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Tentatively, A Convenience
Goodreads Author
Born
in Baltimore, The United States
Website
Genre
Influences
YOU & them
Member Since
October 2007
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/tentativelyaconvenience
My name is "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE". It is NOT "Tentatively, A Convenience". The completely disrespectful push for conformity is on. Such 'normalization' of my spelling, wch I've been using since 1979, is a symptom of what I call "AU", Artificial Unintelligence - both that of algorithms wch can't possibly cope w/ the human imagination & that of robopathic humans - say the type of person who studied creative writing w/ a professor who isn't a creative writer & who isn't published. This type of person then proceeds to learn 'how to be creative' in a completely uncreative way & goes on to not be a creative writer or to be published either but to still be convinced that they're qualified to edit actual published actual creative writers. Tha My name is "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE". It is NOT "Tentatively, A Convenience". The completely disrespectful push for conformity is on. Such 'normalization' of my spelling, wch I've been using since 1979, is a symptom of what I call "AU", Artificial Unintelligence - both that of algorithms wch can't possibly cope w/ the human imagination & that of robopathic humans - say the type of person who studied creative writing w/ a professor who isn't a creative writer & who isn't published. This type of person then proceeds to learn 'how to be creative' in a completely uncreative way & goes on to not be a creative writer or to be published either but to still be convinced that they're qualified to edit actual published actual creative writers. That's a form of regrettably delusional behavior fostered in them by their inability to educate themselves outside of potty training.
Alas, some GoodReads fiend has removed my date of death! I had it as "September 3, 1953" - before my date of birth so that my death won't happen in my lifetime. Some humorless GR person must want me to die. Foo on them.
OTHERWISE, please read this extensive interview w/ me by poet/essayist Alan Davies as part of "Otoliths 27" ( http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/20... ). It's a DOOZY, I promise. It'll also hopefully be published as a small & cheap bk
ALSO, my friend Anthony Levin-Decanini has started an excellent new (as of mid 2013) improvising series called "Crucible Sound" in Pittsburgh at Modernformations Gallery & I was honored by his interviewing me regarding improv for his relevant blog. I quite like the interview & I hope you do too. Here's the link for part 1:
http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...
& the link for part 2:
http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...
I hope you find it interesting enuf to subscribe to the blog & to check out the other programs. If you're in or nearby Pittsburgh, PLEASE ATTEND THE CRUCIBLE SOUNDS! Things like this don't last forever, but while they do they can be quite lively!!
The photo of me is by my friend Julie Gonzalez. Maybe someday I'll write a bio in here but, in the meantime, I'll just sign w/ some of my email signature:
electronically signed,
He-Who-Has-Written
Amir-ul Kafirs
Some tenuous beginnings of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory):
(for all x)x = (for all x)x (Anything is Anything)
(A Double Negative As Not A Positive)
(A finite quantity represented as a set containing
an infinite quantity of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of rational numbers)
does not equal the same finite quantity
represented as a set containing an infinite quantity
OF A DIFFERENT DEGREE of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of irrational numbers).)
m + n does not equal n + m is isomorphic to x
the ceiling of x is greater than or equal to the ceiling of the ceiling of x
(Enough is Enough)
The Formula of the Origin of the H.M. (Hermaphrodite Mafia):
(S0+S0) = so&so (predicate: 1 + 1 = the free variable so-&-so)
interpretation 01: predicate:
The successor to zero plus the successor to zero
equals the free variable so-&-so.
interpretation 02: predicate:
Parents have produced a child
that transcends their fixed gender status.
Some tenuous beginnings of I.J.T. (Internal Jumbling Technique):
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I go to the Emergency Room. I get the bill.
Tentatively, A Convenience
As far as I 'know', most of these questions have been created by Goodreads staff to stimulate the 'Goodreads authors' to make public statements that m…moreAs far as I 'know', most of these questions have been created by Goodreads staff to stimulate the 'Goodreads authors' to make public statements that may be of interest to people ON Goodreads. That's all well & good. The questions are generic & more or less irrelevant to my actual praxis but that's ok. I aim to please. SO, how DO I deal with writer's block?
1st off, I don't have "writer's block". EVER. Or any other kind of creative block. Why don't we hear about "Composer's Block" or "Pornographer's Block"? Maybe the writers who have writer's block are simply impotent, people w/ no ideas worth translating into texts in the 1st place.
2nd. when I see a writer's block I want to carve it, I want to carve a swan into it & watch it melt. Is that sadistic? I don't think so, the writer's block isn't able to feel pain. Or is it? There's always Hylozoism. Maybe the writer's block is ALIVE! Did you ever think of that you insensitive impotent sniveling writer?!
3rd, when I see the writer's block I wonder whether it's a Rubik's Cube. Maybe I just need to twist those little facets until everything lines up, until everything is 'perfect'. But what wd it say to US if it cd talk? 'Please, STOP, my reactive arthritis is killing me'?
4th, there's always the risk of getting the writer's block PREGNANT. I've known thousands of deadbeat writer's block dads. Sure, they act like they're completely comfortable w/ having knocked up a block, a chip off the old block.. but are they really? Look out for those furtive glimpses at table corners, room corners.. They're thinking of the wee ones.. & that one night stand when they had to PROVE to themselves that they weren't impotent, when they were going to stick it to that writer's block no matter what it took. But did they think further? NooOooOoooOo.. Bad plotting, bad narrative structure, no outlining, no thinking of how-it-wd-all-end. (less)
1st off, I don't have "writer's block". EVER. Or any other kind of creative block. Why don't we hear about "Composer's Block" or "Pornographer's Block"? Maybe the writers who have writer's block are simply impotent, people w/ no ideas worth translating into texts in the 1st place.
2nd. when I see a writer's block I want to carve it, I want to carve a swan into it & watch it melt. Is that sadistic? I don't think so, the writer's block isn't able to feel pain. Or is it? There's always Hylozoism. Maybe the writer's block is ALIVE! Did you ever think of that you insensitive impotent sniveling writer?!
3rd, when I see the writer's block I wonder whether it's a Rubik's Cube. Maybe I just need to twist those little facets until everything lines up, until everything is 'perfect'. But what wd it say to US if it cd talk? 'Please, STOP, my reactive arthritis is killing me'?
4th, there's always the risk of getting the writer's block PREGNANT. I've known thousands of deadbeat writer's block dads. Sure, they act like they're completely comfortable w/ having knocked up a block, a chip off the old block.. but are they really? Look out for those furtive glimpses at table corners, room corners.. They're thinking of the wee ones.. & that one night stand when they had to PROVE to themselves that they weren't impotent, when they were going to stick it to that writer's block no matter what it took. But did they think further? NooOooOoooOo.. Bad plotting, bad narrative structure, no outlining, no thinking of how-it-wd-all-end. (less)
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Footnotes
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How to Write a Resumé - Volume II Making a Good First Impression 2nd edition
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Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory)
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Not Necessarily NOT Very Important
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HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) "Systems Management"
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The Kavyayantra Press Reading Series: "vii"
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Puzzle Writing
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But Not Limited To: (Smattering 1)
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Yet Another Slow-Burning Feast of a Few Months Mischief in the U.K., Maybe (A Partial(ly) Epistolary Account of Non-Non & Non-Participation, Maybe)
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Tentatively, A Convenience (Goodreads Author),
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review of Istvan Kantor's Hero in Art - The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 13-14, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticH... It's often difficult for me to write reviews ( review of Istvan Kantor's Hero in Art - The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 13-14, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticH... It's often difficult for me to write reviews (even though I've written over 1,600 of them). Sometimes I prefer to write reviews of bks that few or no other people will write about. Whether this bk is in that category or not I don't know but I suspect that it is. The author is a former friend of mine who it's easy for me to be hyper-critical of - but I've had some excellent times w/ him too so I try to keep those in mind. The subject of this bk was also a friend of mine, albeit not a close one & only from about 1980 to 1983, after wch I lost touch w/ him. I don't consider Richard Hambleton's life to be 'heroic', I consider it to be tragic. He destroyed his life w/ heroin addiction & his health was further destroyed by scoliosis - something that cd've been prevented if he'd taken better care of himself. I'm originally from Baltimore, a small city only a few hundred miles from New York City where it was common for artists to want to move to New York where they hoped to become famous. However, once they moved to New York it was common for these aspiring artists to find themselves mired in extravagant rents for slum apartments in areas where heroin & cocaine were easly bought & where addiction was much easier to achieve than fame. While there were plenty of amazing cultural things to experience in NYC people cdn't necessarily afford to spend much time enjoying them b/c they'd have to work long hrs at shitty wages just to make ends meet. Richard Hambleton was the only person I know who actually 'made it', who started to sell his artworks for prices that cd get him out of the economic cesspool - but he squandered the money on the addiction he picked up quickly along the way. That's tragedy. There's a foreword by Anthony Haden Guest. He got to know Richard sometime in the '80s. He quotes him: ""This is the first piece of public art I ever did," he told me, holding up a pocket mirror. He said that he had stuck up some mirrors all over Vancouver, including the text: Have You See This Face Before? He put up this work under the name of R. Dick Trace-It" - p 5 Perhaps Hambleton's art cd be divided into 3 phases: Mail Art, "Outdoors Art" (as Hambleton is reputed to've preferred over the more common Street Art or Graffiti), & the "beautiful paintings" (sd to be Turner-esque). I'm only familiar w/ those 1st 2 phases. The above-described use of mirrors is wonderful to me & exemplary of Richard's innovativeness as a guerilla artist. "Image Mass Murder, which he made by drawing chalk outlines on the ground to indicate a murder victim and splashing red paint around it, and which he pulled off in fifteen cities of Canada and the US, had been his first public breakthrough and it is no wonder, as Kantor/Cantsin makes plain, that Richard Hambleton was none too happy when he was categorized as either a graffiti artist or a street artist. "Outdoors art" was his preferred term." - p 6 I, personally, see nothing wrong about the terms "Street Artist" or "Graffitist" but I can appreciate people having their preferred deviant lingo since I do the same. In Kantor's preface he says: "Richard told me, during our very last conversation on Orchard Street in 2015, that he always thought that one day I'd become the head of New York's criminal organization and take control of the city. I guess my early museum interventions and police arrests inspired his mind to come up with this fantasy. At that time, both of us were young and ambitious, with a vivid fantasy of taking over the city and making history ourselves." - p 15 Richard's purported fantasy of Istvan as a crime lord just shows how delusional he was. As for the fantasy of "taking over the city"? I find it hard to relate to such a desire for power but it plays into the author's frequent self-designations as things like "The Leader of the People of the Lower East Side" - a position that, as far as I know, none of the people that he apparently thought he was leading were in any way in support of. In Kantor's acknowledgments he lists me on page 17. I'm grateful for that. In the author's prelude there's this: "He definitely loved towers, tall buildings, and monuments, like the Statue of Liberty, the architecture of the Einstein Tower, or Vladimir Tatlin's design of the never built Monument to the Third International. Inspired by their architecture, he even designed a "Perpetual Tower" that functioned as a cyclic calendar." - p 19 & Richard gave me one of those. It's called "R. Dick Trace It's PERPETUAL CYCLIC CALENDAR To The Year 2000". This object is a cardstock rectangle measuring 3&5/8ths by 9&1/8th inches. On one side there's a graph off to the left that has this explanatory caption: "This perpetual cyclic calendar can be used by you, however it has been specifically designed for the Investigation Department as a functional plan to base a series of works through to the year 2000." On the right there's a blank field intended for writing addresses on so the object can be sent thru the mail. In the upper right there's a black & red image of Hambleton's face w/ "CANADA 2000" underneath it - made to look like a postage stamp. On the flip side is the calendar itself. It has machine-like imagery & near the top there's a screw image that can be pulled upward to align dates on the left w/ days on the right. Hence, Jan & Oct of 79-90 align w/ Sun 7, 14, 21, & 28. All in all, this is a well-made object that has a meticulousness that I associate w/ Richard's early dapper appearance. It appears to've been manufactured rather than hand-made. Near the end of the bk Kantor writes: "It's important to mention that I constructed my manuscript without a need for illustrations, which therefore necessitates the reader's collaborative attention and the use of active imagination, something these days that is usually replaced by bombarding images." - pp 262-263 I find this statement odd for various reasons, one of the most important of wch I'll get into later. The cover has an illustration & there's a portrait of Richard before the author's preface so the bk isn't completely w/o images. My description of the above calendar is all well & good but an image of it wd've been better, IMO. A few other images of selected artworks wd've been helpful too. Istvan/Monty has a picture of Hambleton in his later yrs that wd've been a good illustration too. I have to wonder whether something else is at play - such as 'image rights' owned by a non-cooperating gallery or some such. The preface continues thru a suicide fantasy: "Richard's big plan was to jump from the top of the Empire State Building onto a white canvas, and thus create a painting composed of the imprints of his fallen body, marked by blood stains." - p 22 I don't really romanticize this. As a person whose life has been full of suicidal ideation I, instead, empathize w/ the suffering that wd underpin such a dramatic yearning for self-destruction. There's nothing romantic about suffering, it's just a drag. Kantor put some effort into providing background detail, this enriches the bk for me: "The now-gone building at 337 W. Pender had a fascinating history. It was built in 1906, housed the Dominian Hall that later became the Boilermaker's Hall, and then the Pender Auditorium. In the 1960s, it was the original home of the Afterthought, Vancouver's first psychedelic club. The Grateful Dead played their first Vancouver show there on August 5th, 1966. The Pender Auditorium was originally an old labor hall, with a heroic mural covering the entire east wall, painted by Fraser Wilson, depicting "a view of a worker's waterfront." Richard often stopped in front of this monumental artwork, went close to it, touched it, brushed the image with his hand as he walked towards his office." - p 31 Kantor founded Neoism, or, at least, coined the name, & launched it as such when he performed his "Neoist Chair Action" on May 22, 1979. Since that time he's very single-mindedly pursued 'making a name for Neoism' over large parts of the world, he's obsessed w/ having Neoism become a movement accepted on the same level or higher as many movements that've preceded it. There're times when this obsession shapes his perception of events in a way that some of us find overblown. I say this from the POV of someone who's been involved w/ Neoism since the fall of 1980 & who was involved w/ other things prior to then that cd be sd to've been a zeigeist aligned w/ Neoism. "Richard joined the Neoist Conspiracy in its early stage, and took part in apartment festivals in Montreal, Baltimore, and