?
Mexico's conservative presidential candidate Felipe Calderon declared victory despite corpses leaning over ballot boxes with tongues out, fingers steeped in the ink and leftist supporters dancing to dreary cumbia music in the rain with electoral officials' refusal to declare a winner at all, rhetoric growing harsh and split. "They are frightened to tell the truth that Lopez Obrador won and they can't find excuses to make us think otherwise," said office worker Eloisa Cuevas, 45, who stood on her head and puked on exit polls, the impartial official results, and anything newsprint, as an underground train ran off the tracks in a tunnel and speedily overturned, knocking out the First Dysfunctional Family of Rock 'n' Roll in its entirety and raising fears that the transit system was gearing up for a large cultural invasion, meter maids implying that they would kill an abducted Israeli soldier if their demands were not met in regards to Hillary Clinton being run out the chute to handle the viciousness of a national campaign in her dungarees, wary of the lesson of exploding Mexican exit poles spraying murderous piñata shrapnel into throngs of Democrat party loyal with farmer’s tans in the shape of the Russian scythe cutting through numbers.
There was no word on when a ruling would be made if one was to even come. It’s not like increasing the state sales tax from 6 percent to 7 percent would buy new golf shoes for the entire town council and its hordes of buddies. Further appeals to keep harness and thoroughbred tracks open notwithstanding, Assembly Budget Committee members were called to the Statehouse to explain drivers taking to the road in large numbers in preparation for the July 4th  refinery crunch in the style of Kremlin Krime Kommandos. Investors were maintaining their enthusiasm in the face of absolute finitude, infinitely strange in its tossed-off gamma arrangements, morphologically, continued encouragement from declining consumer price inflation projections. Encouragement, that is, to release Palestinian prisoners into thin air like blowing magic bubbles. The enemy will ever bear full responsibility for future consequences just so long as the printing press and such is kept out of his hands of course. And the government of Israel will not yield to the extortion of the post-PLO or the World Court or Captain Kangaroo on a pogo stick lighting his farts. As long as righteousness courses as surely as there will be breadwinners who are not bringing home a paycheck or a book of matches or diddlysquat.
Both Israeli defense officials and Palestinian security officials say that the placenta broke through the uterus wall two days before Olympiad, gringo squatters reluctantly handing over the decorative spoons premature, until the oldest woman ever to bear a child suddenly dropped a bowling ball, the statewide (weird) emergency threatened to close Atlantic City's holes the first time in the 28-year history of legalized gambling in New Jersey. Workers are not deemed "essential" employees who keep getting paid during a shutdown or another contested Mexican election on the gagplank. They say that there was sleight of hand involved, simmer with Monday anger on Tuesday as widows of blasted Marines collect airport donations from National Guardsmen heading out to an early economy class(less) death gong. Cindy Sheehan is planning to launch a hunger strike at the crash site. The latest bid by the US anti-war movement to grab colonel Ann Wright, knock her out with drugs and remove her pigtails with extreme prejudice. Alice Walker and actor Danny Glover will roll a joint fast on a spare Cosmo. Pooling their resources, they disapprove of hand-carved paraphernalia and rising US casualties could be proven to erode public support for conflict.
As Americans get set to fire up barbeques in patriotic celebration of wieners and the catafalque that supported the caskets of people who have lain in state—a polish job to rival those of the Renaissance Restoration Riders—see live feeds of congressional business and use monitors to scan the six-party process that continues strongly to urge North Korea cudgelingly. The United States and Japan. What if something that hasn't happened, happened? the emergency proclamation is the most effective way to fight crime. Beat cops are talking to people in the world community and observing activities in and around a quintuple shooting, stepping over the bodies to ticket reporters reporting on riots and disasters without official approval. Industrial accidents. Natural disasters. Health and public security crises. A big brouhaha in Stanislaus County, a Patterson pageant champ decrowned. The government has given the army a green light to launch a deeper incursion. We have to know when to clench our teeth and to deal a decisive blow. Three militant groups said there would be no further information released about what happened last month at the Apricot festival, fear of reprisals. Little Mister Appricot, four years in age, engaging us by flipping the bird. All talk is of what happened next. Unfortunate flip of the now crownless finger. He doesn’t know and his mom and dad say he likely wouldn't understand anyway.
He had either fainted or become otherwise indisposed prior to the accident outside the headquarters of the Valencia regional government. Fortunately for him he had not yet cum so there was no evidence. As to the final minutes of morgue-like love cresting the hilltop jerkoffathon: the family learned of his niece's fate Monday night, hours after the explosion.
Relatives gathered at a morgue to claim the bodies of their loved ones. Construction workers on balconies overlooking it paused to take part. Red and white carnations lay outside the Jesus station gleaming in the daylight cum-speckled false teeth and several candles burned in the Spanish capital while Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero had some paperwork to do at the café, the package of weakened weekend incentives meant to wean him off enrichment.
Russia and China were contemplating sending high-level officials to Wednesday's meeting to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels for use in the fissile cores of nuclear warheads. A blockade on the shipping of refined oil. Solana last month presented the rewards to Larijani but made no mention of the punishments since six flags agreed on the badly bungled bundled promo package insofar as cancerous brain tumours at the age of four marked the end of Annya's childhood peddling nuclear power to thousands of children worldwide.
Two Greenpeace climbers scaled the ceiling above the speaker's podium holding banners warning future generations about the existence of stinky pederasts at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, after nearly 20 years of finicky research (gluing thumbtacks to fold-out chairs and peeing in the communal Tang). It is still not unusual to see an Iraq-war veteran or amputee in an airport claiming the balloting was manipulated and renewing fears of the black planet. The audience he has ordered the army to push forward with efforts to put to rest allegations concerning a "disgraced" Sir Elton J after Portugal knocked him up. Paris Hilton wants blanket wireless Internet coverage of her ass by year’s end, hopes to set up 400 free WiFi access points next year and allow athletes to pry loose her connections and scale her broadbanded golden locks of hay. "We will act fast and firmly...to create the most favorable conditions for Paris," handlers told reporters, Paris scurrying to collect peanut shells behind the bar. “License fees for fiber optic cables would be cut by 25%, tax breaks will rise 90.”
Women no longer have to forage for wood and make themselves vulnerable to attack from the brutal pro-government janjaweed militias. 45 trained volunteers who have fanned out through the region have assured that their racial antipathy is an outgrowth of prison culture and bad diet. There will be no further children: the surgeons also carried out a hysterectomy. The entire community joined at the hip in a radical display of surrogate magic, skinny pirates reliving the moment they were designated cancer-stricken. Land-shore leave never to be the same, no talk of growing up poor and a day pupil and then how first loves were skinned and then fried just like chicken. The Deep South was never really going to work out as far as Darwinists called it. Fine motor skills, reaction time, and visual attention not so hot. Investigators are attempting to locate the birth farm and provide the basis needed. No parts of democracy's carcass entered either the human or animal feed systems. It had no effect on their likelihood of seeing the gorilla-costumed woman, indicating that even having one stiff drink can make you blind drunk trouble waiting to happen like being shot once in the chest and once in the arm. Military-supply specialists at a U.S. base in Iraq not officially at war, just looking for a quiet crater to sit back in and get their St. Ides on real quiet.
Two groups of tourists were robbed at gunpoint on the National Mall. A 17-year-old woman was sexually assaulted by a Shiite and a Sunni television because they incite Kurdish-ruled HIV prevention sectarianism day and night. Screening everyone between the ages of 14 and 84 for wordvirus. The University of Alabama's Center for Television Research in Birmingham can also send alerts to mobile phone users and computers’ beaconing cones, moving a cursor on a screen down the spinal cord and out to the limbs, emergency oxygen masks at the overhaul base at Kansas City International. The potential for the catastrophic mishap is there like the FAA is there, the shotgun blast on a hunting trip that accidentally wounded a companion. Putin's caustic response underlines the tensions that exist between the United States and Russia as they have staged these get-togethers, foreign policy crises redoubling backwardness and non-freedom in tandem. Gorbachev found a Rumsfeld. They are just hawks protecting sparrows. A nonpartisan forum is by nature a niche medium like "Where's the Beef?" Leaving the watercooler holdovers to explore the thinking behind employee hush money. The president decides whether to grant clemency after a recommendation by the justice minister who had been unmarred by any whiff of scandal said they were to slash up to 50 jobs trying to restructure their editorial operations, continuing to keep soldiers around the world fed up to $1.2 billion in turkeyneck. Contractors in Iraq have been one of the defining features of the American New. Private companies called on for duties as varied as guarding supply convoys and crack cocaine, a digital scale, and packaging materials line the many rooms. Cocco remains under house arrest while he awaits sentencing. Israeli jets bombed the Chancellor at a joint press conference with Bush. Hezbollah from Nahariya told reporters that even Northern Command had come under Katyusha fire, the Lebanese government completely responsible, reminding us that Israel is not at war with Lebanon but at a "high volume crisis,” as a new reality beyond language has been created on the
northern border.
Ken Lay, who was 64, died while vacationing in Colorado on July 5, just six weeks after a jury convicted him and former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling of conspiracy and fraud and Jesus Christ said his name would be cleared. A chicken in Kazakh has laid an egg with the word "Allah" inscribed on its shell. The tunnel ceiling would be suspended over people's heads for decades to come. The drop ceiling was mainly cosmetic, concealing the Lord from the drivers below, just like The Six Million Dollar Man always said while skiing the friendly skies. Neural activity from the motor cortex of the brain kicking up neurotransmitter dust signals from the implant. Decoded. Processed by a computer. Killed seven family members in Indonesia, scientists not sure of their significance.





