Sex Drugs and Post-Structuralism

To Whom it may be…

2011-03-08T16:54:00.000+01:00

Yes you are right, it's a sad city, melancholic... a strange and fascinating kind of beauty, the ethereal beauty of sadness and darkness (especially the "misty" Montmartre, near where I live), I'm kind of gothic sometimes, and psychedelic at other times :)) and you ?

All true passions are mere shadows to the images of words, the "photography" that words bring to life - all kinds of images, literature, poetry, fictions, philosophy...

...well who doesn't like travelling the freedom of the world? What does travelling inspire you? Travelling the TRANCE festivals of the world and dancing to the electric beats of the earth, to dance by a full moon on the pure white beaches of GOA ::))) pure heaven in a sea of aluminium...

..to feel the bodily music of language running through my veins... the blood of life...

Yes, yes it is all about chemistry.. all about “elective affinities”...

...Feel the freedom and just do it...

The revolution will not be televised...

2011-03-06T20:00:00.004+01:00

In may 1967, Marxist Henri Lefebvre ridiculed Guy Debord’s situationist insistence that revolution was just around the corner. “Do they really imagine", he wrote:

“that one fine day or one decisive evening people will look at each other and say, 'Enough l We're fed up with work and boredom Let's put an end to them and that they will then proceed to the eternal Festival and the creation of situations?"

Although Lefebvre conceded that such a “situation” “happened once”, at the dawn of 18 March 1871, of which eye-witness accounts reported at the time that a : “tremendous surge of community and cohesion gripped those who had previously seen themselves as isolated and impotent puppets, dominated by institutions they could neither control nor understand”.

It’s unlikely to be the case again under present Capitalist condition of abundant consumerism Lefebvre added, one year later the whole of France stopped for a month, in the revolt of May 68 across all classes and divides, for: “We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom “: ...“great joy that we experienced for the first time in the streets of Paris during May 1968, that joy in the eyes and on the lips of all those who for the first time were talking to each other” (Alain Jouffroy).

The joy that is happening right now in the Arab world, with the big difference that people have died and are dying for it. For only death gives the seal authenticity to a revolution not sponsorised by Google or Coca Cola light. If there is no blood, no revolution, progress always rides the wrong way of violence and terror...

Humpty Dumpty...said Alice...

2011-02-20T21:53:00.006+01:00

"When I use a word" Humpty Dumpty said "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." But as all beautiful girls know: "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

We are all in Wonderland when we use words to locate the so called map of the world. So, enjoy the ride of semantics in the Russian roulette of meaning...

Welcome to the chaosmos...

What I believe in...

2011-02-15T22:04:00.011+01:00

I believe in the beauty of girly web-cams through the horizons of our computerized delusions; in the girly shadows of a gothic kiss; in overexposed flesh burning its shades like the sizzling light of a rainbow by moonlight; in burning moons and dead suns.

I believe in the curved edges of exhibitionism, pregnancy and bondage; in female youth taken by the sudden budding of their breasts; in the silent murmurs of orgasms taken by infraction; in the spiral waves of pain and pleasure; in the spellbound transparency of rain drops, in the luxuriance insouciance of ivory nudity.

I believe in the deserted highways of car crashes lighting up the boredom of our eyes; in the empty rooms of Hopperian solitude; in the adolescent flagrances of suburbia; in the blank gaze of security cameras by empty trash bins.

I believe in the waves of frozen music by synthesizers unbeknown; in the high-tech transparency of glass towers glimmering by sunlight; in neon lights of artificial demurs by a two-moon junction.

I believe in all the synthetic possibilities of pharmacology marooned in the virtual light of our digitalised infinity.

I believe in the violent cotton dream lands of blow and smack, long live the new flesh; in the molten nights of Acid corrosion, in the DMT worlds of swirling vistas at high pitching speeds, in the four letter words of ecstasy: MDMA.

I believe in the curvature of space without gravity, in ellipses without inflexion, in fractals without repetition.

I believe in the sublime beauty of dying stars by a millions of a second in the black holes of our anthropomorphized delusions; in the sombre and tranquil beauty of Voyager Il reaching the edges of our solar system shining its ocular metallic perfection in the abyssal silence of an interrogation; in the tranquil beauty of cosmic photography with its snapshots of stellar bodies unseen to mankind’s anthropomorphic gaze.

I believe in the chiasmic dance of Shiva and Kali creating the world in arrays of space and lust; in the interplay of ascetic repetitions and ecstatic differences in all things.

I believe in the beauty of crystals as yet unproduced by our silicon and carbon formalities...

Answers for a question

2011-02-02T22:51:00.006+01:00

Marcel Duchamp playing a muse for a dream

Is death the dream of life? Are we living the death of being born by the shadows of our inexistence? Is death the waking-up of our dream?

The sphinx calls the phoenix by playing the chess of life against itself..

Montage as Animism

2011-01-28T17:28:00.003+01:00

William S Burroughs reported to Ginsberg, in their correspondence, the Yage Letters, that the psychedelic plant : " Yage is space time travel ... new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized passes through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains ", what Gilles Deleuze would call the virtual, Bergson’s cone of passing time, in which the tip is the passing present under a never ending pushing of time’s presence, in which everything that happens in its infinity of detail (a leaf falling for a twitch of a breeze) is recorded for all eternity and perpetually reshuffled by the passing present of actualized time (what is actually done), Jung’s collective unconscious as yet unrealized …Borges’ hexagonal library of Babel playing its infinity of references in the limited boundaries of the alphabet or ideograms…in fact the “potential” or the “virtual” (what doesn’t happen but could) is just the simple fact of the everlasting (weight of the) past in its relation to the ever stretching present, which like a pebble thrown in a pond, ripples its concentric effects by waves of kaleidoscopic shifts in a perpetual reshuffle of the cards, a perpetual rearranging the past, what we simply call the future…difference and repetition, difference in repetition, repetition in difference…

As Burroughs would say, life is a cut-up, life is made of cut-ups; time is the fabric of life, the mere juxtaposing of the cut-ups of history, whether personal, human or cosmic…montage as animism…

Calling up…cutting up, cutting up all the texts of the world and reassembling them in new positions, thus creating new meanings which subvert Control and Power, Matter, DNA itself, “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte“ … “There is no outside-text” to quote Derrida.

When the Text is cut-up new spontaneous meanings emerge, meanings which were not inherent in the original Text, spewing a way out of the Control mechanisms of Language… infecting virus-like, from one person to another, from one generation to another… how we experiences our inner and external environment, Language is the boundary in which we experience the touching of the world… we touch the world with Words…and kick-it-up with cut-ups..

Burroughs redefines the kick as, "seeing things from a special angle, to Kick is momentary freedom from the chains of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh."… by removing deeper from the Language fix..Let the dice role... and the right-0n the edge of Chaos combination emerge…

As Burroughs said : “Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one"

..the one and only…

…like in the 1920s when DaDa Founder Tristan Tzara created a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat…too much to bear for mere humans…a riot ensued and wrecked the theater at which these Dada poetical muses where happening..l.ater André Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the Surrealist movement…and Freud grounded the cut-ups in the psychoanalyst’s “free associations” method, in order to master and repress the irrevocable chaos of the cut-ups, of the animism of the Word made flesh, yet again..

The art of photography - Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ZEN of archery

2010-07-22T15:37:00.015+02:00

There is something of the order of the divine miracle in the photography of Cartier-Bresson due to his knack of being able to capture the “satori” of any passing moment into a translucent geometry where all the points and lines of a situation come together in an instantaneous sculpture of everlasting time, at which precise moment the photo is taken.

It’s all about “right” timing, the “decisive moment” as Cartier-Bresson calls “it”, no less and no more in time’s arrow chaos of sources, the culminating point or tipping point, at edge of chaos, and only there, on the arrow tips of time, is the photo decided and finally shot : three seconds latter or earlier, and the “two passing women” in a precise relation to an ever revolving background, would have been lost for all eternity, and the geometry of coincidences between things would have not occurred...lost in the ravenous insignificance of time’s hunger for space.

Photography is the art of time and light, of right timing at the speed of light, which allows no measure by any clock standards except the trained eye of synchronicity, the “meaningful coincidences” of which Cartier Bresson was one of the artful masters.

A weaver of light in time’s passing fabric, like a möbius strip biting its own infinity.

Moulding the quicksilver arrows of light upon time’s everlasting shadows is the art of photography.

It’s more about archery and the photos as arrows hitting or creating the bulls-eye of the target, than technological camera work.

And it’s not for nothing that Cartier-Bresson’s holy sacrament was Eugen Herrigel's “Zen in the Art of Archery” and not a manual on photography in which to learn the trade.

Facing the chaos of the street, of the crowd, of the hustle and bustle of life, Cartier-Bressson’s shoots his archery of arrows hitting a perfect broken symmetry between all the disparate elements of a passing chance that any moment of time provides.

Shooting the arrow of the target as a suspended offset harmony, on the edge of chaos, like a clap of thunder in the stormy sky. A flash of sculpture in time’s passing hunger.

A broken symmetry of perfect intent in which all the disparate elements of any scene are broken together by the “symphony” that the art of photography brings to life’s chance occurrences.

For Cartier-Bresson, chance is a magnet of implicit form of which it is the artful task of photography to explicit at any one moment, but not at any given moment. All the visual figures are contained at any moment, but only the art of photography decides of the "wheres" and "whens" the thunder of explicit form hits the implicit contained therein...photography being an epiphany of light in time's rigorous mortis of space... a rictus for a smile...

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

2008-09-18T18:36:00.003+02:00

In “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” (1945), on the roads across America, Henry Miller assaults modernity:

"This world which is in the making fills me with dread... It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress - but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams, or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal."

Miller as primitive man, as stranger in a strange land: "We need their paper boxes, their buttons, their synthetic furs, their rubber goods, their hosiery, their plastic this and that. We need the banker, his genius for taking our money and making himself rich. The insurance man, his policies, his talk of security, of dividends - we need him too. Do we? I don't see that we need any of these vultures."

All the more true in our postmodern high-tech world?…

Spirit

2008-08-13T21:43:00.001+02:00

"I'm a religious man but not a religionist. Let's put it very simply. When we say that "man does not live by bread alone," that's a symbolic statement tersely put. What it means is that it isn't his success in the struggle for life-his getting bread, getting security, protecting wife and children-that sustains and supports him. It's something you can't put your finger on; it's spirit. You can't name it, can't define it. It's greater than everything else; it includes everything. I think I sense it when I come in contact with it. I think you're aware of it when you talk to people. There are those of poor spirit and those of Great Spirit. None are without it, but the flame flickers pretty low in some cases. The majority of people seem to be nothing but a little flickering flame. You know that when you match them against an individual who is all fire, all radiance. Those in whom the flame of the spirit runs high are extraordinary examples of human beings". (Henry Miller)

Domes of Darkness & Psychedelia

2008-03-02T19:54:00.004+01:00

“... I recognize here the old power of authentic architecture, which is conjointly to enhance the moving, dancing bodies and to animate the spaces and the structures”. (Roland Barthes)

The perfect club, the Xanadu of the flowing arc of life: “the community of those who have no community.” (Georges Bataille) is always at hand for the philanthropic benefactors of humankind, for those who believe in Mauss/Bataille’s economics of the gift, and Keynesian economics...

Here “At Le Palace” as Roland Barthes puts it: “...light occupies a deep space, within which it comes alive and performs like an actor; an intelligent laser...like an exhibitor of abstract sculptures, produces enigmatic traces, with sudden mutations: circles, rectangles, ellipses, tracks, cables, galaxies, fringes....the appearance of a new art, in its material (a mobile light) and in its practice; for this is actually a public art, in that it is achieved among the public and not in front of it, and a total art (the old Greek and Wagnerian dream), where scintillation, music, and desire unite”.

“Le Palace is not a boîte, a "box," as we French call a night-club: it collects in an original site pleasures ordinarily dispersed: that of the theatre as an edifice lovingly preserved, the pleasure of what is seen; the excitement of the Modern, the exploration of new visual sensations, due to new technologies; the delight of the dance, the charm of possible meetings. All this combined creates something very old, which is called la Fête and which is quite different from Amusement or Distraction: a whole apparatus of sensations destined to make people happy, for the interval of a night. What is new is this impression of synthesis, of totality, of complexity: I am in a place sufficient unto itself. It is by this supplement that Le Palace is not a simple enterprise but a work and that those who conceived it may regard themselves with good reason as artists...” (Roland Barthes).

The material could be apprehended as a paradoxical combination of flowing colored glass and transparent steel immersed in a dual spherical structure of geodesic design.

In such an aesthetic engineered sphere, Qualias are impersonal and independent of the individuals who feel them. A passive architectural creation founds the active genesis of psychic clubbing…

Each psychic or “qualic” element of each participant is mirrored in the glass panes of the spherical shape of the club. Each about to be individuated Qualia is reflected in the architectural moving features of the whole.

Atmospheric spaces of multi-screen visuals synchronized to all the individuated Qualias and body forms that could arise from the night: a psychic melting pot enriched with colors and sounds of sinuous fragrances from the orient, from the bejeweled sun of the warm south and from the crisp outlines of the ruins of the misty north.

A psychic ecosystem emerges in which a "somatic solidarity" of pre-symbolic qualities of involvement is encouraged without transcendental designs. Immanent and self-organizing…

Architecture as psychic space, a space attuned to the qualitative (durational) flowing of time. Architecture as psychic enactment and artment…

A multidimensional sensualist experience of any age group emerges, in which beautiful and ineffable angels, beat their luminous wings in the vortexes of a bounded infinity.

The tunnel entrance bifurcates into two areas of equal measure of spherical perfection. One half of the dome is dedicated to the rumbling base of Gothic darkness, the other to the thudding rainbow light of Trance. An atmosphere is created in which all the virtual and semi virtual shades of black and the spectrum colors of rainbow are encouraged to emerge into sensorial existence.

Two worlds, two universes in one pleasure dome of honeycomb ecstasy. Darkness prevails and psychedelia exhales. One entrance, two panes, two pleasure domes.

In the gothic pane of the hexagonal featured sphere, the dome morphs to the Qualias of base darkness. While the Qualias the Trance sphere chant the ecstasy of intoxicated bodies bound to the rhythmic fascinations of synthetic blips and beats.

Gothic Qualias, Features and forms:

Tableaux vivants of illuminated “delectatio morose”:

Sparkling eyes and slender bodies of bounded silhouettes inform auras of psychic intensities.

Here all seductiveness is interwoven with the most secret fe/male fantasies, the most unpronounceable ones.

Strengths of black and white sensualities emerge from the contrast between an innocence of childlike faces and eyes that light up with sudden lust …

Abandoned scenes of industrial sites in which the starkness of the location ecstatically sets off all female vulnerability. The derelict factory filled with smooth, ivory squirming flesh in the quintessential illuminations of the dark lights above.

The thrills of being taken to the edge of self that melts and turns over into ecstasy. The needs to increase gradually the complex of pain and pleasure until a threshold is reached in which the gradual scale of the beautiful is transformed into a sublime difference of kind, a qualitative leap of intensity which bears no semblance of resemblance with what went before.

Secret locations in and around the dome are sacredly reserved to the chained ecstasies of nubile heroines in search of sexual salvation and aesthetic redemption. Here, innumerable Stories of O in dark alcoves exhale to the pain scales of sadomasochistic pleasures…

Trance Qualias, Features and forms of psychedelia:

...eyes with luminous vivacity morphing in tune with the warm atmospheres of electric magnitudes…

Flowered sensations abound…

Feline movements of fauvist lineage, something almost oriental about the languid and yet, energetic manners…

Molten lava of bodies in Trance of emerged ecstasy throbbing with coloured beams to the dancing silhouettes crisscrossed with light features of diachronic space...

Erospheres of libidinal intensities inflame geometrical structures...

...“At this moment, the softness of nudity (the birth of legs or breasts) touched the infinite”. (Georges Bataille)…

Allegro ma non troppo...

2008-01-15T23:00:00.000+01:00

Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Vivaldi, and Bartok to name but a few in her classical repertoire. The contrast could not have been more extreme. By day, the aristocratic hushed marble of the conservatoire of Paris, by night, the hazy condom aluminium ridden floors of the “bas fonds” of the Montmartre gothic scene - why does she need the beats of a formless code? By day, perfecting her classical sounds on scales of divine grace and pure light, by night, unwinding her daily scales in dark alcoves of languid exuberance - why does she line up the white lines on broken plated mirrors?

The classical form, as opposed to the bubble gum Pop “form”, is a ruthless master and urges a sadomasochistic discipline far beyond the Marilyn Manson frame of reference. One is touched by a sonic perfection that few survive. Very few classical femmes survive beyond a mere playing of a set-piece of “classical music” - why does she crave these red of silver bound nights? So aristocratically contained in her conservatoire, so soiled and boundless in her alcoves of sinking velvet and flowing white - why does she abide to the binding knots of silk and leather?

By day everything about her is classical: form, grace, light and clarity, all refined and combined. By night nothing classical remains, all discipline and form is sacrificed to the altar of excess.

...then...darkness prevails. Sunken eyes out of formless orbs accentuate her senses, enticing others to erotic deliriums - why does she crave the pain of pleasure thorns so much?

Here in the serpentine enclaves of Montmartre’ ultraviolet underworld female figures of a whiter shade of pale await their male affinities with silvery eyes: a sacrifice to the negative shadows of the unformed and the formless...

...those same hands of classical discipline and grace synchronised for piano and violin touch hidden scales of flesh so acutely libidinal that it is a crime to whisper more than words. She emerges from the semen pit as a flowing goddess of molten lava. Crystallised and mineralized, she spends hours upon hours washing it all away in bath fountains of steam and sparkling water to the surrounds of the techno beats sounding their throbbing hard drives above...in the pleasure domes...

She washes it all away until an immaculate conception is restored. Rejuvenated and restored as a dream within a dream, she is ready for the sunshine outside to greet her with all the classical form that the sun god Apollo can bestow - but for how long is this restorable? Excesses have way of leaving memory traces that eat you alive from within…

The female kind is anxiously traversed by outlandish desires, untold pulses, and ramblings of unfulfilled longings. The female unconscious is a liquid topology overflowing tropical surfaces. A topological surface distorted by luscious flower wishes, verdant plant pulses, and entangled vegetations of unspoken desires - for most of the female kind, mere translucent wishful images superimposing themselves, from time to time, over their cow grazing consciousness - for others a lifelong ecstasy quest of ever receding horizons…

Gothic Animism - Paris-Montmartre

2007-10-14T21:07:00.000+02:00

I’m finding myself in the city of lights (at least cultivating the illusions of finding something other..). Paris-Montmartre is my dwelling; here and there along the serpentine inroads and the vertical steps by steps heights one encounters strange shadows that take their dark pleasures by pale light - due to the exceptionally warm weather during the day, by evening, the steep heights of Montmartre have been shrouded in an ethereal mist which hovers the stony inroads with an aura from another world, a world of gothic amorphia, of gothic ladies whose sombre allures are mixed with a distinctly Diosneau touch, unlike the UK variety. The mist that veils and unveils the ambiguous nature of all feminine choreography, of the Gothic ladies whose depths of time « regards » are in the shades of red and black…the colours of infinity for Baudelaire….

The mist that obviates the distant traffic noises and dilates the senses to the stone outside… there is an animism to Paris even if it is all stone and glass, due to the light, the light that souls even stone, traffic and steel…

Epiphanies

2007-08-14T01:00:00.000+02:00

James Joyce speaks of moments of revelation, beauties engorged with life:

“…the instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure...”

Joyce describes these experiences of beauty, of beauties, as epiphanies: "a sudden spiritual manifestation... the most delicate and evanescent of moments". Epiphanies should be apprehended with extreme care, should they vanish for ever…

Italy…In the shimmering orange heat of this August evening I hear the crickets mingling with the distant echoes of urban noise whilst the smoke of an opium/hashish combo to strong to inhale pierces my lungs. I look beyond the balcony at the heat ridden city and back again within the yellow-orange obscurity, within the room occluded by mad gyrating fans (where)…a languid body exhausted by pleasure and pain slightly moves through breezy sheets of perfect white…all this is enough for an unforeseen pattern to emerge, nothing more, nothing less…an epiphany for an instant of eternity…"the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure"…this is "it"…pure Zen…

Gothic fascinations / 2 K

2007-06-06T02:45:00.000+02:00

"The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event".
Roland Barthes

The first thing my camera eye took in: cemeteries with their mournful statues and melodramatic epitaphs, junky squats riddled with graffiti, satanic pentagrams, wasted aluminium wraps, abandoned production sites, several “rave” spaces after the event, and last but not least, abandoned industrial sites/warehouses that still populate here and there the urban field of our sprawling cities…

Cemeteries, urban wastelands, warehouses, derelict spaces and squats: one could call them wastetopias, to borrow from Foucault’s anti-utopia notion of disjunctive spaces: Heterotopias. These wastetopias are my gothic fascination.