New York. Neoism was spreading across Canada and the USA through mail-art communication, and Neoist cells and embassies popped up in most major cities, and even in remote country places." - p 35 Richard DID attend "81 APT", the 3rd Neoist Apartment Festival & the 1st one in BalTimOre that I organized. It was a pleasure to have him there & he & I went out one night for him to wheat-paste up one of his "I only have eyes for you" life-size blackprint self-portraits - w/ me acting as his lookout. That cd be sd to've been his taking part in the APT Fest but it seems to me that it was just him doing what he did wherever he went & no-one other than me witnessed the action. Furthermore, he didn't stay for the entire festival, he might've stayed for one or 2 nights, I'm not sure. Later on in this bk, Istvan recounts Richard's showing up for a night of APT 4, a Neoist festival in the end of 1981. I was there for the whole thing & I don't remember Richard being there but Monty sent me a photo of Richard cutting a silhouette portrait of Napoleon Moffat there so I'll take Istvan/Monty's word for it. Monty's account of Richard's arrival doesn't exactly sound like taking part any more than his appearance at 81 APT did. Then Richard DID appear on at least one day of activities at Des Refusés where part of the 5th International Neoist Apartment Festival took place in New York at the beginning of 1982. I remember him being there as an audience member who talked w/ François "Moondog" Mignault about his paintings but didn't otherwise participate. The point being that I think Monty's description of Richard's presence as a taking part in the festivals is his attempt to connect Hambleton more deeply than I think he really was to Neoism. As for "Neoist cells and embassies popped up in most major cities, and even in remote country places"?! That's just plain self-aggrandizing bullshit. Monty might've declared some correspondents "Neoists" w/o their consent or w/o their even caring - but even that wdn't acct for his grossly exaggerated claim. I was in touch w/ many or most of the people who were interested in Neoism & pre-1984 such people in the USA cd probably be counted on 2 hands. After 1984 the number grew considerably but there might've been 10 cities in the US, maximum, where there were 3 or 4 people who'd heard of Neoism & had some vague interest in it but who had very little actual participation. In Canada, I suspect the number of places was even smaller. "Before Richard started his series of shadow figures, he posted his life-size photographic self-portraits on the streets. These were cheaply made blueprints, and eventually they faded away. Instead of black paint, Richard would have a can of glue in his shoulder bag, and also some cheap hardware store brushes. First he would splash glue on the surface of the walls, then on the backs of his posters. He then would use his hands and some rags ro push down bubbles and flatten the papers firmly on the wall, so people couldn't easily pull them off and discard them. He was fast, but also very precise." - p 39 & this brings me to one of the strange parts of this bk for me. Richard had made bk copies of the "I only have eyes for you" blackprints in wch they were folded & enclosed in a cover. When Istvan was writing this "bionovel" he learned that I had one of the bks & he asked me to have pictures taken of me w/ the unfolded self-portrait that he cd use as an illustration in Hero in Art. I was glad to do this, I liked Richard & I liked his work. So, I asked my friend, photographer Julie Gonzalez, to take some pictures for me & I sent them to Istvan. He wasn't satisfied & asked me to do it again. I did, & he still wasn't satisfied so he asked me to do it a 3rd time. I did, & 41 pictures later he picked one he was satisifed w/. THEN he told me he knew a gallery or an art collector who wanted to buy a copy of this blackprint & asked me if I wanted to sell mine. I told him NO b/c, after all, it was a present from Richard & I valued it for that rather than as something to make money off of. Istvan didn't make a specific offer. I never heard anything about the bk again from Istvan. Expecting to have my photo in it I also expected to get a complimentary copy, preferably 2 copies so I cd give Julie one too - it was the least Istvan cd do for getting us to do 3 photo sessions instead of just accepting the 1st batch I offered him. THEN I found the bk for sale online so I just bought a copy for myself. Lo & Behold!, there was no photo in it. It didn't occur to me until later to hypothesize that Istvan might've actually been asking me for the photos to sell to a collector & never had any intention of using them in the bk OR of sharing the money w/ me. My website detailing this experience & showing the photos is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book202... . ""A few years later, he told me that he got money from his sister to pay for the blow ups, because you know it was not cheap. And soon we started seeing these ominous, life-size photos on the streets, his portrait in his black suits, with hand reaching into his breast pocket as if to pull a gun. Also looking quite crazy."" - p 108 Actually, blackprints & blueprints were the cheapest way that I know of to make such large prints. One of the reasons for this was that they did fade pretty quickly so they only had a limited commercial usefullness. I had some made at the time that were about half the size of Richard's that might've cost me about $5. Of course, Richard wd've had hundreds made so that wd've added up (& probably gotten a discount). "The images were printed using a low-cost "blueprint" method and as a result, sooner or later they would fade to white shadows. That evening, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE went out on the streets with him to paste some up. tENT enjoyed his company, and almost forty years later, in an email he sent me on January 31st, 2018, he described Richard as friendly & debonair. "I thought it was fantastic that he appreciated what was happening enough to attend 81 APT even though he wasn't performing, except, perhaps, by doing street paste-ups. By doing that, it showed how invested he was in this underground culture that almost no one else cared about."" - p 142 "Street locations were the primary battlefield for Richard's work of conducting a successful guerrilla offensive against the hypocritical consumer society. Most young East Village artists were begging gallery owners for shows, hoping to sell out after the sudden wind of commercial interest in their painting." - p 40 "Yet, that's not why he started making works on canvas, his primary impulse wasn't financial; the impulse came, rather, from the fact that the short term, only temporary duration of his street works made him depressed. His depression was one of the other reasons why he became addicted to drugs, and then his addiction then jailed him in his messy studios. Eventually, he became what he never wanted to become, and lived in the messy world of an old-fashioned studio artist, high on drugs, starving, careless of his health, looking like a loser, surrounded by crime." - p 41 In other words, a perfect victim for heroin pushers & art world parasites. But parasites, esp human ones, have a way of not caring whether the host survives, figuring, probably, that a new host can always be found & that, in the meantime, the current host can be exploited as much as possible. The result can be that the victim goes so far down that it's hard to even suck their blood anymore. "Years later, Richard himself became a living shadow figure several times when he got evicted and lived on the streets, wondering why is it like that? Richard's reason for being homeless might have been different, but let's note that by the end of the 1980s, the population of homeless people on the Lower East Side had increased to about 80,000. The 1988 Tompkins Square Police Riot was a clear sign of the homelessness crisis in a collapsing society." - p 44 Indeed - & NOT living in the outrageously expensive NYC wd be a good step away from this crisis b/c other cities are much more affordable - but for Richard AND for the author, the lure of NYC is the lure of becoming famous. Is it worth it? Not to me, it's a carrot-on-a-stick. "Everything he did was a strategy to build up his fame. He calculated it all, way before coming to NYC, and he always knew what was the next step to take. He was happy to be doing the things he only fantasized about when he was younger, living in Vancouver in a very conservative environment. He had to keep going and find different destinations in order to achieve the fame he so desired, He needed to supply his soul with perpetual freedom, his robotic, Frankensteinian body needed special fuel." - p 46 "Everything he did was a strategy to build up his fame"? "He calculated it all"? I doubted that he calculated his curvature of the spine, I doubt that he calculated his losing his nose to cancer. "Artists always survive in the slums, and in even worse places. We are the ones who share the holes in the walls, the dry ledges in the sewers, the wind and noise under the bridges, living in the company of rats and roaches." - p 49 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticH... ...more |
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review of D. A. Mishani's The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 10, 2023 I've been making my way thru my personal library's crime fiction / mysteries section, reading work by authors I hadn't previously read, in review of D. A. Mishani's The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 10, 2023 I've been making my way thru my personal library's crime fiction / mysteries section, reading work by authors I hadn't previously read, in alphabetical order. Now, I'm up to "M", the 13th letter of the alphabet, roughly halfway thru. I'm sticking to this project but I'm beginning to get a bit bored by mysteries. So, e.g., when I read the following.. "He put the umbrella on the floor without thanking her, and it was this of all things that put her over the edge. "Are you seriously set on celebrating our anniversary like this?" she asked, and when he got up she almost screamed at him, "Kobi, do you hear me at all? Do you hear that I'm talking to you? It's Mali from class. The war started." He turned to her and his eyes lit up and it was then that she must have understood that something terrible had happened." - pp 17-18 ..I didn't care - more human drama, ho hum. I'm not saying it was poorly written, it's just my state of mind, I'm sick of human drama, fictional or factual. Heavy rain is happening & the detective who's just been promoted is about to investigate his 1st murder case. "Most of the police in the district were busy clearing the roads clogged up with rain or evacuating flooded buildings or dealing with traffic accidents. This is what he, too, did on days like this during his first years with the police. Now he was commander of Investigations and Intelligence, thanks to solving an assault case that occurred not far from their spot on the boardwalk and to those two boys he saved from death." - p 24 The detective Avraham Avraham, goes to the scene of the crime & asks the neighbor on the floor below whether he heard any disturbance. "Yeger was a quiet neighbor and she usually rested in the afternoon hours, like the neighbor himself. So he opened the door and walked up half a flight of stairs, only then it got quiet and he decided not to knock on the door. But his afternoon nap had already been disturbed, so he didn't go back to bed, and a few minutes later he heard footsteps and through the peephole saw a policeman going down the stairs. He thought that someone had called him because of the noise and that the policeman had checked into the matter, so he didn't call the police himself." - p 33 Kobi, the person we're led to believe is the prime suspect, tells his wife Mali something-or-another to explain his recent odd behavior. "And even in retrospect she thought that there was no way to know that he was lying. He said, "Mali, the police are looking for me," and she looked at his red eyes." - p 94 The reader muddles thru the what & why of it along w/ the detective. "Diana said that it wasn't anything important. She wanted to return to a policeman who had been at her place a few days earlier the umbrella he had forgotten, and because she didn't remember his name and didn't have his phone number, she called the station and asked to speak with Avraham." - p 107 "on his way back from a job interview, Kobi struck a pedestrian with his car who had charged into the street without looking. That was their anniversary." - p 119 Avraham Avraham searches surveillance camera footage for something showing a policeman leaving the scene of the crime. Something is found. "If he had received permission from Saban to do it, he would post it the same day on the police Facebook page or ask that it be broadcast on the television news in order to receive the public's help in the search." - p 157 As is so often the case in police fiction, the detective's personal life makes things more difficult for him when his wife's parents come to visit from Belgium w/ the intention of convincing the wife to return home to Belgium from Israel where she & her husband are living. "["]And it is important to us to emphasize that we have nothing against Avi, just the opposite, we respect him, and actually because of that we hope that he will understand and help you to leave."" - p 166 Fortunately, Avi realizes that the in-laws are the murderers & shoots them in self-defense. Just kidding. You know that you're in the 21st century when Facebook plays a role. "He wanted to know where Bengston worked and what car he had, and if it was photographed in the area of the scene on the day the murder took place. He even asked Ma'alul to find out if Bengston had a Facebook account and what kind of material he posted there." - p 219 &, of course, Kobi's cellphone plays a role too. "Yaakov Bengston's cell phone was found in his pants' pocket" - p 268 "Bengston asked Leah Yeger to say her full name and her identity card number, and then said, "Tell me, please, about the rape,"" - p 269 "And for some reason it was written that the killer's cell phone was found in a search that the detective team conducted in the apartment where he resided, and that the voice file in which Yeger was recorded minutes before her death was successfully restored by the Advanced Computing Unit of the Israeli police, even though the killer had erased it from his device." - pp 274-275 "He reminded himself over and over that Mazal Bengston told Vahaba in her questioning that her husband wanted to be caught because he couldn't suffer anymore and that he didn't even erase the incriminating file from his cell phone." - p 278 All in all, this was fine, it was subtle, a good glance at an occluded look at a dysfunctional human being blundering thru an obsession. Still, I didn't care that much - but that probably has more to do w/ my mood than w/ qualities of the bk. ...more |
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review of Jason Rodgers's Invisible Generation by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 4-9, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticR... I usually feel like I live in a mostly illiterate or subliterate environment. I do review of Jason Rodgers's Invisible Generation by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 4-9, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticR... I usually feel like I live in a mostly illiterate or subliterate environment. I don't mean to say that being illiterate, per se, i.e.: unable to read, is something that devalues a person. My displeasure w/ this situation is more rooted in my observation that many of the people I know who consider themselves to be fully literate, including university professors, are, IMO, people who rarely read & people who read at a less-than-8th-grade level. Imagine a psychotherapist who reads a few self-help bks a yr & who, b/c of this, considers theirself to be fully informed & expert. Contrary to this sub-literate commonality are my friends who write bks. There're many - & since this lot tends to be better-read I rejoice in their literateness even if I don't always like their bks 100%. I write bks, very few people read them, even my literate friends. I also review bks, at the moment I've reviewed 1,614 of them. My friends send me their bks for review or I buy them. Not surprisingly (& I don't blame them), they expect me to write glowing reviews of their genius.. or, at least,very favorable reviews. However, for me, review-writing isn't about trying to get my friends to love me, it's about trying to say what I have to say about the bks. More often than not, I go to considerable lengths to entice the review reader into being interested in the bk.. - but I sometimes say things that my friends get offended by. It's common for reviewers of peotry bks to give the bk a 5 star rating w/o even saying anything about the bk - giving the appearance that they mightn't've even read it. I figure that if I'm going to review a bk I shd 1. actually read the thing from cover-to-cover, 2. actually say what I think about it - otherwise, what's the point? At least ONE critic shd write something they mean once in a while instead of trying to win a popularity contest. Of course, the result is that I sometimes lose friends. I DO feel bad about this. I even usually pull my punches - but, still, a little jab gets in here & there. NOW, it might seem like that preface implies that I'm about to be negative about Invisible Generation - but I'm not. I'm not really sure WHAT I'm going to write. I know that I'm going to express some perplexity about my own position in relation to Rodgers's socio-political philosophy. That's partially rooted in my gut reaction to this as being very akin to thinking in the 1980s anarchism that I was heavily involved w/. It's not a 'bad' thing that it seems rooted in that