Signed, Mabuse the Everlovin'



Saturday, November 2, 2019

Summer 1973

June: SPECTRE, the truncated four-hour-fifteen minute version of Jacques Rivette's twleve hour 1971 Blazacian conspiracy opus OUT 1 plays the Internationales Forum des Jungen Films in Berlin. July: Harry Matthews claims to have witnessed Natalia Makarova fall on her ass during a production of SWAN LAKE, the central event of a new Paris Opera Ballet festival known as Les Nuits du Louvre. August: with the support of the Christian Democrats and National Party members, the Chamber of Deputies passes 81–47 a resolution that asks "the President of the Republic, Ministers of State, and members of the Armed and Police Forces" to "put an immediate end" to "breach[es of] the Constitution . . . with the goal of redirecting government activity toward the path of Law and ensuring the Constitutional order of our Nation, and the essential underpinnings of democratic co-existence among Chileans."

Monday, December 31, 2018

Secret Society of Sacred Images

Bread. Bread and butter. Worshipful nourishment. Some things start bare and obvious as a nose.

A poetics. A poetics of acquiescence. There is a hole through which it all pours. Up. As plants rise in the direction of the sun.






Contact high in proximity to martyrs. The two of us, she and I, our tea steeping. And the Owl of Minerva gazing on. Not necessary to verbalize between us this shared sense that when we worship what we worship primarily are sacred agonies.




So long sleep. You were an aberration, an evolutionary hiccup. Relayed in from some Henry James telenovela, The Eternal Unwanted Gentleman Caller awaits the kiss of the axe blade. They have set him up at the Sheraton. Continental breakfast and continental wreckage. Does this town have but the one newspaper? No matter. The news is all bad. Been saying it all along. If time is fundamentally "horror-spreading," our collective acceleration wasn't destined to be pretty.



  
The time of the groupuscule was a time of dream revelry and pirates. Under the paving stones, the beach. Though no man is an island it was always in the interests of The Conspiracy that he convince himself he is. Ideally: every upstart an artist like van Gogh born to an out-of-the-way Asylum, assailed by rays. Talk of solidarity is so much mashed potatoes. All the kids who subsequently grew up reading Pynchon in the suburbs as though in curious camps of internement. And what of the singularity? Clearly God can only make one Juliet Berto.




The undersigned would like to present himself as public witness to the power of the encounter, suspecting (perhaps merely hoping) that it could well benefit those more or less neutralized by despair and stagnation to be reminded that on any given day, no matter how immiserating the slough in which one finds oneself, there is the possibility of striking up a casual conversation that shifts the axes and alters the gradients so entirely that forever thereafter once will be able to look back clearly and decisively upon a turning point.




Have the last fifty years worth of reports of cinema's death been an "exaggeration" in the manner of the May, 1897 announcement of Mark Twain's? All I know is that nobody goes to the cinema because everybody is a creep.




 Even as a young man, baroque freewheeling autodidact Looney Tunes chemical spill that I was, and well before I had even the faintest idea that I was destined for monasticism, the priests of twentieth century literature and cinema were my fraternity. Something about alienation enhanced by vestments and I-can-barely devotion. I adore and admire nothing quite so much as a priest who somehow keeps standing like an utterly exhausted boxer in the double-digit rounds. Of all the seemingly uncharacteristic things one might not expect me to love, the only thing I love more than a quiescent, suffering priest is freshly unretired Swedish pop star Robyn. Robyn and her "emeralds on the pavement."




Youth is beautiful because the young have not yet been inured to the stultifying bullshit that predominates in our institutional and interpersonal arrangements. Youth is tragic because in aggregate the young very quickly will become so inured. Even when they were beautiful they were already dumb, mean, vain.





It has been said that form is the inhuman, God-like dimension of art. In both the workaday world and in the work of art, form is founded in the play of difference, and difference is spawned more or less by inexhaustible variations in paints and technique. That being said, all creatures pull from the same tempestuous well of feeling.