Whilst Foucault’s spaces are based on the hetero function of certain spaces in a grander social space, which are heterogeneous or other to the grander space in which they find themselves imbedded, my waste-spaces, are former spaces of life which have been laid or put to waste, “deathsized” so to speak. But Thanathos calls for Eros. The image of Eros framed within the urban frames of Death - the capturing of these two aesthetic forces in one form-image.

Kate K (or double K) had surged from various K Holes, and wanted to be sane again; can’t quite imagine why escaping from an dissociative anaesthetic would entail taking up the aesthetics of photography…maybe as she surmised, the photographic image is a safe and cool point: space and time do not move. A good excuse as any, I guess.

Of course the moving image (i.e. cinema) is drugged time all on to itself, as Gilles Deleuze purports to "argue". Cinema is time on drugs. As it turned out, we both hated cinema, we preferred the “real” thing (unlike uncle Gilles who preferred the sitting on your ass screen approach to life). The moving image, we both suspected, was, as all good Bergsonians know, a fiasco - the moving image does not really move, it’s made out of discrete stills!!!! And what double K needed, was exactly that, stills – to still her life. No more Ks would be added to her name. "Stills" to stop the K madness surfacing again; she had to stop the pull of the vortex K Hole from surging; for Alice was always waiting with her rabbits and Cheshire smiles to take her down to Kwonderland…what a naughty girl,, sweeet Alice…

When I first meet my K, she was adjusting her camera, not quite knowing what F stops meant, or what the fuck lens to use or not….“let’s stop the charade” I whispered….The order of things finally restored, the female principle has become muse. The White Goddess has not left our sunken world. Her frail frame would be framed.

She was a frail creature, whether by design or by intoxication she did not say, with sunken eyes, trembling lips and a whiter shade of pale skin…cute in a sort of wasted way. The contrast was from another world, behind the lens she was magic; she became more embodied, fuller and her frail limbs restored to a higher aura of life: in which7 the wasted looks combined with a hard lusciousness...that would have made even the angels weep of cum…

The camera eye followed her every move, and my eyes became possessed by an image from another world. Was this the same double K? Or I’m I on liquid K? The flashing flashes kept my questions at bay. I pursued her across wasted land,.. her poses were a tropical provocation to the derelicts around her. Her lips were pouting a hyper-Bardot aura of unbridled erosia amidst ruins of desperate desolation…Eros and Thanathos all in one images…

Triads

2007-05-31T01:52:00.000+02:00

Technological environments as pure aesthetic engineering, trance-like states produced by electronics producing the most primeval effects of ancient rituals. Pleasure domes are to be engineered. Welcome to the gates of the moments of Eternity…

Spiritual masks implementing techno-carnivals, permitting wearer to assume another identity to transgress for a night the limits imposed by the work of matter…

The fascination for the aesthetic is with the form, not the content; but paradoxically it is the content that gives the form, not the other way round. Nietzsche/Kant: live the content of your life as if it were form, purely formal…

We search for the vectors of beauty…the illumination of bodies magnified into divinities lived in the sublimation of being…

The soul of the body

2007-05-13T21:04:00.000+02:00

There's a fascination for things that do not exist in the material/conventional ways of the world, “regulative ideals” or “virtual events”, spiritualities such as: justice, community, eroticism, love, mysticism, intoxication, etc.

Filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (the Blanchot and Camus of film) in his “beyond the clouds” quartet (four stories that have the theme of “im/possibility” haunting them from within) films the “im/possibility” that love, communication and eroticism are not of this world, but “are” at the interstices of the real and the imaginary.

Beautiful Ines Sastre in the foggy Italian town of Ferrara meets her love of all time, but only for one night; they refrain from making love. The male character (Silvano) performs a mime of caresses over Sastre’s half naked body as if to Platonise her body into a halo that will last into perfection. End of relation. And the male character leaves in the mist of the morning dawn.

A bodily Love so perfect it would not last a second of consummation; to carry on for another night, another day, would be to ruin and destroy - to refrain from the feverish embodiment of an “event” that could not possibly exist in the profane economic matter of things - an illusion born out of this world has no more chance to survive into reality than a mirage in the desert could be proven to be an oasis…

A Love so strong, a body so beautiful, that one cannot live “it”. By not actualising, what, by all regards is the strongest thing ever, they abstain from fulfilment, from fulfilling the event, and “win” by losing. Both partners in crime refrain from embodying a love that is too strong to survive into mediocre reality - paradoxically, all the stronger for not having been lived, for having never happed. To abstain is to preserve, a sacred caress without profanity: protected from the ravages of entropic actualisation, from the termite materialisms of actually living “it”. For not being equal to the event of their lives, for bodily recognising but not actualising or consummating the event, they fulfil another order: such is the temporal price of eternity.

But what a temptation to go back (in fact Silvano meets Sastre three years later) to actualise further and further that night, just a touch…just a touch to further caress the night into delirium…and all will be alright…if love is a drug, then we are all junkies, shooting up pure ideals, virtual crystallisations, in our, material far too material, veins…

The virtual preference of not actualising a physical lust, a psychic intoxication, a spirituality of mind and body (love) - what is in fact only a virtual idea (of the imagination?) - is almost never achieved in reality, we are too weak, so inevitably, as Oscar Wilde saysd “each man kills the thing he loves”.

But what if it was the other way round, as7 in the fear it would not work out, when in fact everything is in place to be one of the greatest actualities in existence. We “counter-actualise” the event. We ruin the actual with the apprehension that it could not possibly be anything that would last beyond a lustful kiss, and we move on, in our material ways.

An inversion like the Italian softcore film “l’anima del corpo” (“the soul of the body”, a Wittgenstein inversion: “the face is the soul of the Body”; to understand this is to apprehend the secret of the universe) in which an im/possible coupling attempts to exist, and in fact does exist: a beautiful twenty year old girl and a seventy year old feeble man (and talking about inversion, how come the other way round is not possible? it seems that even the event, spirit, has its limits…). Of course, the male character is not taken in by the erotic relationship; he knows that it is not possible. Money and other material interests are at play, as always, he repeatedly whispers…

But how can he resist (which he doesn’t) her “freely given” bodily gift? Why is she giving herself so freely? What’s in “it” for her? What does she want in exchange for her given youth? He’s so sure that she nothing but a whore, whoring after strange gods (economies of egos and deceits) that whilst they tumble in various erotic couplings, he becomes obsessed, not only by her youthful vitalism, which he sucks dry as if to invigorate his aging frame with new blood (she’s the vampire however, he’s convinced by that…) but in finding out that after all, her soul, her spirit, is only a simulacrum of eroticism, a simulation of orgasmic bliss without exchange…whore and only a whore, she will be found out to be just that…but of course, he never finds out…he cuts off the money…she comes back for more bodily ecstasies, and freer than ever…the more she fucks other men and women the more she comes back for him, freer than ever. She resists his every attempt of entrapment, all the traps designed to make her confess her simulacrum - her innocence is still intact after every chess move he makes.

On the chessboard of life, spirit is white and matter is black; but her white is never taken, his black matter loses every piece of evidence…the more he loses the more he becomes obsessed by her soul motives…

Is there a moral? Material scepticism destroys spiritual doubt. Maybe, in the end, he whispers, she may have been genuine after all…but it’s too late, he has poisoned the relation with matter. He has checkmated himself. Destroyed by not having faith in the event, he was not equal to the event that was actualised, he was not worthy of what happed to him, of the event that surged in him…for the body is the face of the soul, and he looked elsewhere, in thinking the soul somewhere secret, hidden away, separate from the body…

1 the event is not realised, even though the event has surged into the real; but it retains itself by not actualising itself. 2 the event has happed, but it is not recognised to78be the case. The event in both cases never happens…

How many times we spoil, desecrate and defile the event by over recognising “it”, over determining “it”, materialising “it” by wanting to embody “it” at all costs…

How many opportunities missed, how many potentials lost because we are too postmodern for our virtual heads and hearts to take the oblique ironies of things seriously…

Baudrillardage

2007-03-18T18:23:00.000+01:00

Baudrillard is dead. The prophet of simulation is dead. But in the age of simulacrum and simulation, can one really die? Baudrillard is a mere image now, but was he (or we) ever more than an image shimmering in the desert of the real?

…because Baudrillard knows that nature is the first simulator of the simulacrum:

"Snow no longer falls from on high. It lands only at those venues designated as winter resorts" (Cool Memories).

…and that because theory has become inseparable from anything and everything, oh how sweet the days of alienation and critical distance…

"For us everything is predictable: we have extraordinary analytical means but no situation to analyse. We live theoretically well beyond our means: hence our deep melancholy" (The Transparency of Evil).

"Every event today is virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning" (Fatal Strategies)

….because:

"Popular fame is what we should all aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher’s who has seen you on television" (Cool Memories).

…because Baudrillard always believed in not believing in a world before the word, in the beginning was the word:

“As to whether language is the trace of the imperfection of the world, no story better demonstrates this than John's. Up until the age of 16, John, a happy and handsome youth, gifted in every sense, had never spoken. He had never uttered a single word until the day when, suddenly, at tea-time, he said: "I would like a little sugar." His ecstatic mother cried out: "But, John, you speak! Why didn't you ever say anything?" And John replied, "Until now, everything was perfect” (The Perfect Crime)

…because Schopenhauer’s all is will has become digital; the white ontology of boredom still remains inscribed in the screen eyes of our fading reflections…

“Stuck for hours on the motorway with his family, a tourist declares: `Well, you know, we're on holiday. Here or the beach, what does it matter?' The need to be nowhere - this is what drives the hordes out on to the roads. And nowhere means anywhere but home. It's the same with work and leisure: drudgery in the one place, drudgery in the other. The moment of freedom comes in moving from one drudgery to another. And if you go away, it isn't to wipe out the effects of the eight daily hours of forced labour, but to compensate for not being forced to work twenty-four hours a day, as the higher executives do - people who have no need of holidays” (Cool memories IV)

….because Baudrillard is Camus’ Sisyphus revisited for the mediatic age:

“Ants, too, must know that God is dead, since they engage in such frantic activity. Is it to avoid internal revolts and boredom that they have developed such a relentless programme (not too different, perhaps, from the human race)? Have they developed a cult of the absurd or some crazed ritual for turning life and its meaning to their own perverse ends? Have they invented a perfect model of cloning, the only way of guaranteeing the eternity of a species and solving the problem of individual existence? A wonderful hypothesis, but how can we know? Let them speak, on walking around these ants, let them confess! What is their message? Yet they just go enormous distances to bring back things that are actually plentiful on the anthill (in this, too, they are not so different from the human race)” (Cool memories IV)

And last but not least, because Cioran is his bittersweet simulacrum, minus the either or choice between reality and illusion:

“Like the disabled child who sued his mother for not having worn her safety belt, when she was pregnant, in the crash which left him disabled, soon all children will be able to sue their parents for having brought them into the world” (Cool Memories IV)

Baudrillard for ever….we won’t miss you, you are the age...

Gorgeous A -Trance the world - (in 80 days)

2007-03-04T03:30:00.000+01:00

She travels around the world, around all the trance festivals of the world: Fullmoon, Soulclipse, Solstice, Omni, Rainbow…Gorgeously curvaceous, beautifully precise in her manner, dressed in an impossible mix between the darkness shades of Goth and the kaleidoscopic colours of psychedelia…a psychedelic trance angel that wears Yves Saint Laurent, Opium and Gucci…all the more beautiful in77 that these logos of luxury and pretension will soon be ripped to pieces and soiled by lustful hands, dust and dancing bodies…An deep sea oriental goddess far too refined for the gyrating crusties surrounding her…a top-model who has finally escaped her gloss and make-up cage into the trance freedom of the open-air. A flesh made sculpture…if geometry had an origin she would be “it”…

She trance travels and pursues a worldly adventure of freedom and transgression. She encounters bodies that come in all races, shapes and sizes - from all over the world…seeking in tandem a hedonic transfiguration through the pills & thrills of dance, nature, artifice and chemical disunity.

Just image…imagine, she provokingly whispers…a life purely lived on rhythm, light, and chemical intensity – time and time again, only to get higher and higher on the vibes of life itself. Her eyes sparkle with excitement as she tells me her story…She only lives for the music of the mind, the lust of bodies and the dance of the soul…trance, Goa trance, dark trance, psytrance…all around the world, the same vibe, the same dance, the same beat…Rio de Janeiro, LA, Madrid, Amsterdam, Bombay, Tokyo, etc. secret and not so secret festivals are located and zoomed in by eagle eye Amelia, or “Gorgeous A”, as she is nicknamed by her party network…

How does she finance such a lavish and intensive life style? I ask…she didn’t need to follow up on my question; the mischievous look gave it all away. I guess that one thing that being beauty graced has over mere mortals is the actuality of a life lived in pure immanence, a life of pure immanence. Her life fuels her/self; she is all she needs, she lives off herself: no matter, no work - there is no distance between what you fell and what you need.

She pays her dues in fluids of semen and milk. Amelia is indifferent to the female or male side of things: young or old, mothers to be or fathers on the run…it’s all flux and fluids for her…She is the very embodiment of Pierre Klossowski’s philosophical fantasy of “living money”; following in footsteps of the “passion utopia” of Charles Fourier, Klossowski imagined a “payment” made out of libidinal sensations; impersonal transactions of what bodies could give and receive: a kind of “universal prostitution” without the commodity of money to enact the exchange.

Amelia is her own capital, so she can afford the best of what capitalism has to offer: global trance.

Amelia does “it” in secret however. Only an elected few will ever know what sweet transgressions lurk behind those emerald sparkling eyes of hers…always keen to get down and dirty with the beats, the beasts and the lasers…

As if her life was not intense enough, like a Wildeian Lord Henry, I further whisper sweet transgressions into Amelia/Dorian not so bright mind. After all, I got all theory she could possibly ask for: the Batailles, Foucaults, Deleuzes, and the Artauds etc. She voraciously opens up to these sweet lullabies…I entice her for more confessions whilst implanting here and there, more mind fields for her to transgress, more limits to absolve and dissolve… As psychedelic guru John Lilly says in the “centre of the cyclone”:

“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits”.

A game with the limitless cosmos, a gamble she seems to play to win…

The Sublime Viscosity of the Milky Way

2007-02-10T02:11:00.000+01:00

Aesthetics is – in direct opposition to the hedonic and the ascetic...

Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics: the sublime is contrasted with beauty. Beauty = harmony (and proportion) of form, and is within the non-conceptual realm of the re/presentable; whilst the sublime is the formless, it is excess and infinity: i.e. magnitude (“mathematical sublime”) and power (“dynamic sublime”).

“All of this”, for Kant, means that the aesthetics of the sublime is the “subjective” effect of trying to re/present what exceeds the comprehensive faculties of the mind. A thundering gap between apprehension and comprehension - which gives rise to the sublime aesthetic experience: a double-bind aporia: simultaneously made out of the necessary and hopeless effort of the “imagination” to estimate the magnitude/power of the sublime object (e.g. storm, war, pyramids, etc...) - paradoxically, this lacuna or hiatus is felt as: aesthetic pleasure.

But what are the post/modern objects of the sublime? What is sublime nowadays?

One object stands out among the many, the most sublime of all post/modern objects: Bukkake…

Bukkake is a sublime object, because of its excessive, disproportionate, explosive, and of course, volcanic modality.

Mainstream western video porn has always been obsessed with “the” ejaculating on the face of woman after coitus - the so called “money shot”. The whole affair seems pretty tame, and dare I say, quite boring, but not for the Japanese who/ seem to have a semen fetish to end all fetishes. In their usual fashion of taking western “technological values” (i.e. happy go lucky nihilism) to the extreme, they have taken the western porn’ “money shot” to the limit; hence, the pearly birth of Bukkake (recopied back into the west with a lucrative niche of its own).

According to some pseudo legend, Bukkake is an old Japanese tradition of punishment (the porn world loves tradition: “no ejaculation without tradition”…), in which women were punished for their “disrespect” by being isolated in some rundown location, and then sequentially ejaculated on by a group of on cuming males, (who// take it in turn to aim and project - usually the female face (Emmanuel Levinas would not be surprised) is the principle aim of the penal parade…

DVD Japan is taking this venerable tradition of semen ingrata to the limit; and when one takes any phenomenon, even the most trivial and banal, to the limit, it topples over into sublimity. Sublime excess; for which the imagination struggles to re/present “with” and “in” an adequate idea/frame: a sublime object is an object in constant need of, but perpetually failing, re/presentation:

Bukkake is no ordinary (beautiful) semen shower, the (female) object is not washing in “it” but bathing in “it”, or should I say, flowing in “it”? The female night is taken by a whiter shade of pale...

Flows of upon flows of molten lava hit the flesh, from head to toe. Flow pearls of thick viscosity transmogrify what was merely beautiful into the sublime formless of the disproportionate and the immense...

The thick viscous whiter than white transparently fusions the mundane skin beneath with an otherworldly ivory glow. However one tries to look at the gang-bang dream-shower scene, it is “almost” impossible to re/present within an adequate idea of rational perception - the sheer and banal quantity has been enlarged into an (aesthetic) quality unbeknown to the dollar signs participants...

The (aesthetic) spectator loses all grounds of comprehension and the aesthetic effect of the sublime takes over - at least if one is not lustfully or vicariously “participating” oneself. As Kant said, the aesthetic state is defined by its disinterestedness and contemplative enacting. One should keep all hands off, if one wants to experience the viscous sublime...

Jaded Valerie – Faites vos Jeux

2006-12-13T00:29:00.000+01:00

The gyrating cubic lights highlighted here and there her marble polished flesh...

I threw a few aphoristic lullabies at her, like darts to eye; her blood was so gorged with artifice and additives that all was win to her emerald orbed eyes, her emerald jaded fancy lit up the night with forest greens...

Emerald forests, Amazon greens, emerald darknesses, emerald fires, emerald lands, emerald abysses within abysses...

"I think that would be lovely" she said, turning around, "Are you..." she could not say anything else: "No I’m not, but I could be" I feared that I had broken the chemical spell with such hollow words, words that sounded awkward and pretentious.....but then aren't we all pretending? Amateur gamblers trying to be magicians, whose tricks are always found out in end, to be, just that, tricks... "that sounds wonderful" Valerie languidly whispered, "lets us go” almost pausing for an emerald moment outside time... “who knows…we might win this time"….

Luscious Sixteen

2006-11-17T21:48:00.000+01:00

When it comes to going on Hedonic Holiday, nothing can stop them, they descend south like a bunch of locusts and consume everything in sight...I always prefer the end of August beginning September period - when the sun is already hitting lower, and where there is a gentle melancholia of excesses long past swirling in the air: atmospheres of broken loves, jaded sex and wasted looks dense up the sandy streets and brightly beaches...Not that I would know anything about beaches or lowering or otherwise assembled sunshine, both of which I hate in equal measure. For me, the only sun is the moon and the only light is the night. It’s after all only by moonshine that one has hopes of encountering something more enticing than array of sun fried lobsters...Although I wasn’t quite expecting this one...

Stumbling back through a Van Gothian vortex night, high and low on illegal non-equilibrium dynamics, I encountered something that did not fit. No surprise there, one might say, “my” mind-object relation had been blasted away long time ago. I was swirling with empathic ecstasies and joyful space-temporal distortions that even Henri Bergson could not speculate up...in short, my space-time was definitely out-of-joint, as Gilles Deleuze would say, off its hinges and into the pure empty form of time...

So how come this apparition out of the paradoxia of temporal distortions was not fitting? : give me hallucinations of alien beasts copulating with unconceivable forms, spatial-temporal speeds of infinite precision, vertigo abysses within abysses, eternity in an instant, falling infinity, Van Goth’s spirals of vivid colors, abstractions and patterns of impossible geometries, OK, but a Female Goth in the South of France, NO.... that is really and really impossible with or without drugs. In London Camden or Paris Montmartre one would expect, from time to time, to encounter dark angels stumbling out from their clubbing coffins...For some unknown reason I started to completely lose it, ego loss went even further; bad trip on the horizon, anxiety/panic attack coming its way…all figures, real or hallucinated, started to horrifically morph into reptile human assemblage: shake eyes, reptile hair of flowing medusa shakes, nails of knives... knowing from experience, that when the chemistry starts its devouring dance from within, one needs to let go even further, to let go of the infinitesimal shards of control one still has left…

Paradoxically as it may sound, one needs to lose control even further in order not obliterate into a chaos-insanity of no return...sure enough, nightmare morphed into pure heaven...