time, b/c I think that was a very vital time, it's just that I'm in a different phase of my life - one that's probably individualist in a way that makes it hard for me to identify w/ just about anyone's socio-political philosophy anymore. I was 1st contacted by Jason in the fall of 2002 w/ a mailing including $5 for a copy of my Street Ratbag 6 + the 7th issue of his Psionic Plastic Joy zine. At the time I reckon it was remarkable enuf that he even knew about SRB b/c the days when Factsheet Five broadcast knowledge of my publications far & wide were long gone. Having been publishing since 1977 & having a huge personal zine library it was, by now, rare for me to run across any zines or other publications of any kind that distinguished themselves w/ extraordinary imagination. PPJ wasn't one of them, I downright disliked the collages & found the reviews of what I sent him to be lacking in depth or understanding. There, that's the negative part. Now, 20 yrs later, Jason's sent me Invisible Generation & I find that his texts are more sophisticated & the collages, while I still don't really like them, work for me in the context of the bk. I shd explain that I'm not really singling out Jason's collages: I was approached by another friend to write an intro for a friend's collage bk & I declined b/c I find more or less all collages to be lacking in depth of inspiration. Collages from the time of Adolf Wölffli & Hannah Höch interest me b/c they were fresh then. Now they just seem lazy & cliché. Maybe if Rodgers changed his name to Rödgers? Following the 1st collage on p 7, there's what seems to be a flier intended for guerrilla public display, such as on poles. There's a collage background w/ blocks of text put overtop of it. There's a title: "Infinite War Games", 3 text blocks, & a PO Box address for "Campaign to Play for Keeps". Such an intervention into the mediated environment appeals to me & I probably wd've copied the address if I ran across such a thing in my wanderings & then written to it. Some of the text: "I know life is a game and I intend to play for keeps. Time to get serious about joking and work at play. It is time to play hard and play the ultimate game, war games. ""There is no rest for my rebel spirit except in war, just as there is no greater happiness for my vagabond, negating mind than the unihibited affirmation of my capacity to life and to rejoice. My every defeat serves me only as symphonic prelude to a new victory" - Renzo Novatore "The winning strategy in the game of life is the game of insurrection. Civilization teaches lessons in zero sum games of winners and losers. The closest to infinite games are grand narratives of progress where those who are ground up serve the greater good. A new rule set is necessary. Maybe without winners and losers, or maybe disregard such petty concerns as winning or losing." [..] "Struggle is life and anti-entropic. When a person engages in struggle, they are infused with vitality. If they are not actively engaged with struggle, every passing banality crushes them. Struggle is the opposite of sacrifice. The means are more important than the ends. The possibility of ends is merely an added bonus." - p 8 I take it for granted that Rodgers is sincere. At the same time that I like what he wrote, I still find it a bit rhetorical. Such proclamations as Renzo Novatore's are impressive when the proclaimer is backing them up w/ action, w/ praxis instead of theory, as I understand Novatore did. But I, personally, don't want war, for myself or anyone else. IMO the US has been at war for my entire 69 yr life. I've been spared the direct consequences of those wars that the millions of victims haven't been. Nonetheless, there's the Class War, the war waged by the oligarchies on the wage slaves, the war constantly in progress that keeps the vast majority 'in its place'. I've struggled against the domineering interests since I was at least 5. That struggle hasn't necessarily been bad for me but I wonder what my life wd've been like if I'd had a higher percentage of classless good times. Anyway, the rhetoric here, if it isn't unfair to call it rhetoric, is of less interest to me than recountings of what a person has actually done. I reckon that's my pragmatism. What interests me is that I built an addition on my house & what I've done w/ that building, what interests me less are peoples' plans for castles in the sky. Not that "castles in the sky" is what I'd call Rodgers's philosophical hopes. The next page has another street flier w/ a collage background & much smaller blocks of text: "Shoot out at the consensus reality corral. "The six gun swami mounts an offense against the razor wire fence of the black iron prison. The guards in the head have been ambushed." - p 9 I'm happy to see "consensus reality" referred to. That seems like an important idea that's been mostly lost, perhaps not many people ever 'got it' in the 1st place. For me, mediated 'reality' is a construct, one that seems to dominate most people's minds, it's 'reality' b/c people have a 'consensus' that that's what's what. But is it really a "consensus"? To me, the 'consensus' of 'consensus reality' is really an implant, something that "The guards in the head" have planted there in such a way that the people going along w/ it think is of their own creation when, in fact, it isn't. It doesn't originate w/ them at all, it originates w/ their rulers, the people they can barely even acknowledge exist let alone analyze or criticize. "Reality is a constructed process. For most of us this is a symbol system we inhabit to interpret perceptions. It is not simply the same as subjective experience. Language works in an occult fashion, creating the very structure of the reality we inhabit." [..] ""Reality," Carey argues, ""is a product of work and action, collective and associated work and action. It is formed and sustained, repaired and transformed, worshiped and celebrated in the ordinary business of living. To set the matter up in this way is neither to deny, ignore, nor mystify social conflict; in fact, it is an attempt to locate such conflict and make it intelligible. Reality is, above all, a scarce resource.["]" - p 10 Note that this is a humanocentric discussion. What is 'reality' for non-humans? This is a minor observation & one probably of little interest to many other than myself: In 1987 I wrote a letter published in: KAOS (Number 10) (London, England, uk; edited by: Joel Biroco) in wch I stated "as 4 t he spelling "magick": i may prefer t he simpler "magik" as a spelling sufficiently distinct from "magic"" (p 14) & I remember Peter Lamborn Wilson (perhaps writing as Hakim Bey) chiming in somewhere in agreement w/ this. Now, b/c of the following, I wonder if Feral Faun was another advocate of getting away from the spelling "magick" (wch I thought of as a quasi-'ancient' spelling that didn't really resonate w/ me). "Feral Faun expressed the promise and dangers of using magic as a tactic of combating control when he wrote "Magik is the wonderful, erotic relation we can have with every being in the universe. All that is, is alive. Order has separated us from the rest of the universe.["]" - p 13 Once Invisible Generation gets into these essays, the more I find the ideas expressed to be very clear - & as the essays become more recent the more I find them to be even clearer. "We are already surrounded by occult warfare. This battlefield of civilization and consumer culture is composed of warring sigils locked in deadly combat. Corporate logos, organization symbols, advertisements, chain letters, propaganda, mail art, and graffiti. These are all sigils, occult symbols. The environment is covered in corporate sigils in the form of advertising, logos, and billboards. Common tactics such as graffiti are an intuitive and natural reaction to this. This warfare is totally asymmetrical; there is a need to find ways to even the odds." - p 14 "This is a struggle to seize the means of reality production, semiotic guerilla warfare." - p 15 &, indeed, I agree. There're forces at work who're trying to define 'reality' for us all b/c it serves their purposes for us to believe their story. These forces use every means they can think of to achieve this. Now that most people carry around 'smart phones' accessing their attn thru postings to sd phones is one of the most immediate means. Some of us try to counter these attacks on us, trying to 'out-clever' the 'reality'-definers w/ a greater degree of creativity & tactics such as rendering mind-numbingly 'definitive' statements ambiguous &/or suspicious. "Writing is my way. It is the way I gain knowledge. It is the way I spread knowledge. It is the way I communicate. It is the way I confront. It is the only way I know. "I continue to believe that writing, theory, poetics can change the world. They are able to reveal the mechanisms by which control functions. They are able to work out strategies to confront such, They are able to imagine other modes of living. I continue to believe this, maybe because I am very stupid. "Even as I believe in the value of writing I am finding it harder to see what difference it makes to anyone. I know fewer people who even bother to read at all. They might browse something on their phone, but this is not reading, no more than watching the scroll at the bottom of Fox News is reading." - p 20 & here is where I felt an even more heartfelt identification w/ Rodgers. I love reading & writing, I love bks; I've reviewed every bk I've read since the fall of 2007. That's a huge critical thinking project. However, unlike Jason, "It is" NOT "the only way I know." I live in Pittsburgh now - but when I lived in BalTimOre most of my friends read bks, it was central to their intellectual development - & they HAD intellectual development. A small group of us cd get together in the 1970s & talk about, say, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. Cd I do that now?! NO WAY. Friends who read bks are extremely rare - esp in my local environment. I've written 16 bks, NONE of my friends locally has ever expressed even the slightest interest in any of them. They certainly wdn't even read a single page. I attribute this partially to a mass death of intellect, of intellectual curiousity. I, on the other hand, read every day - it's an essential part of my life. For other people I know it's as if reading means nothing to them - why wd they read? It's as if reading wd be the equivalent of staring at a rock for days on end, there's no point to it for them. But, for me, reading means exposing myself to information & stimulation that I won't find elsewhere. E.G.: I never heard of "coolhunting" until I read this: "One textbook on advertising represents them as a form of anthropologist, stating that "the Advertising has long appreciated the value of qualitative data and is currently moving to even more strongly embrace extended types of fieldwork. Coolhunts do this by getting researchers to actually go to the site where they believe cool resides, stalk it, and bring it back to be used in products and its advertising" (O'Guinn, Allen, & Semenik 248). Firms with this as their stated goals began to arise in the 1980s. These marketing firms "search out pockets of cutting edge lifestyle, capturing them on videotape and return to clients like Reebok, Absolut Vodka and Levi's"" - pp 28-29 It's funny thinking about this, imagining being somewhere & seeing someone who you suspect of being a coolhunter. What if what's 'cool' about the people there is that they're readers of heavy philosophy & they don't wear Reeboks or Levis & are teetotalers? "It may be possible to find ways to get the marketers to inadvertently disseminate their own undoing. Of course this subversion may be quickly neutralized; thus all the more reason for nomadism. By the time the subversion is neutralized, the next stage will have already begun, having used the initial subversion as a jumping off point." - p 30 Why not? "Freddy Perlman contructed Leviathan man as "a monstrous body, a body that has become more powerful than the Biosphere. It may be a body without any life of its own. It may be a dead thing, a huge cadaver. It may move its slow thighs only when living beings inhabit it." - p 31 What I think of is a 'superorganism', I see humanity as being deliberately herded together into a superorganism. People who had some individuality are no longer useful as individuals so they're being dumbed down so that they're easier to manipulate as a mass. The less people have to think for themselves in order to function, the more they become dependent on a hierarchy that they have no say in the management of. "Max Stirner wrote that "The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us to no longer let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on 'institutions.'" (Stirner 316). It is not working within the institution, but a rejection of institutions themselves." - p 33 Fair enuf, I suppose - but I don't believe in revolution or insurrection, if I believe in anything at all it's more a matter of what an individual manages to do w/ their life independent of such relative concepts. "As the minor composition does not strive to become a major composition, a component of mass media, or a new hegemony, tactics of invisibility are adopted. "Sometimes clandestine struggles do not necessarily have to aspire to become something else, but can remain so because it makes sense compositionally for them to do so" (Shukaitis 211). Within mass culture the insurrectionist and radical is outnumbered and overpowered. Instead of confronting these situations directly it is probably more useful to work on a different level, in order to deal with this asymetrical situation. Rather than become a fixed mass formation, a subterranean project can remain flexible and dynamic." - p 38 Guerrilla Warfare, or, as I prefer, Psychological Playfare, is most effectively conducted from a position where one can't be immediately pinned down. Hit'n'run. Either that or one has to have a superhuman strength of character, an ability to clearly express & manifest a vision that's more compelling than that of the sizeable opposition. "Where libertarian was once a synonym for anarchist or anti-authoritarian, it now is associated with free market economics. The free market program has proven to be far from liberating" - p 44 I lived w/ the president of the MD Libertarian Party in 1982. He was a rich megalomaniac in his 30s who didn't have to work & whose expenses were pd for by his father, who owned a big car dealership. When his father died, he lost his house on a double lot in a rich neighborhood & moved into the no-longer-in-business car dealership. When I was in Barcelona in 2004 I stayed w/ an anarchist couple who hadn't previously known me but who took me in b/c the 'friend' who I was supposed to stay w/ had 'changed her mind' at the last minute. My Spanish anarchist friends used the word "libertarian" interchangeably w/ anarchist. 'Free market economics' just means that the rich have the legal 'right' to exploit whoever they want to in whatever way they want to in order to maximize their own profit. Anarchists are against governments & laws b/c they take away individual responsibility & impose a fake substitute. 'Free Market' Libertarians are against governments & laws b/c they interfere w/ their being as irresponsible as is convenient for them. Then again, some Libertarians are mainly concerned w/ legalization of drugs & police brutality & surveillance issues - so there's still some crossover between anarchism & libertarianism. ...more |