Signed,
Ensign Acéphale


Thursday, October 26, 2017

La captive


In August of last year I published a piece on this blog entitled "L-U-V," in which I digressed at length on concepts of love and desire as latent to a number of eminent cinematic works. In this winding series of textual analyses and high-minded expostulations I at one point made passing mention of Chantal Akerman's La captive (2000), her adaptation of Proust's La prisonnière (volume six of his À la recherche du temps perdu.) I called Proust's book "the finest work of fiction we have on the subject of a woman held in a man's captivity" (which may be overstating it) and Akerman's loose adaptation as one of the greatest films of all time (which is not overstating it), suggesting that the agenda of the piece I was then in the process of writing did not provide me with an opportunity to go on about La captive therein the way it ought to be gone on about. Akerman's film truly is one of my very favourites. It is also very much a fundamental text on the subject of desire (and ultimately, perhaps, on love). It tells the story of Simon (rendered by the stoic and moribund Stanislas Merhar) and his obsessive, self-destructive relationship with his cagey and enigmatic live-in girlfriend Ariane (as rendered by the mousy and fleet Sylvie Testud). They live together with Simon's grandmother, the seldom-seen matriarch who nominally rules over the well-appointed apartment, speaking as the place does to a kind of old-world old-money luxury. (The apartment is constantly being traversed by bustling laborers, demarcating it as some kind of provisional space.) Simon himself seemingly has no ancillary professional-type responsibilities to keep him from following Ariane on her daily journeyings and fussing about her more generally. He also routinely interrogates her friends, as though almost willing into existence some troubling revelation. The extremely curious erotic life of Simon and Ariane (who normally sleep in separate rooms) is primarily represented in two scenes where Simon performs a kind of miserable frottage on her person whilst she provisionally feigns sleep. The notion that the title of the film refers to Ariane, which we would almost certainly at first assume it does, is continually problematized by the fact she is clearly in some way getting something out of this relationship. There is a kind of unspoken psychosexual agreement here, as there would be between consenting individuals in a properly demarcated sadomasochistic relationship, with its roles and intensive relations rigorously established. What is clear is that Ariane is free to go at any time. Indeed, towards the end she is explicitly invited (or rather ordered) to do so. At her reluctance. (The injunction is rescinded.) Simon's obsessive possessiveness and neurotic paranoia hardly seem to faze her. Just as she feigns sleep in capitulation to some fantasmatic arrangement when Simon rubs up against her, she likewise feigns doe-like innocence and perplexity in the face of Simon's endless interrogations and badgerings. It becomes evident that Simon is perhaps a captive to his own debasing desire far more than Ariane ever has been or will be. He exerts no physical authority over her. He does not treat her violently, nor physically attempt to circumscribe her movements (for the most part), fuss and worry over them though he does. Simon is trapped in Heidegger's eddy. He cannot come to any acceptance regarding the lack of fixity and deep impenetrability of the object of desire, the beloved Other. Simon is a feminized figure. Where he would exert phallic authority or domain, he continually comes up against his own powerlessness and symbolic castration. It is telling that what primarily fuels his consuming paranoia is the fear not that Ariane will leave him for another man but rather that her secret desire is not only to hook up with another woman but to literally be subsumed in a net of Sapphic desire that Simon sees rivening the world he traverses from beneath its surface (or from behind it). Not only is Simon himself divested of phallic agency, he operates in fear that the world in which his desire circulates is one in which the phallus has been commandingly disavowed in toto. Simon ultimately fears that his gender, which ultimately hardly suits him, is a profound redundancy. Akerman has said that when she began to adapt the Proust she had a fairly workable sense of what the text was saying. When she had finished the screenplay, however, she found she no longer had a handle on what the film she was making in fact was. She says she expected that shooting and cutting the film would resolve all this, but once postproduction was complete she still found the film profoundly opaque. I would agree that part of what makes the film so utterly extraordinary an experience is that, considered alongside its superlative formal rigour and aesthetic glory, it holds the spectator at something of a remove. There are things behind things here that never reveal themselves, just as the desired Other within the film herself becomes walled-off and no less compulsively compelling for all that. I have always identified deeply with Akerman as an artist because of how she grapples with the modern problem par excellence: alienation. Ariane paraphrases to Simon in the back of his luxury car, as they are chauffeured about, something she has read recently in a book: "choice, desire, fear, and death," she says, "leave men and women face to face alone." Simon and Ariane represent two modes of operating in relation to standing face to face alone with the Other. Simon represents the preeminent figure of literary modernism: he suffers, obsesses, and drives himself to distraction with denaturing existential dread. Ariane, on the other hand, seems lithe and at ease, playful, untroubled. Akerman's work has often, to my mind, served to draw us a map from dire existential alienation to untroubled play. As such she has always struck me as one of the most down-to-brass-tacks useful artists at least some of whose life coincided with mine. There is almost no denying, however, that as exemplary a model as Akerman presents us in the guise of Ariane, the director's primary identification here is with Simon. When I say that this film directed by a woman, photographed by another woman, and edited by yet another woman primarily identifies itself with the perspective of a man who seeks to mercilessly control and possess a woman, it is important to remember that we are talking about a man who is central to a mobilized libidinal economy which in all its constituent parts ultimately serves to disavow the phallus. Akerman is obviously herself aware of much of the academic discourse on film to have emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with its grounding in psychoanalytic discourse. Scholars like Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz have gone to considerable length to