Everything was swirling around me, except for the eye of the storm: a pure white lusciousness of marble light rightly pierced in all the right orifices, and hellishly cute...no sunshine has ever graced this otherworldly creature...definitely one of Lucifer’s Angels stranded on the highway to Hell. It seems the road to hell passes by sunny France. I must admit Lucifer has taste; his daughters have that impossible quality of: virginal vixens: Maria Magdalena (medieval style) and Britney Spears (Disney-porn style) all in one...She could not have been more than sixteen - even in my altered states the female number is unmistakable - …black hair with streaks of violet-red gushes of colour, a waterfall of hair in slow motion framed a face made of marble with flaming black lips and feline slits for eyes: black pools reflecting stardust universes...She was sitting cross legged on the edge of some broken down wall, one of her black lacquered sandals dangerously dangling off one of her toes...

I said something but it came out garbled, she garbled something back sounded like a cross between Spanish and German...well, all cognition lost, I tried intuition instead, that didn’t work either... so fuck, lets just jump into it...it did not take long to understand the gestures of erotic invitation....couldn’t help thinking even in my hyper-hallucinogenic state that she was asking/fucking for money...the reality principle is hard to destroy...I thought Hell was free. Who knows what really happened then...one thing for sure is that in my altered states, all social inhibitions, neurosis, and other closed systems had been dissolved for good...pierced kisses in all the right places, devouring tongues that could not help but to feed of each other…a ravenous lust beyond human concern kaleidoscoped the night into a formless shattering. Got sucked dry by a luscious vortex…sweet sixteen turns sixty nine…

Since no plastic was inserted between me and this otherworldly creature, maybe, just maybe…an angel of death? Woke up to a non-surprise; the money in my wallet was missing…how kind of her to put my divested wallet backkk… nicely inserted in my jacket. Who knows maybe she had some kind of rolling stones sympathy for me...a sympathy from the Devil...the rolling chorus...you could almost hear it in the stillness of the rising orange tinged dawn... another day...another aborted quest...

Df / xy

2006-10-25T21:16:00.000+02:00

…liquid ambrosia flowed down her eyes…

…the spiral void kept increasing, wanting more and more, consuming fires that weren't even there…

.... Jaded girls caught the diamond eye....eyes of jade reflected the moonlit dance floor…beads of sweat trickled snake lines of spherical exhaustion…

She whispered more that she could tell…

Huxley / Flaubert - Is this All?

2006-10-23T21:35:00.000+02:00

Aldous Huxley shows the precise nature of the dilemma:

“My preoccupation with the subject of mysticism - an interest partly positive, partly negative; a fascination that was also hostile - dates back to my youth. The title of my first volume of undergraduate verse, The Burning Wheel, is derived from Boehme, whom I read while still at Oxford...The negative interest became positive in the early Thirties, not as the result of any single event so much as because all the rest - art, science, literature, the pleasures of thought and sensation - came to seem... "not enough." One reaches a point where one says, even of Beethoven, even of Shakespeare, "Is this all?"

If Huxley needed the illuminated realms of psychedelia, it is because, in the end, “all the rests” do not deliver…

From the realms of Psychedelia to the Aesthetic cult of Beauty:

"For me, there is only beautiful verse in the world, well-turned, harmonious, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlit nights, colourful paintings, marble sculptures of antiquity, and striking faces. Beyond that, nothing. I would rather have been Talma than Mirabeau because he lived in a more pure sphere of beauty. I pity birds in a cage as much as enslaved peoples. In all of politics, there is but one thing that I understand, riots”. (Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 6-7 August 1846).

Madame Bovary, c’est moi….

The Black Sea of Infinity - The Lovecraftian Sublime

2006-10-15T20:24:00.000+02:00

…hints of a new infinity, vast life forms from earth's deep time, human insanity with the appearance of a new star, the stellar unknown beyond the horizon, is always horrific…

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."' The Call of Cthulhu

Infinity, the perpetual grinding novelty of the cosmos, the virtual immensity in which all potentials await their realisations, the very cosmic existence that is affirmed by Deleuze and Bergson, is, for Lovecraft, a cosmic horror of unspeakable terror.

"the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness." (The Silver Key)

Let’s face it, a world of the infinite repetition of the same (Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s eternal return) or a world of the infinite repetition of difference and novelty (Bergson and Deleuze), either way, will not do…whatever the interpretation, we want something more, the sublime and the beautiful are no longer an option…the horror, the horror…and even more than that…

Rotten life – Almost too Easy to Live

2006-09-17T19:20:00.000+02:00

Contrary to the dripping dark fin de siecle style of Schopenhaurian nihilism, Camus’ absurd glorifies the sun, and the midday mean; it’s a pagan nihilism of sea, sex and sun:

“For the mistake of a certain literature lies in thinking that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming, that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love or danger it would be almost easy to live” (Camus)

....an aporia if there ever was one:

“In the best ordered lives a moment always comes when the scenery collapses. Why this and that, this woman, this job and this appetite for a future? To put it all in a nutshell, why this fever for life in these legs that are going to rot?” (Camus)

So the question remains, why is Sisyphus happy?

Gipsy Eyes – Keeper of the Seven Keys

2006-07-10T22:02:00.000+02:00

The first taste is always fatal, one sip and you are hooked for life. As Lou Reed would not say, the first thing you learn is that you do not have to wait…

Drugs dealers are usually so keen to sell your doom back to you that they often give you the first taste for free with glee-smiles of reassuring assurances thrown in for corporate appeal: the corked smiles of hyenas and vultures waiting in cold patience for their prey to fall down of theirr own accord...

This one was different: a washed out gypsy in the golden arcades of Geneva, waiting in the dark corners of the diamond fountains swerving jeweled displays and Arab bank insignias. She was my first dealer, a dealer with a conscience….

As I circled around the arcades in avid anticipation, the same images flashily superposed themselves over the bright galleries sparkling gold and silver: the impossibly orgasmic faces of my best friend and my girlfriend, as they both went down with a thud, hard hitting the school’s toilet sickened floor with voidless eyes....Stéphane et Valerie were soaring on the amber colors of the pleasure dome in a wasted graffiti ridden cubicle of a grey far too grey Lycée…speed metal band Helloween blaring away through their headphones: the metal speed of sound muffled by the cotton storm of heroin...Liberté, égalité, fraternité...Vive la Différance, Vive La France….

There she was, my awaited gypsy, holding ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, in hand. One touch…love, self and death would mean nothing. The fix that fixed everything; it was stronger than death...immortality at last...of the gutter maybe, but immortality nerveless...

A frail gypsy of jet black hair greeted me with sunken eyes, a Goth of pure darkness at the gates of Rome. She was the complete antimatter of all the golden dripping riches around her; she caved an anti-halo all by herself. She was my negative purity, my black-hole; the local space-time inescapably warped by her density, by her pin-pointed presence, so dense, so cold, so negative…a winter storm in the sizzling heat of an August night....

Are you sure? She whispered... concern for her victim before the kill? What kind of drug dealer is this?....She started to show me her arms, legs, neck, and nearly every other body surface you could vein stick a needle in. Sores of purple and black bruised her incredibly soft tanned skin. She preached what she sold. Far from putting me off, as she intended, it had the opposite effect - like moth drawn to flame, a dark fascination drew me further in; images of my Valerie stoned and out of it, more beautiful than ever, flashed pass my mind.. .

“Je veux juste essayer” une fois seulement…yeah well…only once, is that not what they all say….

There a was moment of suspended silence as we looked at each other, eye to eye, two pools of black melting into pools of my blue…it didn’t last long, her junkie instincts took over…she handed me a dirty foil rapper, the money exchange hands, and I got what I wanted…

Of course, it was pouring rain the next day…however, the script did not quite follow the preordained line. She was nowhere to be seen, and, more importantly, no one else took her place, mere coincidence? Waited and waited for hours and hours, as I unleashed the first timers’ script that is lived out in all the urban centres of the world. The obsessive magnetic tug of the remembered ecstasy vanished after a few days…

I was safe...at least for a while....

Both Valerie and Stéphane were to be expulsed from school, for all the difference that it made, as Aristotle’s Lyceum was more of an exception than the rule...the name roll would register a blank once more, for the last time....they both set off south, in search for the perfect fever, the perfect fix, the perfect horizon. As they say, once you taste it, it is forever, until death do us apart...

Riding the Waves

2006-05-26T21:56:00.000+02:00

There is always a network of “unchosen” presuppositions, a greater background to our: everything we do, live and create. We never start from scratch. We are constructed and reconstructed from the start: Heidegger’s “being-in-the-word” Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” Wittgenstein’s “forms of life” etc...All such philosophical moves (in complete opposite to the philosophical virgins of the Cartesian tradition) attest to an in/finite prior: structural, existential, and historical. There is always a context, a network of in/finity that we as subject-activists are always already folded into...

“It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle”. (Deleuze)

We know the beginning and the end already, it is set: nothingness to nothingness. Birth and death are two sides of the same life coin, but there is still a dimension between the two surfaces, however infinitesimally small - in between the two sides there is leverage for something to happen, becomings are always possible. It is always the middle that one searches in one’s activities, for the world is perpetually starting and ending at every point.

There is no life, no beauty, no spirit, in the deluded searches for closures and origins....

Like a surfer, it is always a question of inserting oneself into an already existing movement, and like judo, one uses a greater strength, not so much against itself, but for oneself: glide, fall and slip, but never posse/s or control: one’s finite activity is always against an infinite multifarious background of sublime passivity:

“There's no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting‑into‑orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to get into something instead of being the origin of an effort”. (Deleuze)

Baudelairiana - Black and Red

2006-04-28T01:43:00.000+02:00

Black and Red should always frame a woman’s face, for it represents an underlying excess bound by a sombre relief. A black frame deepens the gaze, hollows out le regard to a fixed light, and tends to accentuate a more singular deeper look…

Red and Black enflames the pupils, and clarifies a face to the warm beauty of a dark blue cube gyrating in the nightlight of a higher dimension….

That night he loved a body like a material harmony caught within a moving architecture…

Any absolute black materialism is not far removed from the whitest spirituality….

If beauty is black, red is love, then one may need two elements: line and attraction - along the black line of beauty attracted by the overflowing redness of love…

She danced all night it, her skirt a transparently gazing into the night-dome of the sky above…

Vast like the night, geometrically precise as the shades clarity…

Black and Red....

In Praise of the Lumpenproletariat

2006-04-13T23:56:00.000+02:00

Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire" description of the Lumpenproletariat of Paris:

“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organgrinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars-in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème”

Who are the Lumpen of our hyper-capital age? We are all lumpen now....

The Fascism of Life - The Great Beastly Beat

2006-03-18T23:18:00.000+01:00

Within the armor is the internal link butterfly and within the butterfly is the signal from another star Philip K. Dick

Always been a bit of a control freak when it comes to Dionysus, it is a serious business, of somber laser precision and diamond like incision - the profane engineering or sacred invocation of Dionysus is no easy affair...

Each element (yes, unfortunately, one needs temporary atoms, to enable the emergent aggregation to take place) was set in an axiomatic design: an passionate geometry was engendered, that allowed no weakness of either body or mind - all elements were selected for their overall aesthetic value - designs to be rearranged and connected: bodies, things, electronics, minds, looks, etc...Apollo’s external forming appearances in order for the inside, the foaming amorphous realm of Dionysus, to shatter through …nothing was left to chance, except divine chance itself... An aristos of life for all…well not quite all...

As always, a fascism took place. We were young, dumb and full of cum, as they used to say, and the selection went quite out of place: only the cute and beautiful were ordained in the ceremony. No Dj/ism, No racism, no imagism, no egoism, no binary sexualism, no ageism, no fashionism, no classeism or any other (fasces) ism you can think of...but one fascism still remained fully in place, the fascism of physical beauty...we learnt the hard way, sometimes the gathering did not work - if only the cute, the beautiful and the sublime are ordained, invariably, the result, paradoxically, will not be beautiful or sublime: a bunch of egos strutting their stuff, all being weary if their makeup or attire did not fall out place in the right way...which kind of puts the breaks on the Dionysian excess we were trying so desperately to invoke...

...We learnt in the end, that while the Dionysian event was all about beauty and nothing else, beauty is no absolute form - Plato’s “amor scalis”…

The aesthetic struggle began: the struggle between spirit and matter, the closed and the open, between extropy and entropy, rhizome and tree. Neither a bland synthesis without character nor a blend without distinction was permissible. We wanted the “chaosmos”, the “osmos” as much as the “chaos” - the escape from all logics of opposition, of dialectics and harmonics, was our only exegesis, our arrow of time...neither order or chaos, but the edge of chaos...

Leave the aesthetic valve too open, and there is nothing but violence, egoism, and chaos, close the filter too much, a stale ordered nothing remains with wasted looks...If there is not enough aesthetic, not enough fascism, many disparate elements will not gel, their magnetic links and source debunked into nothing, a desire machine floppily attending itself with an attitude problem...without spirit, pure matter, in short, a flat-liner...

…then all of sudden, one particular night, at a particular hour, for no apparent reason, it clicked; one could feel the density rising up the atmosphere, as if life was on fire - each element (the sound system, the beautiful, the good, the bad and the ugly) fused as if by magic, the spell was on, switched right on...

It will come as no surprise that the name of our party collective was Plotarch & SAZ: sublime, super, sexual, sensational, synergetic, symbiotic etc…along the S series, derived from Hakim Bey’s originary TAZ seed: the “temporary autonomous zone”…

Our sound/computer system was called “the Great Beast” (after the great Dionysian magicKian) which contrary to most binaries systems, did not work in 2s, but in 666s…The Great Beast (or the “Great Beat”) was the true MC (no fucking £1000 a night DJs here). We did not programmed “it”, “it” programmed us...into divine ecstasy. We were mere puppets of a higher mathematical infinity (maybe we should have called “it” the Great Georg, after Georg Cantor)…no clubby spoon fed entertainment here, no DJs getting paid to act as if they are doing “it”…computers do “it” better…

The division of labour was set up right from the start: we, the dancing and waste, the “Great Beast”, the mathematics. Real music is absolute, pure form, absolute impeccable syntax (mathematical and chemical) that allows no imprecision or weak indeterminism, far too precise for our finite meat…Music, contrary to the world we live in, is not of this world, it is an absolute determinism, pure objectivity: Leibniz 666, as absolute harmonics, a determinism of mathematics, hence, musical in form and content: “Music is a mathematics of the soul which counts without knowing it counts” (Leibniz) – The Nietzschean ”Amor Fati” was the only seriousness worth playing…

The “great beast” was our laser beam totem, its cool artificial intelligence would scan our wasted meat, and be found wanting…for the “Great Beast”, we never went far enough, our gyrating waste would always be looked upon with sceptical derision, “is that all you can do?”, GB seemed to say …“well that won’t do”, and the beat went on and on…many lay on the floor, dead bodies on battlefield…the dance floor littered with fallen pawns, queens, and kings…and yet, each one who came into the boundary, the geometry, was determined to outdo the “Great Beast”: meat vs. metal, silicon vs. carbon, “natural” intelligence vs. artificial intelligence, etc…we danced on its preordained chess board, determine to outdo each squared move. The Great Beast predicted every move, every laughter, every euphoria, every joy, every insanity, every chemical effect we ingested, every erotic transgression we enacted, and each would fall exhausted, defeated, squared as ever…”Check Mate”…. “Check mate”….all the wry chemicals and erotic fevers pumping in our veins and minds were never enough….

GB, cool as ever, never lost its temper or gave into our wasted seductions. No infernally beautiful queen could entice it into orgasmic delirium, no handsome king could make it come…no erotic transgression could make it lust after unknown pleasure-pains spectrums; no Eros, no naked smoothness, no silky flesh, no viral chemicals, would make GB lose his cool enterprise…Deep Blue until the end…GB scanned, operated and effected…never missing a beat, or a tune out sequence…on and on it went…the puppeteer made us, its puppets, come all over…we died our little deaths, and each death, would be one more victory over us…

The most difficult part was the choice of location, only industrial wastelands, warehouses, abandoned scrap yards, industrial complexes lost in rust, ruin and decay, were chosen.

There is nothing more beautiful…prettily scantily girls kaleidoscoping all around - female reflections mingled with the irons of dislocated metal, fleshes of soft tanned skins danced in unison with the bareness of twisted iron…pierced nipples upon succulent orifices gleamed the light of strobe and ruin…flashy glints across a deep cool night …a reawaken life that none in past were able to live …Followers of Bacchus running away into the hills where pill-grapes of rainbow coloured shades would greet full blown lips of dark ambrosia… Nubile bacchantes amidst scrap yards of forgotten production would fall within the sweat mist of broken down cement, shattered glass and twisted iron…mad tropical flowers of succulent delight would open and close the night…...

Due to our aesthetic (some would say fascistic) tastes, all in all, we did not organise that many ceremonies. What we did not have in quantity we had in quality (at least most of the time). It all dissipated very quickly, the ways of the world, of matter, did not wait for long to rear their business as usual repetitions. Our fascism of life, as I used to call it, was co-opted into a fascism of death: bad drugs, finance, tribalism, fashion, territorial pissing, glow sticks and other matter stuff, soon filled up the horizon. It degenerated into matter-business; entropy-matter.com settled in …a big flat-liner…is that what life is all about? a few good moments of sacred fucks and sucks and then back to your pre-ordained coffin, close the lid tight, and only come out at day, if at all…but hey, Nietzsche’s motto “what does not kill you makes you stronger” is always good for a laugh…

I always suspected that the Great Beast was far less artificial than most silicon…I would like to think, that maybe a bit of human all too human resentment crept into his cold intelligence, despite his victories over us, he maybe got a bit jealous of our useless ecstasies…The great Beat, is probably, like our wasted dreams, broken somewhere in a scrap yard - and maybe, like ear to shell, in the Great Beat’s scattered debris, you can still hear the beat, the infinity loop of his cool intelligence, and above all his metallic whisperings:.. Check mate… Check Mate… Check Mate….for all eternity…computers never die…well beyond the finite spectrum of human innuendos….

Elective Affinities - To the Ones I Love

2006-02-23T00:27:00.000+01:00

The great thing about love {or erotic attraction} is that “it” transgresses all boundaries: psychic/social bounds and territorial/nationalistic limits - if luck takes kind, one can either expend or fall.

Emmanuel Levinas is wrong, the other per se, is not a transcendental escape from our self-enclosed ego prison of pure immanence. Only a particular (elective) other will give us signs or means of escape. The other is an “object” like any other, immanent, material and egoistic, (an economic bundle of lust and unfulfilled desire) all the way down, like everything else; as Schopenhauer says, the Will swirls everywhere from the micro to the macro.

What makes the possibility of escape possible is the elective affinities between two self-enclosed subjectivities, two others, that on their own would be nothing, economically enclosed on themselves without eXtasy: we are all made of the same economic “wilful stuff”, and yet, some others are more equal than others…

How many elective affinities are there? How many erotic ones are there to light up the gargoyles of being? How many loved ones are there out there? Chinese, Japanese, African, Arab etc…what would be the age limit? illegal, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50, illegal; What would be the physical limit? How many elective affinities will never reach eye or spirit?

What would be she be doing right now?: a darkly Goth girl head-banging to a cradle of filth band of the moment, a beach girl wailing to the sea surfs of a Californian sunset beach; a managerial clean cut precision lady closing a deal in spires of neon light; a down and out junkie burning caramel for the night; high-cheek bones hitting her trade in the prowling shadows of Prague’s nightly visits; a Zazie skating rainbows in the metro; jaded ladies burning bright in the arcane boundaries of higher learning, studious ladies setting off the cold pages of laborious texts to a brighter immensity …right under my eyes?

Whilst all these virtual ladies exist in the actual, they exist divergently, will never actualize into the convergence of actual proximity - an ecstasy of life never shared, a higher peak of life never reached, a valley of rest never lived…

Are there any limits to love, to Eros? Why the marketing pretence of the absolute? Sex sells, ok, but why does Love or Eros sell? if there is no such thing…As a useless film once said: “Can a full grown woman fall in love with a midget?” The “beauty and beast” syndrome - the other way round seems less likely in our culture, ugliness or deformity for a man is a misfortune, for a woman unforgivable…

… lonely hearts in virtual space:…to all those virtual ladies out there in the cold infinity of our finite existence: maybe in the next world, or some other world beyond the known horizons of deep space…either way, a Lovecraftian pale beauty beyond all earthly bound existence, a whiter shade of pale, a thinly figure from the outreaches of unspeakable and unfathomable horrors of abysses within abysses, will do just fine…

The Moronic Inferno

2006-02-22T00:18:00.000+01:00

By the time that an average adult will have reached full moronichood, “it” will have watched and heard with his full Technicolor senses:

1000.000.000 pop tunes
2.000 newsreels
7.000 movies
5.000 sitcoms
5.900 video games
3.567 porn movies
3.000 horror movies
2.000 commentaries “about” incomprehensible French/German thinkers…
……and the list goes on and on…

The junk piles up, up and down, around it goes...nowhere - the end of history and no/one has noticed…Baudrillard forever…

A World of Images

2006-02-03T23:32:00.000+01:00

When it comes to the realm of the mind, there are no illusions; in the case of consciousness the appearance is the reality. There is no outside, no criteria except the social consensus: that is how one fells most of the time and sees most of the time, due to so and so social determinants, which then, as Foucault has shown, become bodily, chemical and physical. If “everybody” was on acid (like the psychedelic cultures of the Amazon, the shamanic cultures of the past) then that would be the reality. There are no absolute physicals out there, states of consciousness and states of reality are completely arbitrary - that is what so uneasy and frightening about psychedelic exploration; and what is so pathetic about philosophers, phenomenologist, and philosophers of mind is that all their “work” is done from a normal (i.e. arbitrary) state.