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review of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 4, 2023 As I've written before, When I was in my late teens & trying to discover sophisticated literature I thought of Mysteries, or what I'm more prone to c review of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 4, 2023 As I've written before, When I was in my late teens & trying to discover sophisticated literature I thought of Mysteries, or what I'm more prone to call Crime Fiction these days, as an inferior genre, as escapist literature mainly intended to take the reader for a ride w/o any more profound content. It might not've been until decades later that I started discovering mystery writers whose talents I started to appreciate. Now, decades later again, I've found many mystery writers who have qualities that I appreciate - but I've also started to get too jaded to really enjoy them much anymore. It seems that I've really reached that point w/ reading this novel in particular. I've been going thru my personal library's Mystery section in roughly alphabetical (w/ chronological sub-organization) order & picking bks by authors there that I've haven't read yet. I probably added a few bks by Manchette b/c he was written about enthusiastically in a Taibo novel, Taibo being one of my favorites. & this was good, I mean the idea was somewhat interesting & the playing out of it was well-done - but I found myself not particularly caring, I found myself back to my original criticism of mysteries: that there really wasn't the sort of content that I'm looking for. Now the author is reputed to be a 'Leftist', mocking & criticizing the exploitative economic world by having the main Bad guy be someone who's rich & unscrupulous - & the main Mad person thwarts him by being a loose cannon. That's all well & good - but I think I need to go back to SF in wch a profound imagining of the future provides a different type of stimulus. Still, I'll probably read more by Manchette eventually. Anywho, the translator, Donald Nicholson-Smith, translated Taibo too: "He also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henry Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillame Apollinaire, and Guy Debord." - p ii Interesting. It can be hard to judge a translation if one doesn't read both languages involved. I usually judge it by how fluidly it flows & by whether there're interesting idiomatic expressions that seem to fit & add liveliness. This translation seems perfect on all fronts. It's also interesting to me that Nicholson-Smith translated 2 Situationists & then Artaud & Apollinaire. It seems that he has a penchant for the French avant-garde. How Taibo fits in there I don't know given that he writes in Spanish. I'll be on the lookout for other bks translated by Nicholson-Smith. From the intro by James Sallis: "When Manchette began to write his novels in the mid-1970s, the French polar had become a still pool of police procedurals and tales of Pigalle lowlife. Manchette wanted to throw in rocks, disturb the calm surface, bring up all the muck beneath—to demonstrate that the crime novel could be (as he said again and again) "the great moral literature of our time." "For Manchete and the generation of writers who succeeded him, then, these novels became far more than simple entertainment; they became a means of facing society's failures head on. One after another the curtains will be torn back. Pretense. Deceit. Manipulation. Till there in the small, choked room behind it all we witness society's true engines—greed and violence—grinding away." - p vii & there's the promise that crime fiction does deliver on that's what I want from the writers whose work I like.. but in my current jaded state it's not enuf. Crime fiction writers can be great at exploring the psychology of ulterior motives & I appreciate that b/c it's truly observant of the slippery human nature that's usually hidden - but I want more than just human nature, esp human nature under capitalism. "Though dredged from the same dark sense of purloined promise as Chandler's, Manchette's profoundly leftist, distinctly European stance may be something of a problem for American readers. Like many of his generation, Manchette was influenced by the Situationist Guy Debord, whose theories, elaborated in The Society of the Spectacle, were everywhere during France's 1968 insurrections. Situationists held that capitalism's overweening successes came only at the expense of increased alienation, social dysfunction, and a general degradation of daily life" - p xi This translation is from 2014. The Ken Knabb edited Situationist International Anthology was published in the US in 1981. Anyone who participated in or otherwise followed the American political activist underground, esp the anarchist part of it, knows that Situationist ideas were widespread & widely emulated & respected. The Society of the Spectacle, in bk form, is quite short & easily read in a short time. The film might not've become available after a 25 yr hiatus until 1995ish. I know that Keith Sanborn & I screened a VHS copy of it in Buffalo at the end of 1995. As such, I think Sallis's statement re the "distinctly European stance may be something of a problem for American readers" is more than a little naive & underinformed. Furthermore, does this novel really apply a Situationist critique? Perhaps, but IMO it's not really much of one. The Bad guy is a symbol of how PR covers over the real dirt behind making money. That PR cd be sd to be part of the Spectacle. Big deal. I don't think that that particular Bad guy type originated w/ Manchette or that a critique of how false surface values cover over & generate degraded everyday life originated w/ the Situationists. Look at something like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's mystery entitled Unpunished (1929). This particular Bad guy's character is established, a little ambiguously from the get-go: "The redhead inspected the rear of the Lincoln, then straightened up. ""No damage. Why don't you stop them from throwing stones?" ""Self-discipline. You wouldn't understand." ""You pathetic bitch."" - p 7 The redhead is at an insane asylum to ostensibly 'hire the handicapped', i.e. the "Mad" of the story, to be the caregiver for his adopted child. ""I'll write you a check." "The doctor raised his eyebrows. ""A gift," said the redhead emphatically. "A gift for your institution." ""Very well, if you wish. But it is not necessary." ""What you do is interesting." ""Anti-psychiatry, you mean?" ""I don't know," said Hartog. "I mean minding crazy people."" - p 9 More interesting for me than any Situationist influence is this brief reference to anti-psychiatry. The Mad woman goes back to the Bad man's home where he's immediately attacked by someone on his parking lot. The Mad woman, loyal to her new employer & not yet wise to his ulterior motives, defends the redhead Hartog: ""Stop or I'll kill you!" she cried. "The guy looked at her. He had a flat face, a pug nose, and large, very pale gray eyes. On the top of his head the hair was beginning to thin. Yellowish strands lay there limply. ""The safety isn't even off," he said. "With a burst of laughter he whacked the revolver with his rolled-up magazine. The Arminius went skittering across the cement." - p 18 Now, what do you get from the description? The characters of all involved having not been fully established yet one might get a Bad impression based on the "flat face" & "pug nose" that're often associated in crime fiction w/ thugs who've punched in the face frequently. Julie, the Mad caregiver is kidnapped w/ Little Peter, her charge, & told: "["]We're going to let you go later, with a letter. Hartog will pay up. We'll return the kid. Everybody will be happy.["]" - p 43 But have you ever noticed how often people LIE? But Julie, a former juvenile delinquent & someone w/ more than a little cynicism about the motives of others, has quick reflexes & is resourceful enuf to shock the shit out of her hardened criminal captors: "Julie popped into his line of sight, just by Cleaning Products. Her right arm was covered in blood. It looked as if she were wearing a high glove. With her left hand she lobbed a flaming bottle of denatured alcohol at Coco. The thug pressed the trigger of his big Colt and the round buried itself in the ceiling. Coco fell over backwards, uttering a shocked exclamation when his skull struck the floor. Close by him there was a sound like a lightbulb giving up the ghost and he found himself in the middle of a slick of blazing liquid. Little blue flames licked at his pants." - p 107 Go, girl. Anyway, the Mad win out in the end b/c the Bad's single-mindedness was no match for the Mad's unpredictability. A Bad & Mad time was had by all. ...more |
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review of Peter Lamborn Wilson's Conversazione by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 1, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW... PLW & I started corresponding w/ each other sometime in the mid 1980s, possibly as e review of Peter Lamborn Wilson's Conversazione by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 1, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW... PLW & I started corresponding w/ each other sometime in the mid 1980s, possibly as early as before 1984. I don't know wch of us initiated the exchange, we were both very active in outreach, looking for fellow travelers. I even sent him a copy of my very 1st bk, something that I'm unlikely to do now, they're rare enuf so that I charge $50 for one. Our correspondence wasn't frequent, probably less than 1 thing a yr up 'til about 1996, followed by a roughly 15 yr hiatus when we reconnected when I visited him in his home in New Paltz at the end of 2010. Now Peter is dead. Long Live Peter Lamborn Wilson!! He & I crossed paths occasionally: at the Without Borders Anarchist Gathering in San Francisco in 1989, at Dreamtime Village in 1992, at the aforementioned home in December, 2010, & probably elsewhere, maybe NYC. It seems to me that we'd already met in the flesh by SF b/c I remember immediately recognizing him & talking to him there. The point is, we knew each other for almost 40 yrs, I'd read at least 4 or 5 of his bks during that time, I liked his bks, I liked him personally.. &, yet, I never got to know him as well as I shd have.. & now he's dead & it's too late. I find that I miss him very much already. I got this bk for the partially egotistical reason that the editor of "No Quarter" zine told me that Peter calls me a "genius" in it. No Quarter published an excellent memorial issue re PLW. I don't get compliments very often so I esp appreciate one from someone whose opinion I respect. Of course, I also got this bk b/c I wanted to read what're at least close to Peter's last words in print up to now. PLW was an excellent conversationalist, he was always knowledgable & always extremely inspired, AND friendly. All 3 of those qualities seem underappreciated to me at times. "Foods you personally should never have eaten." [..] "I had an idea some years ago, and I think it's a fairly original idea, because I at least have not come across it in anybody's writing, and that is that Christianity is the only religion in the world that has no food taboos—and which in fact is based on overthrowing food taboos. In other words, the basis of Christianity, if you read the bible straight on, is oh you can eat pig now, you can have pigs, you can have crabs, you can have lobsters, it's what the angel tells Saint Peter: it's not important what goes into your mouth, but what comes out, in other words what you say. By which I think the angel meant inspiration. How inspired is your speech. How true is your speech. That's what's important." - pp 9-10 Had you ever thought about that? Christianity having no food taboos? I hadn't, so I get interested. Of course, whether that's true or not might be another thing. I certainly don't know about all religions. "The founder of Futurism, Marinetti, wrote a whole cookbook. "TP: You've read it? "PLW: I've seen it, I've not managed to get hold of it and read the whole thing. One thing I remember is that he said there would be no pasta recipes in that book. That pasta was destroying the Italian personality. We futurists are going to give up eating pasta." - pp 14-15 & I HAVE a copy of the English translation of Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook but can't locate it at the moment in either my "Miscellaneous" or my "Art" sections of my personal library. I remember some of the recipes as humorously inedible so I was hoping to quote one of those. Instead, I'll just have to quote a June 23, 2022 article by Amanda Arnold that I found online: "In 1932, a charismatic Italian poet with a propensity for provocation declared war on his country’s most sacred idol: pasta. It was “an absurd Italian gastronomic religion,” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti decried in The Futurist Cookbook, and those known to enjoy the “passéist” dish were “melancholy types” who “carry its ruins in their stomachs like archaeologists.” They suffered from “incurable sadness,” he railed against his fellow countrymen. And they were weak, pessimistic, and maybe even impotent. "In short, pasta was emasculating. And emasculation had no place in Italian Futurism, the bizarre and nationalist art movement founded by Marinetti in 1909 on the belief that Italy could never gain primacy if its feeble men were so preoccupied with history and tradition. For a strong, Futuristic Italian man to exist, Marinetti wanted anything that celebrated the country’s heritage literally destroyed—museums, libraries, even spaghetti." - https://www.bonappetit.com/story/the-... "Other heroes of food? "Charles Fourier, the Utopian Socialist, was a distant cousin of Brillat-Saverin, as it happens. He invented the term gastrosophy. He took food very seriously, and in his utopia there were whole societies of people who specilaized in growing and eating one kind of pear. There were people who were, not just banquet societies, but banquet societies that specialized in like, old roosters. Old roosters as opposed to fresh young hens. A lot of taste in old roosters, if you know how to cook them right, they can be quite great. Roland Barthes, taking a hint from Fourier, wrote about his favorite meal, which was old rooster accompanied by couscous with rancid butter. He meant that when butter gets sort of cheesy, people call it rancid but it isn't really rancid, it's just butter on its way to being cheese. So in other words, very strong flavors, and he dedicated that meal to Fourier. He wrote an essay about Fourier, a very good essay. Also—the Russian scientist N.N. Vavilov who discovered the origins of apples and cannabis. Stalin murdered him." - pp 18-19 & PLW wrote a small Fourier related bk called The Universe - a mirror of itself published by Miekal And & Elizabeth Was's Xexoxial Endarchy in 1992. I was at Dreamtime Village when they were working on the bk & I was delighted that PLW knew about Fourier who was someone I'd had interest in. In fact, I'm credited in the bk as having done "typesetting", something I don't actually remember my doing. Fourier predicted that followers of his philosophy wd grow tails w/ hands on the end & an eyeball in the palm. This appendage was dubbed the "archibras". I have a tattoo of one in motion w/ 6 fingers on my lower back where the tail wd hypothetically grow. "PLW: Now you're asking not for an objective but a subjective view and I have to say that the one thing I've found about old age and debility is that one by one the pleasures leave you. You simply can't do them anymore. If you try to spend a charming evening drinking champagne and eating fried oysters, you're very likely to deeply regret it the next day. Or even immediately. So right now I feel denuded one by one of the things that I always considered to be pleasures in my life. I don't smoke anymore. I don't smoke pot anymore. I barely drink alcohol anymore. There's so many foods that I can't eat, that my diet is ridiculous, might as well be puritanical, but it isn't really because it's not based on any kind of logic, it has to do with certain chemicals that I can't have anymore. And so on and so forth, and of course the greatest pleasure of all, which is love or sexuality is pretty much closed to old farts." [..] "Everyone always says when I go on my Luddite rant and rave, well at least there's one thing that's really progress and that's modern medicine. And I say no, I'm sorry, I have to give you a critique on that, too. As my friend Jake said, well I expected nothing less. But I have a very deep critique of it, it's not my critique alone, it also comes from the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich who has written on the subject very brilliantly, I recommend her work on big med to everybody." - p 35 This delights me b/c I'm extremely critical of the Medical Industry & I've written 2 llloooonnggg bks on the subject: Unconscious Suffocation - A Personal Journey through the PANDEMIC PANIC ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book202... ) & its sequel of sorts: THE SCIENCE (volume 1) ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book202... ). In fact, what modern medicine represents to me is an opportunity to have oneself experimented on at great cost so that a side-effect can result that is, in turn, experimented on at great cost, ad nauseum until one's financial resources are fully tapped out & one dies. AND to be treated like an imbecile by people who ARE imbeciles if one dares to offer critical analysis. "When the drug for Hepatitis C came on the market, I think it was, what—$600.00 per pill?" - p 36 According to a publication called "The Medical Letter" that provides drug information to drs w/o influence from the pharmaceutical industry: "one dose of Hemgenix costs $3,500,000." Hemgenix is a gene therapy used for the treatment of hemophilia B. That's the most extreme example that I know of of the prohibitive cost of 'modern medicine'. What happened to the idea of taking care of oneself & having a knowledge of local plants w/ medicinal qualities that cd be picked at no cost? If the Medical Industry has its way such things will be completely replaced by EXPENSIVE PRODUCTS. Buy your health from us, WE OWN IT! On Hungary: "But I've been told that back in the days of late communism, goulash communism, that there was a big sexual boom in Hungary. "TP: As a child I remember seeing people walk around almost naked, in nothing but gauze veils or whatever. Scandalous stuff like that. "PLW: By the river you mean? "TP: No, anywhere. Down the street. I mean, this is mid '90's, so maybe it's a survival of what you're talking about." - p 41 I was in Hungary in 1997 & I remember seeing a woman walking in Budapest wearing a pair of shorts that were closer to a thong than to pants - her ass cheeks were completely exposed. As both a nudist & a lecherous heterosexual I was deeply impressed. "PLW: I must have found out about it in Freshman Latin. Or, possibly, from Will and Ariel Durant. You don't know who they were probably. They were a married couple, who in fact were anarchist activists in New York in the '40s. The way they made their living was they wrote a series of books about the history of civilization." - p 45 The Story of Civilization, the 1st volume is credited to Will Durant alone. There're 11 volumes. I have 3 of them. This is the 1st I've heard tell about them being anarchists! Their bks were so omnipresent that I always vaguely imagined that they were history-belongs-to-the-victor kind of stuff. SHEESH. Now I'm going to have to read at least one of them! How will I ever live long enuf?! On the subject of affordable pleasures: "You can always afford sex. Think of the image of the hillbillies sitting in their cabins, what have they got to do in their spare time. Used to have rather baroque sexuality you know. "There are certain places like Baltimore, which is a working-class city to a large extent, which is famous for their sexual "perversion." You've seen the films of John Waters, I always used to say that's Baltimore social realism." - p 47 Ha ha! I think it was in an anarchist discussion group called "Class Class" that we had some readings of a study done by a North American academic in South America about population growth or some such. It was as if the person or people conducting the study were afraid to even mention sex. It was all about economics. What