gender the apparatus of traditional cinema itself as male. Akerman plays off this at the beginning of the film. La captive begins with footage shot on Super 8 of Ariane and a group of young women frolicking on a beach at what we will later come to find out is Normandy. The young women self-consciously orient the (what will prove to be erotically weighted) spectacle of their filiation explicitly for the camera. We cut to Simon manning a film projector, slowing the film, rewinding it, fussing over it. The first word he says is "Je ..." before he trails off, then repeats the word. Akerman is very consciously framing the film we are about to watch around this conjunction between the cinematic apparatus, the male protagonist, and the enunciation of the first person pronoun. Akerman as enunciating author-function as expressed by the text becomes very explicitly conjoined in scopic filiation with Simon. (The film's fixation with the scopic and the obsessional, it bears noting, is reflected in the debt it pays to Hitchcock, especially its explicit oft-discussed invocation of Vertigo (1958) in the virtuoso stalking sequences.) There are not many instances in cinema where a director has this explicitly married his or her point of identification with a protagonist. Simon walks up to the screen and reaches out to Ariane's image, a gulf between them, an integument. Ariane enters the picture as a productive figure of schism and disruption. One of the primary ways she does this is through her voice. The voice of Ariane is, in fact, one of the great voices in all of cinema. Wanting to write about Ariane's voice, I took it upon myself to read my copy, sitting around unread for ever-so-long, of The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema by Kaja Silverman. According to Silverman, there are three ways the female voice in dominant cinema is made to bear the mark of her own castration as well as the castration of the male, which is forcibly displaced onto her. Silverman is a Lacanian, so what we are talking about is castration beyond the Freudian penile concern; this is the castration experienced by the putative subject as it transfers from the mirror phase into the realm of the symbolic by virtue of introduction into language and discourse, thus being divested of its previous integrated wholeness (symbolic castration). Silverman sees the female voice made to bear the brunt of castration by virtue of: 1) the voice being further recessed into the diegesis (the contained world represented in the film), by virtue, for example, of having the voice originate from a woman confined by a frame within the frame, placed on a stage, or presented on a screen inside the screen; 2) explicit grounding of the female voice in the female body, never allowing it to become expressive of the cinematic apparatus and thus the phallic domain; 3) the situation of this voice in a context where it becomes held up to heightened scrutiny (such as the context wherein a woman speaks with an analyst or therapist). In other instances the female voice becomes an analogue for the enveloping maternal voice through which the child first identifies itself in the pre-symbolic domain. I would insist that Ariane's voice (which is essentially, of course, the voice of actress Sylvie Testud) performs a radical function anterior to anything Silverman covers. And when we speak of Ariane's voice we must speak of her singing. Ariane is, of course, as already hinted at, emblematic of visual recessing within the diegesis from the first images of the film on. We first see her on a screen within a screen. A screen, no less, lorded over by Simon. Again and again Ariane is visually recessed, contained. What her voice is doing, however, from the moment we first hear it, is superseding that visual containment and indeed implicitly representing her as uncontainable. The first couple times we hear her sing she does so nominally from within the diegesis but as a voice-off, that is from off-screen. Sound is always less constrained than the visual. When I think of sound I always think of that most exemplary of sound films, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956). In Bresson's film, the protagonist Fontaine builds his escape from prison first with his ears. His ears are free to wander the corridors whilst his eyes remain locked in his cell. Ariane's voice not only breaks free from the confines of recessed or prison-like space, reaching out into spaces where she cannot be seen, but it likewise escapes from her. (It is worth noting that the walls of the apartment seem extremely porous, sound constantly bleeding.) It goes without saying that in the particular alienated world we have already seen established that nothing is more invisible or problematic (for Simon and by extension this particular iteration of the cinematic apparatus) as the Other's interiority. Ariane, recessed though she may be within the diegesis, does not bear the brunt of Simon's symbolic castration, rather she violently confronts him with it. She sings to Simon his lack. Music from within the diegesis of La captive generally has a tendency to explode out of the movie, one of many forces constantly destabilizing Simon's world and disrupting the apparatus of containment that would have Ariane remain docile and pliable (or asleep, as she pretends to be in the only two sex acts depicted in the film). It is indeed during her purported singing lessons that Simon is most worried that Ariane is involved in lesbian dalliances. Singing becomes conceptualized as a libidinal domain of feminine crypto-exchange. The central set-piece of the movie speaks to this. It is one of my favourite set-pieces in all cinema, ever-so-brief though it is. One night as Simon leaves the apartment building, he hears Ariane, framed recessively in a window above him, begin to sing an aria from Così fan tutti. She is soon joined in a duet by a woman in an adjacent building, singing herself from behind barred windows. This piece of music with its decisive lesbian connotations, sung by two women visually pinned, figuratively imprisoned, within visual space, disrupting as it does a whole regime of containment, far from forcing the two vocalists to bear the mark of castration, produces an anarchic fissure, localizing lack and powerlessness decisively in the conceptual space formerly occupied by the phallus and the Law of the Father (to wax psychoanalytic). It is in this context that a would-be captor becomes captive. Desire, a wound, torment. A whirlpool. It would seem that Simon's efforts to finally release Ariane, in effect an attempt to love her, are primarily conducted in order to release himself from his captivity. Unfortunately, though in a way that I find edifying and cathartic, without giving too much away, it all ends in the whirlpool. Akerman has found a perfect actor in Stanislas Merhar. Instead of coming off crazed, he simply seems very, very sad.                