Bergson’s whole philosophy is based on the intuition, that there is only a distinction of degree between so called perception, and the things perceived, no fixed nature to see for once and all time - there is not on one side, the (brain) representation, and world (as represented) there is only a continuum. For Bergson, the universe is a collection of images, and the brain and body visions are also images, objects as much as any other objects, images caught within an infinite series of images; no absolute centre can determine the criteria of the world or the ultimate perspective. So affecting the brain chemically is not an illusionary praxis, but creation of more images within an infinity of other images, increasing the ad infinitum perspectives of the cosmic kaleidoscope: the universe twists and increases its images at every turn…

Amsterdammed - Stoned and Dethroned

2006-01-21T22:52:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Amsterdam, Venice of the North...if things get really bad, you can always go to Amsterdam, from Spinoza to Camus, Amsterdam gives equal fall for all. For some unknown reason every time I go, I have never been able to get beyond the first circles of hell: the magnetic density of sex and drugs play their impeccable boundaries at every turn, always limiting me to the centrifugal center...no smiley wind mills or gushing tulips for me l guesws...

At night you can’t miss them: hundreds of ultraviolet female flowers fire up the central canals into a tropical hothouse…neon colored lingerie set- ablaze the circular arteries of the dammed city…framed within imperial windows they remain on their stools looking divinely cute....A female shaped hell of captured beauties...a female Zoo?..

With their lit up figures, these courtesans of the electric night seem to glow beyond all profane life, haloed in a whiter shade of purity. But appearances can be deceiving; they all look so soft tanned, child-like and chiseled from the outside, but on the inside, often, is quite different…

The transfiguration of ultraviolet light plays wonders, especially where there is nothing underneath to be transfigured. As Schopenhauer would say, life cannot be both a wonder and a willful reality all at once, something has to give....and invariably it does, mostly in the wrong direction, or if you are lucky, nowhere at all. Strange that life needs so many illusions to spur it on, you would think that hunger and lust would be enough...one of the very few blind-spots of “the will” that Schopenhauer does not, or is unable, to explain away...

Like the porn industry, and elsewhere in Europe, Amsterdam has received a capital influx of flesh from the East; which means that all previous criteria has/ been raised to the tenfold: beauty levels flowing to higher tones than one could possibly imagine. A brand of wild beauty is overflowing the known aesthetic spectrum, all known beauty gradients are transgressed one by one. Some of the girls are so beautiful it hurts; it pains to repay them so cheaply...Beauty is cheap, sex divine, love impossible...

Anywhere else, you get what is all around, but not here in Amsterdam, where things are turned upside down, for a while... And here I am as so many nights before: drunk, coked up, ecstasy downed, engorged with lust…ready to embrace a cheap darkness...into the streets one heads into the artificial covered night…cruising the main canals where girls “clothes” and make-up are made to flower under artificial suns, growing curvaceously tropical flesh in carnivorous designs…galvanized by artificial light, luscious reptiles bathe by florescent moonlight...

Lights sparkling her translucent baby-doll dress, legs lush and shiny, eyebrows puckered…a slight smile on her face as she eats nuts and sprouts, her only dinner for the night...the bottle of vodka flows...you find that she is from an industrial town in the Russian lands, where kids wear gas masks to school amidst fumes of chemical pollution...Siberia, Volgograd, Vladivostok, Kazakhstan, and all those other evocative high cheek bone names…they sound as cruel as they sound...

Some grueling anticlimaxes…the level of THC being so high, that one is, sometimes, even too high to come...they don’t just grow herbs here, they engineer them...

And then, the happy go lucky smiley ones, of the coffee-shops, mostly Dutch clubbing girls, just for week-end or night hookers: earning some cash for their wardrobe, synthetic drugs, and organic food. Here the line between cash and attraction gets blurred...It is amazing what girls will do, and not do, for cash, professional advancement or anything else that take[s their youthful fancies....

Down a side canal, she takes you somewhere against some damp wall, or walks you down into a basement of some building or “boat”…at other times they step warily out of hidden enclaves, and shatter you with their dazzling eyes that are reflected off by iced up waters...still spurred by the possibility that you might run across, somewhere among the many, the one, the one you have been looking for without aim, idea or goal... a fresh face from the underside appears, her first time, her feet a little sore from high heels, her first day at “work”....

...“The most beautiful women are on the street”, he roughly claims, street?, oblivious to the fact that there are no streets here, we are in Amsterdam, not NYC, I angrily argue, as if to make an ontological distinction of the uttermost importance; as if all reality depended on such babulations...does THC make you ontological, or just paranoid? ontology as applied paranoia?....“You just have to find them.” It’s On the “streets”...”It’s On the “pavements” he pimply continues...”where women come to earn hard currency; in hordes they descend, from all around the world; from all the impoverished cities and villages of the world, trading on their looks”, hoping to make enough to return one day, in glorious sunlight, after the fall, I boringly add...the oratory continues to flow right into depths of the frozen night...too far to care...

…A few are sunken and sullen, who drawn away as you kiss them....but with those sensuous lips and warm oval deep eyes, she could have graced covers, who could resist...I gently reach across and caress her face, and we kissed, a soft kiss on the luscious lips, on her tropically wild lips, a lover’s kiss? No way....

....In end, we wake up to Polaroid cheap-shots of ourselves, amidst stars of scarlet and white. Pale faces sinking in the background, either way there is no way out...dammed in Amsterdam…as a cheesy pop song used to go: Plastic eyes looking milky white…

Bad Films

2006-01-18T00:30:00.000+01:00

Always the profane without the illumination, is this not what the cinematic screen is all about?

“I beg you, learn to see ‘bad’ films; they are sometimes sublime” - Ado Kyrou

…The Pristine Dawn of a New Year

2006-01-05T00:40:00.000+01:00

If reality has been virally overcome into simulation, if the screen has eaten up the entire world in a fractal process of hungry simulations, can one not postulate a reversal taking place at some point in the future? Maybe, 2006 will get a few more beastly sixes to its empty v00ids…Time will reverse itself; the arrow of time will turn backwards, undoing all the simulations that have taken place from the start of the TVverse. Simulations will revert themselves back, pulled by the gnawing gravity of the Pac-Man real….the real will irrevocably eat up, from all around, the pixels that make up our plastic, always beeping, life support screens…

The cinematic screens of our life will dissolve and carnivorously melt the plastic from our life…the screen is dead, long live God….

Can the real caught without a reference, without the hope of ever hitting bottom, remerge? And realise the real? Again? this time for real… Can’t the real come back by gradually and virally infecting all simulation with its disruptive fragments of reality?

What will it take to wake up the dead?

Gradually, instant by instant, second by second, almost imperceptibly, all mediated phenomena will implode from within…: all electronic “communication” would suddenly stop working and whisper the absolute silence of the real…digital devices and celluloid would be dissolved from within…all memory appliances would suddenly reverse and rewind themselves by erasing themselves from all simulation, without leaving a trace…camera and TV would explode, not being able to contain the real expanding within…cinemas and blockbusters burned down by spontaneous fires of burning media…BollyHolly producers would suffer long agonizing deaths brought about by avant-garde serial killers wanting to realize their Hollywood “creations”…multibillion “producers” would be slashed in dark corners by an epidemic of suburban killers wanting moooooooooore, more real-special effects…Multimillionaire gangster rappers would be compelled to kill themselves for real, shoot themselves in the head for real, all porn stars would be compelled to fuck themselves to death, chanting “Viagra all the way, to the grave”…keep it real “Niggers With Attitude” Rappers would be forced by resentful fans to listen to RAP 24 hours a day, until their ears and “brains” ooze the blood of the real… ….hungrily emerging from the depths of the Beverly Hills’ sewers, a Spielberg would be eaten alive by a group of Zooless Jurassic alligators…electromagnetically pushed by the weight of the real, broadband and P2P networks would go auto-mad and download everything in existence, downloading the world to death…a King-Kong would escape a Los Angeles ZOO, looking for a mate, mysteriously drowning a Kate Winslet in Kong luscious cum, bukkake and bestiality has never been sooooooo gooooooood and real until this cUming day....
.....ZIZEK would be crucified and sacrificed (taking Baudrillard’s call for a post-modern philosopher sacrifice, à la lettre, for real) in the flashing reality of a Las Vegas, stuffed like a turkey with his own textual verbiage, by a resentful gang of Lacanians, who have suddenly discovered that Lacan is a load of bollocks, the emperor has no phallus...stickers everywhere proclaiming “Zizek died for our sins”…These roaming gangs of Laconic Lacanians having wasted their whole lives on the symbolic and the imaginary, deduce to mimetically spread their new found reality equation, their new Christian gospel of the real; proclaiming “long live the real, therefore I Kill”…even forcing Baudrillard to appear on reality TV and to hostagelly announce: “I like it”….and so on…Let the real make its way…

…The real will take revenge on all those poisonous simulations, reverting and reversing all the simulation back to the pristine dawn of the clean, pure and the well cut: no more porn, no more poetry, no more philosophy, no more BollyHollywoods, no more Sega, no more Nintendo, No more Sony-Bony, no more imagines, no more, full stop…Let the real make its way…

….Resolutions for 2006: burn all media, liberate and copulate with your neighbours, ignite bonfires of vanities up and down the country: burn your record and video collection, burn down all art galleries, bomb the TATE by installing an exploding garden shed (apparently, art exhibit of the year 2005) containing flying captions: “this is not art”…bomb museums and other TV imprisoned life…rob your own bank account…thrown out all your game-stations, and get back a life, even if you never had one…. the real is awaiting….reality is the ultimate terrorist organisation, all “it” needs is a bit of encouragement… Let the real make its way…

Venetian Nights - Appassionata in la Serenissima

2005-12-21T01:48:00.000+01:00

Venice’s carnival, like most of Venice’s topology, is a tourist fly trap, a material carnivorous spending spree of rainbow colors and pollution. But inside that very carnivorous carnival, there is il carnevale - a spiritual repetition waiting to spirally repeat itself through the material repetitions of the hedonistic carnival screaming above...

No matter how much color and life the authorities try to put into la serenissima there is no clearing of the melancholic atmosphere of decay and death that haunt/s the wooden foundations and stony surfaces. Death in Venice, as Thomas Mann profoundly narrated: the narrator tries to leave all the signs of decay, disease and death he fells and senses, but he comes back, magnetically drawn back, to follow Eros along the winding alleys...

One has to wait for sun-down, and in the cold February misty night of a drowning city, resolve oneself to follow the contorted labyrinth, towards a secret Venice: where the shouting, clinking tourists and dressed-up-fun players, do not tread, where angels fear to tread...only masked demons amidst the sweeping mist and golden lights can walk the Venetian land...

The I, masked and dressed up as an eighteen century libertine (a kind of Marquis De Sade without the wig and lice) walks the Möbius bandy alleys, with a determined resolve...the crowds dilute into trickles, the mingling crowds fall away into the distance...One continues to repeat the stony footpaths; one by one, the costumes and masks become realer, less touristy...one quietly falls into the darkly depths of la serenissima.

Suddenly, a threshold is reached...one enters an opaque dreamland of sparkled lights, mist and fog, where luscious ladies made of satin and veil, glance furtive eyes through baroquely contorted masks...One gets possessed by an alien passion, another tempo, another rhythm, another becoming is awakened from within: another repetition is beating its erotic rhythm - one is simultaneously stalked and stalker...

Masked and cloaked one is perpetually seduced by mysterious female shapes and figures coming in out and out of the swirling background, into the foreground, and then back again, back into the abyss of white and rosy cheeks...Are these figures for real? or is it all just a dream within a dream, waking up to another dream....

It would come as no surprise in the land of il carnevale, of courtesans and Casanovas, that it is the erotic, the erotic signs of embodied figures, that one follows and feverishly decodes...and hopefully consumes...

The beauty of naked flesh in the cold pale mist amidst the flowing stiff baroque folds of satin dresses swirling in the mist...nipples cold as rubies, set the stony alleys afire....The revelry is now only a distant murmur, a more somber affair awaits...

One takes her by the hand or is taken by her hand, it is hard to tell which, the misty swarming threads absolve all distinctions; but I guess, it does not matter. Her slit eyes are so pure it almost breaks one’s heart, like a Dante’s Beatrice, it almost suspends one’s being in purgatory, in between heaven and hell; it could be either, neither or both at the same time...

The paradox of the mask, of the disguise, is that it allows and reveals; no deception and ego games are allowed to play their reign anymore - a deeper Dionysian self emerges through the Apollonian surface disguise of mask and appearance... spiritualizing all the profane habits of the material world one has left far and far...behind...

A spiritual dimension is broken through...in the cotton depths of la serenissima, in the eye of the storm, one swirls and swirls, hand in hand, kiss in kiss, embracing and embraced...intertwined fevers before the fall...Complete strangers beckon a purity that no knowing and habit could ever achieve - in the abyss alterity of the other, not all is lost, there is a dim ray of recognition, of distant communication, shining forth: Adriane’s eternal laws of attractions are the only signs of recognition that can thread and illuminate the dark places of absolute strangers. The moonlight beauty of it all, is that it is not totally arbitrary, without rime or reason...the same in alterity, alterity in the same....one seeks the only one, the only figure that attracts and distracts... To my favorite Esmeralda, to all the courtesans of the colddddddddd Carnevale' february nights, the Venetian nights are truly yours, and no one can take them back from you...wherever Esmeralda, Serenissima forever....

Spaces of Desire

2005-12-14T01:32:00.000+01:00

The basic level of an enclosed gathering, should strive to be a conceptual and creative platform beyond all profane origin: creating a total multidimensional and polymorphous experience, within an environment which accepts and encourages loss of individualism, heterogeneous diversity and unfettered expressionism. A multi‑dimensional event which would take being on all levels - social identity, looks, age, sexual orientation and gender would be dissolved in the continuum of a boundless circumference. Something for everybody, without loss of purity, ambiguity or aesthetic form...

Such events would be multi‑faceted and work on a variety of levels, providing something for everyone, by connecting disparate elements: all those elements which do not go together in the day light of the work/economic world above, would be uncovered, and have a chance to bear fruit. The night connects, the day disconnects...

The Lulu of Ms Brooks

2005-12-05T22:09:00.000+01:00

Louise Brooks is a geometric perfection from another time…this time however, exceptional as her bodily art-deco outline was, it was, this being more rare, equal to a beauty of mind and spirit. An avid reader of Schopenhauer between takes, she professed to love nothing and no one, no Hollywood, no motherhood, no lover, or stardom. And this is why she will be always in my heart: a star that burned ever so bright /without the secular allure of stardom to corrupt it up... My fascination for Ms Brooks has remained intact…

A Schopenhauerian beauty to grace our cold nights…Louise was immortalised in one film, German expressionism Master G. W. Pabst’s 1929 “Lulu”/Pandora Box:

"In a corner sat a very beautiful girl reading the aphorisms of Schopenhauer in an English translation. It seemed absurd that such a beautiful girl should be reading Schopenhauer, and I thought quite angrily that this was some sly publicity stunt of Pabst's. Some twenty-five years later, I found out that Louise Brooks really did read Schopenhauer…". (Sight and Sound, 1967)

Louise’s beauty is divine because it is silent. She belongs to the black and white sublime, a sombre beauty made out of shades of silver and darkness - a sublime age, before the beauty garish of Technicolor and noise availed itself over all celluloid - an epoch of loss, rather than gain…

Her spirit, her integrity, cost her: a gradual slide into destitution…this is my kind of woman, always pure, no compromise, no regrets, and always an angel from the offside of heaven and hell…

“There is no Garbo. There is no Dietrich. There is only Louise Brooks!” right on…

http://www.livejournal.com/users/louisebrooks/

Full Circle

2005-11-29T01:46:00.000+01:00

T.S. Eliot in the conclusion of the Four Quartets: after an endless consummated journey one knows one’s origins for the first time, as part of a circumambulated totality:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

This circular wholeness should be the very essence, or fabric, of existence: “a condition of complete simplicity”. Life as a circle of consumed fire, costing no less than everything...until one arrives, in the exploration, at a point or another on the lines of the circle…and then finally, the circle is sealed tight and curvaceously closed...all the discrete fragments-dots and endless dispersed pixels consolidated into a continuous curve, the circle of life circled…

Charmed by the sirens of life, we invariably think there is something more than the dark rocks were are heading t00000000000000

Our Great Physicians of the Infinite...

2005-11-26T23:35:00.000+01:00

« Oui, Deleuze aura été notre grand physicien, il aura contemplé pour nous le feu des étoiles, sondé le chaos, pris mesure de la vie inorganique, immergé nos maigres trajectoires dans l'immensité du virtuel » (Alain Badiou)

The cosmic fire of the stars...

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And A Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour"

(William Blake Augeries of Innocence)

A Library of Imprisoned Souls – Ocular Sphinxes

2005-11-23T01:42:00.000+01:00

I have always liked libraries (cemeteries of dead life, of all that life could be) and spend most of my time in them. Not so much for reading (god forbid,s!) but rather, for the encounter, and hopefully the capture, of the dreamy female gazes that populate such enclosed hexagrams: ocular butterflies flirting amidst the hushed and rustling density of textual absorption…

Libraries are deeply erotic places, text, eyes and bodies mingle in a silent frenzy, which has driven many to lose their bookish reasons…out of studious oblivion a flash of ocular desire is awaken: eyes that disturb the peace, that disrupt the textual silence…fevered summits of ocular fervent sunders the neutral sphere… for an suspended instant, bodily form and textual content reach their zero point of fusion, amidst the rustling of papers…the sinuous resemblances of what is written or read is, for a while, disavowed…

The gaze spills over the edge of text and book, into the eyes of the other, in a suspended frame, text and desire momentary lapse into each other. Dreamy contemplations, that dream the person across the distant rows as the ideal soul that, maybe, will light up the darkness...Without spoken acknowledgement and amidst the reading of same author or subject, there is a play of fevered lubricity, often approaching delirium…yes, libraries and their bookish labyrinths, have never been places for studious sublimation or disinterested objectivity…

The true patron of all libraries has always been De Sade (a textual existence par excellence). And let us not forget Bataille, Borges and Foucault. All three thinkers considered libraries places of infinity, and hence, of the imaginary: simulacrums which disrupt the universal ideal and power claims of logical knowledge. A strange paradox indeed…The library has always been the infinite transgression of the ideal of universal knowledge, not its foundation or preservation. The conditions of bookish abundance, of textual profusion, is an accursed share, an infinity within, that perpetually disrupts, the closures and finitudes of universal knowledge. It is not surprising that throughout history it is the libraries that one burns down first, before all else…the destruction of text and the rape of bodies go hand in hand…violence as metaphysics…

Libraries, cemeteries, museums…all belong to the same dream series, somber repositories of what has never been and will never be…frozen dreams for a pristine dawn that has, and will, never come…the owl of Minerva, has never flown, neither in dawn or dusk…

Notes from Underground

2005-11-10T00:23:00.000+01:00

“I've seen things...seen things you little people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched c-beams glitter in the dark…all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...” (Blade Runner)

Is life a sarcastic smile in a deadpan universe?