struck me was that nowhere was it mentioned that people FUCK b/c it's so damned enjoyable & it's generally free (except under the worst capitalist conditions). In other words, it's exactly what PLW is commenting on. As for John Waters's films being "Baltimore social realism"? This is exactly the kind of idea that PLW is full off & that I love about him so much. I didn't even realize or remember that PLW was from BalTimOre until I read this bk. "Wilson" was my mom's maiden name so that makes me wonder what relation, if any, PLW was to me. I wish I'd asked him about his family while he was alive. I tried asking him after he was dead but just got dead silence. "You're not going to have a social revolution in the world on fire. "CS: Well, you have it from the ashes. "PLW: This is what's probably happening in Rojava as we speak. What will turn out to be the last idealistic attempt at a social revolution is being destroyed by the Turks, by Covid, by environmental degradation, by drought, and essentially by the world on fire. I hope not, but I've been following it fairly closely, and it looks to me like a real possibility. They will turn out to have lasted only about as long as the Spanish anarchist utopia. If the Zapatistas are still going I don't even know what they're up to. You don't hear about them anymore. Some people say they're still trucking, but they certainly gave up their international ambitions. You don't hear about them trying to convince other people anymore. So that's that." - p 59 "The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as Rojava, is a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria. It consists of self-governing sub-regions in the areas of Afrin, Jazira, Euphrates, Raqqa, Tabqa, Manbij, and Deir Ez-Zor. The region gained its de facto autonomy in 2012 in the context of the ongoing Rojava conflict and the wider Syrian Civil War, in which its official military force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), has taken part. "While entertaining some foreign relations, the region is not officially recognized as autonomous by the government of Syria or any state except for the Catalan Parliament. The AANES has widespread support for its universal democratic, sustainable, autonomous pluralist, equal, and feminist policies in dialogues with other parties and organizations. Northeastern Syria is polyethnic and home to sizeable ethnic Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian populations, with smaller communities of ethnic Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, and Yazidis. "The supporters of the region's administration state that it is an officially secular polity with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchistic, feminist, and libertarian socialist ideology promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability, social ecology, and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural, and political diversity, and that these values are mirrored in its constitution, society, and politics, stating it to be a model for a federalized Syria as a whole, rather than outright independence. The region's administration has also been accused by some partisan and non-partisan sources of authoritarianism, support of the Syrian government, Kurdification, and displacement. However, despite this the AANES has been the most democratic system in Syria, with direct open elections, universal equality, respecting human rights within the region, as well as defense of minority and religious rights within Syria. "The region has implemented a new social justice approach which emphasizes rehabilitation, empowerment, and social care over retribution. The death penalty was abolished. Prisons house mostly people charged with terrorist activity related to ISIL and other extremist groups, and are a large strain on the region's economy. The autonomous region is ruled by a coalition which bases its policy ambitions to a large extent on democratic libertarian socialist ideology of democratic confederalism and have been described as pursuing a model of economy that blends co-operative and market enterprise, through a system of local councils in minority, cultural, and religious representation. The AANES has by far the highest average salaries and standard of living throughout Syria, with salaries being twice as large as in regime-controlled Syria; following the collapse of the Syrian pound the AANES doubled salaries to maintain inflation, and allow for good wages. Independent organizations providing healthcare in the region include the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Syrian American Medical Society, the Free Burma Rangers, and Doctors Without Borders." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonom... I'm tempted to move there. "PLW: For years and years his admirers would say why doesn't someone make a movie, and it's well known there were famous directors who had taken options on some of his books, and it didn't happen until I'm pretty sure the first one was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which got made into a movie by the title of Blade Runner. I think that was the first P.K. Dick movie." - p 75 I thought I had a printed-out list of all movies based on works by P.K. Dick, a list that included many movies made before Blade Runner. However, I cdn't find that list in the 2 places where it shd've been. SO I looked for such a list on Wikipedia & what I found only listed ONE movie made before Blade Runner: "Imposter", made as an episode of a TV show in 1962. "The first piece that Bob" [Wilson] " put on took place in a ruined caravanserai in Shiraz that had many rooms, and in each room something was going on, and it was all going on simultaneously, and it was in his style, which I don't know if you're familiar with. It was all very beautiful, painterly, and terribly slow. He started life as a painter and then he realized that his work had to be in motion, but it couldn't be in fast motion it had to be in slow motion so that everybody could see everything. That was the key to his work. This was one of his early pieces too. He had put on stuff in New York for sure before I knew him, but this was one of his early works, and the next time he came to Shiraz he put on Seven Nights on Ka Mountain where they gave him an entire mountain with several buildings and he put on a play that lasted non-stop for seven days and seven nights. I was there for all of it." - p 84 Coincidentally, I recently read Carolyn Brown's Chance and Circumstance (you can read my complete review here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticB... ) in wch I read about the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing at the same Iranian festival. For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW... ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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Some Italian Futurist Poets - The Blue Moustache (translated by Felix Stefanile) reviewed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 25, 2012 I probably started learning about the Italian Futurists when I was in my mid 20s. I probably learned about th Some Italian Futurist Poets - The Blue Moustache (translated by Felix Stefanile) reviewed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 25, 2012 I probably started learning about the Italian Futurists when I was in my mid 20s. I probably learned about the Dadaists 1st. For me, the Futurists were the 1st of the 20th century revolutionary cultural movements &, as such, very exciting. Despite this, I think I always identified w/ the Dadaists the most. Ultimately, it was the Michael Kirby edited bk, Futurist Performance that kept my excitement high. This was some very inspired work. &, of course, there was Luigi Russolo's pioneering "The Art of Noise" Futurist manifesto from 1913. Alas, Italian Futurism's leading theorist, F. T. Marinetti, embraced war & early Fascism. Consider this quote from Lesley Chamberlain's 1989 introduction to the English translation of Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook: "At the height of Futurism Marinetti became embroiled with Mussolini and Fascism [..] Throughout 1919 Marinetti lent his skills as an orator to the young Fascist cause. He also took part, for the only time in his life, in the first Fascist activist success, which ended in the destruction of the office and printing works of the socialist newspaper Avanti! in Milan. Moreover it was this action by arditi - ex-servicemen who had banded together against socialism - which actually taught Mussolini that armed intimidation was a useful political tactic against the opposition. By May 1920 however Marinetti was accusing even the Fascists of being reactionary and passéist and he resigned from the Party. There was a rapprochement in 1923-24 but, now married, he never became so deeply engaged again. It was true that in 1926 Mussolini personally selected him as a founder member of his nationalistic Italian Academy. But Marinetti's original, energetic personality and the vitality and intellectual spark of Futurism never fitted with the Duce's abysmal artistic ideal - of something close to Soviet socialist realism. In 1938 Marinetti also strongly condemned anti-semitism in Fascist politics and art." (p 17) All of this is even more complex than that paragraph explains. For one thing, Mussolini started off as a Socialist. For another, the early days of Fascism were probably not as cut & dry as they seem in retrospect. Nonetheless, the Dadaists were clearly anti-nationalistic & anti-war &, as such, much more my kind of folks. Destroy a newspaper office? No thank you. As for the work? Some of it was incredible, some of it.. not so incredible. The painting, for the most part, never did much for me. I saw some of them in the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It might've been a dynamic Gino Severini painting w/ exceptionally thick impasto technique that I liked the most. But things like Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space had already lost their novelty for me by the time I discovered them. In retrospect, I might like such work more now - but in the 1970s things pictorial didn't generally do much for me. More recently, the ETCglobal department at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University revived & realized Fortunato Depero's visionary theater piece "Balli Plastici" in computer animated movie form. The genius of this rearoused my enthusiasm. Interested parties are directed to their "Toybox Futuristi Puppeteering toolkit" software @: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/balli... & the poetry? This, I'd have to say, was Italian Futurism's least imaginative medium. In Felix Stefanile's forward to the blue moustache he states: "Futurism's greatest poet was not an Italian, but a Russian, Maiakovski" (p 14) & I'm inclined to agree. Stefanile continues w/ "As enthusiasts, they wrote a poetry of challenge. Here are some titles of their books - Bayonets, City of Speed, Aeroplane, The Arsonist, Riding The Sun. They delighted in the new glossary of the twentieth century, and used with abandon such words as gasoline, electric, turbine, wires, dynamo. There are many poems about automobiles and airplanes." (p 15) No doubt being able to fly in airplanes was beyond exhilarating - but, these days, w/ car culture dehumanizing life & wars being constantly fought over the natural resources that fuel these luxuries, I personally prefer less exhilaration along these lines. Not being an Italian speaker, I can't really comment on the translations. I will say that the translator's admission that "The aviator's comment about Etna's blue moustache is a neat touch, I think, and I chose to stop my translation there, although the poem goes on for another five or six lines" strikes me as inexcusable!! Cf, eg, Amy Catanzano's review of the translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream @: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Regardless, I enjoyed some of the poems enuf. Here's the translation of one in full: "LET THE MOON BE DAMNED "You also know, my love, the gray disease of our century, that makes us go on dying day by day, as though from the blue heights we'd loosed the ballast of our joy, and now the lightness sears the heart of us. "Mild sentiment of a benumbed bourgeois wrapped in furs that never can be paid for: yearning for what cannot be, thirsting for infinity, the fever of tomorrow. Obsessions hammer at our delicate craniums as thin as the skulls of kittens. "And politics comes begging our support with her treacherous tongue, ardent and malicious, and lying religion closes our wicked eyes - if you want to live, go get a mechanical heart, inhale the red-hot blast of furnaces and powder your lovely face with chimney soot; then shoot a million volts into your system! You must make of life a computed dream triggered by levers, the contact of wires. "And when your heart has become an electrostat, and your tenacious hands are mean as iron, and you can puff your breast up like a sea, then may you vaunt your definitive victory. If, now, the cold machine surpasses man, in its perfection brutal and precise, that day will come we rule the brute machine, lords of the finite and the infinite, "and the moon be damned! "ENRICO CAVACCHIOLI from Riding The Sun, 1914" (p 29) In the end, tho, it was really only the pre-Dadaist 1910 sound poetry of Aldo Palazzeschi's "So Let Me Have My Fun" that earned my respect. Here's an excerpt: "Cucu ruru, ruru cucu, cucucucurucu! "What are these obscenities? These stanzas, who can read them? Freedom, freedom, poetic freedom! They're my passion. "Farafarafarafa, tarataratarata, paraparaparapa, laralaralarala! "Do you know what they are? Avant-garde stuff: not mere grotesqueries but the finishing off of other poetries. "Bubububu, fufufufu, Friu! Friu! "It hasn't a shred of wit - so why does he write it, the block-head?" (pp 50-51) ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of Alan Lord's High Friends in Low Places by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 21-28, 2023 For the complete version of my review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticL... "Instead of "No Future", to me Punk meant No Bullshit—a punk review of Alan Lord's High Friends in Low Places by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 21-28, 2023 For the complete version of my review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticL... "Instead of "No Future", to me Punk meant No Bullshit—a punk speaks his mind bluntly, gets to the heart of a matter, and tells you what's what. Which is the exact opposite of polite social conventions and "being diplomatic"—which is shorthand for bourgeois hypocrisy." - p 16 That seems ok in theory but in actuality it can just mean that any idiot can blurt out any stupid thing in a spirit of total self-righteousness. Just b/c someone says something bluntly doesn't mean that they get anywhere near the "heart of the matter" - wch brings me to writing reviews in general & to writing this review in particular: I've known Alan for 40 yrs. I consider him to be a friend, I'm certainly glad we know each other & that we still communicate. I'm very glad to have read this autobiography - but that doesn't mean that I agree w/ him about everything. SO, I'll be blunt: For me, the people who were & are really serious about rebelling against mainstream society take a stance that there's no turning back from. I remember being in Chicago in 1986 for the Haymarket Centennial, an anarchist gathering, the 1st for a very long time & the 1st in a series of such gatherings to come. I met a woman there who had a mohawk. She told me she'd gotten it for that weekend in Chicago, she was a weekend warrior, she was just going to comb her hair down again to look normal when she went back to her NYC office job on Monday. I was disgusted, I didn't like her at all. She was very loud in her belligerent mouthing off but it was just her act, something to make her feel like a hero. She was a poseur. I had long since been leading a life that pretty seriously showed me as rejecting normality 24/7. A yr later I got my 3D brain tattoo on my head. I kept my head shaved for yrs to make it so people SAW THE TATTOO. Once I got that done I knew I'd have a helluva time getting work to support myself w/, I wasn't rich, I was pppooooorrrrrrrrrr & I needed to survive somehow. That meant that if I got a job the employer had to accept me as is, I was a flagrant weirdo & that was that. Even tho Alan was a 'punk', he was a punk who cd get a straight job any time he needed to. Look at the cover of his bk, he looks pretty damn normal. I wanted to get that out of the way 1st. So much for bluntness. Did I cut thru the bullshit? Maybe. But I also took the risk of alienating Alan, of destroying our friendship. Maybe diplomacy doesn't have to be "bourgeois hypocrisy", maybe it can mean being sensitive to the other person. In this case, I can recognize that Alan has led an extraordinary life, it doesn't have to be an exemplar of what I was going for - & this bk expresses it very clearly. I've been lucky to receive a USB stick w/ "ALAN COMPLETE ARCHIVES" on it that includes things like recordings from his bands. That's a good companion volume to this bk. Alan also sent me this: "HIGH FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES — CLICKABLE WEB LINKS The following web links are the ones referenced in the book's footnotes; you can click on them to access them immediately. They are listed by chapter. The Appendix B web links are also included." This is a very conveniently organized list of the links scattered throughout the bk. I'll list the relevant ones here at the end of every chapter that I comment on & quote from. If you're interested in underground musical & literary culture in Montréal (& beyond) in the 1980s (& beyond) this is an excellent resource. The 1st chapter begins thusly: "I smoked a joint with Burroughs at sunset and fucked Kathy Acker's brains out at dawn. At the time I was a hot