 

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Gertrud

So I offer a favourite dish. Garlanded w/ harbinger. Like a little panther would be. Is.

There is maybe the relenting, the crystalline gaze. Maybe the relenting. Door frame.

Sudden realization of guide status. Stipulated by the proffered dish.

To point the way to the bank, from the bow, a destiny laid out like a scrim of mist.

Words might be useful. Past evidence that they can be. So: the right words then.

I would subsequently become as Gertrud w/ her hearth. But more elated. I would like to imagine.

Passion should not depend on the making fit of the parts that we would have had fit.

Youth. Shudder. I would take it and hold it up and try to sing. A dirge. A flagrant elegy.

Banjo funeral. Two banjos. His and hers. No jangling platitudes. Hoarfrost and mystic shine.

Winter is my labial deposit. Rest me in the ember, amidst dying logs, sated.

I want to show a woman to a destiny in which I have no part. I might feel good about it.

I want to watch from an Irish seaside cliff. There might be binoculars. Ha. God, what a fool.

So permafrost. All the particulars. I would offer myself up to solitude and the right kind of work.
Have had done. I should say have had done. Such pleasure in the dust and doings, alone.

September. 2016. Calgary




Thursday, August 18, 2016

L-U-V


But who ... who will always send you white roses
on your birthday now? The vase will be empty, the little
breath of my life that blew around you once a year will
die away as well! Beloved, listen, I beg you ... it is the first
and last thing I ask you ... do it for me every year on your
birthday, which is a day when people think of themselves - 
buy some roses and put them in a vase.
- Stefan Zweig, "Letter from an Unknown Woman"


and in that knowledge he sensed a tenderness / lying there like the whole of creation.
 - Rilke, "From the Life of a Saint"
   