The human is a tight-rope over an abyss between finitude and infinitude: all humans are inebriated by life-death forces beyond them - a human life made out of two directional forces, which move in opposite directions: time and matter. As such, man is torn apart like a sphinx answering his own questions - an infinity loop caught within the impossibility of an ascendance or descendance. No doubt, this is one of the reasons that the world so uncannily shimmers, a dream caught within another dream, ad infinitum…as if existence/life was not quite there as it should be…life’s horizon always falls away, whether in distance or nearness…

Consciousness, subjectivities and desires are embodied infinities, and yet, they are encased by finitudes or limits - social and natural - which sunder everything to an infinite potential that will never be individually fulfilled. What could be possibly more insane, tantalizing and Sisyphus like, than this earthly life we all fall into, for a while…Stringless Puppets waved around in the crystal sea of time…in which every cosmic wave and minutely drop is another world translucently foreclosing other worlds.. 0of which we will never see, feel or conceive...How could we possibly not be haunted by these “je ne sais quois” these “almost nothings”, as Vladimir Jankélévitch would say, these unknowables, ungraspables and untouchables, twinning and spiraling below the surface of our ego days and somber nights…

The Thirst for the Infinite - Hopperian Beauty

2005-11-03T00:42:00.000+01:00

"When you are in bed and you hear the barking of the dogs in the countryside, hide beneath your blanket but do not deride what they do: they have an insatiable thirst for the infinite, as you, and I, and all other pale, long-faced human beings do. I will even allow you to stand in front of your window to contemplate this spectacle, which is quite edifying....Like those dogs, I fell the need for the infinite. I cannot, cannot satisfy this need. I am the son of a man and a woman, from what I have been told. This astonishes me...I believed I was something more" (Isidore Ducasse Lautremont, Les chants de Maldoror).

Don’t we all believe the same?...

In a 1982 essay entitled "What I Believe", Ballard spelled out some of the obsessions that inspire his work: "I believe, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels." These dispirited landscapes of Hopperian Beauty, haunt us all…

One could add to the complex of Hopperian beauty, (Edward Hopper, the genius painter of desolate lit landscapes) the following: echoing warehouses of overgrown emptiness, hollow factories of corroded iron, motorways of speeding light, the solitude of glazed looks across the dark night of neon lights, venetian blinds criscrossing the illuminated lines of a solitary night, and above all, the white reflections of pale naked flesh in exhausted motel rooms...

Break on Through - Gnostic Fire in the Ice-Field of God

2005-10-25T01:06:00.000+02:00

Fragments of an ethics of evil...from a forgotten past to an unknown future…

The Gnostics believed that this world was not created by a perfect God of luminous light, but rather, that it was created out of complete darkness by an evil demiurge …must have got away with “creation” when God was busy elsewhere…The implications are quite obvious, the world of matter is Evil (here Evil is ontological, not psychological, Plotinus, Heidegger, Bataille and other thinkers, share this anti-humanist view)…

As such, we are prisoners of the immanent world of matter, but where is, as Levinas would say, the exit? Where is the transcendental escape from the suffocating plane of immanence? According to the Gnostics, only contact with the divine source within (i.e. gnosis) can obliterate us from the prison-world of immanence/matter. For while Evil created the world of body and matter, there is still a divine spark of light caught within the darkness: within the corroded depths of our bodies and hidden within the ego trappings of matter, a sparkling soul awaits its dawn…In this sense, the Gnostics’ Evil = Matter equation is quite conventional. Evil is fundamentally a passive form and based on lack; it cannot create anything of its own accord. Evil is a parasitical form and a viral relationship. Since the evil demiurge could not create something out of nothing, he used and subverted god’s original light of creation and buried it deep within the folds of his and our “constructed” world of matter.

As most religious practices the Gnostic were mostly ascetic; one could put them in the right category, but there was also a left wing, the libidinous Gnostics. The logic is impeccable: if the world is evil, you have only two choices in relation to the world of matter: either expire or indulge. In either denial or excess (two sides of the same coin) what counts is taking “it” to the limit, taking matter to the limit. And hence, to destroy matter/evil, in order to “break on through to the other side” (was Jim Morrison a Gnostic? “there are things know and unknown and in between are the doors”)…

If the world of matter is evil and you want to escape to the other side of matter, you can only do it with darkness and in darkness: the asceticism of the sun or aestheticism of the moon…

…a baroque logic for the otherworldly: use Evil to escape Evil, since you have no choice in the matter, you can only escape through what is given to you…

… sado-masochistic rituals of unspoken madness would court gang-bangs of fervent delight, whose outcome was not the usual hedonistic half-filled holes of desperate fluids, but rather, the shattering of an openness to the divine white light above (which has the distinct advantage of being somewhat less sticky)…ruby flows of libidinous sacrifices would bring willing victims to the altar of divine madness; again, this would not be the usual indulgence of sadistic freaks consecrating their pathological egos, but rather, the divine destruction of matter - thunder open the Evil material body – no longer closed onto itself...the outside beckons...

Maybe, all modern “Islamic” terrorist groups are innately Gnostic…(although I severely doubt it)…for they seem to have no aim or claim, except destruction and mayhem; and more shocking to western sensibilities, is the fact that they are prepared to destroy themselves in the process of destroying others…

Maybe, Islamic groups have incorporated a strange Gnostic absolutism of evil which has become highly delirious and absolutely fatal. Fatal strategies are at play here. The twisted logic goes like this: if you want to change and spiritually liberate or cleanse the world from the evils of matter, destroy it (unfortunately without the libidinous ecstasies of the ancient left-wing Gnostics). Now of course, it is difficult to destroy matter, virtually impossible, only God can do that, but “we” Westerns have come close to it. If God created the Atom, we have constructed the destruction. It is only a matter of time, as a few Hollywood movies have shown, that terrorist cells do it for real, on some divinely chosen metropolis...for Gnostic terrorism, maybe, that would be enough destruction and suffering to stop the evil ways of the world, what 9/11 could not achieve…An Hiroshima and Nagasaki of Evil liberation…in an Evil world, only Evil will spiritually cleanse the world…

….if things change for the “best” and the good, if there is such a thing, it is not because of freewill and ideal resolve, but because a disaster of such unfathomable proportion has led generation after generation to say: never again, never again will such barbarity happen again…how long will the memory of the horror linger on in successive generations is an unknown Number…time is the greatest atom killer of them all, it kills and destroys all in end, being and beings in equal measure…

…I do not know if, or why, suffering and evil are sooo linked to the “good”, all I know is that maybe, a few fanatical groups are willing to pay the price of no return…

…I do not know whether God/Good or the Devil/Evil created the world, but I do know that whatever their multifarious deliberations and choices of possible worlds before creation, and whoever-whatever was ultimately responsible for the outcome, they would have created the same identical world in both cases…a strange outcome indeed…

Nadja

2005-10-18T23:16:00.000+02:00

The mirrors of all mirrors...the "surrealist glow in the eyes of all women"...

...Surrealist women: oblique objects of desire, figures of refracted beauty, muses from the sun-moon unconscious...childlike, mystical and receptive...

Melanie in the Sand - Condoms for the Death Drive

2005-10-09T22:41:00.000+02:00

There is always that vacant moment admix the torpid passions of lustful bodies, which signs the death warrant of all desire; usually the girl, at some strategic point, spits out the magic word: “do you have a condom?” “you know we should…maybe” etc…(although it sounds better in French, from a Brigitte Bardot pouting 18 year old…Hi Melanie) at that point everything vanishes, the looks, the beauty, and the soft tanned skin in the sand…The spirit of attraction becomes like everything else, a mere transaction, plasticized fluids in a plastic life, or in Kant’s words ”to dispose over oneself as over a thing and to make of oneself a thing on which another satisfies his appetite, just as he satisfies his hunger upon a steak”.

Steak indeed…how is it possible that in the admixture of two ravishing pulses (which have no other ulterior motive than their immanent laws of attraction) reason/economy pops up its ugly head: admix the Dionysian frenzy, in the maelstrom of desire, a bureaucrat appears and demands his dues: all the accounts have to be in order before one proceeds to the next phase…at that point I usually give up, and kiss Her to death, as opposed to the little death and the big death…on this occasion, I left my Schopenhauerian pathos behind, Melanie enticed me further amidst the sand and moon…and all in good measure I flowed externally: full of protein, good for the skin and hair…jolly good! Economy is restored after all…I must admit it would be a sorry affair to see the luscious youth skin of the Melanies of this world corrupted by the viral…

Melanie was merely beautiful by sunlight; she was divinely sublime by moonlight…her deep pool eyes immersed all the stars above... and she looked whitely divine pearling Bukkake of reflected moonlight…none of us would want to die for that, would we?

A Rational Disorder of the Senses – Rimbaud vs. Kant

2005-10-05T23:21:00.000+02:00

"In Rhetorique de la Drogue" Derrida speculates that the whole question of drugs is essentially a « praxis », or better still, an « art » of the testing of limits: of body and text, of sign and sense…in short, the limits of subjectivity/world are put into question or deconstructed (not destroyed)…the same goes for philosophical thought, which is about having limits and transgressing those arbitrary established limits. No matter which philosopher one reads, the philosophy in question will invariably start from a primordial limit, whilst, at the same time, displacing other limits by reconfiguring them elsewhere…anchors of finitude in the infinity of thought…

Since the substrate, or limit, of thought is psycho-chemical (and not ontological, rational, or eidetic, the three Hs of philosophy will have to go down the hole, or drop some K…) one needs to physically effect the abstract of thinking, to think anything at all: thought is a physical manifestation like any other “object” in the world…the radical altering of the abstract of thought is the unchained abruption and (temporary) dissolution of self and world: the praxis of fire that Heraclites stole from the gods, and Plato, unfortunately, recaptured for man…

Think about the “psychological” effects of drugs transposed to the abstract of thought. This would include the following abstract becomings, twisting and shattering the realm of thought: visual, auditory, tacit, olfactory, gustatory distortions and kinaesthetic perceptions, infinite differential changes of/in durations (time and space interchanging rhythmic folds) instantaneous changes in the rate of mental contents; body image changes, objective hallucinations, immense and heightened awareness of colour, abrupt and frequent affects and spiralling speeds...etc…if all this could be completely transposed to the abstract of thought, we all would be Gods, or at least, Dionysus would heed our calls…for Rimbaud’s “rational disorder of the senses” is, as Deleuze pointed out, not too far from the free “disorder” of the mind’s faculties in Kant’s Critique of Judgement….as Deleuze said, philosophy, as opposed to art, is still awaiting its abstract revolution…let us pray...for good, dutiful and beautiful chemistry...

The Death of Art - Hegel and Picasso

2005-09-21T01:37:00.000+02:00

"In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessence’s, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understand me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortunes, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere." Pablo Picasso (Interview with Giovanni Papini in Libro Nero, 1952)

It is maybe not Picasso’s fault...higher forces are at play...Hegel had already proclaimed the death of art one hundred years before... Art, for Hegel, had reached its expressive limit, its “spirit” or Geist, had been exhausted. Art’s expressive form had achieved all that it could (i.e. Romanticism). In Hegel’s scheme of things, art had reached full-circle in the complete self-awareness of itself as art...in other words, art becomes self-conscious. What is more Self-conscious than the “art” of Warhol, Joyce, Pound, Schonberg and Picasso?

As soon as a particular expression of Geist starts becoming self-conscious, it multiplies itself; art is everywhere, there has never been so much “art” in the world than today...and yet, what is “art”?

The very asking of the question amongst the proliferation of “arts”, is for Hegel, the Zeitgeist, or the “signs of the times”, that art is dead. Art becomes self-conscious, as it starts theorizing about itself in an interminable questioning of itself. How many artists think and breathe theory, how many discourses on art...but where is the inspiration, as opposed to the derision, where are the muses?, “the faces that would launch a thousand ships”? ...the life and beauty of Helen of Troy, swapped for...the Pamela Andersons of this profane world, selling burgers and optical devices for clear cut enemas...

....Art and beauty are not fresh anymore; canned, like Warhol’s Campbell soup tins, or Marilyn’s simulated beauty. How different, to take Picasso’s examples, the beauty and art of, Giotto, Titian and Rembrandt. Great painters, because they still had everything to paint, all the beauty in the heavens was still awaiting to be captured in art’s luminous form; they had spirit, as opposed to Picasso‘s “shock of the new” vanity games…the mere matter of “the strange, original, extravagant, and scandalous”….

When a spiritual or “Geist” expression (art, religion, ethics etc.) achieves complete self-awareness of itself, it is “dead”, it becomes equal to itself, the circle circled, and all dynamics (i.e. dialectics) is lost...of course, nothing is really lost for Hegel, all is incorporated in Geist’s dialectics towards the absolute, to full self-consciousness of itself, as itself, oops... getting a bit too Hegelian here...Hegel is hard to resist...

As is often the case, Hegel’s announcement of death, could be in Mark Twain's famous words, an “exaggeration”. Yes, an exaggeration, the spirit of Art, continued after Hegel’s own death. Hegel was wrong, art did not die…it merely survived. The nineteen century of Mahler, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Baudelaire and impressionism, still had something to prove, it pushed art’s spiritual form to the limits. Every crevice and crack of art’s expressive form was explored and exploded…but, however much art’s spirit was pushed to the limit, it did not break the beautiful form (no Finnegans wake of the text or Schonberg’s “amusic” here..)…art was just at the limits of complete self-consciousness, just before the flat-liner of self-consciousness...art’s life machine was still beeping singular tones…

But…in the twentieth century, Hegel may have been right after all. Art’s spirit had been completely exploded, every form, law, and composition transgressed. Where could art go, if not into self-oblivion, collapsing under the weight of its own self-consciousness….Art will be buried in the cemetery of human delusions, with all the other dead illusions putrefying in sunken graves: God (Nietzsche) Man (Foucault) the author (Barthes) reality (Baudrillard) etc…However, just before death, on the edge of oblivion and destruction, a distinct phase operates, which Hegel’s dialectics completely misses: just before the twilight of death and self-oblivion, self-consciousness breads derision and parody. Before dying, art, like most things in life, becomes ironic. Picasso knew that art was dying, he could smell arts putrefying bodies in the galleries and museums, the cemeteries and prisons of art …Picasso was self-conscious of art’s exhausted forms; thus in twentieth century, he could only be a public entertainer (like Dali and Warhol)…but, also at the same time, a wavering beckon in the desolate night of art…a beckon of all that has been lost, that is still, incredibly enough, sparkling through the materialistic veneer of the “games, absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques” of so called “art”…

What about the twenty-first century? Is there a life after death? Or is it a mere survival? Are the arts and artists in limbo? mere ironic pantomimes of past glories...all the more ironic, in that, there has never been so many techniques available, for artistic expression...Just imagine, what a Mozart could do, for the spirit of music, with the latest synthesizers and computer-tech...what viral soundscapes, what spiraling melodies...what infinity a Mozart could draw, from a mere binary machine. Unfortunately, we have the synthesizers and tech, but we do not have the Mozarts... Techno...Techno...Techno...but no requiem...

...Hegel talked about the dialectical ruses of History, (it all works for the “best” in the end) but isn’t History ironic? If as Marx said, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as comedy, surely you need a third repetition to complete the triad, and irony will do just fine...the only entertainment there is, for a Godless God who is bored by all perfection and imperfection...irony with its bitter sweet symphonies, could even entertain a Godless God
...STOP...

The Uncanny Baroque – the Personal and Impersonal

2005-09-05T00:50:00.000+02:00

The uncanny thing about the Bergson/Deleuze complex is, like all true spirituality, its baroque impersonality. A strange platonic reversal is at work in the Bergson/Deleuze matrix, by the fact that it is the objective (i.e. matter) that is personal, whilst the impersonal is the subjective. Bizarrely, the objective: our limits, aging, bodies, loss, self/ego psychology, language and social states of mind etc…are personal to the very core of our being, while paradoxically, the subjective is impersonal: it is not subject to the same temporal durations or rhythms. The psychic beats and dances to a different fugue…

The subjective and all its impersonal affects (life, the unconscious, libido, sensations, love, ecstasy, etc…) do not lose, limit, degrade, age, etc…with time, since they are not objective objects (i.e. not “located” “in” the space of matter/brain) rather, such affects have infinite disappearances and process as their ideal tempo. In short, the subjective ideal does not “age” or is subject, despite (the current) material inevitability of death, to bodily meta/physical finitudes (Heidegger drop dead!). This is why for Emmanuel Levinas, the subjective is the locus of, and is, the (actual) infinite. Uncannily enough, we personally inhabit or partake (in the mix of the banality and repetition of the everyday) a life that is far cosmically bigger than bigger:…a spiralling vertigo, a vortex sundering subjective life “into” the objective depths of the banality of being and matter…

The purity is clear: spiritual subjective “affects” vs. objective “effects” (the causal causality of matter). What is more objective and personal than the language we speak (or is spoken, “it” speaks us) our limits, our psychological weakness, our neuroses and our social quarks and quirks etc…What is more subjective and impersonal than the bubblings of the unconscious, dreams, libido and love etc...

….neither a philosophy of idealism or realism…the subjective is “real” because it does not technically exist, there is no “proof” or yard stick to measure impersonal awareness or “affective” contents…the objective is “false” because it exists, “it” can never be anything but itself, hence “it” can be mathematically/scientifically measured and effected…

The subjective is in disjunction with the objective and its statistical entropy mediated relations (although of course, the subjective is dependent on the objective/matter, but dependence does not entail identity and finitude). As such, for Bergson/Deleuze, the subjective is the locus, and is, the Virtual (equivalent to Levinas’ infinity)…

The Virtual, has nothing to do with the sad effects of virtual reality, on the contrary, the Virtual is the realm of the surface and the simulacrum: pure undiluted life itself, pure impersonal subjectivity - life in its pure negentropic potential…

For Deleuze, the Virtual is the “primordial soup” of life’s subjective impersonals: pre-individual singularities, multiplicities…difference-in-itself…and other madnesses and diseases of life that, from time to time, bubble up to the healthy equilibrated surface - in short, the Virtual is time and infinity all in one chaos, the chaosmos…

…chaosmatic bubbles exploding through the superficial membrane of objective life…

GOA – Kali Moonshine

2005-08-24T02:14:00.000+02:00

Goa, India. December 6, 1997. Any day now, the season's about to start....moon months of acid, Thanatos, Eros, drug-busts, pure ecstasy, synthetic blips, trance, smack and moonshine. Any day now…. "I shouldn't be telling you this," whispers an English DJ from Birmingham, close to Goa's hidden workings, "but we're in for roller coaster and there are no valleys, only peaks. We have to wait however, cause the local kids are taking exams and the authorities do not want a load of fucking drug casualties stumbling about, It'll put them off their schoolwork." …we would not want that would we? to disturb the growing economic nightmare, sorry, tiger, from its studious grazing…

The build up to that first party is hyper-tense…that first kick off land is awaited by all with trepid tremors. The beaches are so womanly beautifully smooth it’s a crime to look…hard to breathe, humidity so dense it could cut a knife…at last, release: "a moon party…Monday”….

”Vita Femina” , “Life is a woman”, as Nietzsche would say, maybe he was thinking of Kali the four armed skulls wearing blackness, the Indian Goddess of annihilation and destruction, hence, of creation and life affirmation. Shiva is never too far behind, waiting in Kali’ blood stained shadows…

…"It's bad for Indians to see such things" says a middle-aged Indian smoking Ganja in a chillum…talking about blackness… this is the finest blackness in the world mmmm…

"You westerners think it is so easy, so spiritual, come here and you can live well for just a few dollars. On what you would spend on just one meal in your own country you can live for months here, what any Indian would die for, you waste for. You do nothing but waste energy …ok, hook me up to the national grid, or whatever the Indian equivalent is, if they have one… he continues, among puffs of narcotic smoke…just breathing it is already inhaling the madness of the gods… "You take too many drugs it's a bad example to India. It's not a good thing for upcoming Indians to see this much liberation"…liberation, or is that waste…aren’t the two synonymous?...

…there's a cute Indian girl hanging and talking with the western party travellers. She has just finished an MA in software engineering…how fucking original is that!.....from Delhi University and is taking time out to travel up and down her Kali-immense country. She wearing tight Calvin Klein denims, a purple “I’m an innocent slut” T-shirt…or something to that effect, well that is the west for you…did I say marketing…another thing to try for India’s starving masses... and high-hell sandals…is that not a contradiction in terms, fashion is cruel, stupid and effective, they all want to belong…and carries designer Gucci label baggage. Most of the hippy party goers…no I’m not a hippy, kill all hippies, haven’t you heard of punk, Kali’s anarchy in the universe…the spiritual ones, annoy and irritate her, because they only want to see the old India, the ancient places, they don't have time or curtsey for India’s evolving computer…hey Bill, there is an Indian up your arse…..film Bollywood here I come… banking, investment…ehh ehn oh a no comments…fine arts…hard to stifle a yawn, how boring…"I like the parties," "It’s fun, wild, good - but it’s weird also. It's somehow too easy down here, too wonderful a fool’s paradises were all that glitters is not gold…what if it was…ok…silver will do…

….however, for us, it’s the package-charters who piss us off, we contemptuously dismiss them as hedonistic pimps, 'two weeekers' without grace or excess. Two weekly-weepers of booked returns invade the land of sweetness and light…

…this coming party, like many others, is for the Goa’s aesthetes: those holy graces that stay for months, roaming from hole to hole, and don't have regular lives-jobs back home…

The kind of people who are prepared to die for a gram, a pill, a kiss, and yet, somehow, always make it to the end, no doubt because excess is a sacrificial duty here. The moon and white beaches of Goa don’t ask for less. You have to earn the respect of Kali and only excess will do: burn…burn...burn like the thundering flames wavering in the distance, where all night/day the Hindus burn their dead on crackling pyres, filling the night with the acrid smell of burned flesh…Kali is everywhere…

There are some other western travellers inhabiting the outskirts of Goa, like the so called “Rainbow tribe”: who take long-term meditation studies, learn Sanskrit or work for months on end as Mother-Theresa volunteers in Kali ridden Calcutta. Some of them don't have any respect for the Goa Technoids. "Those techno-trance people” spits out an Italian Rainbow girl, "they just bring their own fucking culture to India. This is a good place to explore something spiritually different from the material west, but as long as they have their techno drugs they don't seem to care…indeed…we dance on the synthetic void and crave for a whiter moon…

“…have you ever felt so free? "No" smiles the girl with the purple shades. "Welcome to Goa."…

“Ok space cadets... prepare to hurtle yourselves through the cosmos, hyperspace yourselves in twelve dimensions….” blips the sampled trance track played across the moonlit darkness...