shit sunglassed guitarist in the coolest band in town, single and miserable, lonely with six girlfriends and a few unspellable venereal diseases. And stoned whenever possible. We were well into the Eighties and I was still not using condoms. Splodging into gummy plastic wasn't in my DNA. Sure, it was high risk, but what's the point if things aren't exciting? "Welcome to my Eighties. I had high friends in low places. Mostly at the Foufs—or Les Foufounes Électriques" - p 1 Alan provides the translation as "The Electric Buttocks". When I played there on tour in 1992 I was told it meant "The Electric Vagina". An online translator has it as "The Electric Vulva". Maybe it's "The Electric Cloaca". "Or how about the time in New York, when Pop artist James Rosenquist poured me a glass of champagne. Chris Burden explained to me how to drop steel beams from a helicopter clean through concrete pads, Grace Jones had a fit during her birthday party, and Divine walked in on my brunch? I also once had a hilariously futile phone conversation with Nam June Paik, and J.G. Ballard wrote to me on the back of photos of his cat. "This is not boasting, it's not name dropping, it's the icing on the cake of the crazy life I had throughout the Eighties—which were my Sixties, except I remember 'em better because blow and champagne don't fog up your brain like weed and acid." - p 4 I'm inclined to think that it is, indeed, name dropping b/c otherwise why wd it be worth mentioning that someone walked in on yr brunch or wrote something to you on the back of a picture of their cat? Nonetheless, it's interesting for me since all the people named are of interest to me. Alan mentions me, usually in a complimentary way, quite a few times in this. Given that I'm as ego-starved as the next guy (No, not him - the one lurking in that corner over there), I enjoyed that & I make sure to carry the bk w/ me at all times so that I can shove relevant pages in front of the faces of girls that I want to have sex w/ who are then horrified that this dirty old man is coming anywhere close to them. Still, ya gotta do what ya gotta doo. My 1st appearance, however, isn't one that many people are likely to pick up on: "No, we weren't "high on life". We were high on killing normality before it killed us" - p 5 Kill Normality Before It Kills You being one of my main slogans & one that I wd've introduced to the Montréalers in 1983 at APT 6 (more about that later) - although sometimes I used the alternate version: Stop Normality Before It StopsYou. Somewhat astonishingly to me some people are actually threatened by the version in wch "kill" is used as if "normality" were a flesh & blood being being threatened instead of an abstraction. If I sd Kill Geometrics Before It Kills You wd people feel as threatened? Maybe if they were a geometer. Chapter 1 — PLEASED TO MEET YOU Page 3: MTL Punk movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHPUK... Page 3: Montréal New Wave movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LG7b... "The work was easy. I just had to hop around the construction site with my surverying instrument, and plant rows of sticks showing the height to which earth graders had to pile the subbase gravel. The doofusses driving the dump trucks had fun careening roughshod and regularly snapped whole rows of my precious work, so I had to start all over again. I figured that was my job security." - pp 7-8 People are like dust, you can clean as often as you like but the unwanted will always be there again the next time. Might as well get used to it. "England's '77 Summer Of Hate turned into 1978, and at the end of spring I wrapped up that semester's studies. When Elvis Costello's This Year's Model came out I was utterly demolished. It felt like an insulting gauntlet flung at my feet: if such a dweeb could put out an album, well then so could I! I bought myself a guitar, slowly dusted off my chops, and out of nowhere I immediately began writing songs—something I'd never been able to do." - p 12 Elvis Costello so immediately struck me as mediocre that I never took him seriously. When someone like that has such a prominent media presence there's inevitably some money backing them. How that backing comes into being can be quite arbitrary. I think it might've been John Cougar Mellencamp that I read an interview w/ who stated that his career got a kickstart when a British guy just liked his accent & decided to invest heavily in him. Maybe it was somebody other than Mellencamp. Whoever it was didn't attribute their 'success' to any special talent they had - just to the lucky break of having some rich guy fancy him. How often has that sort of thing happened? "Tracy and Scott got together and soon evolved into the superb five-piece Heaven 17, and gave a show at the McGill Ballroom. In addition to Scott and Tracy they now had Roman Martyn from the Young Adults on guitar, and new faces—Kim Duran, and the luscious Lysanne Thibodeau on keyboards." - p 17 & it must've been a combination of Thibodeau's lusciousness & her having used German underground pop stars in her film "Bad Blood for the Vampire" that led to that film being included in "La Première Rétrospective Filmique Mondiale du Néoisme" in Québec in January, 1999, as well as in a smaller Neoist film fest in Windsor, ONT, in November of the same yr - b/c her film certainly had no connection whatsoever to Neoism & was just being used by the curator in an attempt to associate himself w/ Blixa Bargeld of the band Einstürzende Neubauten. Anyway, if you want to watch a 6 minute close-up of her mouth you can do so here: https://youtu.be/fhYqGKCBTlA . Chapter 3 — MONTREAL PUNK Page 17: Vertigo — by The Screamers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0-w0... Page 21: Love On A Leash — by Arson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0I2k... In the next chapter, Alan quotes a member of a Montréal band called "222" in its early days: ""The following day, a car couldn't be found to return the goddamn Cerwin Vegas" [speaker cabinets] "to the rental store. Since no one in the band had a solution and the rental was in his name, poor Johnny had no choice but to bring back the huge cabinets by himself. He pushed one of the wheeled cabinets from our rehearsal space downtown on Beaver Hall, all the way uphill to Marrazza—a distance of over 7 kilometers. Then he had to go back for the other unwieldy cabinet and do it all over again."" - p 21 My kindof guy! I really respect that he was honest enuf & responsible enuf to do that. Very few people wd. I'm reminded of a time when I was in Baltimore & I saw a woman pushing a guy w/ amputated lower legs in a wheelchair. They were both obviously dirt poor & the guy was trying to get to a hospital for some emergency he was in the midst of. The woman wasn't a relative or a friend she was just someone who took pity on him. When she saw me she recognized a kindred spirit so she asked me to take over & I pushed the guy the last mile or 2. What misery. "My first gig was set for May 11th and 12th" [1979] ", under the name of Alan Lord & The Marauders." - p 23 & on the USB drive holding Alan's life in a nutshell there're 4 recordings of Marauder songs: "I Guess I Like Her", "Feelin Fine", "Go On", & "Just One More Chance". Listening to them, if I didn't 'know' they're 1979 Montréal punk I might think they're 1966 Brit rock. Anyway, they're standard rock instrumentation: rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, drums, vocal. The playing is simple & primitive & competent for what it is. The rhythm guitar has amp reverb on it. I can imagine young people drinking, dancing, & flirting to it. What more do you need? "For the Nelson gig I pasted up my own posters that asked the burning question: "Who is Alan Lord?" Indeed, who the hell was he? I sure wanted to know, I was still looking for him." - p 23 The Marauders were far from original but, what the hell, I'm sure the audience didn't give a shit as long as they got laid at the end of the night & I'm sure they had fun. Chapter 4 — MONTREAL NEW WAVE Page 25: Public Image — by PIL (Public Image Limited) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjzkN... Alan writes about meeting Bernard Gagnon, a synthesizer player, & starting to collaborate w/ him. "After a few jams we saw things gelled between us. I sang and played rhythm guitar, Gagnon played Minimoog on half the songs, then switched to lead guitar for the rest. We recruited Phil Nolan on bass, Angel "Dust" Calvo on drums, and I christened the band Alan Lord & The Blue Genes." - p 27 How about Alan Lord & The Alan Lords? or Alan Lord & The Self-Promoters? Those wd've been funnier band names. There's one song from what they turned into on Alan's USB stick called "DNA". There were hundreds of pop bands in the 1970s w/ synth players but it was still alot fresher than the typical rock instrumentation listed above. Still, synths were expensive. I built a function generator from a (maybe $60) kit in 1976 but it was stolen from me in 1982. That was more my kind of electronic instrument in that era. That & the toy Muson sequencer/synthesizer that cost about $25 & that I wish I still had! One was priced at $714.37 (+ $60.78 shipping) on Reverb 6 yrs ago! What. A. Rip. Off. One thing that I particularly love about this bk is that Alan is truly thankful, truly appreciative of his fellow insider outsiders. "Without the Nelson Grill the nascent scene could have been strangled at birth. So a big Thank You John to Spike. Without him I would have been nothing, I would have remained a frustrated office slave with his pipe dreams quickly dashed." - p 26 In BalTimOre, the thx shd probably go to Roger & Leslee who ran the Marble Bar & the Galaxy Ballroom in the Congress Hotel. Both were havens for the weirdos. The Marble Bar was more of a punk rock club & Roger is reputed to've died in 1984 from a heart attack while dancing there, presumably under the influence of too much coke. The Galaxy Ballroom was where the weirder stuff happened, that's where I did things, that's where part of the 3rd Church & Foundation of the SubGenius Convention happened, that's where part of the 7th International Neoist Apartment Festival happened. In other words: I feel ya, Alan - w/o people like Spike & Leslee & Roger so many of us wdn't've had a place to be as wild as we were. Lardy knows the Marble Bar tolerated my more human-time-bomb aspects. "After the Nelson Grill show, Phil left us to form Ulterior Motive, and we no longer had a bass player. I changed our name to the simpler Vex, and in July we recorded our seminal song DNA" - p 31 Chapter 5 — FROM NEW WAVE TO POST-PUNK Page 30: Nancy Beaudoin — by Aut'Chose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV9HB... Page 32: DNA — by Vex https://soundcloud.com/user-55178726-... Chapter 6 — THE RETURN OF JOHNNY SHIVERS Page 37: Did You No Wrong — by The Sex Pistols https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niaIR... Alan recounts meeting his soon-to-be close friend Mario Campo. As w/ his appreciation of the guy who ran the Nelson Grill, Alan's love for & appreciation of his friend is apparent. "When it was his turn to go onstage, Mario Campo walked up to the mic, holding a sheet of paper. Instead of reading from it, he violently scrunched it into a ball against the mic—which gave loud crinkly sounds coming out of the speakers. He then tossed it at the audience and left in disgust—to howls, hoots and whistles of approval and disapproval." - p 40 Had I been there I suspect I wd've loved the elegance of this gesture of exasperation. "Dave shot me up. I immediately felt woozy and started teetering. "Uh oh," he said, "maybe I gave you too much." Exactly what I didn't want to hear. I collapsed onto the couch and felt happy as a cooing Tribble. I was fine. The great feeling you get on heroin is like sinking into a warm bubble bath and enjoying it eyes closed, a happy mollusk in the suds. Right then I knew I should never get into smack, because that was the only thing I'd ever need in my life. Then I threw up a little retch. Every twenty minutes an unpleasant little retch. Well that nailed the fun out of Junkie Life for me." - p 45 Personally, I've been shot up w/ heroin & dilaudid, I drank paregoric & oral morphine, & smoked opium. I don't recommend any of them. I remember being on heroin while a gay friend read a passage from a bk about how sperm supposedly contains the active ingredient of heroin that supposedly makes you feel so good. I didn't feel good, I just didn't care, I didn't care about my friend or about much of anything else. I was taking heroin b/c I was being self-destructive b/c I'd broken up w/ a woman that I was obsessed w/. The one time I drank oral morphine I was performing w/ my band "Something That Dissolves The Shadow of Something That Was Next to Something That Combusted Twice. Once." (1989.11.04) ( https://youtu.be/yamGE-mVW8A?t=1h26m51s ) in a concert that lasted 4 or 5 hrs. We'd pre-planned that we were going to play a section as hard & fast as we cd for an hr. Just before this section I drank the morphine. I'd been drinking hard alcohol all night. It occurred to me that I might've overdone it so I really plunged into the hard & fast section in an effort to work the morphine & alcohol thru my system in the hope of not ODing. I cd go on & on about such foolishness but I never had the slightest urge or inclination to be a junkie. People often become addicts in the process of trying to escape from their lives & end up more trapped in them than ever. Fortunately, I don't seem to have an addictive biology. I've seen friends shoot heroin & end up under house arrest or worse w/in mnths b/c of their absolute lack of self-control. "But Mario didn't have to travel far to find trouble. Usually he found it in the biker dives of Montréal or at Peter's, where he liked to go get beaten up. Or else in a drunken fit at home, smashing his toilet door, throwing beer bottles at the wall or down the corridor of his apartment building, bringing the cops at three in the morning." - p 52 I met Mario in early 1983 at APT 6 (more about that later) where I witnessed his performance at his apartment & where he translated my English into French for my "Practice for Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear Piercing". He seemed to be a good translator, taking it seriously & doing me the favor in good faith. While I can believe that he had his bad times, such as those described above, I'm glad to say that I met him when he seemed to be up. ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of Ivora Cusack & Stéfani de Loppinot and by Pip Chodorov (for English speaking audiences)'s Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen by Michael Snow by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 20, 2023 Michael Snow, Dec review of Ivora Cusack & Stéfani de Loppinot and by Pip Chodorov (for English speaking audiences)'s Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen by Michael Snow by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 20, 2023 Michael Snow, December 10, 1928 – January 5, 2023. Michael Snow is Dead! Long Live Michael Snow! I probably 1st read about Michael Snow's films in Parker Tyler's Underground Film A Critical History (1969, Grove Press) wch I wd've read probably sometime between 1973 & 1976. This was an important bk for introducing me to a subject that's been near & dear to me ever since. I didn't get a chance to actually see any of those movies until The Baltimore Museum of Art presented "The American Independent Film Series" from October 7, 1976 to June 4, 1977. I still have the program notes from most of the series that I attended. I also have the catalog called A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema (1976, The American Federation of the Arts). This series of films was incrdibly important to me. I'd already made my 1st film in 1975: 001. a. "Lamar "Chip" Layfield / Carol / Pat Brown /tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" - super 8 - indefinite duration - fall '75 b. "Lamar "Chip" Layfield / Carol / Pat Brown /tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" {'inappropriate' quasi-document of semi-correct gambling presentation} - featuring Dan Sacktan as the gambler - 1/2" VHS cassette - 32:10 - fall '75/january '95 c. "Lamar "Chip" Layfield / Carol / Pat Brown / tentatively, a convenience" {'inappropriate' quasi-document of semi-correct gambling presentation + relelvant additions} - with addition of titles & of a reading & display of the relevant section of my 1st book tagged on at the end + a picture of the filmmaker at approximately the time of the film's being made - Quicktime movie - 48:35 - 1700X1275 (HD) - fall 1975/january 1995/May 27, 2017 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/uraX7UhTmxc At the time of my making my 1st film I didn't know of anything else like it. In fact, there's still very-little-to-nothing like it to this day that I know of. Perhaps, I might retrospectively call it "Materialist", perhaps I might compare it slightly to Robert Nelson's "Bleu Shut" (1970). Whatever the case, the films that I felt most aligned to were the ones called Structuralist, a term I wasn't previously familiar w/. Michael Snow's "Wavelength" screened at the BMoA on March 17, 1977. I absolutely loved it. I wd've been 23 at the time. I made my 1st video a few mnths later & my 2nd film in the fall of 1978. What now seems like a mere 15 yrs later, I shot a scene that was a take-off of "Wavelength" for my movie entitled "The "Official" John Lennon's Erection as Blocking Our View Homage & Cheese Sandwich". In Snow's original, a man is seen walking into a loft who then falls to the floor out-of-shot to be then discovered, presumably dead, by 2 women who enter. In my 'remake', the 2 women help the man stand up, he isn't dead. That scene is from here: https://youtu.be/nRqfWwHAdqA?t=1754 to here: https://youtu.be/nRqfWwHAdqA?t=1895 . Actually, it goes on longer but it's intercut w/ other things past this point. On September 12,1995 I got to play w/ CCMC, the free