David Foster Wallace once noted that when we think about killing ourselves, most of us reflexively think of shooting ourselves in the head (he, of course, hung himself, but I tend to think of this as a matter of desperation and available resources). Indeed it is the thinking that torments - especially, pace Heidegger, when it eddies, when it doubles back habitually on itself, when it refuses, pace Nietzsche, to have done with what ought be considered dealt with. Who could blame us for - at our worst, when the chips are down - considering taking out the computer? Even the gravest of physical infirmities is compounded, made all the worse, by our having to think, exasperatingly, unto death, from within it. And grieving is a matter of thinking. When we observe animals in a state of grief - the mother grieving her dead or missing cubs, for example - I cannot help but conclude that we are also observing something like evidence of something like thinking. We cannot have done with the loved one who has moved on or passed away. Perhaps it is a place or a whole entire life-within-our-own-life (a microlife - that time we lived in Boston, say, or that time we lived with Veronica, who is now married to a dentist in Vancouver) that we grieve. It is not only an inability to have done with what ought be considered dealt with, but, as is popularly understood, an inability to let go. My central concern for some time has been with domains of love and domains of desire. A question is raised: is this inability to let go a problem related to love or to desire? My answer may seem surprising. When letting go becomes a problem, it is always as a matter of desire, precisely because letting go was always at-least-partially-consciously built into love in the first place. As always, desire is perhaps central to my world even at a cosmological level. Indeed, my tendency is to take Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire and stretch it into a teleology. I will reduce my whole world at its most essential to drives, flows, coursings, intensities, excitations. Desire. Desire desiring to go where desiring desires to go. And when we desire - when I desire - at its basis this is tantamount to a compulsion to devour, possess (even if in the context of radical instability), go after, and draw into my coursing that which it would please me to have join me. When I desire something - truly, madly, beyond reason, for the sake of having it, simply because I desire it - all at once I find space and time an obstacle. And though I do not understand space and time, not adequately comprehending advanced physics, I nonetheless know I am creaturily beholden to them. By the time I find myself desiring something or someone, both myself and the object of desire are already moving, already changing, and somewhere right away it is breaking my fucking heart. This is the core of the bittersweet in Sappho and Anne Carson. And there is always the threat that we will be driven mad by the fact that nothing can ever be possessed. Both love and desire are grappling with finitude and the insatiable. The difference is that love - adult love - knows it and is founded on it. Love is, above all, a matter of comportment in relation to desire. Love has struck me for a long time as a monumentally complicated set of concepts about which we are habitually lazy - we say "I love you" and mean all kinds of goddamn things - and for some time I thought I understood it best, paradoxically, having grown up a staunch atheist, in relation to the supplicant's love before God. And I had my ideal supplicant. It was Jeanne d'Arc. More to the point, it was Jeanne as represented in two movies, Carl Theodor Dreyer's La passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Robert Bresson's Procès de Jeanne d'Arc. Jeanne is the supplicant. She gets on her knees, having devoted herself to faith and service, and asks to be shown the way. When she sees that the way is toward an unimaginably awful death, she finds her way through anguish and terror to acceptance and surrender. Supplication and surrender also exist in romantic love. We supplicate by giving ourselves to the beloved and asking that he or she give his or herself to us as well. We surrender by acknowledging finitude; that we are already losing one another. Devotion is always a giving of ourselves that has to end. Ideally it would end cleanly in surrender and acceptance. It seldom does. Our brains and our desire upend us. We want to cradle the object of desire for an infinite moment that will never recede, and that is the root of our folly. The supplicant. Is the ultimate amorous mimesis for Jeanne on her knees in prayer not the suitor on his knees proposing marriage? But marriage. It seems like an institution more suited to the corrupting influence of phallic desire than to the reification of love (as a concept, if not necessarily as a social practice). After all, institutions exist in order to regulate anarchic forces, and in the case of marriage what is often being explicitly regulated is female sexuality. It is not only a phallic institution, but originally a feudal one, involving a trade in young people. A marriage is a thing in which a great many women could be said to have found themselves confined, and it is very much a characteristic of phallic desire that it seeks to confine. The finest work of fiction we have on the subject of a woman held in a man's captivity is Proust's The Prisoner, the section of In Search of Lost Time in which Albertine is held hostage by the narrator Marcel's paranoid jealousy. (Chantal Akerman adapted The Prisoner as La captive in 2000, and it is very much as far as I am concerned one of the very greatest films ever made, but I would be diverting my course even further if I were to go on about it (as it ought to be gone on about).) It is notable that no novelist has anatomized this state of affair more masterfully than Proust, precisely because it is Proust, along with Rilke, who has written most eloquently of love as something transitory that occurs, and occurs with an unparallelled capacity to move us, between two people who happen to be passing in separate directions. Suffice it to say that phallic desire is always trying to put the bodies that excite it in confinement. Marriage can be a metaphor or symbol for such confinement, but the cinema effortlessly offers bolder and more unforgiving ones. There is of course the cold and cruel castle of terrors Pasolini translates from de Sade into fascist Italy by way of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, where the profanation and desecration of beautiful young bodies becomes an almost-unthinkable comedy of fascism-as-impotence. An even better example, and far less frequently discussed, is Alain Robbe-Grillet's Successive Slidings of Pleasure, where Anicée Alvina plays a sexualized prisoner, potential perpetrator of a kinky lesbian sex murder, who serves as a wildly unstable object of desire for all of the men (and, you know, nuns or whatever) in the film - indeed sex object before the capital-S State itself. She cannot