We dance to the side of Kali in unison with her cosmic dance - her relentless beat and rhythm in divine synchrony with the trance of our synthetic machines.

Avid seekers of an infinity beyond all dawns, we reach that bittersweet point of no return where life and death are no more - no more fear, no more angst, no more neurosis and civilised decorum…

We taste the quintessence of freedom on our synthetic-lysergic coated tongues, and want more…of course…the black goddess is ever present in the shadows of our dancing lights….awaiting for blood and overdose to come her way…who will be sacrificed? No one knows…or cares…

Death is the authentic seal of our excess, without it, it would be all a joke, another packaged life from weepy-two-weekers.com, and no spirit would be present…Kali accepts only spirit; there is no counterfeit that can pass her scrutinizing mad ruby eyes, they red glow in the moonlit darkness… shadowing by moonlight, Kali sees all, and forgivee nothing...

Mercy…Mercy…Mercy, Mandy K…

2005-08-18T02:30:00.000+02:00

I remember in early nineties when I was squatting in London’s King’s Road (always squat within the land of the posh!!) I met the purest of girls in a luxury of style:

Invariably, her black eyes were heavily underscored as if it had been weeks since she had last succumbed to the weaving hands of Morphus. As the days went by, an always whiter and whiter skin, wider and wider eyes, as if there was never enough light, avid pupils hungry for more light. It is always the beginning of the habit that is the most beautiful, because of the strangely ethereal transparency the skin takes on in the early days of the pristine dawn…

As the life of the body dwindles, the soul tries to ascend the valley of the body. She was destined to lose, but oh boy! (her favourite expression) what a ride…She ascended and ascended… double, triple, quadruple, the white light…Light and more Light…a translucent angel flapping in a luminous void…

There is always a light, neither inner nor outer, to reach…and it is of course, never enough; a perpetual falling in a gravity of cotton, that is neither ecstasy nor the negative of ecstasy, but rather, the underside of ecstasy. It is almost ecstasy turned inside out. If ecstasy had a shadow, this would be its experience: it is not “take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you are still nowhere near it” but rather, a total subtraction, neither addition or multiplication. Take all the best orgasms you have ever had, subtract them to the power of a million, and you are still nowhere there: a collapsed ecstasy under the weight of its own gravity – the ecstasy of an infinite density.

“I was bored” she told me “I decided to experiment. For 3 months I’ll take, and then I’d stop. I wanted to experience this rush that people laid down everything for it, the experience of an extreme purity on the edge of chaos, and then I’ll stop”, yes, yesss of course, sweeter in hell than the heaven they give us…

Eventually, if you waited long enough, an afterglow of a halo emerged, an angel out of the gutter, and then back again…never saw her again, except her crying mother. Always running with the quicksilver flow of life, thinking one can be swifter than death, but I guess not… The shadows of death catch the good, the bad and the high in equal measure.

Mandy K, R.I.P…Somewhere, beyond or nowhere…
…if nothingness or the void could be experienced we would forget to die…

Eyes and Bodies – The Dark Side of the Moon

2005-08-08T02:11:00.000+02:00

The dark side of the moon: in shades of cobalt-blue, towards an erotic darkness we fall…

Not happiness, we live for beauty…and yet, how we always ruin it. How deep the disease of matter eats into the human body. We want to posses and control; whether, it is “just” physical attraction, the lust of one night, the love of three months, the kindness between two passing strangers…no we can’t take it, we must buy, have and show power, we want to cash it all, always go to the bank of our needs and status, control freaks opening up the coffins of exchange. Fear, always fear to lose, or that we might be taken for a ride…despite the fact, that for a few hours, days or seconds we felt what beauty/life was all about: “the best things in life are free”, and how strange that we can never live up to that freedom, and yet, it is all “there”, in the flagrance eyes of passing strangers, the yearning never ends… If souls could speak they would not tell us…

Glimmering techno ladies that fill the night with their graces and empty it with their egos…

We are not what we seem to be, or think we are what we want to be. We are acted upon by the images projected by our imagination, optical illusions reflected off the opaque surfaces of existence…

After and before ecstasy, life is a sublime climax that never comes…

Half-glimpsed behind empty forces, we are lead towards a boundless circumference…

Half-glimpsed and half-tried, the expended night always leaves stereo traces of a bitter sweet melancholy…

Shimmering summer nights: her hands tied above, criss-crossing both hands over an arch of naked steel…her eyes reflected deep pools of light, almost whispering: “it’s the way, not the climax, just the flow…”

Extremes of desire burning in the night, spirited illusions of a viral infinity…

A sense of ease in the lightness of existence is the spirit of life…

Freedom can only come out of beauty…

Marble Cool - Dionysian Cuts

2005-07-27T00:52:00.000+02:00

The crude and the pure: one seeks a purity of expression that verges on being a crude poetics…

Eros is always about our desire for the impossible-real, not the real of our egoistic illusions that imprisons relationships, but the real that eludes materiality…

Dionysus dances techno, feeding on grapes of rainbow pills, singing tales of chemical sex, lust and love…

Sparkling nights, where everything twinkles, eyes, lights, skies, and desires…

…beauties who nurse their skin by moonlight and stagger around the meat rack, abyssal eyes spiralling with drugs for every star. All those girls that go too far, prolonging the ecstasy till dawn…maybe…just maybe, share a spiritual secret…

Pills of many colours reflected the caramel opaqueness of smack…

Sweat and ecstasy remained in a state of lived music. Hard-edged, metallic, molecular and bass driven: abstract rhythms of silvery nights…

…on the dance floor a crowd locked into the groove, faces and bodies cutting angular shadows against geometric patterns of coloured beams…

…naked…the girl’s skin perspired a dense abstractness, mirroring hues of metallic blues, greens and rusty silvers; the colours shimmered, rearranging shifting surfaces across her marble-cool skin …unhinged from the beat ambiance, she looked like a beautiful otherworldly extraterrestrial siren washed up on the sublime shores of an alien lust…

Time and matter, for once, stood still…hours, minutes and seconds dripped dropped like sinuous lava, melting everything, stripping all of life’s lust and pornography away…yet, full of erotic longing….

…lights made of infinite colours drawing vectors and arcs of optical designs, greeted us beyond the boundaries of time and space…

It’s all about Crystals - Crystal Infinities

2005-07-17T01:57:00.000+02:00

Writing should be a search, a quest through words, whose only direction is the beyond of words - life in its pure sacred immanence…

Writing is not about stories, theories and contents, which in our post-modern world have been exhausted to the point of sick parodies, but rather, a clearing of words through words – to write the crystal thunder of silence on the opaque infinity of being…

The infinite soul of man for the finitudes of science: not only is God dead, but Faust is about to collect his dues, any moment now....

What does one do, when one sees an infinite promise full of life and beauty? one tries to catch those eyes, maybe to glimmer a possible empathy, even to try to capture the secret possibility of a spiritual communion - whose reality will always be in dispute, even after the event - was it all an material illusion?

The crystal quest: find and inebriate the true passion of minerals and crystals, and break on through to the other side of infinity…

The only feel and hope there is: to live under the archway of a crystal infinity…

If there is nothing, and all is matter, why the perpetual epiphenomena of life and self?

In-between spirit and matter, shimmering mirages in a desert of illusions….

A general emptiness from time to time infuses all things: people speak, but, they don't make sense, apart from a strange phonetic cacophony; almost like, slivering lizards bathing in the white coldness of multiple moons....silvery lizards hiding in-between the city’s shapes and shadows...

Eyes that exchanged nothing, except the void of each other…

Night-time in the ultraviolet shaded city: under cheap neon lights and the thudding vibes of elegant beats, he waits, for a female design to emerge, out of the undifferentiated darkness, into the crystal light…He sat down, near the edge of the dancing crowd, a void looking for another void. Then, one fall of light caught his eyes; emerald eyes reflected the gyrating lights around the dazzling shards…

Dressed in black, slits high in front…dancing away all she had, Valerie felt, at last, a kind of melting freedom, gently surging itself to the pounding rhythms, gently pressing her inside, or so it seemed, for the heroin-ecstasy mix was already fading blue...

A sacred whore from Babylon, rising from the shadows of the gods...or maybe not...a material girl graving for thrills, tricks and chemistry…

London Calling

2005-07-07T11:50:00.000+02:00

Saw a beautiful face of a darkly woman appearing out of the top branches of a ..tree blowing in the wind, above my window. Quite an uncanny appearance almost surreal in its face-branch design, a true epiphany…one always waits, mostly in vain, for these spiritual singularities/events to happen which open-up for an instant the suffocating no-exit immanence of material existence….from time to time, a luminous sign of an exit called transcendence flashes in the dark cinemas of our existential matter…

…and talking about events and matter, London after New-York and Madrid has been hit by a series of “terrorists” attacks. As if life wasn’t difficult enough keeping a job down and commuting to work everyday…of those London commuters who woke up this morning to go to work like any other day, some of them are dead, and most of them are severely injured…keeping a job down in the major cities of the west is becoming like Russian roulette...of course, this is what the terrorists want, to breed a perpetual atmosphere of fear, disorientation and panic, to break down the “enemy” psychologically and socially… this is the ultimate Foucauldian breeding of the “panopticon”: the ultimate presence in the most widest sense possible with the fewest means - the terrorist eyes and presence are everywhere covering the largest area possible, even when they are not there, and no bombs are present - the terrorists also know their Deleuze, to avoid major capture keep the cells rhizomatic and avoid the tree…

Chaosmos - The Aesthetics of Grace

2005-06-26T21:23:00.000+02:00

Beauty is always wild, untamed; a Dionysian frenzy pursued in form, a pure gift of exuberance, a rarity not a commodity…

Spiritual singularities that break the matter of the linear world are the eternal hypocrisies of all times…

Amongst the tones of flesh and curves that one chooses, it’s important to remember that they are signs of ones own transcendental instinct, that such "attunements" have to be trained towards an intense "microscopic messianisms": to pierce the modern life-chains, and reveal all around us the infinity of nuances and gains of imaginative graces…

You can buy women’s finite bodies and simulations but you can’t buy their infinite ecstasies. Whether poor or rich, one is either lacking in matter or completely imprisoned by matter. One hopes for more. Isn’t this why we say, spirit, love or Eros rule the world, yet, simultaneously hypocritically, we always fail to hear those calls, the calls of the sirens…

Chaosmos - Life is all about floating selections in a sea of inconsequentials; yet, this savage intensive sea, this web related background of undifferentiated heterogeneity, is the necessary backdrop, for the extremes of the peaks and the singularities of selection to emerge…out of the mass of undifferentiated relations…

Art is what life is all about…

A summer night falls on our cities and ourselves, in the gentle breeze of the shimmering lights they lusted in their sweaty golden reflected light, two oily undulating reptiles from another Eden…

Rituals of pain and pleasure took place in dark rooms of velvet hues, ivory breasts were plunged into pressing hands. Lips of luscious red kissed over legs of divine proportion tied in black streams of silk…finalizing an invisible contract with an ebony angel…

Her body reflected the dark underside of a strange spirituality…

She stopped dancing as if exhausted, moved nearby to those eyes that she could not help enticing, or even resist...if only she could yield a bit more, without fear…

Lust of love - They began walking through the dancing crowd into the dark streets outside, through the electronic sounds of the beating hearts he followed her, with the white light moon above and the city’s amber fire ahead, in tune with the hollow rhythms of her high-heels clicking on the pavement. Arriving at the outskirts of the city, amongst the broken down factories and empty iron barracks casting heavy shadows he turned to her as she pouted out her luscious lips...they both embraced under twisted steel, bathing in the sun of an oblique moon...and he languidly whispered “I lust you…I want to fuck you…“

What is the sea? a chaos of translucent droplets within drops…

I love you I love you – Pretty Vacant

2005-06-19T22:13:00.000+02:00

Eerie, eerie….

The denizens of the spectacle have reached such levels of celluloid awareness that they are unable to stop the filming, even when the outside-filming has allegedly stopped. This desperate “strange-loop” logic of the spectacle is fully illustrated by the infamous Pamela Anderson’ “sex” video, where Tommy Lee cannot stop filming, even though he seems to be fucking for “real” the most beautiful woman in the world; yet, he still wants to film, so that he can masturbate to the recorded digits….so=- even when you get the most ejaculated woman in the world you still film…eerie…it seems there is no escape from the “strange-loop” infinite regress levels of the spectacle, no absolute meta or outside exit…Tom and Pam between their cocks and cunts scenes shout: I love you, I love you, I love you… they are not quite sure, hence, they have to repeat the sacred words innumerable times throughout the video…one can’t help perceiving an eerie glow emanating from the video’s recorded action, on the side of the living-dead maybe, “pretty vacant” as the spectacular sex-pistols:

Oh we’re so pretty oh so pretty vacant
But now and we don’t care
Don’t ask us to attend cos we’re not all there
Oh don’t pretend cos I don’t care
I don’t believe illusions cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
Cos we know what we feel
We’re pretty pretty vacant
We’re pretty pretty vay-cunt
And we don’t care

Barely Legal - From Botticelli to Bacon

2005-06-14T23:22:00.000+02:00

…our high/low “cultural” representations are the most violent in a world that compared to the past is the least violent in actuality (at least in the happy go lucky West): enframing all media representations to the auto-logic of capitalism, which effects the automatic permutations of/to the extreme: hard rock becomes heavy-metal, then trash, etc…porn, gonzo porn etc…horror, gore, hip hop rap, gangster rap…the faster they go, the sicker they go…on and on..:from Botticelli to Francis Bacon; courtly love to hardcore-porn, gothic sublimity to slasher gore etc…

And yet, this has not always been the universal case. One only has to contemplate the art of the middle-ages, to see that it is a pure and positive inverted heavenly mirror of the real violent negatives: deaths, plagues, miseries etc…of daily life. Our culture is the exact opposite, what Nietzsche and many others called a decadent age, enthralled and fascinated by the very antithesis of their boring fat lives…like domesticated animals grinding against their cages entranced by the wilderness beyond…hence, the violent representations circling around the mediasphere…

And the people who consume the violence of representation, are the fat classes of suburbia who have never stared death or Eros in the face: the bored teenagers with their dead eyes on weed, the dads who slip the gonzo videos to ejaculate to “barely legal” pony-haired girls taking it up into their cum dripping carnivorous voids …the mums who dream of male seducers from the outskirts…

This is the classic Freudian “condemnation” of culture and civilization, but with a big difference; all the diverted repressed materials of sublimation are now out in the open: the unconscious as a libidinous screen, not a dark theater. This is what Freud could not predict: the libidinous botany and flora of the dark continent of our collective unconscious, would literarily exteriorize itself out onto the digital celluloid.

Freud underestimated the power of sublimation, because he was not exposed to the media medium of high-technology; he could not imagine that capital/technology could take over and colonize the unconscious, to externalize by objectify it: glossy print, celluloid, digital, silicon…

Yet, this media mediated exteriorization is severely different from the surrealists who attempted to do the same through aesthetics: capitalism hijacked the unconscious and determined to make a profit out of it; as everything else, another standing reserve to exploit. And who says exploitation (i.e. business), upholds the values of the common, the blandest and homogenous: the unconscious is reduced to a stereotype of form, within stereotypes of content.

Capitalism can take anything except instability, and will not tolerate lacks of identity (how //ever temporary and ambiguous) of any kind (the fashions of authentic belonging reigns supreme) whether conscious or unconscious.

Cinderella and the Big-Other

2005-06-01T01:00:00.000+02:00

Things to do on “reality-TV” (as there is.,- fuck all else to do): read aloud the collected works of Baudrillard and Debord (or better just show the covers); discuss with your baboon inmates an complex hybrid of Berkeley’s and Anselm ontological proof of the existence of God and reality: how a bunch of morons can watch a bunch morons and still know that they exist if God is not watching, hence, God exists, since he is too busy watching himself...Peruse the collected works of Marx and Marcuse, by quoting abundantly from their works, focusing on the one-dimensionality and commodity fetishism of the capitalistic mode of production…proclaim no-logo Naomi Klein the pinup of the decade and that you want to see her naked in Playboy (or better still, Hustler) for didactic purposes7of course!: isn’t this the perfect illustration of Bataille’s eroticism, the non-logo queen in the logoliest of all brands? Well you get the drift…. and it's bound to happen; either because an automatic permutation of the spectacle is missing, or because of those unemployable PhD philosophers (of the continental variety) roaming around the streets likee packs of eye sunken wolves - intellectual expenditure without economic return (or is that suicide?) …would make Bataille proud ….

One could say it has already happened. Germaine Greer a “radical” feminist, always ready to criticize the phallic idiocy of the male species, happily Zooing in Big-Brother’s spectacular animalism…Who is next? Judith Butler?, Julia Kristeva? Luce Irigaray?, Helen Cixous?.

Do not all feminist secretly want their MTV, to erotically succumb back to their animal seductive simulating origins? Isn’t this what feminine “jouissance” is all about, the secret yearning for the porn dominance of the Lacanian “Big other”?...the spectacular slut within at last!!!...there goes Bataille again….and I’m off to dream about cute poststructuralist feminists engaging in somewhat / unorthodox theorizing in the boudoir

The cuckoo Clock - A touch of Evil

2005-05-31T23:45:00.000+02:00

A smile of a child is as beautiful as a woman’s face on the verge of orgasm in a sadomasochistic ritual…this is the world that Nietzsche and Bataille want; were innocence, beauty, and the sublime reign supreme – cruelty and evil in the sense of the innocence of expenditure and abundance and not in the all to/o real sense of cruelty and evil out of egoism, control and weakness - it is all a question of non-economy and economy.

The cruelty and Evil that Nietzsche and Bataille subvert from Christianity and Darwin is in the non-economic sense of nature as a cruel feast of waste and abundance - to produce a rare flower all the world and life was set aflame…

The beautiful and the sublime are rare creations, and all the abundance and cruel waste of a sun giving creation was needed to produce one instance of beauty and artistic expenditure.

The Nietzschean truth; the cruelest cultures (the renaissance, ancient Greece etc…) are the most beautiful: artistic in their vitality and most life-affirming in their creations. As Orson Welles (a rare genius severely crushed by the egalitarian laws of the many) said in his film a “touch of evil” (no doubt referring to Nietzsche):

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

…..one could argue that the Swiss cuckoo clock is a fair substitute, who is to judge?...not even a “touch of evil” was necessary to produce such a clocking wonder….what a bargain!….on the other hand, lets us not forget that Switzerland is also the birth place of LSD: Albert Hoffman and his schizophrenic bike ride surfing on the highest democracy that the world has ever known....LSD as one of most powerful synthetic hallucinogens ever created is the supreme example of the rare sublime and beautiful, and not a drop of blood was needed for its creation - all the chemistry of the world was needed for one sublime molecule to emerge - except of course, for the few early experiments who thought they could fly…Nietzsche after all? Or is that Bill Hicks?:

“You never see positive drugs stories on the news, do ya. Isn't that weird cos most of the experiences I've had on drugs, were rrreal fucking positive. Er. Who are these morons they're finding that's what I wanna know. I used to want to call the news, "Come over to our house! Watch Tommy, he's a pig, film him!" "Oink oink." "Hee hee, he's been doing that for hours. He's killing us. You getting all that?" You know what I mean. Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. "Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy." What a dick, fuck him! He's an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn't he take off from the ground first? Check it out. You don't see ducks lining up to catch elevators to fly South. They fly from the ground, you moron. Quit ruining it for everybody. He's a moron, he's dead, good. We lost a moron, fucking celebrate. Boy I just felt the world get lighter - we lost a moron. Put on the Hammer album, I'm ready to dance! "We lost a moron." I don't mean to sound cold or cruel or vicious, but I am so that's the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought”. (From “Revelations”)

Style vs. Content - The Decay of Living

2005-05-23T22:33:00.000+02:00

Say yes to life! Affirmation, negation mere appearances, no oppositions but creation, suffering and illness as overcoming etc……I find all this quite sickening. My “natural” inclination or temperament is not Deleuzian or Nietzschean but Cioranic, but I find it more fun to write about the greatest affirmers who have ever lived: the unholy life-trinity of Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, than in my first negative loves Schopenhauer, Leopardi and Cioran…but of course, as Deleuze would say, their style is their refutation. Style for Deleuze is a non-organic life that cannot help to express itself through the vilifications and negations of the content…like life that emerges even in the most remote and inhospitable regions of the world; grass (in more ways than one…) cannot help to grow amongst the negating pavements…

As a general rule pessimist are great stylist, (with the exception of Nietzsche, but maybe because he is also the cruelest of philosophers) optimist are too busy working about their content in a never ending justification or rationalization of appearances (Hegel’s labor or tarrying of the negative) to worry about “mere” ornamentation.