improvising group that Michael Snow was in, at the wonderful Music Gallery. I had already been in touch w/ CCMC's John Oswald thru the home taper network & w/ Paul Dutton in his capacity as a proof-reader for MUSICWORKS magazine but I hadn't communicated w/ Snow yet. Thanks to Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor) this was videoed & I made the following movie: 170. a. "w/ CCMC" - featuring: Michael Snow: piano, John Oswald: alto sax, Paul Dutton: voice singing, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: sampler (w/ live sampling), synthesizers - shot by Istvan Kantor / Monty Cantsin September 12, 1995 @ the Music Gallery, Toronto - edited to DVD sometime around 2002 - VHS -> DVD - 27:39 b. "w/ CCMC" (YouTube version) - this is the excerpt used on the "UNCERTS" compilation w/ title & credits added around November 4, 2009 - VHS -> mini-DV -> computer file -> mini-DV -> YouTube - 3:31 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/epsDAADK2XA I did live sampling of the CCMC players (thanks to the assistance of sound man Paul Hodges) in order to surprise them. Since I was using a fairly primitive 8 bit Mirage sampler that had something like a 3 second sampling limit across 61 keys & that had to have its samples & sequences (limited to 333 key-downs) stored on floppy discs this was a somewhat more laborious & time-consuming process than one might expect. I had just played a different show at the Music Gallery On September 8, 1995 ( https://youtu.be/kjkDZsaWhkk ) & Paul had told me that he thought I was too loud then so he had me potted down more than I wd've liked at the CCMC concert. Oh, well. Despite the slowness caused by the live sampling process & my volume being slightly lower than I preferred, this was an excellent event (albeit for a very small audience). Snow was the greatest pianist I've ever played w/. Michael apparently liked what I was doing enuf to lead to his inviting me to play w/ CCMC whenever I wanted to. I was thrilled. Alas, the extremely decrepit car I had broke down for good & I had to move away from CacaNada soon thereafter so I never got to play w/ them again. This is something I will forever regret. At some point I got a copy of Snow's excellent photography bk entitled Cover to Cover (1975), another work I absolutely love & possibly my favorite photography bk. You can read my silly little review of that here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... . I've also been able to hear a few of his recordings, all of wch are amazing & original. In the meantime, over the decades since I 1st witnessed "Wavelength" I've had the opportunity to see very few other films by Snow: "New York Eye & Ear Control" (1964), "La Region Centrale" (1971), & "<—————>" (aka "Back and Forth") (1969). Considering his importance to experimental filmmaking it's astounding how few the opportunities to see his work have been. I remember John Oswald telling me that when "Rameau's Nephew" premiered in Toronto that he & Snow were the only people in the audience. SO, on learning of Snow's death I decided to look online to see what movies of his, if any, might be available for sale & I found "Presents" (1981) & "Rameau's Nephew" (1974) - both available from RE:VOIR via Anthology in NYC. I bought them. "Rameau's Nephew" came w/ a 176pp bk, the bk that I'll probably get around to reviewing here in some way or another eventually. I read the original Diderot at the same time to look for parallels w/ Snow's film. You can read my review of that here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticD... . I didn't really find any parallels. Perhaps someone wd say: You fool! Jean Philippe Rameau's music is played in one scene ("Polyphony") & the Penguin paperback edition of Diderot's bk (the same edition I reviewed) appears in another ("Commentator"). Diderot's original is just one scene. Snow's film is divided into 25 very heterogeneous sequences: "Whistling" (amazing in & of itself), "Focus", "Mom (Piano)", "Credits", "Mental (1)", "Voice Scene", "Plane", "Sink", "Dennis Burton", "Polyphony", "Bus", "Fart", "Dub", "Piss Duet", "Embassy", "Commentator", "Laughing Chair", "Rain", "English Comedians", "Hotel", "Four", "Mental (2)", "Cymbal-Symbol", "Erratum", & "Addenda" - w/ "Colors" used as transitions. I didn't, personally, find there to be much of an overarching theme. It seemed to be that what unified all the material is that it was just what Snow was thinking about at the time. Snow, & others, might strongly disagree. If you love close looks at complex & difficult experimental films this whole package is for you. Each sequence is analyzed in French & English, small stills from the film are shown, & images of Snow's scripts are there too. This is about as thorough as it's likely to get. If you're NOT an experimental film lover, this whole package will probably be extremely confusing. ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew / D'Alembert's Dream by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 13-19, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticD... Michael Snow is dead, Long Live Michael Snow! Wha?! In the last yr review of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew / D'Alembert's Dream by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 13-19, 2023 For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticD... Michael Snow is dead, Long Live Michael Snow! Wha?! In the last yr at least 2 people died who I didn't really feel the importance of to me until after learning of their deaths. One of them was Michael Snow. It occurred to me that, despite knowing of his work since the 1970s, I'd seen very few of his movies. SO, I looked online for copies of them for sale & got a copy of his Rameau's Nephew (not the full title) wch came w/ a bk. I watched the movie & started reading the bk & realized that I'd just have to read Diderot's original to get a fuller picture of the whole meaning of it all. Fortunately, I'd had a copy of this bk in my personal library for decades & I think it's even the very same edition that appears in Snow's movie in one scene. SOO, I decided to read this 1st before finishing the bk about Snow's movie. From the FOREWORD: "Le Neveu de Rameau, in form as in other respects unique, veers bewilderingly in style from the inflated, rhetorical and bombastic to the simple, slangy and coarse, and often the face value of what is said is not the author's intention, for he is being ironical as well as humorous." - p 7 I'd never read anything by Diderot before & while I found him interesting I'm not so sure I wd've wanted to be a character in either of these 2 bks. Diderot seemed bizarrely insensitive to the people he used. "It was his work as a translator which prompted a syndicate of publishers to entrust to him, after one or two false starts with others, the task of translating Chambers's Cyclopedia, a fairly modest compilation, into French. But like so many things Diderot touched, the simple publisher's project rapidly enlarged itself until the work became the first great Encylclopedia of the modern world, running to seventeen folio volumes of text and eleven supplementary volumes of plates, and taking in all about twenty-five years to reach completion." - p 9 "An eternal adolescent, he was bursting with enthusiasm and curiosity about the worlds of science, art, music, the theatre and technology, full of the excitement of discovery, always elaborating some new theory, arguing with the wrong-headed, an idealist and a realist, sublime but not averse to the smutty joke, a down-to-earth materialist yet haunted by moral scruples and a highly developed social sense, a scientist always in a state of febrile emotion and seldom far from tears, a deadly enemy but the kindest and most companionable of men." - pp 10-11 That's quite a description isn't it? Some people can be unconscious of their contradictions & accept them as necessary to having flexibility of reaction. Others might be unconscious of their contradictions & might seem to be hypocritical or confused. Perhaps the bottom line is that a complex person isn't reducible to a single dogma. "And finally Rameau's Nephew, a work belonging to no recognizable genre, neither novel nor play nor essay nor, in spite of its sub-title, satire, and unique in French literature." - p 11 &, perhaps, that's the description that comes closest to also describing Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen by Michael Snow from roughly 300 yrs later. "Rameau's Nephew is a masterpiece alone of its kind and not a little mysterious. Almost every aspect of it, dating, intention, meaning, is open to debate, and tentative conclusions about one aspect are often flatly contradicted by another." - p 15 "It seems rather stretching a point to suggest that Diderot wrote this brilliant piece of invective for the private satisfaction of knowing that it might possibly be published after his death and after that of most of the people attacked." - p 17 "Nor is the list of conjectures exhausted. Is it a dialogue between the respectable, law-abiding side of each one of us and the anarchist, irresponsible, wholly self-centered side?" - p 18 It's an ongoing project of mine to point out what I consider to be misues of "anarchy", "anarchist", "anarchism", "anarchistic", etc, in things that I read. The above's a perfect example. "law-abiding" is equated w/ being "respectable". It wd've been "law-abiding" in Nazi Germany to assist in the robbery & murder of Jews, homosexuals, dissidents, & Gypsies. Somehow, that's not "respectable" to me. The opposite of this is presented as being "anarchist" wch is equated w/ "irresponsible" & "wholly self-centered" & yet it's anarchists who put the most emphasis on taking responsibility for oneself & NOT relinquishing it to the following of laws & leaders. It's also anarchists who make themselves wholly unpopular by protesting & resisting ongoing acts of injustice - a process about as opposite of "self-centered" as it gets. "I hold discussions with myself on politics, love, taste or philosophy, and let my thoughts wander in complete abandon, leaving them free to follow the first wise or foolish idea that comes along." [..] "There the most amazing moves can be seen and the poorest conversation be heard, for if you can be a man of wit and a great chessplayer like Legal you can also be a great chess-player and an ass like Foubert and Mayot." This is the 1st flagrant insult from Diderot that appears in Rameau's Nephew. It's no wonder that he didn't publish it when it was written. I can't really say that I completely approve of insulting people &, yet, there is some refreshment to be had from openly speaking one's generally more self-censored thoughts. Rameau's Nephew is full of insults. "a hundred lickspittles would come and pay court to me every day (he seemed to see them all around him — Palissot, Poincinet, the Frérons, father and son, La Porte[)]" - p 44 These are real people, real enemies of Diderot. "9. Palissot (1730-1814), arch-enemy of the movement, caricatured Diderot and his associates in the comedy Les Philosophes (1760). There were two Poinsinets, cousins, one of whom, Henri Poinsinet (1735-69), known as the younger, attacked the Encylopaedists in his comedy Le Petit Philosophe (1760). The elder Fréron (1719-76), the great enemy of Voltaire, waged an anti-philosophic warfare in his Année littéraire. His son was born in 1754, which again dates this part of the work well into the 1770s. Les Trois siècles de la littérature française, 3 vols, 1772, by Sabatier des Castres, Palissot and others, a sort of history of French literature, was violently biased and hostile to Voltaire and the Enlightenment. This reference is yet another factor in the final dating of this work." - p 128 [..] "He is a compound of the highest and the lowest, good sense and folly." - p 33 "HE: You have always taken a certain amount of interest in me because, although I am a chap you really despise, I amuse you at the same time." - p 45 Diderot's depiction of Rameau's nephew presents him as simultaneously impossibly talented & a sycophantic creep - but slipping thru his cracks there's a FOOL, as in a comedian who speaks truth to power & gets away w/ it if he's charming enuf. "He stirs people up and gives them a shaking, makes them take sides, brings out the truth, shows who are really good and unmasks the villains. It is then that the wise man listens and sorts people out." - p 35 He's also really the nephew of the famous composer. While I was reading this bk I got out the boxset I have of Jean Philippe Rameau's opera-ballet entitled "Les Indes Galantes" (1735; revised 1743) & listened to it 2 or more times to 'put me in the mood' for having an opinion about Rameau's music wch this bk's introductory scholarliness tells me Diderot didn't like. I know next to nothing of Baroque era music so listening to this opera-ballet just yields a respect for the apparent attn to detail w/o yielding a true appreciation of what might've made it most interesting in its day. "He is a nephew of the famous musician who has delivered us from the plainsong of Lully that we have been chanting for over a hundred years, who has written so many unintelligible visions and apocalyptic truths on the theory of music, not a word of which he or anyone else has ever understood" - p 35 Wow, that really makes me want to read Rameau's music theory bk(s). I wonder if they're available in English? "Rameau's 1722 Treatise on Harmony initiated a revolution in music theory. Rameau posited the discovery of the "fundamental law" or what he referred to as the "fundamental bass" of all Western music. Heavily influenced by new Cartesian modes of thought and analysis, Rameau's methodology incorporated mathematics, commentary, analysis and a didacticism that was specifically intended to illuminate, scientifically, the structure and principles of music. With careful deductive reasoning, he attempted to derive universal harmonic principles from natural causes. Previous treatises on harmony had been purely practical; Rameau embraced the new philosophical rationalism, quickly rising to prominence in France as the "Isaac Newton of Music". His fame subsequently spread throughout all Europe, and his Treatise became the definitive authority on music theory, forming the foundation for instruction in western music that persists to this day." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Ph... Wow again. On 2nd thought I've probably intuitively rejected Rameau's theory from day one. Or even the day before day one. Nonetheless, I just bought the bk. "I: Speaking of your uncle, do you see him sometimes? "HE: Yes, going past in the street. "I: Doesn't he ever do anything for you? "HE: If he ever did anything for anybody it was without realizing it. He is a philosopher in his way. He thinks of nothing but himself, and the rest of the universe is not worth a pin to him. His wife and daughter can just die when they like, and so long as the parish tolls tolling their knell go on sounding intervals of a twelfth and a seventeenth everything will be all right. He's quite happy. That is what I particularly value in men of genius. They are only good for one thing, and apart from that, nothing." - p 37 Whew! That's harsh there Diderot old man! "I: Steady, my dear fellow. Now look, tell me—I won't take your uncle as an example, for he is a hard man, brutal, inhuman, avaricious, he is a bad father, bad husband, bad uncle; but it is not quite certain that he is a man of genius, that he has taken his art very far or that his work will count ten years from now." - p 40 Uh.. I bought 3 records of his music today, 259 yrs after his death, so it looks like he made the cut. "Who is disgraced today, Socrates or the judge who made him drink the hemlock? "HE: And a fat lot of goood it has done him! Was he condemned and put to death any the less for that? Was he any the less a seditious citizen? Because he despised a bad law did that do anything to prevent his encouraging fools to despise a good one? Was he any the less impudent and eccentric as a person?" - p 39 These strike me as odd questions that Rameau's nephew is asking since he's being presented as an "impudent and eccentric" person himself. Diderot waxes ironic. "Or again we could wish that Voltaire had the gentleness of Duclos, the ingenuousness of Abbé Trublet or the uprightness of Abbé d'Olivet" - p 42 "Charles Duclos (1704-72), novelist, historian and essayist. His most important work was the Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle (1750). In 1755 he became secretary of the Acamémie française. Although sympathetic towards the Encyclopaedists he was a moderate man and thought Diderot a violent fanatic, and used his influence to keep him out of the Academy. Hence Diderot's resentment. "The Abbé Trublet (1697-1770) was a deadly enemy of Voltaire and a sarcastic, unpleasant person. "The Abbé d'Olivet (1682-1768), historian of the Académie française, had a reputation for hypocrisy and dissimulation. Diderot is therefore ironically praising this trio for the opposite virtues to their known vices." - p 127 Rameau's nephew has gotten out of favor w/ the rich patrons he was usually brown-nosing b/c he left some of his contempt slip. Diderot encourages him to try to get back in their good graces. "HE: Yes, you are right. I think that is best. She is kind hearted. Monsieur Vieillard says she is so kind! I know myself that she is. And yet to have to go and eat humble pie in front of the bitch! Beg for mercy at the feet of a miserable little performer who is constantly booed by the pit!" - p 48 "I: Ah, but you see, my friend, she is fair, pretty, young, soft and plump, and so it is an act of humility to which one more delicate than you might stoop upon occasion. "HE: Let's get this clear: there is arse-kissing literally and arse-kissing metaphorically. Ask fat old Bergier, who kisses Madame de la Marque's arse both literally and metaphorically — and my goodness, in that case I should find them both equally unpleasant. "I: If the way I'm suggesting doesn't appeal to you then have the courage to be a pauper. "HE: But it is hard to be a pauper while there are so man wealthy idiots you can live on. And then the self-conetempt; that is unbearable." - p 49 Throughout, Diderot's position vis a vis Rameau & his nephew seems to be one mostly of contempt.. &, yet, when he gives these presumably highly exaggerated accts of his pioneering work as an air violinist (centuries ahead of air guitarists) his descriptions make the nephew seem astoundingly talented. "(At the same time he takes up the position of a violinist, hums an allegro of Locatelli, his right arm moves as though bowing and his left hand and fingers seem to fly up and down the neck. If he plays a wrong note he stops, tightens or loosens the string, plucking it with his nail to make sure it is in tune, then takes up the piece again where he broke off, tapping the time with his foot; head, feet, hands, arms, body all play their part.