be contained precisely because she continues to assert her own twisted sexuality in captivity and because as long as she remains a part of the erotic equation, we are promised a world of chaos and entropy. There are scenes where she is covered in red paint and leaves sanguine prints of her own body on the white walls. We are given a reenactment of the anthropometries of Yves Klein. But red, not blue. Red like menstrual blood. Red like the blood that is not on Lady Macbeth's hands but nonetheless is (which is very different from saying 'the blood that Lady Macbeth hallucinates she has on her hands'). The investigators and the bumbling sleuths, the captors as well, embody phallic desire. The woman and the crime, the site of meaning in a world that refuses to cohere to a regime of meaning, is the feminine. This is a film about a sick and distorted phallic desire, but also about resistance to it; emancipatory sexuality, forces that destabilize. The appeal for me is purely erotico-political. This stuff, though it may titillate or radicalize or both, cannot make me cry. Love can make me cry. Love in the movies can make me cry. And the best part about love in the movies is that it can do so without threatening to destroy my desiring mind. Real life can offer me no such promise. When I try to love in my own life, my thinking can occasionally go off the fucking rails. I usually start thinking about love and desire, as I think about most important things, from a peaceful and abstracted place. I woke up one morning last week. Peaceful. I immediately found myself thinking of Hitchcock's Notorious. I think about Notorious now and then. And when I think about Notorious, I think about the kiss. If you can even call it a kiss. The embrace, kissing and talking ... the stupor. I remember a dream I had a number of years ago. It left a significant imprint upon my psyche. In the dream I met a woman. It had been a long time since I had felt safe giving myself over to a relationship in waking life, but in this dream I was in this new glorious relationship, and I was full of unimaginable elation and purpose. We were to be married. At the wedding I spoke to my beloved and her female friend about Hitchcock. I asked them what their favourite Hitchcock was. They both named a Hitchcock movie that does not actually exist in real life. I told them, the happiest moment in my life, that my favourite was Notorious, because: the kiss. Years later I awake, again thinking about the kissing. Of course, this kissing happens on a hotel balcony and in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro, where the Olympics happened to be occurring at that very moment. I had to throw the movie on to appease myself. We first meet Alicia Huberman, a circumspect, guarded, and composed woman, played by the luminescent Ingrid Bergman, as an American judge is passing sentence upon her Nazi father. When we next see her she is drunk and getting drunker, holding court at home with a bevy of guests, letting her guard down. One of her guests is a stranger: Devlin, as rendered by Cary Grant. When Alicia meets Devlin her guard is down, she is drunk, and though she is immediately clearly attracted to this man, she was already in a kind of swoon. The protracted kiss later in the film is also a kind of yielding swoon. It was apparently shot the way it was - the kiss being interrupted for bits of dialogue, the lovers moving from the balcony into the hotel room - because the production code had rules about how long a couple could kiss uninterrupted, and Hitchcock merely found a way to sustain these insane sexual pyrotechnics for as long as possible. It remains truly one of the greatest set-pieces in all cinema. It should be noted, however, that what we are watching is of course primarily desire rather than love. Desire doesn't only desire to possess, desire can also desire to capitulate, to yield. What is remarkable about Bergman's yielding swoon, however, is that it is so heartbreaking and moving. It were as though she were breaking through something substantial, in a kind of sustained amorous inebriation, in order to finally give of herself. Perhaps, then, there is something of love in this. This giving. And then the story has her in a sense martyr herself. Devlin is a secret agent working for American intelligence and he suddenly finds himself having to persuade Alicia, for whom he is falling, to infiltrate a group of Nazi conspirators in Rio in order to subvert their plans. To do so she must marry one of the members. A sham marriage. Alicia concedes, not because of some deep political conviction, but ultimately because of a kind of giving that has been rudely set off course. Implicit in this is the knowledge that what she and Devlin had on that balcony in Rio was something transitory, but something that will always have mattered, and will always inform what is to come. Here the subject of love enters the picture. Eventually Devlin will rescue Alicia from her faux husband and mother-in-law's plot to poison her, the ruse having been uncovered, and this time Devlin will heroically carry Alicia out of the lair of Nazis draped in his arms like a bride over the threshold. Alicia is basically dying at this point and is unquestionably in full swoon. Although Notorious is a total masterpiece, it strikes me as unsatisfactory as an investigation of love. It has something of love to it, though: desire + mutual aid (plus the characters are at times admirably prepared to give one another space, something love by necessity absolutely permits). This giving that love entails: how shall we elucidate it? I remember seeing Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty when it came out in 1996. I was a teenager. I really didn't care that much for the movie, but I recall even now being tremendously struck by a line declared by one of the actresses: I remember it explicitly as "there is no love; there is only proof of love." The line hit me hard. Interestingly enough, Bertolucci's next feature, 1998's Besieged, was explicitly about that sentiment, and it was a movie that meant a lot to me. The internet attributes the "there is no love; there are only proofs of love" quote to both Pierre Reverdy and Jean Cocteau, but I can swear I remember reading an interview with Bertolucci around at the time of Besieged, where, mentioning the quote, he says he got the line from Pasolini. Besieged, if it is about love, is about love as a selfless giving without hope of reward. Dedication. David Thewlis's Jason is prepared to give Thandie Newton's Shandurai, who is nominally his maid, anything to show her his love. This ultimately includes rescuing her husband from political imprisonment in Africa, and returning him to her. The ultimate "proof of love" in cinema, however, would have to be the central, organizing letter in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Max Ophüls's 1948 Hollywood film is an adaptation of Stefan Zweig's incredibly powerful work of short fiction (really somewhere between short story and novella) of the same name. The letter in the movie is the