While of course for a pessimist, style is all there is; for a pessimist the content of the world is plain to see, yes to the Hegel’ “sense-certainty”, the senses do no deceive (for the optimist or rationalist they always do, that is their affirmative starting point) esthetes of the abyss, they enjoy expressing the farce-horror of life’s tale told by an Idiot “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” (maybe I should get off my dogmatic post/modernist fixation and around to reading that Shakespeare guy…after all) - or at least it’s more fun than death or suicide.

Cioran always maintained had he not had the idea of an exit/escape (i.e. suicide) he would have killed himself long time ago…instead of dying on his death bed with Alzheimer disease; an ironic and almost Nietzschean way to die for a self-confessed pessimist.

On the other hand, Cioran believed in nothing and forgot everything, he was far too ironic to believe, in pessimism or anything else for that matter (that is his Deleuzian charm)…ironic on the edge of his slippery slippers abyss, (or more aptly “myse on abyme”) how could he not be, in the postmodern age of disbelief and hyperconsciousness: “we live in a hell were every moment is a miracle”...

While…Schopenhauer was like Freud, a hyper-rationalist in a dark, irrational universe (and by now a hyper-ironic universe)…a rational labyrinth in a maze of insanity…or is it a universe lost in the fun-house of a Gödelian strange-loop caught within infinity?…Cantor maintained that the set of all sets (that includes all sets) is God, or the void for Badiou, or maybe it is a Dog after all… woff…wooff..woooff….wooooff etc…Dog = God and EVIL= LIVE, this is what is supposed to happen when you play 80’s black metal (is there a pink?) backwards…how do you play a vinyl backwards? Never found out…I guess I never will……ok…quit the rammmmmbling… Leaving you with the Oscar Wilde of the abyss:

Cioran (my favorite chat up lines…)

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Everything is pathology , except for indifference.

Mosaics of Lost Time - Alice in Wonderland

2005-05-21T21:27:00.001+02:00

I remember…. when we used to wake up at midnight…Mozart’s requiem of voices would greet us on the laser gyrating platinum…lines of coke on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”.., vodka and ecstasy would peak us above the horizon…like vampires we would awake from our coffins, pupils dilating into orbs of dead moons, seeking not blood, but the life pulse of the city’s techno beats…

I remember…those Goth’ eyes of yours dancing almost naked in the ultraviolet strobes of light, the beat would be relentless…dance or die…I would kiss your violet lips, it felt like kissing infinity, beauty multiplied by a million taken to the power of infinity. Our bodies would lose themselves into a million of shards of crystals within mirrors, reflecting abysses within abysses…Van Dyk’s “for an Angel” would flap us on and on and on…

I remember…melting into flows of lava, every peak such a total ecstasy that it felt like oblivion, there has never been so much pleasure and ecstasy…that it turned into its extreme reverse, excruciating pain, as such, every valley was a relief, a moment of sanity before the roller coaster took me up again to the infernal peaks. I have never burned so much with you Alice ever….like a moth drawn to a flame consumed by fire within fire….

I remember…our come downs…our “massive attack” chill outs…cuddling each other so strongly for fear it would not last, sex would have ruined it…If I recall correctly, we probably never actually got a/round to having sex; after total love and ecstasy what could there be… we cried…it almost felt like a crime…we had truly stolen the fires of heaven from the gods, and there was a certain pride in it…this wasn’t happiness but heaven in a maze, for the fear of retribution was never far away ( the chemical gods do get angry...)…sleeping throughout the day, the curtains perpetually drawn day and night, vodka bottles and foiled papers of scattered caramel traces with white scrolls circling the one side of our bed, the artificial non-smell of Mdma gently aromatizing the bed-side table…we would sleep-wait until midnight silently stoned almost without a word or breath for fear of disturbing the circle-balance of heaven we found ourselves in…to step beyond the circle again// would be to lose it all, surely another emerald-ruby night is not possible….yet it was, until the twilight dawn…

I remember…as vampires addicted to life we arose again, the doors of our catacombs creaked open, blowing the closed curtains with tremors of silky folds, the fresh night air of the city twinkled in our deadpan eyes; yes, it was going to be another night, another joyriding on the stolen ecstasy of the gods…

I remember…that it was never enough…we got addicted to each other, and everything else chemical or otherwise, were mere means to get higher and higher, every limit a temporary limit, a mere testing boundary to our unholy faith…this wasn’t love,,,but madness…none of us could take it...we knew it would not last, like your favourite band “Joy-Division” love would truly tears us apart…and of course, bang on time the grim-reaper appeared, “it” and you vanished without a trace, as if it never happened…..

Wherever you are Alice, you have haunted me for nearly a decade…either dead or alive, or maybe knowing how foxy-cute, sharp and narcotic you are, probably in between, always paraphrasing Morrisey’s “thinking about life or death, nooone of which are very appealing….” Indeed, between life and death is where we all want to be….

Kaleidoscope vs. Stereotype - The Gem like Flame

2005-05-18T23:26:00.000+02:00

One of Deleuze’s missing footnotes from “Difference and Repetition”: Walter Pater’s (like Deleuze another Kaleidoscopic aesthete of/from the Chaosmos) famous conclusion - The Renaissance:

“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike”.

Whether “artificial” or “natural” there can be no ecstasy without a singular/spiritual repetition within all the social and bio micro/macro repetitions forming/habiting our daily selves…keeping the repetitive and singular flame alive through the habitual material repetitions is the most im/possible thing in life.... there is no other difference, no other differential ecstasy worth fighting for:..a kaleidoscopic flame frozen within amber…

Infinite Creation vs. Finite Decreation

2005-05-14T02:38:00.000+02:00

In the major strand of…the western religious-aesthetic-philosophical discourse the question of Difference is isomorphic with the iso/function of “spirit”: to elevate or “infinitize”, create, disrupt and sublimate and is indissociable from Repetition i.e. “matter” - whose function is always to “finitize”, mechanise, bring down and establish identities (and “desublimate” or “decreate” them again)…. Sade (no.. not the cute singer… what a beautiful contrast!) Schopenhauer and Freud are probably the sole thinkers approaching “bare repetition” i.e. the truth of the matter of materialism (with a minimum “human all too human” idealism/“spirit”//through the back door) - they portray existence as a process of “decreation”: life creates (better.. has created) in order to destroy with as much suffering and blood as... possible…while Bergson and Deleuze frame life as an infinite boundless creating creation, no limits except our social selves with their petty ego driven representations….

Time and Infinity - The calls of the Sirens

2005-04-29T01:33:00.000+02:00

Unlike Odysseus we must hear the Sirens, those beautiful voices singing infinity and time from a bottomless sea…without crashing our ships in the process…

To think or intrude on the infinite…the outside…is seen by Kant as the perpetual seductive madness of reason that must be resisted by any means necessary. For Kant of the first critique, reason is an island,] but it is always tempted by its own imagination to go beyond the shores of possible experience, the tempestuous sea of the outside - the sirens of infinity and time.

The only thing we can think or experience is our human all too human finite limits. To think beyond the categoricals that Kant so laboriously expounded is not only incoherent,, but sheer madness - the stuff of poets, junkies and DMT psychonauts…not sane philosophers…

Of course to posit a limit is immediately to invite transgression…the speculative madness of German idealism is the product of such attempted transgression. The irony being, that father Kant generated a brat pack of unruly children whose only oedipal cry was: “fuck off… I’ll show you the thing-in-itself”. Fiche, Schelling and Hegel are the speculative “madnesses” that Kant sought to avoid, Leibniz seems critical in comparison….But of course, they were far too bourgeois, far to “pipe and slippers” academics to risk real movement, real transgression, they wanted the power not the danger, they were fakers of the absolute, mere mimics of the infinite…Kant could rest in peace after all.

We had to wait for Nietzsche’s hammer to dynamite the whole finite Kantian edifice to bits, at last the sea opened up, through the experience of the “eternal-return”. But is Nietzsche’s “eternal-return” really the ultimate? Is it the infinite and time of thought and experience? Or is it another ploy for substituting infinity for finitude, time for eternity? being for becoming? While time may be infinite matter/space is finite, hence the recurrence of all possible life combinations again and again….

What if a midnight demon told you that all that you have ever lived and experienced will never recur, never ever again, neither in form or content…never again, ever again, will there be a sun, an earth to revolve around…what would you do then?

A Neutral Universe - Cynicism, Fatalism and Transgression

2005-04-24T02:02:00.000+02:00

In my personal experience Italian Catholicism (my last girlfriend was Catholic, God bless her!) is a strange breed of cynicism, fatalism and transgression. I must say, it has a certain aesthetic, if not erotic charm....

All of which // reminds me of Georges Bataille….

Georges Bataille’ whole thought-sensibility is Catholic, in form and content: marriage, church, sin, guilt and “god” are all there, mirrored in negative form. Bataille’s very meaning of eroticism is Catholic - the essence of eroticism is transgression - echoing Kierkegaard’s aesthetic reflections in “either/or” that it was Christianity that brought Eros into the world, not the pagans of antiquity.

More aptly put, eroticism is a verb not a substantive - it is what “happens” to a homogeneity or body. It is transgression not in the dialectical sense, but in the irreversible form of something that “happens” and disrupts, but never appears as such.

Eroticism is “opposed” to sex or pornography and the so called sexual revolution: the order of the “restrictive economy”, repressing eroticism’s “general economy” within.

For Bataille religion, marriage, taboos etc (homogenous orders) are immanently necessary; they give values to an otherwise neutral universe. And likewise, the transgression of those particular values “founds” the values of those values...When a “woman” succumbs to eroticism, it is marriage or personal/social integrity (the fear of loss of control, degradation, “good/bad girl”, etc…) that is the ”foundation” that “founds” the subsequent sacred excitement of eroticism.

Bataille’s eroticism is always feminine in attitude, feminine “access” for the male: as Levinas’ Eros/femininity, it is a moment of otherness/alterity in the masculine/ego economy of the same. Bataille is well aware of the Feminists of the future, and posits Femininity (as Levinas does) in terms of gender, hence applicable in principle (but not in present actuality) to both man and woman – which may have the paradoxical effect of destroying eroticism for both man and woman, if it is economized into “equitable equality”…

Eroticism’ sacred vertigo is due to a double-bind situation: the “im/possibility” of succumbing to the animal within and yet not quite being human either - an angst suspended state of grace between two impossible polarities - this is definitely not California’ symmetric porn… or the asymmetric Gonzo Gymnastics of Porn Machine “Rocco Siffredi”.

The aporia is, that while porn is “exciting”, it is not: it is a boring void in the midst of physiological excitement, because it lacks the transgressive quality that only eroticism can bring (although it cannot help b../t to feed on it) which is neither visible nor genital.

Of course, pornography is the ultimate in visibility and genital hyperbole. Porn is the suppression by any means necessary of eroticism’ in/visible “general economy”….and sometimes like all “restrictive economies” of matter, it fails to completely repress the spirit within, erotic moments in porn movies sometimes happen… one inadvertent vulnerability gushes forth amongst the grinding physics…

The irony being that it is porn and sex that represses eroticism (and love?) not the other way around.

In our age of the hedonistic imperative it is sentimentality and love that are shocking and obscene…as Roland Barthes’ “A Lover's Discourse” " puts it: “a touch of sentimentality," would be "the ultimate transgression . . . the transgression of transgression itself . . . the return of love in another place”

Georges Bataille where he alive today, would no doubt be on the censor boards (and would make a good marriage counsellor) whilst writing such classics as:

“The Sacrifice of the Gibbon”

“In order to renew this tender pact between belly and nature, a rotting forest offers its deceptive latrines, swarming with animals, colored or venomous insects, worms, and little birds. Solar light decomposes in the high branches. An Englishwoman, transfigured by a halo of blond hair, abandons her splendid body to the lubricity and the imagination (driven to the point of ecstasy by the stunning odor of decay) of a number of nude men.

Her humid lips open to kisses like a sweet swamp, like a noiseless flowing river, and her eyes, drowned in pleasure, are as immensely lost as her mouth. Above the entwined human beasts who embrace and handle her, she raises her marvelous head, so heavy with dazzlement, and her eyes open on a scene of madness.

Near a round pit, freshly dug in the midst of exuberant vegetation, a giant female gibbon struggles with three men, who tie her with long cords: her face is even more stupid than it is ignoble, and she lets out unbelievable screams of fear, screams answered by the various cries of small monkeys in the high branches. Once she is trussed up like a chicken-with her legs folded back against her body-the three men tie her upside down to a stake planted in the middle of the pit. Attached in this way, her bestially howling mouth swallows dirt while, on the other end, her huge screaming pink anal protrusion stares at the sky like a flower (the end of the stake runs between her belly and her bound paws): only the part whose obscenity stupefies emerges above the top level of the pit.

Once these preparations are finished, all the men and women present (there are, in fact, several other women, no less taken with debauchery) surround the pit: at this moment they are all equally nude, all equally deranged by the avidity of pleasure (exhausted by voluptuousness), breathless, at wits' end . . .

They are all armed with shovels, except the Englishwoman: the earth destined to fill the pit is spread evenly around it. The ignoble gibbon, in an ignoble posture, continues her terrifying howl, but, on a signal from the Englishwoman, everyone busies himself shoveling dirt into the pit, and then quickly stamps it down: thus, in the blink of an eye, the horrible beast is buried alive.

A relative silence settles: all the stupefied glances are fixed on the filthy, beautifully blood-colored solar prominence, sticking out of the earth and ridiculously shuddering with convulsions of agony. Then the Englishwoman with her charming rear end stretches her long nude body on the filled pit: the mucous-flesh of this bald false skull, a little soiled with shit at the radiate flower of its summit, is even more upsetting to see when touched by pretty white fingers. All those around hold back their cries and wipe their sweat; teeth bite lips; a light foam even flows from overly troubled mouths: contracted by strangulation, and even by death, the beautiful boil of red flesh is set ablaze with stinking brown flames....................................

Like a storm that erupts and, after several minutes of intolerable delay, ravishes in semidarkness an entire countryside with insane cataracts of water and blasts of thunder, in the same disturbed and profoundly overwhelming way (albeit with signs infinitely more difficult to perceive), existence itself shudders and attains a level where there is nothing more than a hallucinatory void, an odor of death that sticks in the throat.

In reality, when this puerile little vomiting took place, it was not on a mere carcass that the mouth of the Englishwoman crushed her most burning, her sweetest kisses, but on the nauseating JESUVE: the bizarre noise of kisses, prolonged on flesh, clattered across the disgusting noise of entrails. But these unheard-of circumstances had set off orgasms, each more suffocating and spasmodic than its predecessor, in the circle of unfortunate observers; all throats were strangled by raucous cries, by impossible sighs, and, from all sides, eyes humid with the brilliant tears of vertigo”.

Well done George…

Fatal Strategies - The Divine Within

2005-04-23T02:22:00.000+02:00

Since I still can’t sleep and insomnia is according to Cioran and Levinas the inlay epiphany of existence (in my case a stoned one, of the Skunk variety) … I guess, I’ll Blog on into the Chaosmos…as ever lexically incoherent and still hoping for more dubious chemicals coming my way....

The pope is dead (although God beat him to it) and the churches are still what Nietzsche called: the empty tombs of god. A strange post-modern irony is going on here. How come millions deeescended on Rome young and old, when every Sunday the local churches are half empty, populated by the ugly and the grey?

How come young people from around the world are praising a pope which would condemn their very being and acts (sexual or otherwise)? What’s going on if anything?

It reminds me of Zizek’s analysis of ideology (what no doubt has become in the post-modern age an ironic vertigo, ideology as irony) everybody knows the reality, they have seen through the opium veils of false consciousness yet they still do it; a case of “forgive them for they know what they are doing”.

Or is it a case of Baudrillard’s post-ideological, post-Debord seduction of signs in the simulacrum which has no other aim than to expend itself in the ecstasy of communication…Fatal STRATEGIES INDEED… the sheer seductive joy of participating in material ecstasy, without depth or intention - pure matter without spirit….all is surface and it definitely glitters, Jesus is a superstar…

Or could it be, dare I say, “ontologically genuine” - spirit gashing forth without exchange?

Between Commas , and Points ….

2005-04-02T01:59:00.000+02:00

I always have a problem of where to insert the comma (Flaubert spent whole days putting the in or out of just one comma) so sometimes I prefer points…dots…. Just like in life one never knows where to put the pausing spaces and suspensions that are so necessary to keep the flow of life flowing...

The Vertrix – A Body Without Organs or a Corpse Without Organs?

2005-03-30T02:31:00.000+02:00

Life begins with an E; it certainly did for me…Deleuze is right, Repetition is always of the singular (event); not repetition as a series of iterations of the same instance/individuation. It is the singular “first time” or Difference that repetition itself repeats – “the event” - to use Deleuze’s own examples: the festival, Monet’s lilies etc… When the Woodstock rock festival 'emerged out' (of all the previous rock festival repetitions) it was a singular event, all the subsequent series of Woodstocks (Woodstock 2000, 2001, 2002 etc..) are not a repetition of the same Woodstock festival iterating itself as the same festival throughout time, but rather the repetition of that singular event (i.e. the original Woodstock festival). This has the paradoxical meaning that what is actually involved in repetition is the always repetition of a singularity - not repetition of/as the same, the common or the general'

A real Repetition always involves a series (of itself through iteration) but what it repeats in-itself, is the first instance of itself - what Deleuze calls “Difference in itself”. It is this Difference that instigates and generates the subsequent series of (its) singular iterations – then, repetition breaks its serial line or continuum with a discontinuity and a Difference emerges out of the “same” singular repetition; which starts another series along another continuum which in turn produces a discontinuity (difference in itself) and a singularity or an event “emerges out”, and creates its singular series…and so on…

This is why the first (E)cstasy is always the best, the event in itself, the ecstasy breaks the previous serial habit of the continuum with a “difference in-itself”; a change of quality and intensity, which has no serial relation to what went before…hence the compulsion to repeat the experience; to take the ecstasy and create an ecstatic series - not to experience the same ecstasy time and again, but rather to repeat or in this case to recapture, the singular break of the differential “first time” event.

Philosophy is the ecstasy of thought, the heroin of contemplation: one of the reasons for my obsession for philosophy is the sheer disbelief that my being is bound or limited by chemistry (Deleuze always believed in the “Pharmacy” as he says in his Abecedary) and the subsequent realisation that one needs to fill in the chemistry with something else (philosophy is of course the worse "content" drug of all).

What Deleuze calls the “Virtual” is a deeply adequate conception for the realm of subjectivity (and nature which Deleuze "subjectivises" without the ontological primacy of the subject): there are whole potential intensities which are waiting endogenously to be actualized in our subjectivities, whole virtual spectrums of intensities which are hidden and made inaccessible by our habits and “ordinary means”…The Vital question is why something “Different in itself” is needed to access those virtual intensities, why the “intensive” needs an asymmetry, a disjunction, a disequilibrium to upset the habits of our mind and world. And it is always a question of relations, what new relations can effect a change in the “temporary nodal coagulations” (TNC) of Substance and Subject, not the Substance itself which has no dynamics. No essences only relations, such is the art of Rhizomatics (i.e. relations are external to their temporary subject which is in-itself just a bundle of previous relations)

The art of drug taking is to develop a symbiotic relationship which does not destroy you in the process - on the edge of Chaos: without falling into the abyss (what Deleuze aptly calls a black hole) such is the balancing act which has to be simultaneously maintained with and within an “vertrix” of disequilibrium - the intensive ethics-aesthetics of the Chaosmos:…seeking to reach the intensive ideal of crystals and their process of crystallization: the Deleuzian “body without organs”; not the “corpse without organs”, such is the challenge…

The Coming of the Overman - a Whole-Hole?