[)]" - p 53 The fact that he's miming playing a piece by Locatelli is marvelous enuf but what I wonder is: If this had been written 80 yrs later wd it've been Niccolò Paganini? The nephew partially employs himself giving music lessons to the children of the aristocracy. Given that he's obviously passionate about music he expresses a cynical attitude to teaching it. 1st, tho, Diderot dismisses it as useless. "HE: Eight! She should have had her fingers on the keys these four years. "I: But perhaps I was not all that anxious to bring into her educational program a subject that takes up so much time and serves so little purpose." - p 56 I'm not really that sure that I like Diderot. I respect that he was an Encyclopaediast but it seems like he might've also been right at home in today's QUARANTYRANNY in wch music has been declard non-essential in contrast to Dunkin' Donuts. For me, the performance of music is a highly disciplined activity in wch perceptual acuity, intuition, & a sort of instinctual mathematic ability combine at a speed difficult to track. But then I'm not one of those people who's easily impressed by some big guys throwing a ball around & ramming into each other. I'm more impressed by any pianist who can play Alkan or Scriabin or Sorabji or Elliott Carter, etc. Doing that makes a football player look like little more than a boulder being shoved downhill in contrast. "I: I am reflecting that everything you have said is more specious than logical. But let it go at that. You say you have taught accompaniment and composition? "HE: Yes. "I: Knowing nothing whatever about it? "HE: No, I certainly didn't, and that is why there were worse teachers than me: the ones who thought they knew something. At any rate I didn't ruin the intelligence and fingers of the children. When they went on from me to a good teacher, having learned nothing they had nothing to unlearn, and that was so much time and money saved." - p 58 Diderot admits to an affinity for some of the things that the nephew is saying. "I'm not above the peasures of the senses myself. I have a palate too, and it is tickled by a delicate dish or a rare wine. I have a heart and a pair of eyes, and enjoy looking at a pretty woman. I like to feel her firm, round bosom, press her lips with mine, drink pleasure from her eyes and die of it in her arms. I am not averse to a night out with my men friends sometimes, and even a pretty rowdy one. But I won't hide the fact that it is infinitely more pleasureable for me to have helped the unfortunate, successfully concluded some tricky bit of business, given some good advice, read something pleasant, taken a walk with a man or woman I am fond of, spent a few instructional hours with my children, written a worthwhile page, fulfilled the duties of my position, said some tender, soft words to the woman I love and made her love me." - pp 66-67 Personally, I can enjoy the above things too - but coming inside a woman's vagina has a special place in those pleasures that makes it stand out. "I have some soft notes which I accompany with a smile and an infinite variety of approving faces, with nose, mouth, eyes and brow all brought into play. I have a certain agility with my hips, a way of twitching my spine, raising or lowering my shoulders, shutting my eyes and being struck dumb as though I had heard an angelic, divine voice come down from heaven. That's what gets them. I wonder whether you appreciate the full power of this last attitude. Watch it. Look. "I: It certainly is unique. "HE: Do you think any somewhat vain female brain can resist it? "I: No. I must say you have taken the talent for making fools of people and bootlicking as far as it will go." - p 74 It seems that Rameau's nephew was a sort of Elvis Presley of the Baroque era. These days he'd probably just get the girls stoned & dispense w/ the talent. "You hear nothing but names such as Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, and God knows what epithets coupled with them. Nobody is allowed to have any brains unless he is as stupid as we are." - p 80 "This speech is a sustained piece of invective against enemies of the Encyclopaedic movement, whether wealthy people with vested interests in ignorance or reaction or their abject tools, the army of unsuccessful writers and professional scandalmongers (today we might call them gossip columnists)." - p 129 ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of John D. MacDonald's The Green Ripper by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 13, 2023 Since I started reviewing bks for Goodreads in the fall of 2007 I've put a checkmark next to the title on the title page after I finish a bk & usually wr review of John D. MacDonald's The Green Ripper by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 13, 2023 Since I started reviewing bks for Goodreads in the fall of 2007 I've put a checkmark next to the title on the title page after I finish a bk & usually write "Finished" followed by the appropriate date. On some of the bks I've read that I remember reading before the fall of 2007 I just put the check. I remembered reading a John MacDonald bk & this is the only one I have in my personal library but I went ahead & read the whole thing anyway in my process of reading crime fiction bks in alphabetical order of author's last name that I haven't already read something by. After I read the whole fucking thing I went to the title page to check it off & saw that there was already a check there. Reading it, nothing had seemed familiar, I didn't remember a single detail. That brings up the issue: Did I really read it already? OR did I misremember that I'd read it already? OR was it such a generic reading experience that it wasn't at all memorable? OR has my memory really gotten that bad?! I think I probably misremembered that I'd already read it, perhaps confusing the author's fairly common-type name w/ another similar crime fiction writer's name, maybe John LeCarre? NOW, the question is: Who gives a shit? In other words, write the fucking review for fuck's sake, will you?! On the back cover, there's a plug for this by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, no less: "To diggers a thousand years from now...the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen." Really? What are they? Drinking buddies or something?! I like Vonnegut but that's one of the most shameless pieces of hyperbole I've ever read. This was published in 1979. I was alive then, I remember what it was like, so I found this bit of economic explanation interesting: ""There is a debt of perhaps two trillion dollars out there, owed by governments to governments, by governments to banks, and there is not one chance in hell it can ever be paid back. There is not enough productive capacity in the world, plus enough raw materials, to provide maintenance of plant plus enough overage even to keep up with the mounting interest." ""What happens? It gets written off?" "He looked at me with a pitying expression. "All the major world currencies will collapse. Trade will cease. Without trade, without the mechanical-scientific apparatus running, the planet won't support its four billion people, or perhaps even half that. Hydrocarbon utilization heats and houses and clothes the people. There will be fear, hate, anger, death, The new barbarism. There will be plague and poison. And then the new Dark Ages."" - pp 12-13 Now, personally, by 5 yrs later, I was pretty much a frequent doomsayer. I thought there wd have to be a revolution in the United States. After all, we had the most flagrant puppet president imaginable, Ronald Reagan. The world's human population has almost doubled since then. That's cause enuf for alarm right there. Do you ever wonder how the US cd force so many people out of work during the QUARANTYRANNY & then pay them all more money than they wd've ordinarly gotten from unemployment? I certainly do. It's been explained to me that the US borrowed money from China, I have no idea whether that's true or not. It all just reinforces money as some sort of fantasy object that 'works' as long as people believe in it. In other words, I'm still a doomsayer except that I haven't really seen doom come in the last 44 yrs since this bk was published so why shd I believe in it now? There're people who've come to public prominence proclaiming that humanity is irreversibly damaging the environment. I think humans love a good apocalypse story, they're thrilling - but when it really comes down to it people keep on keepin' on & the planet is the best survivalist of them all. Hands down. Oh, yeah, this bk. Is it a spoiler to quote the part where the title's explained? "And on the way home she would explain to me how she had outwitted the green ripper. I had read once about a little kid who had overheard some adult conversation and afterward, in the night, had terrible nightmares. He kept telling his people he dreamed about the green ripper coming to get him. They finally figured out that he had heard talk about the grim reaper. I had told Grets about it, and it had found its way into our personal language. It was not possible that the green ripper had gotten her." - pp 42-43 Better the green ripper than the brown splurter. Travis's girlfriend, Grets, has died. Her death is suspicious. So are the visitors Travis receives soon thereafter. ""Before that, their pants were too long. Long enough to step on the back of their cuffs. Like Kissinger. The necktie knots were wrong. Frenchmen tie them that way. When Klein cleaned his glasses and held them up to the light, I looked through them too, and I saw no distortion."" - p 55 & when I looked at that language it was totally transparent. Travis assumes a new identity in order to penetrate a cult group that he thinks is implicated in Grets's death. "As I walked, I talked to imaginary people, talked as Tom McGraw would talk to them. He was servile when he talked to people in power. He was affable as a dog with his peers. He was nasty to those he considered beneath him. I worked my way into the role." - p 123 In other words, he was an untertan. In the cult's compound he witnesses what appears to be training for a terrorist attack. "They walked close and lovingly, laughing and talking together, looking at each other, not at their surroundings. When the whistle blew, they would snatch at the luggage, yank it open, remove an automatic weapon, let the luggage fall to the ground, stand with their backs to each other, almost, in a little deadly square formation, hold the weapons aiming out in four directions, and revolve slowly." - p 130 The cult members had all been trained by different military or paramilitary or revolutionary groups. "Barry had been trained in Cuba by the DGI and had been a weapons instructor at Baninah near Benghazi in Libya. Chuck had trained at a camp near Al-Ghaidha in South Yemen, along with people from the IRA. Sammy had trained in the U.S. Marine Corps and later in the Cuban training center near Bagdad, where the famous Carlos was an adviser. Persival interrupted to give Carlos's correct name, Ilyich Rameirez Sanchez. Stella had been in the Weather Underground and had trained in their mountain camp in Oregon, and later in Bulgaria." - p 153 Now, keeping in mind that this bk's from 1979 do you notice anything odd about the above? How about "Al-Ghaidha in South Yemen"? Al Ghayda (transliterated variously) is a city in Yemen. "Al-Qaeda (/ælˈkaɪdə, ˌælkɑːˈiːdə/; Arabic: القاعدة, romanized: al-Qāʿida, lit. 'the Base', IPA: [ælqɑːʕɪdɐ]) is a Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization led by Salafi jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic state known as the Caliphate. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs, but also include other peoples. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian and military targets in various countries, including the 1998 United States embassy bombings, the 2001 September 11 attacks, and the 2002 Bali bombings; it has been designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and various countries around the world. "The organization was founded in a series of meetings held in Peshawar during 1988, attended by Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Muhammad Atef, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other veterans of the Soviet–Afghan War. Building upon the networks of Maktab al-Khidamat, the founding members decided to create an organization named "Al-Qaeda" to serve as a "vanguard" for jihad." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda To an Arabic-ignorant person (me), "Al-Ghaidha", as a location near a terrorist training camp in 1979, seems awfully similar to "Al-Qaeda", the terrorist group whose name seems to mean "the base" & that didn't get any attn that I can recall until their triple whammy air-strike on 9/11 - 22 yrs later. According to the above Wikipedia entry, Al-Qaeda wasn't founded until 1988. Did John MacDonald know something in 1979 that still hasn't been put together w/ later times? According to Google Translate, "Al-Ghayda" means "Grove" in English & "Al-Ghayha" means "the aim". It looks like I'm barking up the wrong tree. The cult group has typical rhetoric: ""We make the oppressors visible to the people by giving them reason to show how cruel and tough they can be. We force them to react. Like Chicago and Kent State, but much much more." ""By going out and killing people?" ""That isn't the purpose, Brother. To kill people. Our civilization has gotten too complicated. It's full of machines and plastics. Brother Persival says it is very sick, and like a sick person, it can't survive if a lot of other things happen to it."" - p 181 "He hesitated, then said, "It's on a spike, see? You shove it into the ground at a little slant. You find a good place, a half mile from the end of a runway. Then you pull this top cap off and throw it away. Then you unscrew this little cap down here near the base. Then you push this little switch, and from then on you make no loud noises, Brother. It is an acoustic trigger. A loud noise, like a jet going over low, closes the circuit, and that ignites the propellant and it comes out fast. Little vanes snap open. It's a heat-finder. Little heat-senstive guidance system. It will pick right up to a thousand meters a second, which is somewhere around two thousand miles an hour. It has a four-mile range and it'll hit the hottest thing it can find, which will be a jet engine, and it's got enough muscle to blow off a wing or a tail, whatever." - pp 220-221 But it turns out they were just kidding & these heat-seeking missiles were for making a perfect Mai Tai & Travis's girlfriend comes back from the dead & everyone lives happily ever after in a world where those trillions of dollars in debt just disappear & no-one even remembers about it anymore. ...more |
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Cognitive Dissidents
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A meeting place for people dedicated to subverting oppressive 'realities' by whatever means we're inspired to use. A meeting place for people dedicated to subverting oppressive 'realities' by whatever means we're inspired to use. ...more
Goodreads Librarians Group
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A place where all Goodreads members can work together to improve the Goodreads book catalog. Non-librarians are welcome to join the group as well, to A place where all Goodreads members can work together to improve the Goodreads book catalog. Non-librarians are welcome to join the group as well, to comment or request changes to book records. For general comments on Goodreads and for requests for changes to site functionality, try Goodreads Help or use the Contact Us link instead. For tips on being a librarian, check out the Librarian Manual . Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who have applied for and received librarian status on Goodreads. They are able to edit and improve the Goodreads catalog, and have made it one of the better catalogs online. Activities include combining editions, fixing book and author typos, adding book covers and discussing policies. Please avoid all-caps, especially in thread topics, as it is considered SHOUTING. If you are having trouble finding the link to add a new thread, try this: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/new?context_id=220-goodreads-librarians-group&context_type=Group ...more
Working Class Readers
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What sort of books do working class readers enjoy? Clearly all books! but OK if we are thinking reading in a class conscious way, what might we highli What sort of books do working class readers enjoy? Clearly all books! but OK if we are thinking reading in a class conscious way, what might we highlight to other working class readers. This might be books by working class writers; it might be books about working class lives or jobs or themes; but it might be something else! ...more
Oulipo
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Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Harry Matthews, etc.