central object (object of proof) within the work as well as the central organizing agent of the narrative. In Zweig's prose piece it is the bulk of the text itself. This is a rare example of a film adaptation improving upon the already-masterful prose piece it adapts (the other example I can think of at this moment is Cronenberg's Crash). The reason the film is superior is actually because the vision is more encompassing and dense, but also because the feelings and the sentiment are writ upon flesh and in the gaze. Absence is physically powerful. The "incorporeal and passionate" woman of the prose fiction, becomes a living ghost and heartrending after-image (in both the Zweig and the Ophüls, which diverge in so many ways, we are to understand that this letter was written by a woman who is deceased by the time it is read). The letter is a proof, testament to a love - a consummate, devout, and consuming love, born of impossible-seeming (even monstrous) desire - about which the man who is reading the letter, and is its intended recipient, remained unaware the entire time it coursed through his world. I have always thought that alcohol is an unspoken agent in this story. I think of the man who receives the letter (R., a famous novelist, in the Zweig, Stefan Brand, a famous composer, in the Ophüls movie) as a heedless libertine who has failed to recognize the woman who loves him the two times she has reentered his life, not only because of the abundance of lovers he has had, but because his life has been lived in inebriation and dissipation. Regardless, it is the letter of a dead woman that opens his eyes to a profound devotion to which he was blind. The movie again is far more powerful because it ends with Stefan Brand deciding to offer himself up to likely death in a duel with an it-is-said-extremely-adept-in-such-matters gentleman that he had originally intended to avoid - a mortal responsibility he had sought to shirk. The only way Brand can do justice to the revelation he has experienced, and the love which now informs his life, is to offer up that life in somnolent capitulation. In the movie we see in love the passage toward two deaths. However, the Zweig prose piece does something better than the movie (apart from refusing to sanitize the level of debasement to which the letter-writer allows herself to sink in service to the amorous object): it demonstrates more directly that the the love of the woman for the man to whom she writes is born of a desire and a pursuit which is actually deeply aberrant and totally fucked up. Indeed if love exists here in the giving and in the farewell, there is a twisted and self-destructive desire implicit throughout in the silent pursuit and the overwhelming pining existence to which the woman has subjected herself. There is something else I love in the Zweig: the white roses. The writer of the letter has been buying R. white roses every year on his birthday, just like the white rose he has no recollection of having given her on their first night together lo those many years before. She implores R to continue buying himself roses on his birthday as homage to the love that now newly informs his world. A gift, then, a proof, that refuses to stop giving, to stop proving, for the duration of R.'s life. Though those we love are passing away from us, they will have always been there. We remain ghosts, traces, proofs, even when both parties have been extinguished as living beings, as desiring consciousness in flow. What of lasting reciprocal love? What are we to make of it? Where are we to find it? Not in Letter from an Unknown Woman, of course. There are not a lot of movies about lasting amorous relationships that can make me cry. But there is at least one, and it is one that when I announce my abiding passion for I tend to be met met with incredulous perplexity in my interlocutors. It is David Fincher's F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation (the original was decidedly not a great work of literature) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie I hold to be the greatest love story in recent memory - indeed one of the greatest ever. Benjamin (remarkably rendered by Brad Pitt) is aging backwards, that is from old man to little boy. Benjamin expresses the core tragedy of his predicament when he asserts that he is "getting younger, all alone." He is. But we are each of of us getting older on our own. Ideally we experience transitory and deep connection during that time. Benjamin's is a biological reversal, but in fascinating ways it also informs how he develops mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. His love for Daisy, then, which he carries with him for most of his life, is a love complicated by what Daisy herself calls "kismat." This is fate as compromised by incongruent realities. Because the couple are aging in opposite directions, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button offers a unique distillation of the idea of lovers on separate trajectories (though we absolutely mustn't forget that all lovers are on such trajectories). Indeed it is in the middle that true amorous reciprocity exists. Daisy herself says it: though they have always loved one another, they have spent most of their lives unable to be together, and they are "meeting in the middle." Part of what is so moving about this movie to me as I enter my late thirties, is that it presents middle age as the ideal time for romantic love (how many Hollywood movies do that !?!). Death hovers over all love. Over all desire as well, though desire I find often seeks to dispel this fact. Benjamin is reared in a halfway house for senior citizens approaching death. Death is an ever-present fixture in his early life. It is one of the residents of the house who first lays out the conditions of love for him: "We’re meant to lose the people we love," she avers, "how else would we know how important they are to us?" But the love will always have been loved. It remains imprinted on the spirit of the All, it leaves its ghosts, traces, and proofs. And it is carried to the grave by the second one to arrive there. Desire in many cases does a serviceable job of momentarily replicating the infinite moment it seeks to entrench, perhaps in a single embrace (as upon the balcony in Notorious, a balcony to which I cannot stop returning). And art.  Great art itself approximates immortality. This is represented slyly in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. There is a moment after Benjamin returns from World War Two and reconnects with Daisy. Together they look at Rudyard Kipling's Old Man Kangaroo at five in the afternoon, from a book that meant something to them when they were very little and their love was something all together far more impossible. The image on the page remains the same. It always will. They do not. They encounter it from the standpoint of two distinct new vantages. These are two people alone together on their separate trajectories, catching their curious reflection in the river of time. That is love.

                        
Old Man Kangaroo