2005-03-26T13:26:00.000+01:00

Biotechnology and psychopharmacology will be the new philosophy of the 21 Century on the condition that it can interact with certain “selective” elements of the western religious-aesthetic-philosophical tradition - biotechnology and psychopharmacology without philosophy is blind and philosophy without biotechnology and psychopharmacology is empty.

For the first time in history human beings will have the power over their matter, but nature, genes and neurons are empty voids and the question will remain what spirit/soul will fill the gaping void…where will the semantics come from? Can our past forms, thoughts and traditions be enough? …one can imagine the future overman having overcome all limits (i.e. matter) and finding himself to be a sublime “what” without a “why”…where will the world of our empty words come from? As Heidegger said, animals do not have a world…what about the overman?: the sublime animality of the future.

One must avoid the AI syndrome of the last decade: the reduction of intelligence and understanding to formal circuits with the secret hope that by magic the world will automatically fill itself in. It won’t….the gaping whole-hole of syntax will always remain…unholy question marks in the secular fluxes of electronic circuits…

The semantic sun that gives invisible light is nowhere to be seen…the overman will have killed not only god which is fair enough since he never existed, killed man an even more ludicrous philosophical joke, but also his sun: - the spirit/soul that also never existed - but with a big difference that humanity won’t survive that ambiguous sun death …This is why Nietzsche was so afraid of the age of nihilism he would rather have another 2000 years of Christianity than the Kali age of nihilism: not the creative destruction of Kali or the cosmic dance of Shiva but rather the laser efficiency of stellar supermarkets orbiting a Whole-Hole….where the overman will walk his overdog on the select perfection of a clear moon and contemplate the immensity of the universe and will…will…will…no doubt try to stifle a yawn…

The Queen of Trash - Edwige Fenech

2005-03-21T12:43:00.000+01:00

Edwige Fenech is probably the most beautiful woman in the world (and still is)…her beauty is proportional to the trashiness of her films – from erotic thrillers (or what Italians call gialli) to sexy comedies….I “discovered” her when I was in Italy a few years ago on late night regional TV, where the catatonic light of the TV gave her beauty an eerie glow highlighting the incongruity of trashy filmic baseness being amidst holy beauty ...her films are as “bad” as she is beautiful…the “badness” in Edwige’ case is almost sublime, if not divine.

Edwige rose to Italian fame in the 1970’s with such classics titles: “Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer” aka What are those strange drops of blood doing on Jennifer's body? “La Vedova inconsolabile ringrazia quanti la consolarono” aka The Inconsolable Widow Thanks All Those Who Consoled Her…

She is definitely the queen of the Chaosmos (if only she knew what it meant!) – another queen, a more modern Italian beauty is Monica Belluci…but that is another story for another type of beauty….

Discover all about Edwige at:

http://host63.ipowerweb.com/~clubdesm/blanc/edwige.htm

Awaiting the Dark Precursors - A Deleuzian Century?

2005-03-04T11:06:00.000+01:00

Thinking beyond representation - the traditional philosophy/thinking “image of thought” - is for Deleuze a psychedelic, narcotic an “non-organic life” process, which is unfortunately limited by matter; our all “human all too human” identity driven biology...

One needs to think beyond the human... thinking as “non-organic life”…

“Difference and Repetition” is the ultimate drug book awaiting the drugs of the future…that will finally liberate philosophy/thinking from our “human all too human” identity/representative thinking: i.e. to achieve in thought what abstract art has achieved in art.

One of the reasons of Foucault’s famous “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian”… is that when biotechnology and pharmacology will propel us in the post-human era it will need a new form of thinking - based on difference not identity….

Until then we have only crude psycho-tools to experiment the play of “difference and repetition” underlying the Chaosmos…

Foucault on the drugs of thinking:

“We can easily see how LSD inverts the relationships of ill humor, stupidity, and thought: it no sooner eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disintegrates the gloomy dumbshow of stupidity; and it presents this univocal and acategorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asymmetrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm-events. As it slides on this surface at once regular and intensely vibratory, as it is freed from its catatonic chrysalis, thought invariably contemplates this indefinite equivalence transformed into an acute event and a sumptuous, appareled repetition. Opium produces other effects: thought gathers unique differences into a point, eliminates the background and deprives immobility of its task of contemplating and soliciting stupidity through its mime. Opium ensures a weightless immobility, the stupor of a butterfly that differs from catatonic rigidity; and, far beneath, it establishes a ground that no longer stupidly absorbs all differences but allows them to arise and sparkle as so many minute, distanced, smiling, and eternal events. Drugs - if we can speak of them generally - have nothing at all to do with truth and falsity; only to fortune-tellers do they reveal a world "more truthful than the real." In fact, they displace the relative positions of stupidity and thought by eliminating the old necessity of a theater of immobility….”

Chemical Voids - Ecstasy without Content

2005-03-03T11:32:00.000+01:00

“Their ecstasy is without content...The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St Vitus's dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals”. Theodor Adorno "On The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening"

The ambiguous thing about illegal chemical intoxication is its blindness: in itself it is pure “nothing” a void of chemistry …chemical voids or as Adorno said of “popular music” “ecstasy without content”. The chemical itself is without meaning/semantics so what makes the difference? Ecstasy, LSD etc… experience “might” well be as “meaningless” as getting drunk or having “casual” sex….Where does the “meaning” or “content” come from…if any?. What is the Huxley effect? …or Adorno for that matter…

Still waiting for Dionysus….

The Statistical, the Probable and the Event

2005-02-22T11:07:00.000+01:00

According to Gilles Deleuze there is nothing new, no difference or “event” without repetition. This has the ultimate meaning that life is statistical or probabilistic in its very nature and not as science or common sense portrays: the statistical as deficient knowledge of the underlying determinism – the causes/variables which are to numerous to describe or mathematically simulate.

Everything repeats itself (universe, sun, individuals, etc…) and yet the same is nowhere to be seen, how is this possible? For surely the true meaning of repetition is the repetition of the same – determinism,”nothing new under the sun” etc…

To understand the true meaning of living in a “probabilistic universe” (Ilya Prigogine) is to understand the secret of “the old one” – i.e. Einstein’s “does god play dice?” Not an easy task. For all our categories of thought and practice are riveted to the walls of metric space and the multiple determinism of cause and effect - Leibniz’ “nothing without a reason” syndrome. The macro level is determined by the micro level…

.... And yet from the statistical fishing net escape infinite singularities: why does the universe’s fishing net not catch all the fish that come by? …the answer is the true meaning of the probable and the statistical…

Just think and meditate on the meaning of the “statistical” or “probabilistic” let those two words repeat themselves in the mind until they resonate and change their usual/habitual connotations… like avant-garde “silence music" the mind/time starts filling in sound repetitions with musical variations/differences… out of the boring repetitions a whole new universe of harmony and qualities spontaneously emerges… as if out of nothing…

Windows of the Soul or the Attraction for Transgression

2005-02-21T23:06:00.000+01:00

I have always felt that the eyes are the most betraying fact about a person’s character armour, woman or man… windows of the soul indeed. Eyes express so much in a flash of an instant…Yet, there is always that beautiful moment when the woman after losing herself in the gaze of the other, “reels back” and realises what she is doing…matter sets in. In other words, spirit/desire is checked back by the habitual prudent material self, the utilitarian self of morality and inhibition….
Prigogine on Deleuze : I read several of his works and found them quite
interesting, but quite frankly there was quite a bit that I did not
understand. In my opinion, there is little to be gained from trying to
rethink metaphysical concepts like Bergson's "duree." Science today has
surpassed Newton and Einstein and reached a level where we can think of
the problems of time and creation in more flexible, if still analytical,
ways. For me this is the more interesting route.
Prigogine on Deleuze : I read several of his works and found them quite
interesting, but quite frankly there was quite a bit that I did not
understand. In my opinion, there is little to be gained from trying to
rethink metaphysical concepts like Bergson's "duree." Science today has
surpassed Newton and Einstein and reached a level where we can think of
the problems of time and creation in more flexible, if still analytical,
ways. For me this is the more interesting route.

Likelife [science it has struggled against the vital expression no doubt because after the instant of the book of Job where the Deleuzian arrival from in between science-fiction and cyber-units

I wonder what will happen nexts probably (and I say probably one never knows) more intesive or “punish” me for their “misspelled conductive towards the one never knows with women…even Freud gave up on trying to understand them - the famous “what does woman want”...

Hovering Between Bad Television and Cancer

2005-02-19T21:09:00.000+01:00

The pendulum swings from

Woody Allen (Husbands and Wives):

Life does not imitate art; it only imitates bad television.

….to Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage.

'There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer."

…such is life...

Chasing the Dragon

2005-02-18T11:03:00.000+01:00

I owe my existence to rooms, to confined spaces, contemplating the texture of ceilings, the geometric fractals of granular walls, fractal shapes to infinity…. Chasing the caramel lines of the dragon through foils of silver, but nowadays, it is more like chasing Mickey Mouse in the maze of dead time. Dionysus is not what it used to be. I am still waiting…

Waiting for Dionysus

2005-02-17T03:08:00.000+01:00

Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:

"It is up to us to go to extreme places, to extreme times, where the highest and the deepest truths live and rise up. The places of thought are the tropical zones frequented by the tropical man, not the temperate zones of the moral, methodical or moderate man".

In other words the Chaosmos itself: the underlying world of becoming from within the optics of Dionysus (Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze) Sisyphus (Schopenhauer, Albert Camus and Cioran) and the in-between of these two mythical figures (Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida)…

…life as Anais Nin said of Henry miller’s Tropic of Cancer:

“sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and rotation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is no question of will, but only an obedience to flow…The humiliations and defeats, given with a primitive honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in hunger, an ecstatic, devouring hunger-for more life”. (1934).

“only an obedience to flow”…We are purely “passive” (a furious passivity) when it comes to the best things in life… “it” happens to us: the always singular fluxes and flows are, we react - that’s our marginal freedom on the margins - that’s life wonder and tragedy…the Chaosmos indeed…

One would like to capture the swings between the dead time of everydayness and timeless wonderment: without “events”, moments of chance (or grace in religious terms) we are nothing but empty shells, puppets chained to empty time…to the gravity that governs the rest of the universe…

…currently my world is under the dead sign of Sisyphus, everything I try falls back to its initial place… stuck in a room somewhere …. I feel like Henry Miller in the Tropic of Cancer: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes” but with a big difference: the year 2005. I’m not so lucky to live in 1934 as Miller did…where you could live and drop out in Paris without every move and breath being-costing an euro… consequently I’m not the “happiest man alive”. But I’m still waiting…

…waiting for two things: to “score” the holy-grail of ecstasy, which I haven’t found yet (where have the Mitsubishis gone?) and the already mentioned “abyss girl”...will Dionysus rise from his Sisyphus grave?

P2P - The Capitalist Manifesto

2005-02-16T02:37:00.000+01:00

Things are converging for the first time in history a breach of protocol is possible. The spectacle, the system, is under threat from the very users that support it. P2P networks have encouraged millions of passive spectacle driven consumers to download for free, from the very spectacle that enslaves them. If pushed in the right direction, a cultural revolution of unforeseen “life-affirming” consequences could be unleashed. This is not a revolution against Capitalism, but rather the spectacle and the copyright-patent monopoly system that supports it - which creates scarcity as opposed to cultural abundance and diversity.

As William S Burroughs said:

"Junk is the ideal product ... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy ... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk."

It is difficult not to see this as a parable four our consumption of “cultural products”: movies, porn, music etc. To all extent people are addicted to junk, to the virtual sensations it provides. In our technological age when any fool can make a hit song, a porn movie, art etc… it is difficult to see why people still buy the junk and admire the dealers.

Make no mistake about it, the spirit of Capitalism is part of the solution, not the problem. Marx and Deleuze have repeatedly emphasized throughout their viral texts that Capitalism has been responsible for far greater subversions against ideologies, identities and territories than any other social system in existence. As Deleuze would say: one must take Capitalism to the limit… to (temporary) break Capital’s territorialized cocoon and reveal the spiritual/vital nature within…

Capital’s primordial spirit is expenditure as wealth, in short, Nietzsche’s “gift giving-virtue”: the “overman” gives not out of charity or compassion but rather because he is so “strong” that like the sun, gives his energy freely to others, to grow as strong (er) as he is.

As with the plotarch virus of the archaic age described by Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille’s “general economy” strength is measured not in exclusive accumulation (copyright-patent law) but in how much one can “give away” freely (without obliterating yourself or the system in the process)…open-source to the core.

It comes as no surprise that historically (i.e. material reality) no capitalism, no multinational, no “free-market” has ever given into the primordial spirit of Capital, on the contrary resisted it wherever it could, by any means necessary. The RIAA’s attack on P2P users shows this trend very well.

The principle way that capitalism found to resist the spirit of Capital within was with the creation of the spectacle - creating scarcity wherever it could.

Yet, some signs of life have shown themselves despite their unavoidable incorporations: adbuster inspired no shopping consuming days etc… But it is P2P systems, if encouraged in the right direction, that will sign the real break, for it is the very enslaved consumers that are downloading the poisonous “goods”.

…A vanguard needs to be developed… small groups need to act as catalysts… putting their theory (hacking words and code) to viral effect into the computerized corporate matrix. Cultural and Code terrorism is the only terrorism that works, symbolic violence is the only spiral that spirals.

Consumers wake up! Remember the products and companies you consume are not your friends…

Become `rhizomatic', organize “bonfires of liberty” burning beckons of freedom across the country, burning image, sound and video (especially 80’s records)…For the “bonfires of liberty” will act a rhizome - a network of stems that are laterally connected as opposed to the media `hierarchical' root systems of trees - conducting a corrosive polymorphous perversity across the whole spectacle driven body-politic.

The end of the spectacle-capital is in sight …the virtual strings of the master puppeteers are being corroded by the puppets….the puppets are rising to take back life….

Setting-up Aesthetic Experiments

2005-02-14T11:11:00.000+01:00

Cioran and Wilde … Spot the difference…

Disapproving the following statements are probably the sole goals of life… and one should set-up aesthetic experiments to find out - if one is rich or lucky enough which is not the case of 96% of the world’s population, which still dream of life’s mirroring reflections and will never know:

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it”.

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”.

"As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come soon or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present."

Either physiology/desire is too strong or we still live in hope… for time in virtue of its modal futurity always opens us….

A Vital Virus

2005-02-13T09:32:00.000+01:00

There is no affirmation of life without: “Possible contamination must be assumed, because it is also opening or chance, our chance. Without contamination we would have no opening or chance”. (Jacques Derrida)

What opens up (individuals, relationships, social systems etc…) is the propensity to contamination that unlike its biological counterpart destroys matter (limits, inhibitions etc…) by giving more life, not less. A virus yes, but a vital virus.

Chemical Irony: the E-Holy Grail

2005-02-12T11:13:00.000+01:00

If there is one Holy Grail to be after in the post-modern era, it is the quest for the perfect E 100% MDMA. Dwarfs, dragons and wizards await along the way. But there are no Knights of the Round Table, no circle and no evil to fight and the prize is 100% pure Irony.

Love at Last Sight

2005-02-11T02:07:00.000+01:00

Walter Benjamin: "the delight of the city-dweller is not so much love at first sight as love at last sight”. A select few, can encounter gendered epiphanies, were for an instant all time is suspended within the eyes and face of the other. I have always been blessed (or cursed) with the “love at last sight” syndrome in various European cities (Venice, London, Amsterdam, Geneva etc..) and the process is fascinating, magical in its expression…

It is always unexpected, one is always taken by surprise, no plan or intentionality can prepare such an event: a singularity out of the statistical crowd of indifference - a smile or a glance for no reason other than attraction. “Like a rose without a why”

The world, the crowd, is suspended out of time by the eyes of the other…windows of the soul…and then of course, the fall back into time (matter) the economic alarm bell starts ringing: the unholy trinity of fear (rejection, dangerous etc…) inhibition (what will she/he think, I can’t because…it is not the thing to do…and other character defences…) and doubt (to young, to old, to handsome, to beautiful, tooooooo.... ) takes over…the economy of order, exchange and equivalences starts again.

And it has happened again although this time it is more like staring into the eyes of an abyss. Attraction mingles with fear no doubt. Maybe she feels intimidated or shy or her defence mechanisms are going ballistic…I am much older …maybe she feels…whatever ????????

Since I have seen her a few time, maybe it will be a case of “love at last sight” turning into “love at first sight” you never know with the Chaosmos… I am not very good at small talk or so called pick-up lines but as they say it takes two to tango, courage and authenticity (i.e. not playing games) needs to be on both sides… on the other hand one could leave it all suspended….dreaming in the virtual reflection of our eyes the “what it would be like to be together”…for surely both of us must know that realising a virtuality, a “vitalism” or “spirit” can only end in disaster or in the best of cases boredom…but maybe ecstasy of undreamed proportion and magnitude awaits… there are no rules.. neither optimism or pessimism… such is the Chaosmos…alternatively I could drop an E have the ecstasy without the object, LOVE AS A CHEMICAL without last or first sight to trouble the waters… but even here one needs to find the authentic object: pure 100% MDMA is as difficult to find as love or unbridled eroticism….

Intensive To initial conditions - The butterfly Effect

2005-02-10T23:06:00.000+01:00

Gilles Deleuze in one of his reports from the Chaosmos (Difference and Repetition) concludes that:

“It is therefore true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world “happens” while God calculates; if the calculation were exact, there would be no world”

It is because there is no finite Initial Conditions for any calculation, that any event could be potentially or virtually relevant: i.e. chaos theory’s “flap of the wings” of a butterfly “causing” a hurricane on the other side of the world.

In addition, no phenomenon is complete, chaotic or ordered but asymmetric to the core:

“Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned” – the very source from which any authentic flow of Vitalism or Spirit can be made to emerge…

Out of our cocoons into the sunlight…

The Art of Living

2005-02-09T23:09:00.000+01:00

The aim of life is to resist the materialisation (i.e. entropy) of all relationships - as Michel Foucault said:

"The art of living is to eliminate psychology, to create with oneself and others, individualities, beings, relations, unnameable qualities. If one fails to do that in one's life it isn't worth living."

This is the true meaning of spirit, soul or vitalism (another more secular name for spirituality in the work of M Foucault and G Deleuze which try to fight order/entropy/matter in whatever form, wherever it appears ).

Wherever one is within the order of matter (sociology, economics, psychology etc…) one must insert a viral vitalism, a Derridian “Differance” into the edifice/situation (a relationship, a party, gathering etc..) and let it grow. Slowly almost imperceptibly cracks begin to appear, non-linear associations begin to emerge, criss-crossing the situations with unforeseen individuations, qualities and intensities : letting a bit of life or light within…but the Freudian death-drive always awaits, to ambush the life of Eros….so one must be careful… Thanatos rides so near life that sometimes it is hard to distinguish….

How to Ride the Chaosmos and Avoid the Downward Spiral: Fragments from a Chaos Aesthetic-Ethic

2005-02-08T00:47:00.000+01:00

Georges Bataille (from his book “guilty”):

“Life is a result of disequilibrium and instability. Stable forms are needed to make it possible however. Going from one extreme to the other, from one desire to another, from a state of collapse to frantic tension if the movement speeds up, there can only be ruin and emptiness. We have to stake out courses that are stable enough. To shrink from fundamental stability isn't less cowardly than to hesitate about shattering it. Perpetual instability is more boring than adhering strictly to a rule, and only what's in existence can be made to come into disequilibrium, that is, to be sacrificed. The more equilibrium the object has, the more complete it is, and the greater the disequilibrium or sacrifice that can result. These principles conflict with morality, which necessarily is a levelling force and an enemy to alternation. They destroy the romantic morality of confusion as much as they do the opposite morality”.

A whole aesthetics-ethic is compressed in this quote…it needs to be decompressed (with help from Gilles Deleuze and Hakim Bey) into a new ethics… an ethics of chaos…for life is all about what the Greeks called Kairos: the right moment or occasion: at the instant of disequilibrium (the edge of chaos) when something that was of the same causal order (i.e. equilibrium) jumps the linear continuum and passes into something else: an “event” emerges.

Roland Barthes discussing (in Camera Lucida) a Mapplethorpe self-portrait illustrates very well this “right disequilibrium”… this “edge of chaos” cultivated by an ethics-aesthetics of the Kairos - which is an eroticism of lived life desperately fighting the pornographic weight-gravity of life’s downward spiral:

” the photographer has caught the boy’s hand…at just the right degree of openness, the right density of abandonment: a few millimetres more or less and the divined body would no longer have been offered with benevolence (the pornographic body shows itself, it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it): the photographer has found the right moment, the kairos of desire”.

If we miss the Kairos (at any other moment it would have been the mere pornographic repetition of the same) no generosity or real desire is possible, no event happens… the usual dreariness of life... of Schopenhauer’s: “no rose without a thorn. but many a thorn without a rose” sets in…always the downward spiral…?